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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Heartbreak House
+
+Author: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Posting Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #3543]
+Release Date: November, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTBREAK HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+
+A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES
+
+
+By Bernard Shaw
+
+
+1913-1916
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL
+
+
+Where Heartbreak House Stands
+
+Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this
+preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the
+play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional
+diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy
+even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had
+produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of
+which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been
+performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown
+us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did
+not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
+was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
+futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering
+the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and
+energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken
+it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house
+standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and
+amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated
+the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by
+seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they
+were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these
+charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold
+up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in
+exploiting and even flattering their charm.
+
+
+
+The Inhabitants
+
+Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts,
+got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial
+affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared
+and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just
+as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and
+professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays
+fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music,
+art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
+fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same
+utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could
+write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social
+opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and
+newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their
+activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They
+did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to
+realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when
+they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing
+to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety
+theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined
+by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our
+society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an
+economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as
+Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with
+all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its
+best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For
+prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.
+
+
+
+Horseback Hall
+
+But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative
+to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for
+horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted
+them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths
+of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,
+churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative
+electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two
+establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the
+music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the
+stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
+first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden
+of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers
+who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were
+apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had
+to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is
+hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.
+
+
+Revolution on the Shelf
+
+Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper.
+It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to
+church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.
+When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your
+bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary
+biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself
+and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
+Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the
+movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson,
+Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and,
+generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of
+the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious
+experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday
+morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been
+brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
+police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might
+not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful
+Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton
+liner.
+
+In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
+barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front
+bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible
+ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from
+the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets
+instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with
+money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other
+went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the
+medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
+going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as
+Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society
+going without any instruction in sociology.
+
+
+
+The Cherry Orchard
+
+The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.
+With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as
+the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of
+Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and
+would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds.
+Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through
+the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of
+Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious
+modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a
+vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public
+affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
+inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even those who
+lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors
+and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without
+continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things
+or starve.
+
+From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things
+could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government
+it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the
+electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or
+debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a
+vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.
+
+
+
+Nature's Long Credits
+
+Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not
+one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She
+demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls
+us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common
+domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly
+and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
+consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two
+generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and
+then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh
+air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for
+plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the
+city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital
+gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid
+for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to
+sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
+
+This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political
+science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates
+during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the
+Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless
+affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage,
+torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of
+ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
+through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or
+Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in
+1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the
+shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the
+appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens.
+In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against
+many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being
+slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow.
+Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But
+when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years
+she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never
+dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and
+came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
+winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the
+victors.
+
+
+
+The Wicked Half Century
+
+It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than
+false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately
+suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had
+been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a
+pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught
+that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do
+can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue
+as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
+him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and
+allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might
+be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the
+middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured
+the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are
+all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion,
+inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins
+and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions
+over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose,
+conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions,
+produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human
+machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process
+incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
+competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
+available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our
+instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted
+with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying
+us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent
+doubtfully reparable in our time.
+
+It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be
+accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully
+in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the
+subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons
+than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific
+career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless
+rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that
+this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in
+scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
+naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a
+barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all
+scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries
+of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless
+method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.
+Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and
+that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel
+Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."
+
+
+
+Hypochondria
+
+Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
+alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing
+of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the
+doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside.
+But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running
+after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds,
+but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would
+actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon
+named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
+materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the
+like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in
+the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered
+therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this
+half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and
+surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were
+not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of
+the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
+winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror
+of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations.
+Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily
+killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course)
+in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on
+to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. They
+explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could
+make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by
+cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
+the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was
+the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's
+shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was
+so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual
+creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces
+of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest
+off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they
+operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
+clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies
+of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever
+have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared
+to the General Medical Council.
+
+
+
+Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying
+
+Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from
+this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it
+believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that
+cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,
+whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's
+saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read
+about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which
+point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how
+to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
+gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the
+firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the
+hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.
+
+
+War Delirium
+
+Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
+field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
+the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this
+experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics,
+exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning
+millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do
+not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those
+who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand.
+I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at
+once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most
+serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did
+not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
+course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political
+and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But
+the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a
+conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All
+foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed.
+No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions
+must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be
+stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences
+about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an
+intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and
+schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was
+saved only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
+more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established
+by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized
+with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money.
+And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no
+discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing
+what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities,
+but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the
+presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the
+annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices;
+label themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that
+was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that they had
+nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live
+gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign
+of returning sanity, the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into
+prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting
+of the Flag Days was brought under some sort of regulation.
+
+
+
+Madness in Court
+
+The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were
+acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at
+last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the
+Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked
+with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a
+Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence.
+Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always
+manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged
+with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not
+smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were
+in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious
+objections to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament
+introducing Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these
+persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their
+convictions. Those who did so were very ill-advised from the point
+of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with
+savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence
+of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military
+training in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
+occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on
+behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act
+on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the
+Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their
+being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict
+would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of
+the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were
+gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,
+pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of
+war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly;
+and its law was set aside for Lynch law.
+
+The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest
+Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a
+gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was
+shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off
+no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed.
+The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M.
+Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that
+the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun
+with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
+unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.
+
+
+
+The Long Arm of War
+
+The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
+influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
+doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the
+battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India.
+But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence,
+reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever
+would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire,
+and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders,
+where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another
+as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it
+after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for
+relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
+shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for so many
+centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be
+more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected
+to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in
+cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst
+bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel
+on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly
+full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and
+mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a
+good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
+down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America
+where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went
+beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive
+illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me
+to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do
+that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,
+with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as
+unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying
+the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether
+our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
+newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on
+young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were
+being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England,
+and the more private records of the methods by which the American
+War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the
+possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.
+
+
+
+The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
+
+Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war
+maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of
+liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under
+which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by
+simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without
+any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence.
+Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased
+by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
+fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity
+of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory
+laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the
+loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances
+and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the
+formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
+that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless
+we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and
+beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not
+change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was
+that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that
+every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science
+and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying
+grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and
+most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
+been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the
+pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like
+hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us,
+the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek
+history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves
+into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest,
+joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first,
+and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with
+insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
+ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
+in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of
+civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the
+very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers,
+and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was
+crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that
+German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by
+journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in
+fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and
+our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they
+certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of
+German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German
+literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant
+abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth
+in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of
+such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the
+arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
+appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great
+realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily
+and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing
+the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the German dukes from the
+roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious and historically
+appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against
+Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a
+traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the
+Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving
+his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
+only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
+confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called
+themselves patriots.
+
+
+
+The Sufferings of the Sane
+
+The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
+carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane
+people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated
+by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The
+stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative
+were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that
+mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the
+hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true;
+for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should
+all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
+friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give
+them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously
+sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the
+heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We
+had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the
+sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat
+old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons
+they had "given" to their country.
+
+No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only
+embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth
+set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then
+think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about
+the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly
+repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really
+valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming
+fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public
+eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
+themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient
+soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment
+by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others.
+They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they
+would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship.
+They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back
+because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by
+its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
+fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away
+the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the
+blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to
+pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the
+effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic
+faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For
+it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were
+forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but
+even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found
+themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for
+it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
+themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They
+"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
+
+
+
+Evil in the Throne of Good
+
+This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
+in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or
+witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their
+own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not
+easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw
+away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of
+inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can
+answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of
+Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of
+Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
+are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a
+change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
+
+Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
+and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable
+loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on
+destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind
+might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors
+away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
+Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best
+harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the
+trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly
+civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth
+was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
+"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the
+death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!
+
+
+
+Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
+
+But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
+frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom
+an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage
+ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a
+child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they
+had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings
+day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious
+imprecations on "the Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and
+satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths
+they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
+cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be
+actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances
+of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as
+sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.
+
+For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of
+our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I
+will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have
+such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I
+noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling
+beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going
+splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly
+there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been
+torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including
+a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been
+drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had
+only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine
+arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing
+frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their
+heads now lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was
+the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase
+to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me,
+with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and
+the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a
+heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with
+the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than
+most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim
+satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the
+civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a
+sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
+impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and
+natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless
+paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything
+to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before,
+having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They
+were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too
+big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size
+for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just
+the same reason pass a vote for £30,000 without a word, and then spend
+three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
+shillings for refreshments?
+
+
+
+Little Minds and Big Battles
+
+Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during
+the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire
+magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive
+even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing
+but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of
+bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity
+of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the
+dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce
+any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
+Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of
+Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation"
+in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside
+trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end
+marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup,
+their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put
+a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in
+the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other
+that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the
+army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man
+would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for
+democracy." His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he
+would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud
+against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to
+his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to
+find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.
+
+It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out
+of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the
+light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt
+whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians.
+But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the
+comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to
+be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this
+could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess,
+and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice
+at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
+general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,
+"If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got me into
+khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary
+to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at.
+Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately
+propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense,
+which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war
+before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
+army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very
+serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane
+European State could afford to do.
+
+
+
+The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
+
+Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
+critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time
+was conducting a war which involved the organization of several
+millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with
+provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been
+done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass
+from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and
+suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to
+pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
+to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who
+still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency
+was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their
+business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the
+raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide
+of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from
+operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A
+precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "If
+you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out
+of the way," was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people
+went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the
+way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
+seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where
+the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and
+invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor
+and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately
+intimidating the Government by its blusterings into using the
+irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus
+enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of
+terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word
+from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
+courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much
+less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by
+criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the
+Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable
+moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a
+childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our
+great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind
+all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the
+effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
+activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its
+incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its
+endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season
+and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the
+conquest of Europe.
+
+
+
+The Practical Business Men
+
+From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical
+business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing
+their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the
+success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them
+and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The
+pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we
+tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the
+war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
+they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation
+they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.
+
+
+
+How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down
+
+Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of
+her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
+save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of
+the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent
+practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional
+rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination
+of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture
+posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing
+some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have
+shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the
+world by the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But
+in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and
+file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always
+inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot
+have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action,
+like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of
+himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what
+he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the
+writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not
+uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war
+work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter
+absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo
+the opinions of that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the
+prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of
+the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master
+spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could
+enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the
+whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of
+victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by
+very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if
+there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the
+war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total
+breakdown of its organization.
+
+
+
+The Mad Election
+
+Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days.
+The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in
+parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of
+action to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the
+armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers
+who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated
+by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that
+they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to
+apologize publicly for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent.
+Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk
+tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader
+will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called,
+in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the
+coupon." Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them
+without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be
+fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must
+necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and
+the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
+opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest
+bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the
+general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to
+pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually
+to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had,
+in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked,
+cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from
+this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet;
+but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the
+heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest
+necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded
+almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.
+
+
+
+The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
+
+Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no
+denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing
+Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the
+superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British
+can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the
+three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men,
+saying that "Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would
+ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for
+thunder: nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he
+had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
+every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters
+of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a
+finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a
+whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may have seen a Stratford cottage struck
+by one of Jove's thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted
+thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
+said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford, as
+French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find the old
+familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and at the end of
+the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a fragment of a broken
+churn here and there? Would not the spectacle of the angry ape endowed
+with powers of destruction that Jove never pretended to, have beggared
+even his command of words?
+
+And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human
+nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half
+a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for
+then the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and
+we should take greater care not to get into them. In truth, it is, as
+Byron said, "not difficult to die," and enormously difficult to live:
+that explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but
+infinitely more arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious
+risk of death more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious
+certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that he
+taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without some soldier
+who braved death in the field so recklessly that he was decorated or
+specially commended for it, being haled before our magistrates for
+having failed to resist the paltriest temptations of peace, with no
+better excuse than the old one that "a man must live." Strange that one
+who, sooner than do honest work, will sell his honor for a bottle of
+wine, a visit to the theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all
+obtained by passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on
+the most desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if,
+after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of life? If
+it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men attain it? At all
+events it is clear that the kingdom of the Prince of Peace has not yet
+become the kingdom of this world. His attempts at invasion have been
+resisted far more fiercely than the Kaiser's. Successful as that
+resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of National Debt that is not
+the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and do not intend
+to pay it. A blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the
+long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
+materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the
+blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am
+afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.
+
+
+
+Plague on Both your Houses!
+
+Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
+foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried
+in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately
+they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished
+many times by successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and
+Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of
+Vanity Fair. Another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient
+public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
+sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction
+of that generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian
+life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent.
+Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people who
+thought it could not last more than six months were very signally
+refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos
+lasted months instead of hours. But there would have been nothing
+surprising in its lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact
+that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe,
+which it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly organized
+for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the
+belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled
+to compel themselves to go on with it. Considering its magnitude, the
+war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. The
+end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it;
+and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the
+belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the
+situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she
+began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted.
+Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy
+as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed.
+And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether Germany
+and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are
+already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have struck from
+the limbs of the vanquished.
+
+
+
+How the Theatre fared
+
+Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European theatre
+of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the
+slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home
+to supper after washing off their rose-pink wounds. It is nearly twenty
+years since I was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a
+book for lack of an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a
+performance in a theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient.
+Heartbreak House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it
+because the war has completely upset the economic conditions which
+formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The change is
+not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor in the authors
+and actors, but in the audiences. For four years the London theatres
+were crowded every night with thousands of soldiers on leave from the
+front. These soldiers were not seasoned London playgoers. A childish
+experience of my own gave me a clue to their condition. When I was a
+small boy I was taken to the opera. I did not then know what an opera
+was, though I could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in
+my mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly
+in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded balcony
+filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be the opera
+singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni, and wondered how
+soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled by the fact that I was
+made to sit with my back to the singers instead of facing them. When the
+curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were unbounded.
+
+
+
+The Soldier at the Theatre Front
+
+In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same
+predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was
+evident that they had never been in a theatre before and did not know
+what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I sat beside a young
+officer, not at all a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain
+rose and enlightened him as to the place where he had to look for his
+entertainment, found the dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible.
+He did not know how to play his part of the game. He could understand
+the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic
+feats. He not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who
+imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended
+that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind
+them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very
+sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions
+of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama
+obvious to him.
+
+Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was
+established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers)
+often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It
+was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them
+on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the
+oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military
+spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far
+as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories
+of George Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
+would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were
+only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace
+would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen
+plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own
+astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly
+sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The author of some of the most
+grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the
+trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it
+gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see
+a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of
+hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial
+things gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
+having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to
+the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only
+to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and
+under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a
+mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty
+girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty
+and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.
+
+Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical
+comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a
+practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the
+bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples
+consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night;
+mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got
+into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting
+complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their
+equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
+astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in
+drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of
+his naked person to be descried from time to time.
+
+
+
+Heartbreak House
+
+Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and
+were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical
+comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade
+had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing:
+these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much
+pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what
+they thought fresh and clever.
+
+
+
+Commerce in the Theatre
+
+Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London
+theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must
+pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people:
+they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable
+rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a
+guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin
+flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the
+funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.
+
+
+
+Unser Shakespeare
+
+Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a
+national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of
+Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and
+influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national
+culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents
+of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single
+handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated
+swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods
+lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll
+in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this
+situation," and let it pass without another word.
+
+
+
+The Higher Drama put out of Action
+
+The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The
+beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents
+went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled
+everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of
+management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every
+night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained
+without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible
+to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its
+way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and
+three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a
+desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an
+artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare
+and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
+potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay
+might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise
+occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the beginning
+of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in
+England. In America I had already established myself, not as part of the
+ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius
+of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the
+system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
+of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the Emperor of
+Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole
+official attention paid me by the British Courts was the announcement
+to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for
+public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the
+British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to
+the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household.
+
+Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage,
+and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert
+Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold
+Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in
+the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a
+London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals
+of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of
+Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible
+solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much
+money as it cost to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work
+appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and
+therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators
+as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands
+of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not
+yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the
+commercial value of their time and energy too closely. The war struck
+this foundation away in the manner I have just described. The expenses
+of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded
+by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an
+ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher
+drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation,
+now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to
+provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory
+theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at last
+disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom
+it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly
+made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question
+altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.
+
+
+
+Church and Theatre
+
+I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to
+care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not
+born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the
+beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note
+that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what
+a church was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody
+had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women
+paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like
+Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were
+read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,
+Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by
+greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of
+pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass
+windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of
+painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes
+produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only
+enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous
+practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular
+troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed
+church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which
+the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in
+churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless
+rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on
+driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and
+partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the
+temple had become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions
+that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church
+were laid on the shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable
+place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the
+slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls.
+When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with
+the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the Little Theatre in
+the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived
+within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers.
+In point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the
+fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any
+operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture
+glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres.
+It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the Blondin
+Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian
+decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and care,
+the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the gloomiest of little
+conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the Puritan point of view,
+have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the Little
+Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's
+Magic or Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why
+the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact
+remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the national
+value of the theatre I owed the first regular public performance of
+a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime,
+whereas if she had given the money to the Church she would have worn
+a halo for it. And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of
+things may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners again
+and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can
+go to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible
+reply is that they want to see something new and possibly something
+wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a
+revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for
+admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the church door
+shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to one
+performance at any theatre he or she prefers. Thus shall the sensuous
+charms of the church service be made to subsidize the sterner virtue of
+the drama.
+
+
+
+The Next Phase
+
+The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I read at
+breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation
+that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to
+confirm the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction
+is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible
+years. Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the
+assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half
+full week in and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will
+be at no greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may
+benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the
+fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon
+the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost both faith in
+and patience with the theatrical pretences that had no root either in
+reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war
+in the distribution of income. It seems only the other day that a
+millionaire was a man with £50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his
+income tax and super tax, and insured his life for the amount of his
+death duties, he is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his
+nominal property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget
+which is called "a respite for the rich." At the other end of the scale
+millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in
+their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and
+taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also
+for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of women have
+been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and
+independence. The thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been
+pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an
+unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although
+the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make
+a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to
+his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to
+be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we
+were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only
+a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a
+possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in
+other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process
+anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.
+
+Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who
+was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how,
+after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other
+war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a
+heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years
+in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the
+task they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel
+was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn
+anything from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that
+we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for,
+are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years
+revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed
+by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how
+happy Lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired
+messages became scraps of paper. He knows well that from the Peace
+Conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will
+be able, like Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind:
+and the gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy
+the militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in Cologne
+imprisoning every German who does not salute a British officer; whilst
+the government at home, asked whether it approves, replies that it
+does not propose even to discontinue this Zabernism when the Peace is
+concluded, but in effect looks forward to making Germans salute British
+officers until the end of the world. That is what war makes of men and
+women. It will wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving
+impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to be
+despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be dotards.
+In the meantime there is, for him, another history to write; for me,
+another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that is what wars are for,
+and what historians and playwrights are for. If men will not learn until
+their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own
+for preference.
+
+
+
+The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
+
+To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the theatre
+will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest Hohenzollern
+languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of
+fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to
+have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps
+alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant;
+the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland;
+Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory
+as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one
+another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and
+Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in
+their everlasting seats.
+
+
+
+How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet
+
+As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about
+the war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is significant. You
+cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. War cannot
+bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter
+that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their
+country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers
+and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of
+boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the
+electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and
+lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their
+prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. For
+unless these things are mercilessly exposed they will hide under the
+mantle of the ideals on the stage just as they do in real life.
+
+And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed
+cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still
+in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of
+the realm. We are just now reading the revelations of our generals and
+admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. During the war, General A,
+in his moving despatches from the field, told how General B had covered
+himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us
+that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying
+his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he
+ought to have done. An excellent subject for comedy now that the war
+is over, no doubt; but if General A had let this out at the time, what
+would have been the effect on General B's soldiers? And had the stage
+made known what the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War
+who overruled General A thought of him, and what he thought of them, as
+now revealed in raging controversy, what would have been the effect on
+the nation? That is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally
+silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes
+no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany
+or England perish; is ready to cry with Brynhild, "Lass'uns verderben,
+lachend zu grunde geh'n" sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus
+becomes in time of war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or
+trinitrotoluene. That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from
+the footlights during the war; for the Germans might on any night have
+turned the last act from play into earnest, and even then might not have
+waited for their cues.
+
+June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+
+
+
+
+ACT I
+
+The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking
+very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September, is seen through
+the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after
+part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the
+windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the
+room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. A row
+of lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat
+interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern
+post and the sides. Another door strains the illusion a little by being
+apparently in the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open
+sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the
+stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches beside
+the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery.
+Against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench. The vice has a board
+in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a
+waste-paper basket. A couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench.
+In the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway
+with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it
+is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.
+
+On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak
+drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set
+squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler
+of discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. The
+drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has the window on
+its left hand. On the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a
+ship's fire bucket. On the port side of the room, near the bookshelves,
+is a sofa with its back to the windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article,
+oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of
+blankets hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table
+is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its
+back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a round top
+and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the
+bookcase. It is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all
+convincingly) a woman's hand in the furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of
+narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck.
+
+The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the
+landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow is the
+cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a
+flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a
+long garden seat on the west.
+
+A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the
+window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the
+view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the
+Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been
+reading.
+
+A clock strikes six.
+
+The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an air of
+one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. She is a pretty
+girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively
+dressed, evidently not a smart idler.
+
+With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's chair;
+sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the book sinks to
+her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber.
+
+An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened
+bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and disappears in the
+pantry without noticing the young lady. She places the bottles on the
+shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. As she returns with these,
+the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the
+womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book and
+places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure; but you are
+a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that
+I have been invited here.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you're invited, are you? And has nobody come?
+Dear! dear!
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at
+the window; and I heard him calling out, "Nurse, there is a young and
+attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what she wants." Are
+you the nurse?
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I'm Nurse Guinness. That was old Captain
+Shotover, Mrs Hushabye's father. I heard him roaring; but I thought it
+was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs Hushabye that invited you,
+ducky?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I'd better
+go.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs Hushabye
+has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to
+see you, won't it?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find
+that nobody expects me.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. You'll get used to it, miss: this house is full of
+surprises for them that don't know our ways.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but
+still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a
+whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag
+on the front steps for everybody to fall over. Also a tennis racquet.
+Who the devil left them there?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I'm afraid.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this
+misguided and unfortunate young lady?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my
+daughter's invitations? This is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! A
+young and attractive lady is invited here. Her luggage is left on the
+steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned,
+tired and starving. This is our hospitality. These are our manners. No
+room ready. No hot water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep
+in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Now it's all right, Captain: I'll get the lady some tea;
+and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [To the young
+lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to
+the door leading to the hall].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman, that
+because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the
+right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you
+have brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social
+intercourse?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she goes out
+into the hall on her way to the kitchen].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits down in
+the big wicker chair].
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was
+originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship's chandler with stores
+which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No doubt he
+became rich. Are you his daughter?
+
+ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to say that
+though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one
+word to say against him. I think my father is the best man I have ever
+known.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh
+degree of concentration?
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have two
+daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you here. I
+keep this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the seventh degree
+of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them.
+[Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak
+table]. I have a second daughter who is, thank God, in a remote part of
+the Empire with her numskull of a husband. As a child she thought the
+figure-head of my ship, the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing
+on earth. He resembled it. He had the same expression: wooden yet
+enterprising. She married him, and will never set foot in this house
+again.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to
+Ellie's side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in England
+this very moment. You have been told three times this week that she is
+coming home for a year for her health. And very glad you should be to
+see your own daughter again after all these years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of the
+human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter Ariadne was
+born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If she comes, I am not
+at home. If she wants anything, let her take it. If she asks for me, let
+her be informed that I am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. That's no talk to offer to a young lady. Here, ducky,
+have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have given
+this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather
+insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into
+the leathern bucket].
+
+ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have been
+glad of anything.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to drop.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that fly-blown
+cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He disappears into the
+pantry].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. There's a man for you! They say he sold himself to the
+devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the
+more I believe them.
+
+A WOMAN'S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse! Papa!
+Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.
+
+Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It's Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs
+Hushabye's sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling]. Coming,
+Miss, coming.
+
+She carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out
+when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who bursts in much flustered.
+Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so
+precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous)
+is one of comic silliness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don't look a
+day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn't she expect me?
+Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on the steps? Where's
+papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh! I beg your pardon. I
+suppose you are one of my nieces. [Approaching her with outstretched
+arms]. Come and kiss your aunt, darling.
+
+ELLIE. I'm only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. I'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes up the
+tray].
+
+ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he's forgotten what he went for already. His
+mind wanders from one thing to another.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don't be silly, Nurse. Don't call me Miss.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what
+you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after
+twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the
+steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive
+anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always
+gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the
+same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was
+used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and
+longed all the time--oh, how I longed!--to be respectable, to be a lady,
+to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself.
+I married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir Hastings
+Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in
+succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House. I
+have been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like this. I
+wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought
+to, you know), and I was looking forward to it. And now the state of
+the house! the way I'm received! the casual impudence of that woman
+Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione might at least have been here:
+some preparation might have been made for me. You must excuse my
+going on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and
+disillusioned: and if I had realized it was to be like this, I wouldn't
+have come. I have a great mind to go away without another word [she is
+on the point of weeping].
+
+ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me either.
+I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady Utterword? My
+luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone.
+
+The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese lacquer and
+a very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally on the end of the
+table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor
+against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. Ellie
+pours out a cup greedily.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must fetch
+another cup [he makes for the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. Papa!
+Don't you know me? I'm your daughter.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [He vanishes
+through the half door].
+
+Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.
+
+ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don't be so distressed. Have this cup
+of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to
+me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to
+me. Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
+
+The captain returns with another cup.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can't have forgotten me. I am
+Ariadne. I'm little Paddy Patkins. Won't you kiss me? [She goes to him
+and throws her arms round his neck].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You
+are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been away,
+Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing
+strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But I'm your daughter. You haven't seen me for years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home, we have
+to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure
+them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence
+by dwelling on their vices. That is how I have come to think my absent
+daughter Ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself
+here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the
+room].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very
+well, papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for
+herself].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn? Billy
+Dunn?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on the
+sofa].
+
+ELLIE [protesting]. No--
+
+Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?
+
+NURSE. You've actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh, miss,
+he didn't forget you after all! You HAVE made an impression.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in
+this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her
+children are not youthful.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this
+house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that
+might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were
+certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
+
+NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady
+Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? Do you
+hear?
+
+NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I'll tell them all they must call you My
+Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having servants
+with no manners?
+
+ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. Lady
+Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don't ask me. You can see for yourself that I've
+just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years' absence! and it
+seems that I am not expected.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or
+not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I'll find a room for
+her myself [he makes for the door].
+
+ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please--[He goes out]. Lady
+Utterword, I don't know what to do. Your father persists in believing
+that my father is some sailor who robbed him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My father is a
+very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of
+course he is worse. And I must warn you that it is sometimes very hard
+to feel quite sure that he really forgets.
+
+Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces Ellie. She
+is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and even better looking.
+She has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, and
+a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders
+in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a
+rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque
+contour.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long
+have you been here? I've been at home all the time: I was putting
+flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down for a moment
+to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off to sleep. Papa woke
+me and told me you were here. Fancy your finding no one, and being
+neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her again]. My poor love! [She
+deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile Ariadne has left the table and
+come over to claim her share of attention]. Oh! you've brought someone
+with you. Introduce me.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don't know me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face quite
+well. Where have we met?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Didn't Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is really too
+much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [Rising
+angrily]. I'll go straight to a hotel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious
+goodness, you don't mean to say that you're Addy!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don't think I can be so
+changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real
+affection for me. And Papa didn't think me even worth mentioning!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the chair
+instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You DO look
+a swell. You're much handsomer than you used to be. You've made the
+acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to marry a perfect hog
+of a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church
+mouse; and you must help me to stop her.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man's coming here today with your father
+to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case
+in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret of it?
+
+ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don't know how wonderfully good he
+was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable man,
+Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who
+knew Ellie's grandparents. They were both poets, like the Brownings; and
+when her father came into the world Mazzini said, "Another soldier born
+for freedom!" So they christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting
+for freedom in his quiet way ever since. That's why he is so poor.
+
+ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in it, and
+marry someone you love?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are you going
+to kiss me or are you not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I DON'T want to be kissed; but I do want you to behave
+properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been separated for
+twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate the
+smell of powder.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling--[she is interrupted by the return of
+the captain].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The sheets
+were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the
+port side].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or take
+them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne's old room.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That little hole!
+I am entitled to the best spare room.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She told me
+she would marry anyone to get away from home.
+
+LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I will
+leave the house.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man with
+bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in a blue
+serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a
+soft black hat of clerical cut.
+
+ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through
+the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else.
+I will have it out with Papa now, this instant. [To Mazzini]. Excuse me.
+[She follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns
+it].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come, Mr
+Dunn! You don't mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter, you know,
+but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have some delightful
+talks with him.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He draws
+her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs Hushabye, for
+your kindness to my daughter. I'm afraid she would have had no holiday
+if you had not invited her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract young
+people to the house for us.
+
+MAZZINI [smiling]. I'm afraid Ellie is not interested in young men, Mrs
+Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. Won't
+you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find a cupboard for coats
+and hats and things in the corner of the hall.
+
+MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes--thank you--I had better-- [he
+goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!
+
+ELLIE. Who?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. "Graver,
+solider tastes," indeed!
+
+ELLIE [aghast]. You don't mean that you were speaking like that of my
+father!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.
+
+ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns to the
+door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I'll tell your father why.
+
+ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this, Mrs
+Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.
+
+ELLIE. Certainly not now?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I'll tell your father.
+
+ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair--if you take his part against me and
+against your own heart for a moment, I'll give that born soldier of
+freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head
+for a week.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know--
+
+She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you'd like to know. Excuse
+me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little confused by
+his manner. He is making Mangan help him with something in the garden;
+and he wants me too--
+
+A powerful whistle is heard.
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].
+
+MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me. [He
+hurries out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don't understand. My father and Mr
+Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't care what they were: we must sit down if you are
+going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at Ellie's waist, and
+makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. Now, pettikins, tell me all
+about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss Mangan, don't they? He is a Napoleon
+of industry and disgustingly rich, isn't he? Why isn't your father rich?
+
+ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His parents
+were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not
+afford to give him a profession.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy
+rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business. Hasn't he
+succeeded in it?
+
+ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some
+capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads
+and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same
+difficulty of not having capital enough. I don't know how to describe it
+to you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.
+
+ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn't it? I shouldn't
+have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have pulled
+hard--[between her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.
+
+ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr Mangan
+did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father
+and respect for his character. He asked him how much capital he wanted,
+and gave it to him. I don't mean that he lent it to him, or that he
+invested it in his business. He just simply made him a present of it.
+Wasn't that splendid of him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never even
+seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely disinterested.
+Pure generosity.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman's pardon. Well, what became of the
+money?
+
+ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I went
+to another school for two years.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?
+
+ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly
+ruined.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. I never could understand. But it was dreadful. When
+we were poor my father had never been in debt. But when he launched out
+into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. When the
+business went into liquidation he owed more money than Mr Mangan had
+given him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.
+
+ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. I was
+quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have picked up
+so much slang from the children that I am really hardly presentable. I
+suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. The
+business turned out a great success. It now pays forty-four per cent
+after deducting the excess profits tax.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren't you rolling in money?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my father
+was made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded
+several of his friends to put money into the business. He was sure it
+would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. But they all
+lost their money. It was dreadful. I don't know what we should have done
+but for Mr Mangan.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after all his
+money being thrown away?
+
+ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. He
+bought what was left of the business--the buildings and the machinery
+and things--from the official trustee for enough money to enable my
+father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his discharge.
+Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was an
+honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead
+of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan started a company to take up the
+business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation;
+for I wasn't earning anything then.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the tender
+passion?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair one
+night at a sort of people's concert. I was singing there. As an amateur,
+you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores.
+He was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with
+me. I never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when I took him home and
+introduced him to my father, his own manager. It was then that my father
+told me how nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great
+chance for me, as he is so rich. And--and--we drifted into a sort
+of understanding--I suppose I should call it an engagement--[she is
+distressed and cannot go on].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted into it;
+but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to
+do with it.
+
+ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it's no use. I am bound in honor and gratitude.
+I will go through with it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know, of
+course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don't
+love. Do you love this Mangan man?
+
+ELLIE. Yes. At least--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't want to know about "at least": I want to know
+the worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible
+people, especially old people.
+
+ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away
+intolerantly to starboard]. --grateful to him for his kindness to dear
+father. I know. Anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. What do you mean?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. Of course not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She
+picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at
+Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you're not in love with an actor?
+
+ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn't it? Why else should you be reading
+Othello?
+
+ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.
+
+MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your father
+does seem to be about the limit.
+
+ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That seems to
+me so extraordinary. I like Othello.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn't he?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is horrible.
+But don't you think it must have been a wonderful experience for
+Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been
+out in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible
+adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit
+and talk with her and tell her about them?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's your idea of romance, is it?
+
+ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.
+
+Ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs
+Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa
+and resumes her seat beside her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories
+that Othello told Desdemona couldn't have happened--?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But they
+didn't.
+
+ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a sphinx: I
+never know what you mean.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you
+know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!
+
+ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?
+
+ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who
+have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white,
+and very handsome, and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew
+there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about
+Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him.
+
+ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don't want to
+make a secret of it, though of course I don't tell everybody. Besides, I
+don't know him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't know him! What does that mean?
+
+ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh?
+
+ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite--almost intimately.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You don't know him; and you know him almost intimately.
+How lucid!
+
+ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I--I got into conversation
+with him by chance at a concert.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts,
+Ellie.
+
+ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our
+turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. But
+he was only one of the committee. I happened to tell him that I was
+copying a picture at the National Gallery. I make a little money that
+way. I can't paint much; but as it's always the same picture I can do it
+pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. It happened that he
+came to the National Gallery one day.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One students' day. Paid sixpence to stumble about through
+a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and
+found the floor clear! Quite by accident?
+
+ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He knows
+lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are all in love
+with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the National Gallery
+and persuade me to come with him for a drive round Richmond Park in a
+taxi.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It's wonderful what
+you good girls can do without anyone saying a word.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn't make acquaintances in
+that way I shouldn't have any at all.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself.
+May I ask his name?
+
+ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid name!
+
+ELLIE. Oh, I'm so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was afraid it
+was only a silly fancy of my own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?
+
+ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique chest--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A what?
+
+ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a
+night of the most terrible thunderstorm.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get into
+it because he was afraid of the lightning?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was
+embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!
+
+ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. --de Rougemont?
+
+ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A vicomte.
+His life has been one long romance. A tiger--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the tiger
+from a hunting party: one of King Edward's hunting parties in India.
+The King was furious: that was why he never had his military services
+properly recognized. But he doesn't care. He is a Socialist and despises
+rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You, Ellie, of
+all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward,
+good girl.
+
+ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don't believe
+me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don't believe you. You're inventing every word
+of it. Do you take me for a fool?
+
+Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye is
+puzzled.
+
+ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I'm very sorry. I see now that it sounds very
+improbable as I tell it. But I can't stay if you think that way about
+me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan't go. I couldn't be so
+mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has really told
+you all this.
+
+ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don't say that you don't believe him. I
+couldn't bear that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest. But you
+should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back to her seat].
+Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. I'm not so foolish. I don't fall in love with people. I'm
+not so silly as you think.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about--to give some
+interest and pleasure to life.
+
+ELLIE. Just so. That's all, really.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? No tedious waiting
+to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad
+night. How delightful it makes waking up in the morning! How much better
+than the happiest dream! All life transfigured! No more wishing one had
+an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any
+book! No desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be
+alone and just think about it.
+
+ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know? Oh,
+you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy you!
+and how I pity you!
+
+ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?
+
+A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing
+a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate
+walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at
+sight of the women on the sofa.
+
+ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this is Mr
+Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.
+
+ELLIE. But now--[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa].
+Steady, my pettikins.
+
+THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his
+hat and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is Hector
+Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man
+would care to confess to. I never use it when I can possibly help it. I
+have been away for nearly a month; and I had no idea you knew my wife,
+or that you were coming here. I am none the less delighted to find you
+in our little house.
+
+ELLIE [in great distress]. I don't know what to do. Please, may I speak
+to papa? Do leave me. I can't bear it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. I--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.
+
+HECTOR. If you think it better--[he goes out, taking his hat with him
+but leaving the stick on the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now, pettikins,
+he is gone. There's nobody but me. You can let yourself go. Don't try to
+control yourself. Have a good cry.
+
+ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were going to
+be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.
+
+ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a fool.
+[Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She begins prowling to
+and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young women
+can resist Hector. I couldn't when I was your age. He is really rather
+splendid, you know.
+
+ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But
+how can you love a liar?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there
+wouldn't be much love in the world.
+
+ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you please.
+If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector's courage, he will go straight
+off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself
+that he isn't a coward. He has a dreadful trick of getting out of one
+third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. He
+has a whole drawerful of Albert Medals for saving people's lives.
+
+ELLIE. He never told me that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can't
+bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his stories are
+made-up stories.
+
+ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and really
+has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and
+that never happened?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don't have their virtues and
+vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.
+
+ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There's something odd about this
+house, Hesione, and even about you. I don't know why I'm talking to
+you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that
+heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It's only life educating you, pettikins.
+How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?
+
+ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh, how can
+you remind me of him, Hesione?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You don't
+mind now, do you, dear?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.
+
+Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.
+
+HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One second
+more, and she would have been a dead woman!
+
+MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye has
+just been telling me the most extraordinary--
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room].
+
+HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I'll tell it to you after dinner.
+I think you'll like it. The truth is I made it up for you, and was
+looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. But in a moment
+of impatience at being turned out of the room, I threw it away on your
+father.
+
+ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench, scornfully
+self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes it. I should not
+have believed it.
+
+MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of course
+she does not really think that. [He goes to the bookshelves, and
+inspects the titles of the volumes].
+
+Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan,
+carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs' meeting, is
+about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing
+a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion,
+straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it
+is impossible to describe them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. Says his
+name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. Men
+seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the
+pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own
+way than try to explain.
+
+MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she
+indicates Hector].
+
+MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. Very
+pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have not found the
+journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.
+
+HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].
+
+ELLIE. You haven't shown me my room yet, Hesione.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite at home,
+Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the captain in the
+pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr Mangan.
+
+She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You're going to marry Dunn's daughter. Don't. You're
+too old.
+
+MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That's fairly blunt, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's true.
+
+MANGAN. She doesn't think so.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.
+
+MANGAN. Older men than I have--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him].--made fools of
+themselves. That, also, is true.
+
+MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don't see that this is any business of
+yours.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody's business. The stars in their courses
+are shaken when such things happen.
+
+MANGAN. I'm going to marry her all the same.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?
+
+MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I never
+made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn't bring it off. That's the
+sort of man I am; and there will be a better understanding between us
+when you make up your mind to that, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you
+make a hundred thousand a year.
+
+MANGAN. I don't boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred
+thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand
+to him and call him brother.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?
+
+MANGAN. No. I can't say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from Mangan with
+his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the Chinese
+tray].
+
+MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don't quite understand
+my position here. I came here on your daughter's invitation. Am I in her
+house or in yours?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of
+God. What is true within these walls is true outside them. Go out on the
+seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. She is still too
+young.
+
+MANGAN [weakening]. But I'm very little over fifty.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan, you will
+not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away into the pantry].
+
+MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate's child? What are
+you talking about?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry her.
+
+MANGAN. Who will stop me?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door leading
+to the hall].
+
+MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she brought me
+down here to break it off?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing more than
+I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry
+a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one
+myself for two years.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I am damned!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The negress
+redeemed me.
+
+MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of talking.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It's the other sort of talking that makes
+quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.
+
+A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners
+proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has an
+engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is
+found to be at least over forty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no
+knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the bell
+ring? The door is open.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you [he makes
+for the door].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I'm afraid you don't know who I am.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make distinctions
+between one fellow creature and another? [He goes out. Mangan and the
+newcomer stare at one another].
+
+MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Very.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has arrived
+and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione's feelings! May I ask are you a member of
+the family?
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, Hesione.
+[Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same moment the
+captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my kissing your
+daughter, Captain, when I tell you that--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as much
+as you like [he makes for the pantry].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and
+turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but
+probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago-- that your younger
+daughter married a numskull?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she'd marry anybody to get away from
+this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is no longer
+like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been boiled in bread
+and milk for years and years, like other married men. Poor devil! [He
+disappears into the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him].
+I don't believe you are Hastings Utterword.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am Randall
+Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I was abroad
+diplomatizing when he was married.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe
+in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must lock it
+up--[recognizing the stranger with a shock] Randall, how dare you? [She
+marches at him past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and joins Mangan near the
+sofa].
+
+RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?
+
+RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at Claridge's;
+so I followed you down here. You are looking extremely well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't presume to tell me so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no right
+to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the
+window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and
+looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie are now seen strolling
+together].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I beg
+your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a perfect fool of
+myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.
+
+MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman walking in
+the garden with Miss Dunn?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. She quarrelled mortally with my husband only
+ten minutes ago; and I didn't know anyone else had come. It must be a
+visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh, it is Hector. They've
+made it up.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man?
+
+RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One's husband never is, Ariadne
+[he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One's sister's husband always is, Mr Randall.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are just as
+bad.
+
+Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. Randall
+rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. Hector comes
+forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very best.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.
+
+HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?
+
+HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful
+admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought-- [pulling himself
+together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I am extremely glad
+to welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave
+courtesy].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law;
+and have done with it. [She leaves them to themselves].
+
+HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not only to
+hospitality but to civilization.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands
+cordially].
+
+Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie]. Your
+father has washed himself.
+
+ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the pantry
+window.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and
+brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and Mrs
+Hushabye.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut--oh, I forgot:
+you've met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie's hand, and beaming at
+his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She is my daughter.
+[He draws her arm through his caressingly].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister's--er--
+
+RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn. How do
+you do?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.
+
+HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don't introduce us any more. [He moves away
+to the big chair, and adds] Won't you sit down, Lady Utterword? [She
+does so very graciously].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it's like making people show their
+tickets.
+
+MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The great
+question is, not who we are, but what we are.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?
+
+MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.
+
+MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in?
+Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance of a
+city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through
+the garden].
+
+DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or a
+murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must really go
+and explain. [He follows the captain].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It's no use. You'd really better-- [but Dunn
+has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for some tea. We
+never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the
+servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen veranda is the best place
+to ask. May I show you? [She goes to the starboard door].
+
+RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don't think I'll take any tea
+this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. There's nothing to see in the garden except papa's
+observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and
+things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of doors; so come
+along.
+
+RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn't that rather risky?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a
+thunderstorm.
+
+LADY UTTERORRD. That's something new. What is the dynamite for?
+
+HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is trying to
+discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well
+of a Mahatma.
+
+ELLIE. The captain's tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that you've
+had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before you were ten
+minutes in the house?
+
+ELLIE. I did.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].
+
+MANGAN. Won't you come, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. I'm too tired. I'll take a book up to my room and rest a little.
+[She goes to the bookshelf].
+
+MANGAN. Right. You can't do better. But I'm disappointed. [He follows
+Randall and Mrs Hushabye].
+
+Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to Lady
+Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.
+
+ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of
+adventure, Lady Utterword?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.
+
+ELLIE. Then I'll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through the
+hall].
+
+HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I have to
+tell her!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what did you
+mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? What did you
+think?
+
+HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. May I
+tell you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.
+
+HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of saying, "I
+thought you were a plain woman."
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to notice
+whether I am plain or not?
+
+HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only photographs
+of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the
+daughters of that supernatural old man. There is some damnable quality
+in them that destroys men's moral sense, and carries them beyond honor
+and dishonor. You know that, don't you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once for all
+that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think because I'm a
+Shotover that I'm a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian.
+But I'm not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No child brought up in a
+strict Puritan household ever suffered from Puritanism as I suffered
+from our Bohemianism.
+
+HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in the
+houses of their respectable schoolfellows.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.
+
+HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. But
+intelligent people can always manage, unless they are Bohemians.
+
+HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your
+attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count
+yourself?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure
+you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly
+correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just
+what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance.
+An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of
+any woman worth knowing.
+
+HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. You
+are a dangerous woman.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.
+
+HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am not
+making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you had better
+know how I feel if you are going to stay here.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, Hector. And
+terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself, at that game. Is it
+quite understood that we are only playing?
+
+HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer
+worthlessness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my brother-in-law,
+Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in his arms and kisses her
+strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [She
+pushes him suddenly away]. You shall not do that again.
+
+HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended.
+
+MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don't let me disturb you; I
+only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting; and he'll catch
+cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has actually
+condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the garden: it's cooler
+now [she goes out by the port door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don't believe any man can kiss
+Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the hall].
+
+HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain's cap.
+
+HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. Where's Miss
+Dunn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. Addy
+won't let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.
+
+HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love
+to her automatically. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't
+hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with
+me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get
+landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm
+not a bit in earnest.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in her
+life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. She
+is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me.
+
+HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such an
+amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I believe that
+is why I have never been able to repeat it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were frightfully in
+love with one another, Hector. It was such an enchanting dream that I
+have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. I have
+invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving
+you another turn. But it has never come off.
+
+HECTOR. I don't know that I want it to come off. It was damned
+dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven. This
+sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is hell. I shall
+kill her if she persists.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a horse.
+[Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.
+
+HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?
+
+HECTOR. I presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than by
+Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it
+with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there, daddiest?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You've been to the gravel pit. Don't drop it about the
+house, there's a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the evening
+light is now very red].
+
+HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a feeling
+without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of
+your life?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes into the
+pantry].
+
+Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. He
+does not move for some time. Then he folds his arms. Then, throwing his
+hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically
+once to and fro. Suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak
+table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate
+duel with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him
+through the body up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on
+the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight
+into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says
+in a deep and thrilling tone, "Do you love me!" The captain comes out
+of the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with his arms stretched
+out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going
+through a series of gymnastic exercises.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will never be as
+strong as a gorilla.
+
+HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.
+
+HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite than you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.
+
+HECTOR. And that you can, eh?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+HECTOR. What's the use of that? You never do attain it.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept forever in
+the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for
+greasing their bristles and filling their snouts?
+
+HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both.
+I refuse to die until I have invented the means.
+
+HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do,
+unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They
+know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves.
+When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them.
+
+HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a very nice
+daughter. Mangan's son may be a Plato: Randall's a Shelley. What was my
+father?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces the
+drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of
+color].
+
+HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.
+
+HECTOR. Just so--we are members one of another. [He throws himself
+carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought of this killing
+of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel
+in the lion's den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always
+survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as
+they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the
+lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and
+the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What
+are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I'll
+spare them in sheer--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?
+
+HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that
+my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their
+door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can't spare them until you have the power to kill
+them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions
+of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They're
+going to do it. They're doing it already.
+
+HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the
+sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half
+of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these
+people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having
+the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they
+bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and
+singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
+
+HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be such a
+demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left you
+nothing but dreams, as some women do.
+
+HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it
+accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands of the shrew
+and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [Walking
+distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must think these things out.
+[Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will
+discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the
+ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at
+me. And I must hurry. I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is
+about to go into the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when
+Hesione comes back].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to
+entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting about?
+
+HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is madder
+than usual.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.
+
+HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back. [They
+return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.
+
+HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent
+lifeboat I invented?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since Easter!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous
+extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve
+thousand for the invention before that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic
+keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot
+afford life-saving inventions. Can't you think of something that will
+murder half Europe at one bang?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on
+slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn't your husband invent
+something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
+
+HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However, you are
+right: I ought to support my wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should never
+see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.
+
+HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor
+husbands?
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is anyhow!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It sticks
+in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you are.
+
+HECTOR. You are your father's daughter, Hesione.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in generals:
+they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel and wind in a
+machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. Saved! You
+are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these dreadful people
+and entertain them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don't forget that.
+
+HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them.
+The servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the
+house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a house!
+What a daughter!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!
+
+HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?
+
+HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their firesides,
+their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. Why are they
+not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them
+into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to
+be even with us?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].
+
+      I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors
+            thereof,
+      That men might come for their choosing, and their betters
+            spring from their love;
+      But one of them married a numskull;
+
+HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].
+
+      The other a liar wed;
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].
+
+      And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where are
+you?
+
+HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the
+garden].
+
+The captain goes back to his place at the table.
+
+HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the
+light.
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn. Ellie
+comes in, followed by Mangan. Both are dressed for dinner. She strolls
+to the drawing-table. He comes between the table and the wicker chair.
+
+MANGAN. What a dinner! I don't call it a dinner: I call it a meal.
+
+ELLIE. I am accustomed to meals, Mr Mangan, and very lucky to get them.
+Besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me.
+
+MANGAN [shuddering liverishly]. Too rich: I can't eat such things. I
+suppose it's because I have to work so much with my brain. That's the
+worst of being a man of business: you are always thinking, thinking,
+thinking. By the way, now that we are alone, may I take the opportunity
+to come to a little understanding with you?
+
+ELLIE [settling into the draughtsman's seat]. Certainly. I should like
+to.
+
+MANGAN [taken aback]. Should you? That surprises me; for I thought I
+noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you could. Not for the
+first time either.
+
+ELLIE. I was very tired and upset. I wasn't used to the ways of this
+extraordinary house. Please forgive me.
+
+MANGAN. Oh, that's all right: I don't mind. But Captain Shotover has
+been talking to me about you. You and me, you know.
+
+ELLIE [interested]. The captain! What did he say?
+
+MANGAN. Well, he noticed the difference between our ages.
+
+ELLIE. He notices everything.
+
+MANGAN. You don't mind, then?
+
+ELLIE. Of course I know quite well that our engagement--
+
+MANGAN. Oh! you call it an engagement.
+
+ELLIE. Well, isn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. This is the
+first time you've used the word; and I didn't quite know where we stood:
+that's all. [He sits down in the wicker chair; and resigns himself to
+allow her to lead the conversation]. You were saying--?
+
+ELLIE. Was I? I forget. Tell me. Do you like this part of the country? I
+heard you ask Mr Hushabye at dinner whether there are any nice houses to
+let down here.
+
+MANGAN. I like the place. The air suits me. I shouldn't be surprised if
+I settled down here.
+
+ELLIE. Nothing would please me better. The air suits me too. And I want
+to be near Hesione.
+
+MANGAN [with growing uneasiness]. The air may suit us; but the question
+is, should we suit one another? Have you thought about that?
+
+ELLIE. Mr Mangan, we must be sensible, mustn't we? It's no use
+pretending that we are Romeo and Juliet. But we can get on very well
+together if we choose to make the best of it. Your kindness of heart
+will make it easy for me.
+
+MANGAN [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like deliberate
+unpleasantness in his voice]. Kindness of heart, eh? I ruined your
+father, didn't I?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not intentionally.
+
+MANGAN. Yes I did. Ruined him on purpose.
+
+ELLIE. On purpose!
+
+MANGAN. Not out of ill-nature, you know. And you'll admit that I kept a
+job for him when I had finished with him. But business is business; and
+I ruined him as a matter of business.
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand how that can be. Are you trying to make me
+feel that I need not be grateful to you, so that I may choose freely?
+
+MANGAN [rising aggressively]. No. I mean what I say.
+
+ELLIE. But how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my father? The
+money he lost was yours.
+
+MANGAN [with a sour laugh]. Was mine! It is mine, Miss Ellie, and all
+the money the other fellows lost too. [He shoves his hands into his
+pockets and shows his teeth]. I just smoked them out like a hive of
+bees. What do you say to that? A bit of shock, eh?
+
+ELLIE. It would have been, this morning. Now! you can't think how little
+it matters. But it's quite interesting. Only, you must explain it to me.
+I don't understand it. [Propping her elbows on the drawingboard and her
+chin on her hands, she composes herself to listen with a combination of
+conscious curiosity with unconscious contempt which provokes him to more
+and more unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance].
+
+MANGAN. Of course you don't understand: what do you know about business?
+You just listen and learn. Your father's business was a new business;
+and I don't start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They
+put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. They
+wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them.
+They're what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing
+is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In
+a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out
+to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if
+they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very
+same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple
+of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third
+lot. If it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too,
+and leave their work and their money behind them. And that's where the
+real business man comes in: where I come in. But I'm cleverer than some:
+I don't mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your
+father's measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work
+himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child
+in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too
+great a hurry to wait for his market. I knew that the surest way to
+ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. I
+explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money;
+for I take no risks in ideas, even when they're my own. Your father and
+the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than
+a heap of squeezed lemons. You've been wasting your gratitude: my kind
+heart is all rot. I'm sick of it. When I see your father beaming at
+me with his moist, grateful eyes, regularly wallowing in gratitude, I
+sometimes feel I must tell him the truth or burst. What stops me is that
+I know he wouldn't believe me. He'd think it was my modesty, as you did
+just now. He'd think anything rather than the truth, which is that he's
+a blamed fool, and I am a man that knows how to take care of himself.
+[He throws himself back into the big chair with large self approval].
+Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [dropping her hands]. How strange! that my mother, who knew
+nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you!
+She always said not before papa, of course, but to us children--that you
+were just that sort of man.
+
+MANGAN [sitting up, much hurt]. Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you
+marry me.
+
+ELLIE. Well, you see, Mr Mangan, my mother married a very good man--for
+whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul
+of goodness--and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
+
+MANGAN. Anyhow, you don't want to marry me now, do you?
+
+ELLIE. [very calmly]. Oh, I think so. Why not?
+
+MANGAN. [rising aghast]. Why not!
+
+ELLIE. I don't see why we shouldn't get on very well together.
+
+MANGAN. Well, but look here, you know--[he stops, quite at a loss].
+
+ELLIE. [patiently]. Well?
+
+MANGAN. Well, I thought you were rather particular about people's
+characters.
+
+ELLIE. If we women were particular about men's characters, we should
+never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. A child like you talking of "we women"! What next! You're not in
+earnest?
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I am. Aren't you?
+
+MANGAN. You mean to hold me to it?
+
+ELLIE. Do you wish to back out of it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, no. Not exactly back out of it.
+
+ELLIE. Well?
+
+He has nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops into
+the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. But a
+cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans over towards her on his
+right elbow, and speaks in a low steady voice.
+
+MANGAN. Suppose I told you I was in love with another woman!
+
+ELLIE [echoing him]. Suppose I told you I was in love with another man!
+
+MANGAN [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. I'm not joking.
+
+ELLIE. Who told you I was?
+
+MANGAN. I tell you I'm serious. You're too young to be serious; but
+you'll have to believe me. I want to be near your friend Mrs Hushabye.
+I'm in love with her. Now the murder's out.
+
+ELLIE. I want to be near your friend Mr Hushabye. I'm in love with
+him. [She rises and adds with a frank air] Now we are in one another's
+confidence, we shall be real friends. Thank you for telling me.
+
+MANGAN [almost beside himself]. Do you think I'll be made a convenience
+of like this?
+
+ELLIE. Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father.
+Well, a woman's business is marriage. Why shouldn't I make a domestic
+convenience of you?
+
+MANGAN. Because I don't choose, see? Because I'm not a silly gull like
+your father. That's why.
+
+ELLIE [with serene contempt]. You are not good enough to clean my
+father's boots, Mr Mangan; and I am paying you a great compliment in
+condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. Of course
+you are free to throw over our engagement if you like; but, if you do,
+you'll never enter Hesione's house again: I will take care of that.
+
+MANGAN [gasping]. You little devil, you've done me. [On the point of
+collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. Wait a bit,
+though: you're not so cute as you think. You can't beat Boss Mangan as
+easy as that. Suppose I go straight to Mrs Hushabye and tell her that
+you're in love with her husband.
+
+ELLIE. She knows it.
+
+MANGAN. You told her!!!
+
+ELLIE. She told me.
+
+MANGAN [clutching at his bursting temples]. Oh, this is a crazy house.
+Or else I'm going clean off my chump. Is she making a swop with you--she
+to have your husband and you to have hers?
+
+ELLIE. Well, you don't want us both, do you?
+
+MANGAN [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. My brain won't
+stand it. My head's going to split. Help! Help me to hold it. Quick:
+hold it: squeeze it. Save me. [Ellie comes behind his chair; clasps his
+head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her hands from his forehead
+back to his ears]. Thank you. [Drowsily]. That's very refreshing.
+[Waking a little]. Don't you hypnotize me, though. I've seen men made
+fools of by hypnotism.
+
+ELLIE [steadily]. Be quiet. I've seen men made fools of without
+hypnotism.
+
+MANGAN [humbly]. You don't dislike touching me, I hope. You never
+touched me before, I noticed.
+
+ELLIE. Not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice woman,
+who will never expect you to make love to her. And I will never expect
+him to make love to me.
+
+MANGAN. He may, though.
+
+ELLIE [making her passes rhythmically]. Hush. Go to sleep. Do you hear?
+You are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet, deeply
+deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+He falls asleep. Ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes into
+the garden.
+
+Nurse Guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which comes in
+from the hall.
+
+GUINNESS [speaking to someone outside]. Mr Mangan's not here, duckie:
+there's no one here. It's all dark.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [without]. Try the garden. Mr Dunn and I will be in my
+boudoir. Show him the way.
+
+GUINNESS. Yes, ducky. [She makes for the garden door in the dark;
+stumbles over the sleeping Mangan and screams]. Ahoo! O Lord, Sir! I
+beg your pardon, I'm sure: I didn't see you in the dark. Who is it? [She
+goes back to the door and turns on the light]. Oh, Mr Mangan, sir, I
+hope I haven't hurt you plumping into your lap like that. [Coming to
+him]. I was looking for you, sir. Mrs Hushabye says will you please
+[noticing that he remains quite insensible]. Oh, my good Lord, I hope
+I haven't killed him. Sir! Mr Mangan! Sir! [She shakes him; and he is
+rolling inertly off the chair on the floor when she holds him up and
+props him against the cushion]. Miss Hessy! Miss Hessy! quick, doty
+darling. Miss Hessy! [Mrs Hushabye comes in from the hall, followed by
+Mazzini Dunn]. Oh, Miss Hessy, I've been and killed him.
+
+Mazzini runs round the back of the chair to Mangan's right hand, and
+sees that the nurse's words are apparently only too true.
+
+MAZZINI. What tempted you to commit such a crime, woman?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [trying not to laugh]. Do you mean, you did it on purpose?
+
+GUINNESS. Now is it likely I'd kill any man on purpose? I fell over
+him in the dark; and I'm a pretty tidy weight. He never spoke nor moved
+until I shook him; and then he would have dropped dead on the floor.
+Isn't it tiresome?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past the nurse to Mangan's side, and inspecting him
+less credulously than Mazzini]. Nonsense! he is not dead: he is only
+asleep. I can see him breathing.
+
+GUINNESS. But why won't he wake?
+
+MAZZINI [speaking very politely into Mangan's ear]. Mangan! My dear
+Mangan! [he blows into Mangan's ear].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's no good [she shakes him vigorously]. Mr Mangan,
+wake up. Do you hear? [He begins to roll over]. Oh! Nurse, nurse: he's
+falling: help me.
+
+Nurse Guinness rushes to the rescue. With Mazzini's assistance, Mangan
+is propped safely up again.
+
+GUINNESS [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with her
+nose]. Would he be drunk, do you think, pet?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Had he any of papa's rum?
+
+MAZZINI. It can't be that: he is most abstemious. I am afraid he drank
+too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. You know, Mrs
+Hushabye, I really think he has been hypnotized.
+
+GUINNESS. Hip no what, sir?
+
+MAZZINI. One evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing
+performance, the children began playing at it; and Ellie stroked my
+head. I assure you I went off dead asleep; and they had to send for a
+professional to wake me up after I had slept eighteen hours. They had to
+carry me upstairs; and as the poor children were not very strong, they
+let me slip; and I rolled right down the whole flight and never woke up.
+[Mrs Hushabye splutters]. Oh, you may laugh, Mrs Hushabye; but I might
+have been killed.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I couldn't have helped laughing even if you had been, Mr
+Dunn. So Ellie has hypnotized him. What fun!
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. It was such a terrible lesson to her: nothing
+would induce her to try such a thing again.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who did it? I didn't.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought perhaps the captain might have done it
+unintentionally. He is so fearfully magnetic: I feel vibrations whenever
+he comes close to me.
+
+GUINNESS. The captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: I'll back him
+for that. I'll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Wait a bit. [To Mazzini]. You say he is all right for
+eighteen hours?
+
+MAZZINI. Well, I was asleep for eighteen hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Were you any the worse for it?
+
+MAZZINI. I don't quite remember. They had poured brandy down my throat,
+you see; and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quite. Anyhow, you survived. Nurse, darling: go and ask
+Miss Dunn to come to us here. Say I want to speak to her particularly.
+You will find her with Mr Hushabye probably.
+
+GUINNESS. I think not, ducky: Miss Addy is with him. But I'll find her
+and send her to you. [She goes out into the garden].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [calling Mazzini's attention to the figure on the chair].
+Now, Mr Dunn, look. Just look. Look hard. Do you still intend to
+sacrifice your daughter to that thing?
+
+MAZZINI [troubled]. You have completely upset me, Mrs Hushabye, by all
+you have said to me. That anyone could imagine that I--I, a consecrated
+soldier of freedom, if I may say so--could sacrifice Ellie to anybody or
+anyone, or that I should ever have dreamed of forcing her inclinations
+in any way, is a most painful blow to my--well, I suppose you would say
+to my good opinion of myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rather stolidly]. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI [looking forlornly at the body]. What is your objection to
+poor Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then I am so
+accustomed to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the brute!
+Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver,
+who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to
+his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of
+iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women
+and girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry,
+I think you call him, don't you? Are you going to fling your delicate,
+sweet, helpless child into such a beast's claws just because he will
+keep her in an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how
+rich he is?
+
+MAZZINI [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. Bless you, dear Mrs
+Hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! Poor dear Mangan
+isn't a bit like that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [scornfully]. Poor dear Mangan indeed!
+
+MAZZINI. But he doesn't know anything about machinery. He never goes
+near the men: he couldn't manage them: he is afraid of them. I never can
+get him to take the least interest in the works: he hardly knows more
+about them than you do. People are cruelly unjust to Mangan: they think
+he is all rugged strength just because his manners are bad.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you mean to tell me he isn't strong enough to crush
+poor little Ellie?
+
+MAZZINI. Of course it's very hard to say how any marriage will turn out;
+but speaking for myself, I should say that he won't have a dog's chance
+against Ellie. You know, Ellie has remarkable strength of character. I
+think it is because I taught her to like Shakespeare when she was very
+young.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [contemptuously]. Shakespeare! The next thing you will tell
+me is that you could have made a great deal more money than Mangan. [She
+retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port end of it in the worst of
+humors].
+
+MAZZINI [following her and taking the other end]. No: I'm no good at
+making money. I don't care enough for it, somehow. I'm not ambitious!
+that must be it. Mangan is wonderful about money: he thinks of nothing
+else. He is so dreadfully afraid of being poor. I am always thinking of
+other things: even at the works I think of the things we are doing and
+not of what they cost. And the worst of it is, poor Mangan doesn't know
+what to do with his money when he gets it. He is such a baby that he
+doesn't know even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating
+and drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all. Ellie
+will diet him splendidly. You will be surprised when you come to know
+him better: he is really the most helpless of mortals. You get quite a
+protective feeling towards him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who manages his business, pray?
+
+MAZZINI. I do. And of course other people like me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Footling people, you mean.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose you'd think us so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And pray why don't you do without him if you're all so
+much cleverer?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, we couldn't: we should ruin the business in a year. I've
+tried; and I know. We should spend too much on everything. We should
+improve the quality of the goods and make them too dear. We should be
+sentimental about the hard cases among the work people. But Mangan keeps
+us in order. He is down on us about every extra halfpenny. We could
+never do without him. You see, he will sit up all night thinking of how
+to save sixpence. Won't Ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his
+house in hand!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of
+industry!
+
+MAZZINI. I am afraid all the captains of industry are what you call
+frauds, Mrs Hushabye. Of course there are some manufacturers who really
+do understand their own works; but they don't make as high a rate of
+profit as Mangan does. I assure you Mangan is quite a good fellow in his
+way. He means well.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He doesn't look well. He is not in his first youth, is he?
+
+MAZZINI. After all, no husband is in his first youth for very long, Mrs
+Hushabye. And men can't afford to marry in their first youth nowadays.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can't you
+say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why don't you
+inspire everybody with confidence? with respect?
+
+MAZZINI [humbly]. I think that what is the matter with me is that I am
+poor. You don't know what that means at home. Mind: I don't say they
+have ever complained. They've all been wonderful: they've been proud of
+my poverty. They've even joked about it quite often. But my wife has had
+a very poor time of it. She has been quite resigned--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shuddering involuntarily!]
+
+MAZZINI. There! You see, Mrs Hushabye. I don't want Ellie to live on
+resignation.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want her to have to resign herself to living with a
+man she doesn't love?
+
+MAZZINI [wistfully]. Are you sure that would be worse than living with a
+man she did love, if he was a footling person?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite interested in
+Mazzini now]. You know, I really think you must love Ellie very much;
+for you become quite clever when you talk about her.
+
+MAZZINI. I didn't know I was so very stupid on other subjects.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are, sometimes.
+
+MAZZINI [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. I have learnt a
+good deal about myself from you, Mrs Hushabye; and I'm afraid I shall
+not be the happier for your plain speaking. But if you thought I needed
+it to make me think of Ellie's happiness you were very much mistaken.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [leaning towards him kindly]. Have I been a beast?
+
+MAZZINI [pulling himself together]. It doesn't matter about me, Mrs
+Hushabye. I think you like Ellie; and that is enough for me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I'm beginning to like you a little. I perfectly loathed
+you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome
+elderly prig I ever met.
+
+MAZZINI [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. I daresay I am all that.
+I never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you. They always
+frighten me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [pleased]. Am I a gorgeous woman, Mazzini? I shall fall in
+love with you presently.
+
+MAZZINI [with placid gallantry]. No, you won't, Hesione. But you would
+be quite safe. Would you believe it that quite a lot of women have
+flirted with me because I am quite safe? But they get tired of me for
+the same reason.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. Take care. You may not be so safe as you
+think.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh yes, quite safe. You see, I have been in love really: the
+sort of love that only happens once. [Softly]. That's why Ellie is such
+a lovely girl.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, really, you are coming out. Are you quite sure you
+won't let me tempt you into a second grand passion?
+
+MAZZINI. Quite. It wouldn't be natural. The fact is, you don't strike on
+my box, Mrs Hushabye; and I certainly don't strike on yours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Your marriage was a safety match.
+
+MAZZINI. What a very witty application of the expression I used! I
+should never have thought of it.
+
+Ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. Oh! here is Ellie at last. [She goes behind the
+sofa].
+
+ELLIE [on the threshold of the starboard door]. Guinness said you wanted
+me: you and papa.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You have kept us waiting so long that it almost came
+to--well, never mind. Your father is a very wonderful man [she ruffles
+his hair affectionately]: the only one I ever met who could resist me
+when I made myself really agreeable. [She comes to the big chair, on
+Mangan's left]. Come here. I have something to show you. [Ellie strolls
+listlessly to the other side of the chair]. Look.
+
+ELLIE [contemplating Mangan without interest]. I know. He is only
+asleep. We had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the middle of
+it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You did it, Ellie. You put him asleep.
+
+MAZZINI [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. Oh, I hope
+not. Did you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [wearily]. He asked me to.
+
+MAZZINI. But it's dangerous. You know what happened to me.
+
+ELLIE [utterly indifferent]. Oh, I daresay I can wake him. If not,
+somebody else can.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It doesn't matter, anyhow, because I have at last
+persuaded your father that you don't want to marry him.
+
+ELLIE [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. But why did
+you do that, Hesione? I do want to marry him. I fully intend to marry
+him.
+
+MAZZINI. Are you quite sure, Ellie? Mrs Hushabye has made me feel that I
+may have been thoughtless and selfish about it.
+
+ELLIE [very clearly and steadily]. Papa. When Mrs. Hushabye takes it on
+herself to explain to you what I think or don't think, shut your ears
+tight; and shut your eyes too. Hesione knows nothing about me: she
+hasn't the least notion of the sort of person I am, and never will. I
+promise you I won't do anything I don't want to do and mean to do for my
+own sake.
+
+MAZZINI. You are quite, quite sure?
+
+ELLIE. Quite, quite sure. Now you must go away and leave me to talk to
+Mrs Hushabye.
+
+MAZZINI. But I should like to hear. Shall I be in the way?
+
+ELLIE [inexorable]. I had rather talk to her alone.
+
+MAZZINI [affectionately]. Oh, well, I know what a nuisance parents are,
+dear. I will be good and go. [He goes to the garden door]. By the way,
+do you remember the address of that professional who woke me up? Don't
+you think I had better telegraph to him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [moving towards the sofa]. It's too late to telegraph
+tonight.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose so. I do hope he'll wake up in the course of the
+night. [He goes out into the garden].
+
+ELLIE [turning vigorously on Hesione the moment her father is out of the
+room]. Hesione, what the devil do you mean by making mischief with my
+father about Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [promptly losing her temper]. Don't you dare speak to me
+like that, you little minx. Remember that you are in my house.
+
+ELLIE. Stuff! Why don't you mind your own business? What is it to you
+whether I choose to marry Mangan or not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable little
+matrimonial adventurer?
+
+ELLIE. Every woman who hasn't any money is a matrimonial adventurer.
+It's easy for you to talk: you have never known what it is to want
+money; and you can pick up men as if they were daisies. I am poor and
+respectable--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [interrupting]. Ho! respectable! How did you pick up
+Mangan? How did you pick up my husband? You have the audacity to tell me
+that I am a--a--a--
+
+ELLIE. A siren. So you are. You were born to lead men by the nose: if
+you weren't, Marcus would have waited for me, perhaps.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [suddenly melting and half laughing]. Oh, my poor Ellie, my
+pettikins, my unhappy darling! I am so sorry about Hector. But what can
+I do? It's not my fault: I'd give him to you if I could.
+
+ELLIE. I don't blame you for that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a brute I was to quarrel with you and call you names!
+Do kiss me and say you're not angry with me.
+
+ELLIE [fiercely]. Oh, don't slop and gush and be sentimental. Don't you
+see that unless I can be hard--as hard as nails--I shall go mad? I don't
+care a damn about your calling me names: do you think a woman in my
+situation can feel a few hard words?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor little woman! Poor little situation!
+
+ELLIE. I suppose you think you're being sympathetic. You are just
+foolish and stupid and selfish. You see me getting a smasher right in
+the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best part that can
+never come again; and you think you can help me over it by a little
+coaxing and kissing. When I want all the strength I can get to lean on:
+something iron, something stony, I don't care how cruel it is, you
+go all mushy and want to slobber over me. I'm not angry; I'm not
+unfriendly; but for God's sake do pull yourself together; and don't
+think that because you're on velvet and always have been, women who are
+in hell can take it as easily as you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shrugging her shoulders]. Very well. [She sits down on the
+sofa in her old place.] But I warn you that when I am neither coaxing and
+kissing nor laughing, I am just wondering how much longer I can stand
+living in this cruel, damnable world. You object to the siren: well,
+I drop the siren. You want to rest your wounded bosom against a
+grindstone. Well [folding her arms] here is the grindstone.
+
+ELLIE [sitting down beside her, appeased]. That's better: you really
+have the trick of falling in with everyone's mood; but you don't
+understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom there is only
+one man and only one chance.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I certainly don't understand how your marrying that object
+[indicating Mangan] will console you for not being able to marry Hector.
+
+ELLIE. Perhaps you don't understand why I was quite a nice girl this
+morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, yes, I do. It's because you have made up your mind to
+do something despicable and wicked.
+
+ELLIE. I don't think so, Hesione. I must make the best of my ruined
+house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pooh! You'll get over it. Your house isn't ruined.
+
+ELLIE. Of course I shall get over it. You don't suppose I'm going to sit
+down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a
+pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Association. But my
+heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that
+what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. In
+the world for me there is Marcus and a lot of other men of whom one is
+just the same as another. Well, if I can't have love, that's no reason
+why I should have poverty. If Mangan has nothing else, he has money.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And are there no YOUNG men with money?
+
+ELLIE. Not within my reach. Besides, a young man would have the right
+to expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he found I could
+not give it to him. Rich young men can get rid of their wives, you know,
+pretty cheaply. But this object, as you call him, can expect nothing
+more from me than I am prepared to give him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He will be your owner, remember. If he buys you, he will
+make the bargain pay him and not you. Ask your father.
+
+ELLIE [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their subject].
+You need not trouble on that score, Hesione. I have more to give Boss
+Mangan than he has to give me: it is I who am buying him, and at a
+pretty good price too, I think. Women are better at that sort of bargain
+than men. I have taken the Boss's measure; and ten Boss Mangans shall
+not prevent me doing far more as I please as his wife than I have ever
+been able to do as a poor girl. [Stooping to the recumbent figure].
+Shall they, Boss? I think not. [She passes on to the drawing-table, and
+leans against the end of it, facing the windows]. I shall not have to
+spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last, anyhow.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising superbly]. Ellie, you are a wicked, sordid little
+beast. And to think that I actually condescended to fascinate that
+creature there to save you from him! Well, let me tell you this: if you
+make this disgusting match, you will never see Hector again if I can
+help it.
+
+ELLIE [unmoved]. I nailed Mangan by telling him that if he did not marry
+me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on her wrists and
+seats herself on the end of the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [recoiling]. Oh!
+
+ELLIE. So you see I am not unprepared for your playing that trump
+against me. Well, you just try it: that's all. I should have made a man
+of Marcus, not a household pet.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [flaming]. You dare!
+
+ELLIE [looking almost dangerous]. Set him thinking about me if you dare.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, of all the impudent little fiends I ever met! Hector
+says there is a certain point at which the only answer you can give to a
+man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down. What would you say if
+I were to box your ears?
+
+ELLIE [calmly]. I should pull your hair.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. That wouldn't hurt me. Perhaps it comes
+off at night.
+
+ELLIE [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to her]. Oh,
+you don't mean to say, Hesione, that your beautiful black hair is false?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [patting it]. Don't tell Hector. He believes in it.
+
+ELLIE [groaning]. Oh! Even the hair that ensnared him false! Everything
+false!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pull it and try. Other women can snare men in their hair;
+but I can swing a baby on mine. Aha! you can't do that, Goldylocks.
+
+ELLIE [heartbroken]. No. You have stolen my babies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pettikins, don't make me cry. You know what you said about
+my making a household pet of him is a little true. Perhaps he ought to
+have waited for you. Would any other woman on earth forgive you?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself! [Pulling
+herself together]. There! You couldn't help it: neither of us could help
+it. He couldn't help it. No, don't say anything more: I can't bear it.
+Let us wake the object. [She begins stroking Mangan's head, reversing
+the movement with which she put him to sleep]. Wake up, do you hear? You
+are to wake up at once. Wake up, wake up, wake--
+
+MANGAN [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them]. Wake
+up! So you think I've been asleep, do you? [He kicks the chair violently
+back out of his way, and gets between them]. You throw me into a trance
+so that I can't move hand or foot--I might have been buried alive! it's
+a mercy I wasn't--and then you think I was only asleep. If you'd let
+me drop the two times you rolled me about, my nose would have been
+flattened for life against the floor. But I've found you all out,
+anyhow. I know the sort of people I'm among now. I've heard every word
+you've said, you and your precious father, and [to Mrs Hushabye] you
+too. So I'm an object, am I? I'm a thing, am I? I'm a fool that hasn't
+sense enough to feed myself properly, am I? I'm afraid of the men that
+would starve if it weren't for the wages I give them, am I? I'm nothing
+but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience of by designing
+women and fool managers of my works, am I? I'm--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with the most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr Mangan,
+you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while
+you were pretending to be asleep. It was not meant for you to hear.
+
+MANGAN. Pretending to be asleep! Do you think if I was only pretending
+that I'd have sprawled there helpless, and listened to such unfairness,
+such lies, such injustice and plotting and backbiting and slandering of
+me, if I could have up and told you what I thought of you! I wonder I
+didn't burst.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [sweetly]. You dreamt it all, Mr Mangan. We were only
+saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep. That was all,
+wasn't it, Ellie? Believe me, Mr Mangan, all those unpleasant things
+came into your mind in the last half second before you woke. Ellie
+rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the disagreeable sensation suggested
+a disagreeable dream.
+
+MANGAN [doggedly]. I believe in dreams.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So do I. But they go by contraries, don't they?
+
+MANGAN [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. I shan't forget,
+to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in the
+garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a dirty low mean thing
+to do. You had no right to let me come near you if I disgusted you.
+It isn't my fault if I'm old and haven't a moustache like a bronze
+candlestick as your husband has. There are things no decent woman would
+do to a man--like a man hitting a woman in the breast.
+
+Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with
+her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a
+child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye, at the distressing sound he
+makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. She rises and runs to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't cry: I can't bear it. Have I broken your heart? I
+didn't know you had one. How could I?
+
+MANGAN. I'm a man, ain't I?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly]. Oh no:
+not what I call a man. Only a Boss: just that and nothing else. What
+business has a Boss with a heart?
+
+MANGAN. Then you're not a bit sorry for what you did, nor ashamed?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was ashamed for the first time in my life when you said
+that about hitting a woman in the breast, and I found out what I'd done.
+My very bones blushed red. You've had your revenge, Boss. Aren't you
+satisfied?
+
+MANGAN. Serve you right! Do you hear? Serve you right! You're just
+cruel. Cruel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only find
+some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. By the way [sitting down
+beside him on the arm of the chair], what's your name? It's not really
+Boss, is it?
+
+MANGAN [shortly]. If you want to know, my name's Alfred.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [springs up]. Alfred!! Ellie, he was christened after
+Tennyson!!!
+
+MANGAN [rising]. I was christened after my uncle, and never had a penny
+from him, damn him! What of it?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that
+you had a mother, like anyone else. [Putting her hands on his shoulders
+and surveying him]. Little Alf!
+
+MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little heart, but
+a real one. [Releasing him suddenly]. Now run and make it up with Ellie.
+She has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than I had
+[she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door].
+
+MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.
+
+ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?
+
+MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of anything
+about a man except what they can get out of him? You weren't even
+thinking that about me. You were only thinking whether your gloves would
+last.
+
+ELLIE. I shall not have to think about that when we are married.
+
+MANGAN. And you think I am going to marry you after what I heard there!
+
+ELLIE. You heard nothing from me that I did not tell you before.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps you think I can't do without you.
+
+ELLIE. I think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after coming
+to know us so well.
+
+MANGAN [with something like a yell of despair]. Am I never to have the
+last word?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [appearing at the starboard garden door]. There is a
+soul in torment here. What is the matter?
+
+MANGAN. This girl doesn't want to spend her life wondering how long her
+gloves will last.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [passing through]. Don't wear any. I never do [he goes
+into the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome dinner
+dress]. Is anything the matter?
+
+ELLIE. This gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last word?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [coming forward to the sofa]. I should let him have it,
+my dear. The important thing is not to have the last word, but to have
+your own way.
+
+MANGAN. She wants both.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. She won't get them, Mr Mangan. Providence always has the
+last word.
+
+MANGAN [desperately]. Now you are going to come religion over me. In
+this house a man's mind might as well be a football. I'm going. [He
+makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has
+just emerged from his pantry].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all
+here.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You were welcome to come: you are free to go. The wide
+earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But your things, Mr Mangan. Your bag, your comb and
+brushes, your pyjamas--
+
+HECTOR [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome Arab
+costume]. Why should the escaping slave take his chains with him?
+
+MANGAN. That's right, Hushabye. Keep the pyjamas, my lady, and much good
+may they do you.
+
+HECTOR [advancing to Lady Utterword's left hand]. Let us all go out into
+the night and leave everything behind us.
+
+MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company,
+especially female company.
+
+ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land
+where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its
+latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will certainly not be comfortable without your
+luggage, Mr Mangan.
+
+ELLIE [impatient]. Go, go: why don't you go? It is a heavenly night: you
+can sleep on the heath. Take my waterproof to lie on: it is hanging up
+in the hall.
+
+HECTOR. Breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with the
+captain at six.
+
+ELLIE. Good night, Alfred.
+
+HECTOR. Alfred! [He runs back to the door and calls into the garden].
+Randall, Mangan's Christian name is Alfred.
+
+RANDALL [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress]. Then
+Hesione wins her bet.
+
+Mrs Hushabye appears in the port doorway. She throws her left arm round
+Hector's neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa: and throws
+her right arm round Lady Utterword's neck.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. They wouldn't believe me, Alf.
+
+They contemplate him.
+
+MANGAN. Is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if I was
+the latest thing in a menagerie?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are the latest thing in this menagerie.
+
+Before Mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from upstairs:
+then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. The staring group breaks up in
+consternation.
+
+MAZZINI'S VOICE [from above]. Help! A burglar! Help!
+
+HECTOR [his eyes blazing]. A burglar!!!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. No, Hector: you'll be shot [but it is too late; he has
+dashed out past Mangan, who hastily moves towards the bookshelves out of
+his way].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [blowing his whistle]. All hands aloft! [He strides out
+after Hector].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. My diamonds! [She follows the captain].
+
+RANDALL [rushing after her]. No. Ariadne. Let me.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, is papa shot? [She runs out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Are you frightened, Alf?
+
+MANGAN. No. It ain't my house, thank God.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into court as
+witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our private lives?
+
+MANGAN. You won't be believed if you tell the truth.
+
+Mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand, comes from
+the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, my dear Mrs Hushabye, I might have killed him. [He throws
+the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair]. I hope you
+won't believe I really intended to.
+
+Hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man before him
+by the collar. He plants him in the middle of the room and releases him.
+
+Ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her father's
+chair and pats his shoulders.
+
+RANDALL [entering with a poker]. Keep your eye on this door, Mangan.
+I'll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door and stands on
+guard there].
+
+Lady Utterword comes in after Randall, and goes between Mrs Hushabye and
+Mangan.
+
+Nurse Guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on Mangan's
+left.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What has happened?
+
+MAZZINI. Your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs, and gave
+me a pistol that Mr Hushabye had been practising with. I thought it
+would frighten him; but it went off at a touch.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, and took the skin off my ear. Precious near took the
+top off my head. Why don't you have a proper revolver instead of a thing
+like that, that goes off if you as much as blow on it?
+
+HECTOR. One of my duelling pistols. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI. He put his hands up and said it was a fair cop.
+
+THE BURGLAR. So it was. Send for the police.
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! It was not a fair cop. We were four to one.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What will they do to him?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten years. Beginning with solitary. Ten years off my life.
+I shan't serve it all: I'm too old. It will see me out.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You should have thought of that before you stole my
+diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, you've got them back, lady, haven't you? Can you give
+me back the years of my life you are going to take from me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, we can't bury a man alive for ten years for a few
+diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten little shining diamonds! Ten long black years!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Think of what it is for us to be dragged through the
+horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs in the
+papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you a good
+beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in England there
+is no real protection for any respectable person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. I'm too old to be giv a hiding, lady. Send for the police
+and have done with it. It's only just and right you should.
+
+RANDALL [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so
+pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker between his
+fingers like a well folded umbrella]. It is neither just nor right
+that we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to gratify your moral
+enthusiasm, my friend. You had better get out, while you have the
+chance.
+
+THE BURGLAR [inexorably]. No. I must work my sin off my conscience.
+This has come as a sort of call to me. Let me spend the rest of my life
+repenting in a cell. I shall have my reward above.
+
+MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can't behave naturally in this
+house.
+
+HECTOR. My good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody else's
+expense. Nobody here is going to charge you.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh, you won't charge me, won't you?
+
+HECTOR. No. I'm sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly leave the
+house?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Right. I'll go to the police station and give myself up.
+[He turns resolutely to the door: but Hector stops him].
+
+HECTOR.                      { Oh, no. You mustn't do that.
+
+RANDALL. [speaking together] { No no. Clear out man, can't you; and
+                               don't be a fool.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE                { Don't be so silly. Can't you repent at
+                               home?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will have to do as you are told.
+
+THE BURGLAR. It's compounding a felony, you know.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is utterly ridiculous. Are we to be forced to
+prosecute this man when we don't want to?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Am I to be robbed of my salvation to save you the trouble
+of spending a day at the sessions? Is that justice? Is it right? Is it
+fair to me?
+
+MAZZINI [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if it were
+a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. Come, come! let me show you how you
+can turn your very crimes to account. Why not set up as a locksmith? You
+must know more about locks than most honest men?
+
+THE BURGLAR. That's true, sir. But I couldn't set up as a locksmith
+under twenty pounds.
+
+RANDALL. Well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. You will find it in
+the nearest bank.
+
+THE BURGLAR [horrified]. Oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put into
+the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it
+were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He throws himself
+into the big chair and covers his face as if in prayer].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Randall!
+
+HECTOR. It seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection for
+this inopportunely contrite sinner.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But twenty pounds is ridiculous.
+
+THE BURGLAR [looking up quickly]. I shall have to buy a lot of tools,
+lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense: you have your burgling kit.
+
+THE BURGLAR. What's a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene welding
+plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? I shall want a forge, and a smithy,
+and a shop, and fittings. I can't hardly do it for twenty.
+
+HECTOR. My worthy friend, we haven't got twenty pounds.
+
+THE BURGLAR [now master of the situation]. You can raise it among you,
+can't you?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Give him a sovereign, Hector, and get rid of him.
+
+HECTOR [giving him a pound]. There! Off with you.
+
+THE BURGLAR [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. I won't
+promise nothing. You have more on you than a quid: all the lot of you, I
+mean.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vigorously]. Oh, let us prosecute him and have done with
+it. I have a conscience too, I hope; and I do not feel at all sure that
+we have any right to let him go, especially if he is going to be greedy
+and impertinent.
+
+THE BURGLAR [quickly]. All right, lady, all right. I've no wish to be
+anything but agreeable. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen; and thank
+you kindly.
+
+He is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by Captain
+Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard]. What's
+this? Are there two of you?
+
+THE BURGLAR [falling on his knees before the captain in abject terror].
+Oh, my good Lord, what have I done? Don't tell me it's your house I've
+broken into, Captain Shotover.
+
+The captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and leads
+him to the middle of the group, Hector falling back beside his wife to
+make way for them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [turning him towards Ellie]. Is that your daughter? [He
+releases him].
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, how do I know, Captain? You know the sort of life you
+and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere
+in the wide world, as you might say.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mazzini]. You are not Billy Dunn. This is Billy
+Dunn. Why have you imposed on me?
+
+THE BURGLAR [indignantly to Mazzini]. Have you been giving yourself
+out to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting yourself, in a
+manner of speaking!
+
+MAZZINI. My dear Captain Shotover, ever since I came into this house I
+have done hardly anything else but assure you that I am not Mr William
+Dunn, but Mazzini Dunn, a very different person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. He don't belong to my branch, Captain. There's two sets in
+the family: the thinking Dunns and the drinking Dunns, each going their
+own ways. I'm a drinking Dunn: he's a thinking Dunn. But that didn't
+give him any right to shoot me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. So you've turned burglar, have you?
+
+THE BURGLAR. No, Captain: I wouldn't disgrace our old sea calling by
+such a thing. I am no burglar.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What were you doing with my diamonds?
+
+GUINNESS. What did you break into the house for if you're no burglar?
+
+RANDALL. Mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong window,
+eh?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, it's no use my telling you a lie: I can take in most
+captains, but not Captain Shotover, because he sold himself to the devil
+in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in
+your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the
+heart of man. But I'm no burglar.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Are you an honest man?
+
+THE BURGLAR. I don't set up to be better than my fellow-creatures, and
+never did, as you well know, Captain. But what I do is innocent and
+pious. I enquire about for houses where the right sort of people live. I
+work it on them same as I worked it here. I break into the house; put a
+few spoons or diamonds in my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take
+up a collection. And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get caught
+when you're actually trying to. I have knocked over all the chairs in a
+room without a soul paying any attention to me. In the end I have had to
+walk out and leave the job.
+
+RANDALL. When that happens, do you put back the spoons and diamonds?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, I don't fly in the face of Providence, if that's what
+you want to know.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Guinness, you remember this man?
+
+GUINNESS. I should think I do, seeing I was married to him, the
+blackguard!
+
+HESIONE } [exclaiming { Married to him! LADY UTTERWORD } together] {
+Guinness!!
+
+THE BURGLAR. It wasn't legal. I've been married to no end of women. No
+use coming that over me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Take him to the forecastle [he flings him to the door
+with a strength beyond his years].
+
+GUINNESS. I suppose you mean the kitchen. They won't have him there. Do
+you expect servants to keep company with thieves and all sorts?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Land-thieves and water-thieves are the same flesh and
+blood. I'll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. Off with you both.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, Captain. [He goes out humbly].
+
+MAZZINI. Will it be safe to have him in the house like that?
+
+GUINNESS. Why didn't you shoot him, sir? If I'd known who he was, I'd
+have shot him myself. [She goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do sit down, everybody. [She sits down on the sofa].
+
+They all move except Ellie. Mazzini resumes his seat. Randall sits down
+in the window-seat near the starboard door, again making a pendulum of
+his poker, and studying it as Galileo might have done. Hector sits on
+his left, in the middle. Mangan, forgotten, sits in the port corner.
+Lady Utterword takes the big chair. Captain Shotover goes into the
+pantry in deep abstraction. They all look after him: and Lady Utterword
+coughs consciously.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So Billy Dunn was poor nurse's little romance. I knew
+there had been somebody.
+
+RANDALL. They will fight their battles over again and enjoy themselves
+immensely.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [irritably]. You are not married; and you know nothing
+about it, Randall. Hold your tongue.
+
+RANDALL. Tyrant!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we have had a very exciting evening. Everything will
+be an anticlimax after it. We'd better all go to bed.
+
+RANDALL. Another burglar may turn up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, impossible! I hope not.
+
+RANDALL. Why not? There is more than one burglar in England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you say, Alf?
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. Oh, I don't matter. I'm forgotten. The burglar has put
+my nose out of joint. Shove me into a corner and have done with me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. Would you
+like a walk on the heath, Alfred? With me?
+
+ELLIE. Go, Mr Mangan. It will do you good. Hesione will soothe you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [slipping her arm under his and pulling him upright]. Come,
+Alfred. There is a moon: it's like the night in Tristan and Isolde. [She
+caresses his arm and draws him to the port garden door].
+
+MANGAN [writhing but yielding]. How you can have the face-the heart-[he
+breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What an extraordinary way to behave! What is the matter
+with the man?
+
+ELLIE [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary distance].
+His heart is breaking: that is all. [The captain appears at the pantry
+door, listening]. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes
+mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your
+boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness
+and the beginning of peace.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of the
+rest]. How dare you?
+
+HECTOR. Good heavens! What's the matter?
+
+RANDALL [in a warning whisper]. Tch--tch-tch! Steady.
+
+ELLIE [surprised and haughty]. I was not addressing you particularly,
+Lady Utterword. And I am not accustomed to being asked how dare I.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course not. Anyone can see how badly you have been
+brought up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I hope not, Lady Utterword. Really!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know very well what you meant. The impudence!
+
+ELLIE. What on earth do you mean?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [advancing to the table]. She means that her heart will
+not break. She has been longing all her life for someone to break it. At
+last she has become afraid she has none to break.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her arms
+round him]. Papa, don't say you think I've no heart.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising her with grim tenderness]. If you had no heart
+how could you want to have it broken, child?
+
+HECTOR [rising with a bound]. Lady Utterword, you are not to be trusted.
+You have made a scene [he runs out into the garden through the starboard
+door].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! Hector, Hector! [she runs out after him].
+
+RANDALL. Only nerves, I assure you. [He rises and follows her, waving
+the poker in his agitation]. Ariadne! Ariadne! For God's sake, be
+careful. You will--[he is gone].
+
+MAZZINI [rising]. How distressing! Can I do anything, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [promptly taking his chair and setting to work at the
+drawing-board]. No. Go to bed. Good-night.
+
+MAZZINI [bewildered]. Oh! Perhaps you are right.
+
+ELLIE. Good-night, dearest. [She kisses him].
+
+MAZZINI. Good-night, love. [He makes for the door, but turns aside to
+the bookshelves]. I'll just take a book [he takes one]. Good-night. [He
+goes out, leaving Ellie alone with the captain].
+
+The captain is intent on his drawing. Ellie, standing sentry over his
+chair, contemplates him for a moment.
+
+ELLIE. Does nothing ever disturb you, Captain Shotover?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I've stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in a
+typhoon. Life here is stormier; but I can stand it.
+
+ELLIE. Do you think I ought to marry Mr Mangan?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [never looking up]. One rock is as good as another to
+be wrecked on.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in love with him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Who said you were?
+
+ELLIE. You are not surprised?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Surprised! At my age!
+
+ELLIE. It seems to me quite fair. He wants me for one thing: I want him
+for another.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Money?
+
+ELLIE. Yes.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it. One
+provides the cash: the other spends it.
+
+ELLIE. Who will have the best of the bargain, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You. These fellows live in an office all day. You will
+have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but you will both be
+asleep most of that time. All day you will be quit of him; and you
+will be shopping with his money. If that is too much for you, marry a
+seafaring man: you will be bothered with him only three weeks in the
+year, perhaps.
+
+ELLIE. That would be best of all, I suppose.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the
+hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a
+damned soul in hell.
+
+ELLIE. I never thought of that before.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you're marrying for business, you can't be too
+businesslike.
+
+ELLIE. Why do women always want other women's husbands?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in
+to one that is wild?
+
+ELLIE [with a short laugh]. I suppose so. What a vile world it is!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It doesn't concern me. I'm nearly out of it.
+
+ELLIE. And I'm only just beginning.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes; so look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. Well, I think I am being very prudent.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I didn't say prudent. I said look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. What's the difference?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own
+soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it;
+but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.
+
+ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the
+room]. I'm sorry, Captain Shotover; but it's no use talking like that
+to me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me. Old-fashioned people think
+you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have,
+the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a
+very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is it? How much does your soul eat?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and
+lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this
+country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls
+are so horribly starved.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Mangan's soul lives on pig's food.
+
+ELLIE. Yes: money is thrown away on him. I suppose his soul was starved
+when he was young. But it will not be thrown away on me. It is just
+because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the
+women who are not fools do.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are other ways of getting money. Why don't you
+steal it?
+
+ELLIE. Because I don't want to go to prison.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is that the only reason? Are you quite sure honesty
+has nothing to do with it?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, you are very very old-fashioned, Captain. Does any modern
+girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting money are the
+honest and dishonest ways? Mangan robbed my father and my father's
+friends. I should rob all the money back from Mangan if the police would
+let me. As they won't, I must get it back by marrying him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't argue: I'm too old: my mind is made up and
+finished. All I can tell you is that, old-fashioned or new-fashioned,
+if you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow that all the books and
+pictures and concerts and scenery in the world won't heal [he gets up
+suddenly and makes for the pantry].
+
+ELLIE [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. Then why did
+you sell yourself to the devil in Zanzibar?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping, startled]. What?
+
+ELLIE. You shall not run away before you answer. I have found out that
+trick of yours. If you sold yourself, why shouldn't I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I had to deal with men so degraded that they wouldn't
+obey me unless I swore at them and kicked them and beat them with my
+fists. Foolish people took young thieves off the streets; flung them
+into a training ship where they were taught to fear the cane instead of
+fearing God; and thought they'd made men and sailors of them by private
+subscription. I tricked these thieves into believing I'd sold myself
+to the devil. It saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was
+damning me by inches.
+
+ELLIE [releasing him]. I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss Mangan to
+save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches won't
+save even your body.
+
+ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the body, and
+the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to
+persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our
+bodies. I am afraid you are no use to me, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What did you expect? A Savior, eh? Are you
+old-fashioned enough to believe in that?
+
+ELLIE. No. But I thought you were very wise, and might help me. Now I
+have found you out. You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to
+say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away
+before they can answer you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It confuses me to be answered. It discourages me. I
+cannot bear men and women. I have to run away. I must run away now [he
+tries to].
+
+ELLIE [again seizing his arm]. You shall not run away from me. I can
+hypnotize you. You are the only person in the house I can say what I
+like to. I know you are fond of me. Sit down. [She draws him to the
+sofa].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [yielding]. Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are
+dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the
+world.
+
+They sit side by side on the sofa. She leans affectionately against him
+with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half closed.
+
+ELLIE [dreamily]. I should have thought nothing else mattered to
+old men. They can't be very interested in what is going to happen to
+themselves.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A man's interest in the world is only the overflow
+from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not
+yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow
+up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or
+an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is
+no overflow: you are a child again. I can give you the memories of my
+ancient wisdom: mere scraps and leavings; but I no longer really care
+for anything but my own little wants and hobbies. I sit here working
+out my old ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. I see my
+daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and sentiment
+and snobbery. I see you, the younger generation, turning from their
+romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common
+sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen
+into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been.
+You are looking for a rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship,
+danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more
+intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward
+was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your
+life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
+
+ELLIE [sitting up impatiently]. But what can I do? I am not a sea
+captain: I can't stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering
+seals and whales in Greenland's icy mountains. They won't let women be
+captains. Do you want me to be a stewardess?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are worse lives. The stewardesses could come
+ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail.
+
+ELLIE. What could they do ashore but marry for money? I don't want to be
+a stewardess: I am too bad a sailor. Think of something else for me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't think so long and continuously. I am too old.
+I must go in and out. [He tries to rise].
+
+ELLIE [pulling him back]. You shall not. You are happy here, aren't you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you it's dangerous to keep me. I can't keep
+awake and alert.
+
+ELLIE. What do you run away for? To sleep?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. To get a glass of rum.
+
+ELLIE [frightfully disillusioned]. Is that it? How disgusting! Do you
+like being drunk?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No: I dread being drunk more than anything in the
+world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily
+pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does
+that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very very old,
+like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don't know how terrible that
+is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later
+on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in
+the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be
+free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every
+ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep
+sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have
+had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. Go get me
+another: Guinness knows where it is. You had better see for yourself the
+horror of an old man drinking.
+
+ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must never
+be in the real world when we talk together.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my
+second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can't remember
+what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have
+dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the
+happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the
+sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
+
+ELLIE. You dread it almost as much as I used to dread losing my dreams
+and having to fight and do things. But that is all over for me: my
+dreams are dashed to pieces. I should like to marry a very old, very
+rich man. I should like to marry you. I had much rather marry you than
+marry Mangan. Are you very rich?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Living from hand to mouth. And I have a wife
+somewhere in Jamaica: a black one. My first wife. Unless she's dead.
+
+ELLIE. What a pity! I feel so happy with you. [She takes his hand,
+almost unconsciously, and pats it]. I thought I should never feel happy
+again.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+ELLIE. Don't you know?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No.
+
+ELLIE. Heartbreak. I fell in love with Hector, and didn't know he was
+married.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so sufficient
+to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of
+everything, even of hope?
+
+ELLIE [gripping the hand]. It seems so; for I feel now as if there was
+nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That's the only real strength. That's genius. That's
+better than rum.
+
+ELLIE [throwing away his hand]. Rum! Why did you spoil it?
+
+Hector and Randall come in from the garden through the starboard door.
+
+HECTOR. I beg your pardon. We did not know there was anyone here.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That means that you want to tell Mr Randall the story
+about the tiger. Come, Captain: I want to talk to my father; and you had
+better come with me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [rising]. Nonsense! the man is in bed.
+
+ELLIE. Aha! I've caught you. My real father has gone to bed; but the
+father you gave me is in the kitchen. You knew quite well all along.
+Come. [She draws him out into the garden with her through the port
+door].
+
+HECTOR. That's an extraordinary girl. She has the Ancient Mariner on a
+string like a Pekinese dog.
+
+RANDALL. Now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat?
+
+HECTOR. You are in what is supposed to be my house. I am at your
+disposal.
+
+Hector sits down in the draughtsman's chair, turning it to face Randall,
+who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the carpenter's bench.
+
+RANDALL. I take it that we may be quite frank. I mean about Lady
+Utterword.
+
+HECTOR. You may. I have nothing to be frank about. I never met her until
+this afternoon.
+
+RANDALL [straightening up]. What! But you are her sister's husband.
+
+HECTOR. Well, if you come to that, you are her husband's brother.
+
+RANDALL. But you seem to be on intimate terms with her.
+
+HECTOR. So do you.
+
+RANDALL. Yes: but I AM on intimate terms with her. I have known her for
+years.
+
+HECTOR. It took her years to get to the same point with you that she got
+to with me in five minutes, it seems.
+
+RANDALL [vexed]. Really, Ariadne is the limit [he moves away huffishly
+towards the windows].
+
+HECTOR [coolly]. She is, as I remarked to Hesione, a very enterprising
+woman.
+
+RANDALL [returning, much troubled]. You see, Hushabye, you are what
+women consider a good-looking man.
+
+HECTOR. I cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity; and
+Hesione insists on my keeping it up. She makes me wear these ridiculous
+things [indicating his Arab costume] because she thinks me absurd in
+evening dress.
+
+RANDALL. Still, you do keep it up, old chap. Now, I assure you I have
+not an atom of jealousy in my disposition.
+
+HECTOR. The question would seem to be rather whether your brother has
+any touch of that sort.
+
+RANDALL. What! Hastings! Oh, don't trouble about Hastings. He has the
+gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest detail,
+and actually likes it. That gets him to the top wherever he goes. As
+long as Ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly, he is only too
+thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor for him.
+
+HECTOR. And as she has all the Shotover fascination, there is plenty of
+competition for the job, eh?
+
+RANDALL [angrily]. She encourages them. Her conduct is perfectly
+scandalous. I assure you, my dear fellow, I haven't an atom of jealousy
+in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of every place she
+goes to by her thoughtlessness. It's nothing more: she doesn't really
+care for the men she keeps hanging about her; but how is the world to
+know that? It's not fair to Hastings. It's not fair to me.
+
+HECTOR. Her theory is that her conduct is so correct
+
+RANDALL. Correct! She does nothing but make scenes from morning till
+night. You be careful, old chap. She will get you into trouble: that is,
+she would if she really cared for you.
+
+HECTOR. Doesn't she?
+
+RANDALL. Not a scrap. She may want your scalp to add to her collection;
+but her true affection has been engaged years ago. You had really better
+be careful.
+
+HECTOR. Do you suffer much from this jealousy?
+
+RANDALL. Jealousy! I jealous! My dear fellow, haven't I told you that
+there is not an atom of--
+
+HECTOR. Yes. And Lady Utterword told me she never made scenes. Well,
+don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste jealousy on a
+real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long
+run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world
+pose, which you carry so well in other respects.
+
+RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a
+gentleman without being accused of posing.
+
+HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the
+poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under
+your pose is apparently Ellie's favorite, Othello.
+
+RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me
+tell you.
+
+HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe
+under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned
+to play them.
+
+RANDALL. If it's all the same to you I had rather you didn't play them
+on me. You evidently don't quite understand my character, or my notions
+of good form.
+
+HECTOR. Is it your notion of good form to give away Lady Utterword?
+
+RANDALL [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. I have
+not said a word against Lady Utterword. This is just the conspiracy over
+again.
+
+HECTOR. What conspiracy?
+
+RANDALL. You know very well, sir. A conspiracy to make me out to be
+pettish and jealous and childish and everything I am not. Everyone knows
+I am just the opposite.
+
+HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It
+often does have that effect. [He goes to the garden door and calls Lady
+Utterword with commanding emphasis]. Ariadne!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [at some distance]. Yes.
+
+RANDALL. What are you calling her for? I want to speak--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [arriving breathless]. Yes. You really are a terribly
+commanding person. What's the matter?
+
+HECTOR. I do not know how to manage your friend Randall. No doubt you
+do.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall: have you been making yourself ridiculous,
+as usual? I can see it in your face. Really, you are the most pettish
+creature.
+
+RANDALL. You know quite well, Ariadne, that I have not an ounce of
+pettishness in my disposition. I have made myself perfectly pleasant
+here. I have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable in the face of
+a burglar. Imperturbability is almost too strong a point of mine. But
+[putting his foot down with a stamp, and walking angrily up and down the
+room] I insist on being treated with a certain consideration. I will
+not allow Hushabye to take liberties with me. I will not stand your
+encouraging people as you do.
+
+HECTOR. The man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know. He is jealous. As if he had any right to be! He
+compromises me everywhere. He makes scenes all over the place. Randall:
+I will not allow it. I simply will not allow it. You had no right to
+discuss me with Hector. I will not be discussed by men.
+
+HECTOR. Be reasonable, Ariadne. Your fatal gift of beauty forces men to
+discuss you.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh indeed! what about YOUR fatal gift of beauty?
+
+HECTOR. How can I help it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You could cut off your moustache: I can't cut off my
+nose. I get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me.
+And then Randall says I run after men.
+
+RANDALL. I--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes you do: you said it just now. Why can't you think
+of something else than women? Napoleon was quite right when he said that
+women are the occupation of the idle man. Well, if ever there was an
+idle man on earth, his name is Randall Utterword.
+
+RANDALL. Ariad--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. Oh yes you
+are: it's no use denying it. What have you ever done? What good are you?
+You are as much trouble in the house as a child of three. You couldn't
+live without your valet.
+
+RANDALL. This is--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are
+selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth. You
+can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and
+your ailments and the people who have offended you. [Turning to Hector].
+Do you know what they call him, Hector?
+
+HECTOR } [speaking { Please don't tell me. RANDALL } together] { I'll
+not stand it--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the Rotter: that is his name in good society.
+
+RANDALL [shouting]. I'll not bear it, I tell you. Will you listen to me,
+you infernal--[he chokes].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Well: go on. What were you going to call me? An infernal
+what? Which unpleasant animal is it to be this time?
+
+RANDALL [foaming]. There is no animal in the world so hateful as a woman
+can be. You are a maddening devil. Hushabye, you will not believe me
+when I tell you that I have loved this demon all my life; but God knows
+I have paid for it [he sits down in the draughtsman's chair, weeping].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [standing over him with triumphant contempt]. Cry-baby!
+
+HECTOR [gravely, coming to him]. My friend, the Shotover sisters have
+two strange powers over men. They can make them love; and they can make
+them cry. Thank your stars that you are not married to one of them.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [haughtily]. And pray, Hector--
+
+HECTOR [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her right
+round him and away from Randall: and gripping her throat with the other
+hand]. Ariadne, if you attempt to start on me, I'll choke you: do you
+hear? The cat-and-mouse game with the other sex is a good game; but I
+can play your head off at it. [He throws her, not at all gently, into
+the big chair, and proceeds, less fiercely but firmly]. It is true that
+Napoleon said that woman is the occupation of the idle man. But he added
+that she is the relaxation of the warrior. Well, I am the warrior. So
+take care.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by his
+violence]. My dear Hector, I have only done what you asked me to do.
+
+HECTOR. How do you make that out, pray?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You called me in to manage Randall, didn't you? You said
+you couldn't manage him yourself.
+
+HECTOR. Well, what if I did? I did not ask you to drive the man mad.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. He isn't mad. That's the way to manage him. If you were
+a mother, you'd understand.
+
+HECTOR. Mother! What are you up to now?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It's quite simple. When the children got nerves and
+were naughty, I smacked them just enough to give them a good cry and
+a healthy nervous shock. They went to sleep and were quite good
+afterwards. Well, I can't smack Randall: he is too big; so when he gets
+nerves and is naughty, I just rag him till he cries. He will be all
+right now. Look: he is half asleep already [which is quite true].
+
+RANDALL [waking up indignantly]. I'm not. You are most cruel, Ariadne.
+[Sentimentally]. But I suppose I must forgive you, as usual [he checks
+himself in the act of yawning].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [to Hector]. Is the explanation satisfactory, dread
+warrior?
+
+HECTOR. Some day I shall kill you, if you go too far. I thought you were
+a fool.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [laughing]. Everybody does, at first. But I am not such
+a fool as I look. [She rises complacently]. Now, Randall, go to bed. You
+will be a good boy in the morning.
+
+RANDALL [only very faintly rebellious]. I'll go to bed when I like. It
+isn't ten yet.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It is long past ten. See that he goes to bed at once,
+Hector. [She goes into the garden].
+
+HECTOR. Is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of men to
+women?
+
+RANDALL [rising resolutely]. I'll not speak to her tomorrow. I'll not
+speak to her for another week. I'll give her such a lesson. I'll go
+straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [He makes for the door
+leading to the hall].
+
+HECTOR. You are under a spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to the
+devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and
+these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I am tied to
+Hesione's apron-string; but I'm her husband; and if I did go stark
+staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. But why should
+you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by Ariadne as a toy donkey
+is dragged about and beaten by a child? What do you get by it? Are you
+her lover?
+
+RANDALL. You must not misunderstand me. In a higher sense--in a Platonic
+sense--
+
+HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when
+pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean.
+
+RANDALL [feebly]. Well, if I don't mind, I don't see what business it is
+of yours. Besides, I tell you I am going to punish her. You shall see:
+I know how to deal with women. I'm really very sleepy. Say good-night to
+Mrs Hushabye for me, will you, like a good chap. Good-night. [He hurries
+out].
+
+HECTOR. Poor wretch! Oh women! women! women! [He lifts his fists in
+invocation to heaven]. Fall. Fall and crush. [He goes out into the
+garden].
+
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+In the garden, Hector, as he comes out through the glass door of the
+poop, finds Lady Utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock on the east
+side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by the electric arc,
+which is like a moon in its opal globe. Beneath the head of the hammock,
+a campstool. On the other side of the flagstaff, on the long garden
+seat, Captain Shotover is asleep, with Ellie beside him, leaning
+affectionately against him on his right hand. On his left is a deck
+chair. Behind them in the gloom, Hesione is strolling about with Mangan.
+It is a fine still night, moonless.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What a lovely night! It seems made for us.
+
+HECTOR. The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night? [He
+sits down moodily in the deck chair].
+
+ELLIE [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. Its beauty soaks into my
+nerves. In the night there is peace for the old and hope for the young.
+
+HECTOR. Is that remark your own?
+
+ELLIE. No. Only the last thing the captain said before he went to sleep.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I'm not asleep.
+
+HECTOR. Randall is. Also Mr Mazzini Dunn. Mangan, too, probably.
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+HECTOR. Oh, you are there. I thought Hesione would have sent you to bed
+by this time.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light,
+with Mangan]. I think I shall. He keeps telling me he has a presentiment
+that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
+
+MANGAN [plaintively]. But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you
+wouldn't listen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was listening for something else. There was a sort of
+splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a
+distance and then died away.
+
+MANGAN. I tell you it was a train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour. The
+last is nine forty-five.
+
+MANGAN. But a goods train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not on our little line. They tack a truck on to the
+passenger train. What can it have been, Hector?
+
+HECTOR. Heaven's threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile
+creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either
+out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we
+have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and
+destroy us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing comfortably in
+her hammock]. We have not supplanted the animals, Hector. Why do you ask
+heaven to destroy this house, which could be made quite comfortable if
+Hesione had any notion of how to live? Don't you know what is wrong with
+it?
+
+HECTOR. We are wrong with it. There is no sense in us. We are useless,
+dangerous, and ought to be abolished.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense! Hastings told me the very first day he came
+here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What! The numskull said there was something wrong with
+my house!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I said Hastings said it; and he is not in the least a
+numskull.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What's wrong with my house?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Just what is wrong with a ship, papa. Wasn't it clever
+of Hastings to see that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The man's a fool. There's nothing wrong with a ship.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, there is.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what is it? Don't be aggravating, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Guess.
+
+HECTOR. Demons. Daughters of the witch of Zanzibar. Demons.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Not a bit. I assure you, all this house needs to make it
+a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites and sound sleep
+in it, is horses.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Horses! What rubbish!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes: horses. Why have we never been able to let this
+house? Because there are no proper stables. Go anywhere in England where
+there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people;
+and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of
+the household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole
+room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things
+piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never
+ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only
+two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the
+neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the
+people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the
+wrong ones.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is some truth in this. My ship made a man of me;
+and a ship is the horse of the sea.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Exactly how Hastings explained your being a gentleman.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Not bad for a numskull. Bring the man here with you
+next time: I must talk to him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Why is Randall such an obvious rotter? He is well bred;
+he has been at a public school and a university; he has been in the
+Foreign Office; he knows the best people and has lived all his life
+among them. Why is he so unsatisfactory, so contemptible? Why can't he
+get a valet to stay with him longer than a few months? Just because he
+is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano,
+and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and
+poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my
+house. If he would only--[she is interrupted by the melancholy strains
+of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself
+indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have
+you been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! Go to bed
+instantly, Randall: how dare you? [The window is slammed down. She
+subsides]. How can anyone care for such a creature!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Addy: do you think Ellie ought to marry poor Alfred merely
+for his money?
+
+MANGAN [much alarmed]. What's that? Mrs Hushabye, are my affairs to be
+discussed like this before everybody?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I don't think Randall is listening now.
+
+MANGAN. Everybody is listening. It isn't right.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But in the dark, what does it matter? Ellie doesn't mind.
+Do you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. What is your opinion, Lady Utterword? You have
+so much good sense.
+
+MANGAN. But it isn't right. It--[Mrs Hushabye puts her hand on his
+mouth]. Oh, very well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How much money have you, Mr. Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Really--No: I can't stand this.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense, Mr Mangan! It all turns on your income,
+doesn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Well, if you come to that, how much money has she?
+
+ELLIE. None.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are answered, Mr Mangan. And now, as you have made
+Miss Dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to show your
+own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Come, Alf! out with it! How much?
+
+MANGAN [baited out of all prudence]. Well, if you want to know, I have
+no money and never had any.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, you mustn't tell naughty stories.
+
+MANGAN. I'm not telling you stories. I'm telling you the raw truth.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Then what do you live on, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Travelling expenses. And a trifle of commission.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling expenses for
+our life's journey?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?
+
+MANGAN. People think I have. People think I'm an industrial Napoleon.
+That's why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you I have nothing.
+
+ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus's tigers? That
+they don't exist?
+
+MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they're not mine. They belong
+to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing
+capitalists. I get money from such people to start the factories. I find
+people like Miss Dunn's father to work them, and keep a tight hand so as
+to make them pay. Of course I make them keep me going pretty well; but
+it's a dog's life; and I don't own anything.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, Alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it to get
+out of marrying Ellie.
+
+MANGAN. I'm telling the truth about my money for the first time in my
+life; and it's the first time my word has ever been doubted.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How sad! Why don't you go in for politics, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Go in for politics! Where have you been living? I am in
+politics.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I'm sure I beg your pardon. I never heard of you.
+
+MANGAN. Let me tell you, Lady Utterword, that the Prime Minister of this
+country asked me to join the Government without even going through the
+nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. As a Conservative or a Liberal?
+
+MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all burst
+out laughing]. What are you all laughing at?
+
+MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!
+
+ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!
+
+HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all
+the evening!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party funds,
+Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the money:
+they knew how useful I should be to them in the Government.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. This is most interesting and unexpected, Mr Mangan. And
+what have your administrative achievements been, so far?
+
+MANGAN. Achievements? Well, I don't know what you call achievements;
+but I've jolly well put a stop to the games of the other fellows in the
+other departments. Every man of them thought he was going to save the
+country all by himself, and do me out of the credit and out of my chance
+of a title. I took good care that if they wouldn't let me do it they
+shouldn't do it themselves either. I may not know anything about my own
+machinery; but I know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow's. And
+now they all look the biggest fools going.
+
+HECTOR. And in heaven's name, what do you look like?
+
+MANGAN. I look like the fellow that was too clever for all the others,
+don't I? If that isn't a triumph of practical business, what is?
+
+HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Do you expect to save the country, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Well, who else will? Will your Mr Randall save it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the rotter! Certainly not.
+
+MANGAN. Will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and his fine
+talk?
+
+HECTOR. Yes, if they will let me.
+
+MANGAN [sneering]. Ah! Will they let you?
+
+HECTOR. No. They prefer you.
+
+MANGAN. Very well then, as you're in a world where I'm appreciated and
+you're not, you'd best be civil to me, hadn't you? Who else is there but
+me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham
+democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply
+of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the
+country with the greatest ease.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with a
+stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God's way. The man
+is a numskull.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What do you
+say, Miss Dunn?
+
+ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put upon
+him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.
+
+MANGAN [contemptuously]. I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into
+parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We've not come to
+that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you governs the
+country so long as we govern you.
+
+HECTOR. We? Who is we, pray?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. The devil's granddaughters, dear. The lovely women.
+
+HECTOR [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say, and deliver us from
+the lures of Satan!
+
+ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and
+Shakespeare. Marcus's tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false;
+there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful
+black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing
+that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration;
+and that turns out to be--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [placidly]. A good deal of my hair is quite genuine. The
+Duchess of Dithering offered me fifty guineas for this [touching her
+forehead] under the impression that it was a transformation; but it is
+all natural except the color.
+
+MANGAN [wildly]. Look here: I'm going to take off all my clothes [he
+begins tearing off his coat].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD.  [in consternation]   { Mr. Mangan!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER                      { What's that?
+
+HECTOR.                               { Ha! Ha! Do. Do.
+
+ELLIE                                 { Please don't.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching his arm and stopping him]. Alfred, for shame! Are
+you mad?
+
+MANGAN. Shame! What shame is there in this house? Let's all strip stark
+naked. We may as well do the thing thoroughly when we're about it.
+We've stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us strip ourselves
+physically naked as well, and see how we like it. I tell you I can't
+bear this. I was brought up to be respectable. I don't mind the women
+dyeing their hair and the men drinking: it's human nature. But it's not
+human nature to tell everybody about it. Every time one of you opens
+your mouth I go like this [he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid
+of what will come next. How are we to have any self-respect if we don't
+keep it up that we're better than we really are?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I quite sympathize with you, Mr Mangan. I have been
+through it all; and I know by experience that men and women are delicate
+plants and must be cultivated under glass. Our family habit of throwing
+stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably
+rude, but positively dangerous. Still, there is no use catching physical
+colds as well as moral ones; so please keep your clothes on.
+
+MANGAN. I'll do as I like: not what you tell me. Am I a child or a grown
+man? I won't stand this mothering tyranny. I'll go back to the city,
+where I'm respected and made much of.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city. Think of
+Ellie's youth!
+
+ELLIE. Think of Hesione's eyes and hair!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog
+barking to keep the truth out!
+
+HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword's beauty! her good sense! her style!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can really do
+any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn't
+it?
+
+MANGAN [surrendering]. All right: all right. I'm done. Have it your own
+way. Only let me alone. I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels
+when you all start on me like this. I'll stay. I'll marry her. I'll do
+anything for a quiet life. Are you satisfied now?
+
+ELLIE. No. I never really intended to make you marry me, Mr Mangan.
+Never in the depths of my soul. I only wanted to feel my strength: to
+know that you could not escape if I chose to take you.
+
+MANGAN [indignantly]. What! Do you mean to say you are going to throw me
+over after my acting so handsome?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I should not be too hasty, Miss Dunn. You can throw
+Mr Mangan over at any time up to the last moment. Very few men in his
+position go bankrupt. You can live very comfortably on his reputation
+for immense wealth.
+
+ELLIE. I cannot commit bigamy, Lady Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE.                         { Bigamy! Whatever on earth are
+                                        you talking about, Ellie?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [exclaiming altogether { Bigamy! What do you mean, Miss
+                                        Dunn?
+
+MANGAN                                { Bigamy! Do you mean to say
+                                        you're married already?
+
+HECTOR                                { Bigamy! This is some enigma.
+
+ELLIE. Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover's white wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie! What nonsense! Where?
+
+ELLIE. In heaven, where all true marriages are made.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!
+
+MANGAN. He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!
+
+HECTOR [quoting Shelley].
+
+     "Their altar the grassy earth outspreads
+      And their priest the muttering wind."
+
+ELLIE. Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul
+to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father.
+
+She draws the captain's arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain
+remains fast asleep.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, that's very clever of you, pettikins. Very clever.
+Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie. You must be content with
+a little share of me.
+
+MANGAN [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. It isn't kind--[his emotion
+chokes him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is the most
+conceited young woman I have met since I came back to England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Ellie isn't conceited. Are you, pettikins?
+
+ELLIE. I know my strength now, Hesione.
+
+MANGAN. Brazen, I call you. Brazen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Tut, tut, Alfred: don't be rude. Don't you feel how
+lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren't you happy, you and
+Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful enough to please
+the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the
+world. We women have managed all that for you. Why in the name of common
+sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you happiness is no good. You can be happy when
+you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half dead than ever I was
+in my prime. But there is no blessing on my happiness.
+
+ELLIE [her face lighting up]. Life with a blessing! that is what I want.
+Now I know the real reason why I couldn't marry Mr Mangan: there would
+be no blessing on our marriage. There is a blessing on my broken heart.
+There is a blessing on your beauty, Hesione. There is a blessing on your
+father's spirit. Even on the lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on
+Mr Mangan's money there is none.
+
+MANGAN. I don't understand a word of that.
+
+ELLIE. Neither do I. But I know it means something.
+
+MANGAN. Don't say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I was
+ready to get a bishop to marry us.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Isn't he a fool, pettikins?
+
+HECTOR [fiercely]. Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.
+
+Mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown, comes from
+the house, on Lady Utterword's side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. What's
+the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, no: nothing's the matter: but really it's impossible to
+go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one's
+window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had to come down and
+join you all. What has it all been about?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.
+
+HECTOR. For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has tried
+to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an
+idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope you don't mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye. [He
+sits down on the campstool].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your daughter's match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems that Mr
+Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely
+nothing.
+
+MAZZINI. Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if people
+believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don't
+believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask poor Ellie to depend
+on what I can do for her?
+
+MANGAN. Don't you run away with this idea that I have nothing. I--
+
+HECTOR. Oh, don't explain. We understand. You have a couple of thousand
+pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence a dozen, and
+half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with
+when you are found out. That's the reality of your millions.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are genuine
+and perfectly legal.
+
+HECTOR [disgusted]. Yah! Not even a great swindler!
+
+MANGAN. So you think. But I've been too many for some honest men, for
+all that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are determined
+to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.
+
+MANGAN. There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I
+have been made to look like a fool, though I'm as good a man in this
+house as in the city.
+
+ELLIE [musically]. Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house,
+this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it
+Heartbreak House.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal.
+
+MANGAN [breaks into a low snivelling]!!!
+
+MRS HUSAHBYE. There! you have set Alfred off.
+
+ELLIE. I like him best when he is howling.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Silence! [Mangan subsides into silence]. I say, let
+the heart break in silence.
+
+HECTOR. Do you accept that name for your house?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
+
+HECTOR. We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we
+haunt it.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [heart torn]. It is dreadful to think how you have been
+here all these years while I have gone round the world. I escaped young;
+but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my heart too. But it shan't.
+I have left you and it behind. It was silly of me to come back. I
+felt sentimental about papa and Hesione and the old place. I felt them
+calling to me.
+
+MAZZINI. But what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling,
+Lady Utterword!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was only
+the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered and not
+wanted.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You left because you did not want us. Was there no
+heartbreak in that for your father? You tore yourself up by the roots;
+and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you.
+What right had you to come back and probe old wounds?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You were a complete stranger to me at first, Addy; but now
+I feel as if you had never been away.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Thank you, Hesione; but the influenza is quite cured.
+The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this
+gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to
+me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any
+stables.
+
+HECTOR. Inhabited by--?
+
+ELLIE. A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and
+an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, really, Mrs Hushabye--
+
+MANGAN. A member of His Majesty's Government that everybody sets down as
+a nincompoop: don't forget him, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation
+is to be married to my sister.
+
+HECTOR. All heartbroken imbeciles.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable specimen of
+what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people,
+most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic,
+free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You do us proud, Mazzini.
+
+MAZZINI. I am not flattering, really. Where else could I feel perfectly
+at ease in my pyjamas? I sometimes dream that I am in very distinguished
+society, and suddenly I have nothing on but my pyjamas! Sometimes I
+haven't even pyjamas. And I always feel overwhelmed with confusion. But
+here, I don't mind in the least: it seems quite natural.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. An infallible sign that you are now not in really
+distinguished society, Mr Dunn. If you were in my house, you would feel
+embarrassed.
+
+MAZZINI. I shall take particular care to keep out of your house, Lady
+Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will be quite wrong, Mr Dunn. I should make you very
+comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and anxiety of wondering
+whether you should wear your purple and gold or your green and crimson
+dressing-gown at dinner. You complicate life instead of simplifying it
+by doing these ridiculous things.
+
+ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?
+
+HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor devil
+upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as Mangan
+howls when my wife twists his.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but have
+his heart broken. It is a change from having his head shampooed. Catch
+anyone breaking Hastings' heart!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest
+satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I forgot you, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I don't see that quite, either.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are
+successful.
+
+MANGAN. But I don't want to be regarded merely as a successful man. I
+have an imagination like anyone else. I have a presentiment.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting myself
+to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. You
+bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [She drags him away
+into the darkness].
+
+MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it's all very well to make
+fun of me; but if you only knew--
+
+HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?
+
+MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting something. I
+don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.
+
+HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't have a
+baby.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me:
+and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave
+everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers
+of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It's
+madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play
+at earthquakes with.
+
+MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was young.
+
+HECTOR. Think! What's the good of thinking about it? Why didn't you do
+something?
+
+MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote
+pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in
+the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't
+have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had
+any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a
+revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we
+could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except,
+of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to.
+Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things
+considered.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps somebody cleverer than you and Mr Mangan was at
+work all the time.
+
+MAZZINI. Perhaps so. Though I was brought up not to believe in anything,
+I often feel that there is a great deal to be said for the theory of an
+over-ruling Providence, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Providence! I meant Hastings.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one
+of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the
+rocks.
+
+MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure you,
+they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to
+the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The
+moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until
+she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. After
+the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It's
+amazing how they get along, all things considered. Nothing happens,
+except something not worth mentioning.
+
+ELLIE. What is that, O Captain, O my captain?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [savagely]. Nothing but the smash of the drunken
+skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the
+tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a
+trap.
+
+ELLIE. Moral: don't take rum.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [vehemently]. That is a lie, child. Let a man drink ten
+barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting
+skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer
+it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and
+trusts to Providence that I call the drunken skipper, though he drank
+nothing but the waters of the River Jordan.
+
+ELLIE. Splendid! And you haven't had a drop for an hour. You see you
+don't need it: your own spirit is not dead.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Echoes: nothing but echoes. The last shot was fired
+years ago.
+
+HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call
+England?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled
+ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike
+and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in
+favor of England because you were born in it?
+
+HECTOR. Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still
+have the will to live. What am I to do?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an
+Englishman.
+
+HECTOR. And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be
+damned.
+
+ELLIE. Quiet, quiet: you'll tire yourself.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought all that once, Captain; but I assure you nothing will
+happen.
+
+A dull distant explosion is heard.
+
+HECTOR [starting up]. What was that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Something happening [he blows his whistle]. Breakers
+ahead!
+
+The light goes out.
+
+HECTOR [furiously]. Who put that light out? Who dared put that light
+out?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [running in from the house to the middle of the
+esplanade]. I did, sir. The police have telephoned to say we'll be
+summoned if we don't put that light out: it can be seen for miles.
+
+HECTOR. It shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the house].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. The Rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they say.
+Unless we can give the Rector a bed he has nowhere to lay his head this
+night.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The Church is on the rocks, breaking up. I told him it
+would unless it headed for God's open sea.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And you are all to go down to the cellars.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go there yourself, you and all the crew. Batten down
+the hatches.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And hide beside the coward I married! I'll go on the
+roof first. [The lamp lights up again]. There! Mr Hushabye's turned it
+on again.
+
+THE BURGLAR [hurrying in and appealing to Nurse Guinness]. Here: where's
+the way to that gravel pit? The boot-boy says there's a cave in the
+gravel pit. Them cellars is no use. Where's the gravel pit, Captain?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall into
+it and break your dirty neck. [She pushes him contemptuously towards the
+flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the hammock and waits there,
+as it were by Ariadne's cradle].
+
+Another and louder explosion is heard. The burglar stops and stands
+trembling.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That was nearer.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The next one will get us. [He rises]. Stand by, all
+hands, for judgment.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh my Lordy God! [He rushes away frantically past the
+flagstaff into the gloom].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emerging panting from the darkness]. Who was that running
+away? [She comes to Ellie]. Did you hear the explosions? And the sound
+in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra: it's like Beethoven.
+
+ELLIE. By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.
+
+She and Hesione throw themselves into one another's arms in wild
+excitement. The light increases.
+
+MAZZINI [anxiously]. The light is getting brighter.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [looking up at the house]. It's Mr Hushabye turning on
+all the lights in the house and tearing down the curtains.
+
+RANDALL [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute].
+Ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: I beg and implore
+you, go down to the cellars!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [quite composed in her hammock]. The governor's wife in
+the cellars with the servants! Really, Randall!
+
+RANDALL. But what shall I do if you are killed?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will probably be killed, too, Randall. Now play your
+flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good. Play us "Keep the
+home fires burning."
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [grimly]. THEY'LL keep the home fires burning for us:
+them up there.
+
+RANDALL [having tried to play]. My lips are trembling. I can't get a
+sound.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of God.
+
+HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his former
+place]. There is not half light enough. We should be blazing to the
+skies.
+
+ELLIE [tense with excitement]. Set fire to the house, Marcus.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.
+
+HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save you; but
+it will show that your souls are still live.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It's magnificent.
+
+They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.
+
+HECTOR [gravely]. Miss Dunn, you can do no good here. We of this house
+are only moths flying into the candle. You had better go down to the
+cellar.
+
+ELLIE [scornfully]. I don't think.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. An
+officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr Hushabye is behaving
+like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it
+is they who will survive.
+
+ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should you run
+any risk?
+
+MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running!
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! What
+next?
+
+A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats,
+or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered
+glass from the windows.
+
+MAZZINI. Is anyone hurt?
+
+HECTOR. Where did it fall?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [in hideous triumph]. Right in the gravel pit: I seen
+it. Serve un right! I seen it [she runs away towards the gravel pit,
+laughing harshly].
+
+HECTOR. One husband gone.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, poor Mangan!
+
+HECTOR. Are you immortal that you need pity him? Our turn next.
+
+They wait in silence and intense expectation. Hesione and Ellie hold
+each other's hand tight.
+
+A distant explosion is heard.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]. Oh! they have passed us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down
+and goes asleep].
+
+ELLIE [disappointedly]. Safe!
+
+HECTOR [disgustedly]. Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has
+become again suddenly! [he sits down].
+
+MAZZINI [sitting down]. I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have
+survived; and Mangan and the burglar--
+
+HECTOR. --the two burglars--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. --the two practical men of business--
+
+MAZZINI. --both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new
+house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they'll come again
+tomorrow night.
+
+ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]. Oh, I hope so.
+
+Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Heartbreak House, by Bernard Shaw
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
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+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Heartbreak House
+
+Author: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Release Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #3543]
+Last Updated: December 10, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTBREAK HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Bernard Shaw
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1913-1916
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <h3>
+      Contents
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> HEARTBREAK HOUSE </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ACT I </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ACT II </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> ACT III </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Where Heartbreak House Stands
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this
+      preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was
+      begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists
+      and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the
+      guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four
+      fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The
+      Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in
+      England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it
+      in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not waste any
+      sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe was stifling its
+      soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that
+      overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the
+      control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful
+      consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was
+      not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about
+      the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the
+      pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium
+      poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly and exercising
+      them violently until they were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist,
+      had no faith in these charming people extricating themselves. They would,
+      he thought, be sold up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore
+      had no scruple in exploiting and even flattering their charm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Inhabitants
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no
+      further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs,
+      than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared and said,
+      "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen's
+      intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional
+      class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the
+      country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature,
+      and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting,
+      eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same utter futility. The
+      nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole
+      repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our
+      politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of
+      sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that
+      contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the
+      common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in
+      their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on
+      incomes which they did nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made
+      themselves look like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into
+      the types of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They
+      took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for high
+      culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as practicable, a
+      moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it
+      up with sex and with all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very
+      delightful place at its best for moments of relaxation. In other moments
+      it was disastrous. For prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable
+      Capua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Horseback Hall
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative to
+      Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for horses
+      with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted them,
+      talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of
+      their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity, churchgoing
+      (as a substitute for religion), and conservative electioneering (as a
+      substitute for politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed
+      at the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the picture
+      gallery would be found languishing among the stables, miserably
+      discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the first chord of
+      Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden of Klingsor; but
+      sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers who could make the
+      best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were apart and knew
+      little of one another; so the prime minister folk had to choose between
+      barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which
+      was the more fatal to statesmanship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Revolution on the Shelf
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper. It
+      aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to church
+      or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends. When you
+      spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your bedroom not
+      only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and
+      even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself and Mr Granville
+      Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold Bennett, and Mr
+      John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the movement. You would
+      find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson, Butler, Scott Haldane,
+      the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and, generally speaking, all the
+      literary implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern Socialist
+      and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious experience to spend Sunday in
+      dipping into these books, and the Monday morning to read in the daily
+      paper that the country had just been brought to the verge of anarchy
+      because a new Home Secretary or chief of police without an idea in his
+      head that his great-grandmother might not have had to apologize for, had
+      refused to "recognize" some powerful Trade Union, just as a gondola might
+      refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton liner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians
+      were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House
+      of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern
+      thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who
+      had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds.
+      Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far
+      as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although this is
+      as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it
+      qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine
+      without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and
+      domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction
+      in sociology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cherry Orchard
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.
+      With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as the
+      heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of Erasmus
+      or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and would have
+      made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds. Not that they
+      would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of
+      being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
+      get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural equipment;
+      but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum would have left them
+      helpless end ineffective in public affairs. Even in private life they were
+      often helpless wasters of their inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's
+      Cherry Orchard. Even those who lived within their incomes were really kept
+      going by their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
+      run a business without continual prompting from those who have to learn
+      how to do such things or starve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things could
+      be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It
+      is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves;
+      for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant
+      electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of
+      reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nature's Long Credits
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one
+      that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She
+      demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls
+      us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common
+      domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and
+      scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
+      consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two
+      generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and
+      then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is
+      a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers.
+      Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with a
+      pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene,
+      slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid for the
+      guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep again
+      and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political science
+      has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates during my
+      lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the Second. In
+      international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of
+      family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of
+      pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious activity
+      produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled through. Nature gave
+      us a longer credit than she gave to France or Germany or Russia. To
+      British centenarians who died in their beds in 1914, any dread of having
+      to hide underground in London from the shells of an enemy seemed more
+      remote and fantastic than a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras
+      and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles
+      Dickens we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass;
+      but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps
+      there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it
+      to the utmost. But when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance.
+      For four years she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which
+      Egypt never dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of
+      London, and came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not
+      undone by winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead
+      bodies of the victors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Wicked Half Century
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than
+      false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately
+      suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had
+      been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a
+      pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught
+      that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can
+      alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue as to
+      whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left him a
+      fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and allaying
+      his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might be expected to
+      behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the middle of the
+      nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the
+      name of Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that
+      predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as human beings
+      are produced by their environment, their sins and good deeds being only a
+      series of chemical and mechanical reactions over which they have no
+      control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so
+      forth, are, they taught, mere illusions, produced because they are useful
+      in the continual struggle of the human machine to maintain its environment
+      in a favorable condition, a process incidentally involving the ruthless
+      destruction or subjection of its competitors for the supply (assumed to be
+      limited) of subsistence available. We taught Prussia this religion; and
+      Prussia bettered our instruction so effectively that we presently found
+      ourselves confronted with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent
+      Prussia destroying us. And that has just ended in each destroying the
+      other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be
+      accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in
+      my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject.
+      For the present I will only say that there were better reasons than the
+      obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to
+      very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided
+      they were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated very
+      powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific doctrine which is
+      associated with the name of the great naturalist Charles Darwin began, it
+      was not only a reaction against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology
+      intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied,
+      as it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics,
+      chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its investigators
+      called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only one result possible in
+      the ethical sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from human
+      affairs, or, as Samuel Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the
+      universe."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hypochondria
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane alongside
+      Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing of Wagner
+      and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the doltish
+      materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside. But being
+      an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running after cures.
+      It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to
+      get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you pull
+      all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named Pyorrhea. It was
+      superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances,
+      clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent
+      that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did
+      soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all
+      sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the
+      abyss. The registered doctors and surgeons were hard put to it to compete
+      with the unregistered. They were not clever enough to appeal to the
+      imagination and sociability of the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor,
+      the orator, the poet, the winning conversationalist. They had to fall back
+      coarsely on the terror of infection and death. They prescribed
+      inoculations and operations. Whatever part of a human being could be cut
+      out without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died
+      (unnecessarily of course) in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and
+      tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's
+      inside was safe. They explained that the human intestine was too long, and
+      that nothing could make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting
+      the pylorus by cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening
+      it directly to the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that
+      medicine was the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the
+      carpenter's shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their
+      practices) was so important that no consideration for the interests of any
+      individual creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar
+      commonplaces of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the
+      remotest off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge,
+      they operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous
+      scale, clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the
+      bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare
+      ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution
+      compared to the General Medical Council.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from
+      this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it
+      believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that
+      cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,
+      whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's
+      saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read
+      about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which
+      point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to
+      die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently gave
+      it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the
+      firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the
+      hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      War Delirium
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but
+      at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of
+      Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this experience. The horror
+      of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of
+      splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their
+      emperor, was tame in comparison. I do not know whether anyone really kept
+      his head completely except those who had to keep it because they had to
+      conduct the war at first hand. I should not have kept my own (as far as I
+      did keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a scribe and speaker
+      I too was under the most serious public obligation to keep my grip on
+      realities; but this did not save me from a considerable degree of
+      hyperaesthesia. There were of course some happy people to whom the war
+      meant nothing: all political and general matters lying outside their
+      little circle of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went
+      mad, the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of nature
+      had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All
+      schools must be closed. No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers,
+      of which new editions must appear and be bought up every ten minutes.
+      Travelling must be stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered.
+      All pretences about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as
+      an intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and
+      schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was
+      saved only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
+      more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established by
+      one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized with the
+      illusion that they could win the war by giving away money. And they not
+      only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no discoverable
+      object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing what was
+      plainly the business of the civil and military authorities, but actually
+      handed out money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind
+      to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the annihilation of
+      the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices; label themselves
+      Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that was heaped on them.
+      Attractively dressed young women found that they had nothing to do but
+      parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live gloriously on the
+      profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign of returning sanity,
+      the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les
+      autres, and the passionate penny collecting of the Flag Days was brought
+      under some sort of regulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madness in Court
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were acquitted,
+      even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at last the
+      judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the Unwritten
+      Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked with
+      impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a Victoria
+      Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. Unfortunately
+      the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest itself
+      in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged with any sort of
+      conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not smack of war
+      delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were in the
+      country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious objections
+      to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament introducing
+      Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these persons, merely
+      requiring them to prove the genuineness of their convictions. Those who
+      did so were very ill-advised from the point of view of their own personal
+      interest; for they were persecuted with savage logicality in spite of the
+      law; whilst those who made no pretence of having any objection to war at
+      all, and had not only had military training in Officers' Training Corps,
+      but had proclaimed on public occasions that they were perfectly ready to
+      engage in civil war on behalf of their political opinions, were allowed
+      the benefit of the Act on the ground that they did not approve of this
+      particular war. For the Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the
+      evidence as to their being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that
+      the verdict would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the
+      prejudice of the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors
+      were gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,
+      pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war;
+      but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly; and its
+      law was set aside for Lynch law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest
+      Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a gentleman
+      who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was shot by
+      another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off no worse
+      than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed. The slayer of
+      Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M. Clemenceau was
+      carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that the same thing
+      would have happened in England if the war had begun with a successful
+      attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an unsuccessful one to
+      assassinate Mr Lloyd George.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Long Arm of War
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
+      influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made doubtful
+      by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the battlefields,
+      notably on the west coast of North America and in India. But the moral
+      pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence, reproduced this
+      phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever would have raged
+      most furiously in the countries actually under fire, and that the others
+      would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts
+      literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed armies drove
+      each other back and forward over it after terrific preliminary
+      bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving their feelings more
+      emphatically than by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "C'est la
+      guerre." England, inviolate for so many centuries that the swoop of war on
+      her homesteads had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the
+      Flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at
+      last what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations, or
+      lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft
+      guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop
+      windows in London, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled with
+      steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women and children, and burnt and
+      wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal of violent language, and produce a
+      wrath on which many suns go down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the
+      United States of America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that
+      the war fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there
+      was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It
+      is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid
+      American do that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in
+      England, with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the
+      air as unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts
+      studying the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances
+      whether our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
+      newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on young
+      girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were being
+      uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England, and the
+      more private records of the methods by which the American War Loans were
+      raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the possibilities of a
+      raid clean out of our heads for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war
+      maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of
+      liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under
+      which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by
+      simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without any
+      pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. Though it
+      was urgently necessary that production should be increased by the most
+      scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no fact was
+      better established than that excessive duration and intensity of toil
+      reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory laws were
+      suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the loss of
+      their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and
+      warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the
+      formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
+      that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless we
+      did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and beneficial
+      in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not change men's
+      minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was that the impact
+      of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can
+      understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion
+      from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the
+      licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors.
+      Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when
+      the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are
+      blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when
+      this scripture was fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less
+      appalling because a few students of Greek history were not surprised by
+      it. Indeed these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as
+      the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance without
+      even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable school governor
+      expelling the German professor with insult and bodily violence, and
+      declaring that no English child should ever again be taught the language
+      of Luther and Goethe, were kept in countenance by the most impudent
+      repudiations of every decency of civilization and every lesson of
+      political experience on the part of the very persons who, as university
+      professors, historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the
+      accredited custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps
+      necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and German
+      dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and recruiters in black
+      and red as European dangers (as in fact they are), leaving it to be
+      inferred that our own militarism and our own political constitution are
+      millennially democratic (which they certainly are not); but when it came
+      to frantic denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German
+      poetry, German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even
+      German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards British and
+      French chemistry and so forth in the relation of heaven to hell, it was
+      clear that the utterers of such barbarous ravings had never really
+      understood or cared for the arts and sciences they professed and were
+      profaning, and were only the appallingly degenerate descendants of the men
+      of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national
+      frontiers in the great realm of the human mind, kept the European comity
+      of that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the
+      battle-field. Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the
+      German dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious
+      and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of
+      Guelph against Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of
+      a traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the
+      Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving
+      his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage: only
+      paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as confidently as
+      the people who were disgracing their country called themselves patriots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Sufferings of the Sane
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
+      carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane
+      people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated by
+      the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid,
+      the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared
+      a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall
+      but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war,"
+      was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; for when nearly
+      every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all have gone quite
+      out of our senses if we had taken our own and our friend's bereavements at
+      their peace value. It became necessary to give them a false value; to
+      proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the
+      liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of
+      their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the
+      parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at last the
+      comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men, sitting comfortably in
+      club chairs, and boasting of the sons they had "given" to their country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only
+      embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth set
+      on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then think
+      of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about the
+      policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly
+      repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really
+      valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming
+      fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye,
+      so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as themselves.
+      These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient soldiers
+      (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment by the
+      hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others. They left
+      their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have
+      left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not,
+      like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship had
+      been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers. The ship had
+      to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his fluxions and Michael Angelo
+      his marbles to save it; so they threw away the tools of their beneficent
+      and ennobling trades, and took up the blood-stained bayonet and the
+      murderous bomb, forcing themselves to pervert their divine instinct for
+      perfect artistic execution to the effective handling of these diabolical
+      things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of
+      ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the
+      very talents they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only
+      effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly
+      promoted, and found themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a
+      growing relish for it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of
+      mankind, in spite of themselves. For many of them there was not even this
+      consolation. They "stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Evil in the Throne of Good
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it in civil
+      life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or witness
+      destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their own woes.
+      Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not easy for
+      those who had to write and speak about the war to throw away their highest
+      conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead
+      of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one
+      person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St. Francis to
+      the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don Quixote extremely
+      irksome. But that change had to be made; and we are all the worse for it,
+      except those for whom it was not really a change at all, but only a relief
+      from hypocrisy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
+      and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to
+      the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction.
+      Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been
+      aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work
+      for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being
+      killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors had to be
+      sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was no mere British
+      consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the good European, the
+      slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the
+      English. Fools exulted in "German losses." They were our losses as well.
+      Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him
+      his death blow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a frivolous
+      exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom an inability to
+      realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage ones. Again and
+      again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a child and its mother
+      limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they had been reading with
+      great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings day after day in their
+      newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the Huns" as
+      murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying vengeance. At such
+      moments it became clear that the deaths they had not seen meant no more to
+      them than the mimic death of the cinema screen. Sometimes it was not
+      necessary that death should be actually witnessed: it had only to take
+      place under circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it
+      home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually
+      visible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of our
+      young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I will not
+      go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have such
+      exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I noticed
+      either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the
+      usual one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and that
+      our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly there came the news that
+      an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been torpedoed, and that several
+      well-known first-class passengers, including a famous theatrical manager
+      and the author of a popular farce, had been drowned, among others. The
+      others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had only laid the country under
+      great obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was laid
+      on that loss. Immediately an amazing frenzy swept through the country. Men
+      who up to that time had kept their heads now lost them utterly. "Killing
+      saloon passengers! What next?" was the essence of the whole agitation; but
+      it is far too trivial a phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage
+      which possessed us. To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve
+      Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania
+      seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted
+      personally with the three best-known victims, and understood, better
+      perhaps than most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even
+      found a grim satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact
+      that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should
+      get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
+      impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and natural
+      feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless paradox.
+      When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything to say about
+      the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before, having totally
+      forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They were not heartless
+      anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp,
+      and the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not
+      surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason pass a
+      vote for £30,000 without a word, and then spend three special meetings,
+      prolonged into the night, over an item of seven shillings for
+      refreshments?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Minds and Big Battles
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during
+      the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire
+      magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive
+      even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing
+      but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of
+      bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity of
+      it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the
+      dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce
+      any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
+      Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of
+      Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation" in
+      the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers
+      learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel
+      had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and
+      horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put a new spirit into
+      the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches roared
+      with laughter over it for days, and told each other that it would do the
+      blighters at home good to have a taste of what the army was up against.
+      Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man would work at home
+      regardless of the call "to make the world safe for democracy." His brother
+      would be killed at the front. Immediately he would throw up his work and
+      take up the war as a family blood feud against the Germans. Sometimes it
+      was comic. A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return to the
+      trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had wounded him and
+      pay him out for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out of it,
+      grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the light of
+      any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt whether it
+      was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians. But there can be
+      no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively
+      ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to
+      make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be done
+      by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a comprehension
+      of which they were incapable. When the armistice at last set me free to
+      tell the truth about the war at the following general election, a soldier
+      said to a candidate whom I was supporting, "If I had known all that in
+      1914, they would never have got me into khaki." And that, of course, was
+      precisely why it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any
+      diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confusion of ignorance
+      was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of nursery bogey
+      stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last overreached itself and
+      made it impossible to stop the war before we had not only achieved the
+      triumph of vanquishing the German army and thereby overthrowing its
+      militarist monarchy, but made the very serious mistake of ruining the
+      centre of Europe, a thing that no sane European State could afford to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the critical
+      reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time was
+      conducting a war which involved the organization of several millions of
+      fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with provisions,
+      munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been done by a mob
+      of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the
+      newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban
+      drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from
+      Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover
+      England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed
+      in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who
+      were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave the
+      rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the raving was useful to the
+      efficient, because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted
+      attention very conveniently from operations that would have been defeated
+      or hindered by publicity. A precept which I endeavored vainly to
+      popularize early in the war, "If you have anything to do go and do it: if
+      not, for heaven's sake get out of the way," was only half carried out.
+      Certainly the capable people went and did it; but the incapables would by
+      no means get out of the way: they fussed and bawled and were only
+      prevented from getting very seriously into the way by the blessed fact
+      that they never knew where the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of
+      England was silent and invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the
+      heavens with its clamor and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was
+      also unfortunately intimidating the Government by its blusterings into
+      using the irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible
+      people, thus enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up
+      a reign of terror which could at any time have been broken by a single
+      stern word from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that
+      sort of courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it,
+      much less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops
+      by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the
+      Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable moment,
+      during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a childish
+      cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our great
+      disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind all
+      this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective
+      England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and activity.
+      The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its incontinences,
+      its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its endless and
+      intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season and out. The
+      esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the conquest of Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Practical Business Men
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical
+      business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing their
+      personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the success
+      of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those
+      on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The pitiable failure
+      of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these poor
+      devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an air of monstrous
+      and hopeless farce. They proved not only that they were useless for public
+      work, but that in a well-ordered nation they would never have been allowed
+      to control private enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of
+      her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
+      save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of the
+      men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent
+      practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional
+      rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination of
+      the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture
+      posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing some
+      of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have shared the
+      common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the world by the
+      newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But in the end the
+      talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and file of the men
+      of action; for though the great men of action are always inveterate
+      talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot have their
+      minds formed for them by others, the average man of action, like the
+      average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of himself in words
+      even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what he reads about
+      himself and other people in the papers, except when the writer is rash
+      enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not uncommon during
+      the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war work, describing
+      events within his own experience that reduced to utter absurdity the
+      ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo the opinions of
+      that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the prevailing confusion
+      and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of
+      action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. This was a
+      privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. For the unprivileged
+      citizen there was no escape. To him the whole country seemed mad, futile,
+      silly, incompetent, with no hope of victory except the hope that the enemy
+      might be just as mad. Only by very resolute reflection and reasoning could
+      he reassure himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their
+      appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for a single
+      day without a total breakdown of its organization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mad Election
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days. The
+      worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in
+      parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of action
+      to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the armistice
+      was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers who had done
+      voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated by persons who had
+      apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that they could avoid, and
+      who even had in the course of the election to apologize publicly for
+      bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent. Party leaders seek such
+      followers, who can always be depended on to walk tamely into the lobby at
+      the party whip's orders, provided the leader will make their seats safe
+      for them by the process which was called, in derisive reference to the war
+      rationing system, "giving them the coupon." Other incidents were so
+      grotesque that I cannot mention them without enabling the reader to
+      identify the parties, which would not be fair, as they were no more to
+      blame than thousands of others who must necessarily be nameless. The
+      general result was patently absurd; and the electorate, disgusted at its
+      own work, instantly recoiled to the opposite extreme, and cast out all the
+      coupon candidates at the earliest bye-elections by equally silly
+      majorities. But the mischief of the general election could not be undone;
+      and the Government had not only to pretend to abuse its European victory
+      as it had promised, but actually to do it by starving the enemies who had
+      thrown down their arms. It had, in short, won the election by pledging
+      itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and vindictive; and it did not
+      find it as easy to escape from this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The
+      end, as I write, is not yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless
+      savagery will recoil on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall
+      be forced by the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the
+      Europe we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to complete
+      her destruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no denial
+      of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing Man to an
+      angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the superior virtue
+      of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British can behave
+      themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen
+      war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "Could
+      great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet; for
+      every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but
+      thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he had seen something far
+      more destructive than thunder in the hand of every village laborer, and
+      found on the Messines Ridge the craters of the nineteen volcanoes that
+      were let loose there at the touch of a finger that might have been a
+      child's finger without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare
+      may have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's thunderbolts,
+      and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch and clear away the bits
+      of the broken chimney. What would he have said if he had seen Ypres as it
+      is now, or returned to Stratford, as French peasants are returning to
+      their homes to-day, to find the old familiar signpost inscribed "To
+      Stratford, 1 mile," and at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in
+      the ground and a fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the
+      spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction that Jove
+      never pretended to, have beggared even his command of words?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human
+      nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half a
+      diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for then
+      the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and we
+      should take greater care not to get into them. In truth, it is, as Byron
+      said, "not difficult to die," and enormously difficult to live: that
+      explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely
+      more arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death more
+      bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious certainty of it? Bolo
+      taught us all how to die: can we say that he taught us all how to live?
+      Hardly a week passes now without some soldier who braved death in the
+      field so recklessly that he was decorated or specially commended for it,
+      being haled before our magistrates for having failed to resist the
+      paltriest temptations of peace, with no better excuse than the old one
+      that "a man must live." Strange that one who, sooner than do honest work,
+      will sell his honor for a bottle of wine, a visit to the theatre, and an
+      hour with a strange woman, all obtained by passing a worthless cheque,
+      could yet stake his life on the most desperate chances of the
+      battle-field! Does it not seem as if, after all, the glory of death were
+      cheaper than the glory of life? If it is not easier to attain, why do so
+      many more men attain it? At all events it is clear that the kingdom of the
+      Prince of Peace has not yet become the kingdom of this world. His attempts
+      at invasion have been resisted far more fiercely than the Kaiser's.
+      Successful as that resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of National
+      Debt that is not the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and
+      do not intend to pay it. A blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord"
+      is in the long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off
+      raw materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the
+      blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am
+      afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plague on Both your Houses!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the foundations
+      of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried in the ruins,
+      their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately they can be built
+      again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished many times by
+      successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, by
+      Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of Vanity Fair.
+      Another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient public schools
+      and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite sufficient to
+      keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction of that
+      generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian life was
+      during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent. Fortunately
+      it was a very short war. It is true that the people who thought it could
+      not last more than six months were very signally refuted by the event. As
+      Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos lasted months instead of
+      hours. But there would have been nothing surprising in its lasting thirty
+      years. If it had not been for the fact that the blockade achieved the
+      amazing feat of starving out Europe, which it could not possibly have done
+      had Europe been properly organized for war, or even for peace, the war
+      would have lasted until the belligerents were so tired of it that they
+      could no longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it.
+      Considering its magnitude, the war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as
+      the shortest in history. The end came so suddenly that the combatant
+      literally stumbled over it; and yet it came a full year later than it
+      should have come if the belligerents had not been far too afraid of one
+      another to face the situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide
+      for the war she began, failed again to surrender before she was
+      dangerously exhausted. Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much
+      too close to bankruptcy as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which
+      both were bluffed. And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful
+      whether Germany and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the
+      victors are already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have
+      struck from the limbs of the vanquished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the Theatre fared
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European theatre of
+      war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the slain,
+      rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home to supper
+      after washing off their rose-pink wounds. It is nearly twenty years since
+      I was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a book for lack of
+      an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a performance in a
+      theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient. Heartbreak House
+      has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it because the war has
+      completely upset the economic conditions which formerly enabled serious
+      drama to pay its way in London. The change is not in the theatres nor in
+      the management of them, nor in the authors and actors, but in the
+      audiences. For four years the London theatres were crowded every night
+      with thousands of soldiers on leave from the front. These soldiers were
+      not seasoned London playgoers. A childish experience of my own gave me a
+      clue to their condition. When I was a small boy I was taken to the opera.
+      I did not then know what an opera was, though I could whistle a good deal
+      of opera music. I had seen in my mother's album photographs of all the
+      great opera singers, mostly in evening dress. In the theatre I found
+      myself before a gilded balcony filled with persons in evening dress whom I
+      took to be the opera singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as
+      Alboni, and wondered how soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled
+      by the fact that I was made to sit with my back to the singers instead of
+      facing them. When the curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were
+      unbounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Soldier at the Theatre Front
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same predicament.
+      To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was evident that
+      they had never been in a theatre before and did not know what it was. At
+      one of our great variety theatres I sat beside a young officer, not at all
+      a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain rose and enlightened him as
+      to the place where he had to look for his entertainment, found the
+      dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible. He did not know how to play
+      his part of the game. He could understand the people on the stage singing
+      and dancing and performing gymnastic feats. He not only understood but
+      intensely enjoyed an artist who imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking.
+      But the people who pretended that they were somebody else, and that the
+      painted picture behind them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I
+      realized how very sophisticated the natural man has to become before the
+      conventions of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the
+      drama obvious to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was
+      established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers) often
+      as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It was
+      hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them on. The
+      best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the oldest quips
+      and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military spectators out
+      of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices
+      were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of George
+      Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, would
+      probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were only a
+      minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace would
+      look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen plays in the
+      most artistic settings, found himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting
+      for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty
+      girls. The author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time
+      told me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse of
+      the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent but delightful
+      pleasure merely to see a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field
+      produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values
+      were altered. Trivial things gained intensity and stale things novelty.
+      The actor, instead of having to coax his audiences out of the boredom
+      which had driven them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of
+      distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no
+      longer under fire and under military discipline, but actually clean and
+      comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with anything and everything that
+      a bevy of pretty girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending
+      to be pretty and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical
+      comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a
+      practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the
+      bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples
+      consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night;
+      mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got into
+      the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting
+      complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their
+      equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
+      astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in
+      drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of his
+      naked person to be descried from time to time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heartbreak House
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and were
+      thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical
+      comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade
+      had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing:
+      these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much
+      pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what
+      they thought fresh and clever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Commerce in the Theatre
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London theatre.
+      Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must pay rent.
+      In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people: they are all
+      for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable rent for the
+      proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a guinea more than
+      Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin
+      beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid
+      Mozart, out goes Mozart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unser Shakespeare
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a
+      national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of
+      Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and
+      influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national
+      culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents
+      of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single
+      handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated swearer
+      in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost its
+      tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in ruin to the
+      bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this situation," and let
+      it pass without another word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Higher Drama put out of Action
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The beds
+      and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents went up to
+      an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled everywhere except
+      at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management to such a
+      degree that unless the houses were quite full every night, profit was
+      impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide
+      popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited extent
+      before the war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were
+      only half full until Saturday and three-quarters full then. A manager who
+      was an enthusiast and a desperately hard worker, with an occasional
+      grant-in-aid from an artistically disposed millionaire, and a due
+      proportion of those rare and happy accidents by which plays of the higher
+      sort turn out to be potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by
+      which time a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus
+      and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at
+      the beginning of the century which made my own career as a playwright
+      possible in England. In America I had already established myself, not as
+      part of the ordinary theatre system, but in association with the
+      exceptional genius of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no
+      difficulty: the system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and
+      Municipal, kept drama of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted
+      to the Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a
+      time when the sole official attention paid me by the British Courts was
+      the announcement to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine
+      were unfit for public performance, a substantial set-off against this
+      being that the British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid
+      no regard to the bad character given me by the chief officer of its
+      household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage,
+      and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert
+      Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold Bennett,
+      John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in the nineteenth
+      century have stood rather less chance of production at a London theatre
+      than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient
+      Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he
+      wrote them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of theatres
+      which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost to rent and
+      maintain them. In such theatres work appealing to a relatively small class
+      of cultivated persons, and therefore attracting only from half to
+      three-quarters as many spectators as the more popular pastimes, could
+      nevertheless keep going in the hands of young adventurers who were doing
+      it for its own sake, and had not yet been forced by advancing age and
+      responsibilities to consider the commercial value of their time and energy
+      too closely. The war struck this foundation away in the manner I have just
+      described. The expenses of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to
+      a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher
+      drama can, as an ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus
+      the higher drama, which has never really been a commercially sound
+      speculation, now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being
+      made to provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and
+      repertory theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has
+      at last disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers
+      whom it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly
+      made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question
+      altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Church and Theatre
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to
+      care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not born in
+      mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the beginning of
+      the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note that all these
+      soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what a church was. And
+      they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody had ever warned them
+      against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in their best
+      clothes; where stories of improper females like Potiphar's wife, and
+      erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were read aloud; where the sensuous
+      and sentimental music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was
+      more popular than severe music by greater composers; where the prettiest
+      sort of pretty pictures of pretty saints assailed the imagination and
+      senses through stained-glass windows; and where sculpture and architecture
+      came to the help of painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things
+      had sometimes produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who
+      were not only enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music,
+      but famous practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even
+      regular troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed
+      church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which
+      the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in
+      churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless
+      rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on driving
+      the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and partly of
+      insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the temple had
+      become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions that were so
+      carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church were laid on the
+      shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of penance in
+      which we suffer so much inconvenience on the slenderest chance of gaining
+      a scrap of food for our starving souls. When the Germans bombed the
+      Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with the horror of the sacrilege. When
+      they bombed the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing
+      two writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it, the fact was not
+      even mentioned in the papers. In point of appeal to the senses no theatre
+      ever built could touch the fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its
+      Virgin in beauty, nor any operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside
+      its David. Its picture glass was glorious even to those who had seen the
+      glass of Chartres. It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look
+      at the Blondin Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the
+      Adam-Adelphian decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much
+      taste and care, the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the
+      gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the
+      Puritan point of view, have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one
+      whom the Little Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr
+      Chesterton's Magic or Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real
+      reason why the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no,
+      the fact remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the
+      national value of the theatre I owed the first regular public performance
+      of a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime,
+      whereas if she had given the money to the Church she would have worn a
+      halo for it. And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of things
+      may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners again and again
+      why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can go to St.
+      Paul's or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible reply is that
+      they want to see something new and possibly something wicked; but the
+      theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a revolution makes me
+      Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for admission to our churches.
+      But everyone who pays at the church door shall receive a ticket entitling
+      him or her to free admission to one performance at any theatre he or she
+      prefers. Thus shall the sensuous charms of the church service be made to
+      subsidize the sterner virtue of the drama.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Next Phase
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I read at
+      breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation
+      that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to confirm
+      the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction is
+      setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible years.
+      Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that
+      they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in and
+      week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will be at no greater
+      disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may benefit, first, by the
+      fact that many of us have been torn from the fools' paradise in which the
+      theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon the sternest realities and
+      necessities until we have lost both faith in and patience with the
+      theatrical pretences that had no root either in reality or necessity;
+      second, by the startling change made by the war in the distribution of
+      income. It seems only the other day that a millionaire was a man with
+      £50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his income tax and super tax, and
+      insured his life for the amount of his death duties, he is lucky if his
+      net income is 10,000 pounds though his nominal property remains the same.
+      And this is the result of a Budget which is called "a respite for the
+      rich." At the other end of the scale millions of persons have had regular
+      incomes for the first time in their lives; and their men have been
+      regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and taught to make up their minds that
+      certain things have to be done, also for the first time in their lives.
+      Hundreds of thousands of women have been taken out of their domestic cages
+      and tasted both discipline and independence. The thoughtless and snobbish
+      middle classes have been pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience
+      of being ruined to an unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous
+      jolt; and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would
+      automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would
+      never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is
+      already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our
+      condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution,
+      lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is
+      now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in
+      other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process
+      anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who
+      was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how,
+      after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other war
+      of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a heroic
+      task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years in
+      abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the task
+      they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel was right
+      when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from
+      history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that we, the new
+      conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for, are sitting
+      down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years revenge upon
+      and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed by those who
+      know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how happy Lincoln was
+      in perishing from the earth before his inspired messages became scraps of
+      paper. He knows well that from the Peace Conference will come, in spite of
+      his utmost, no edict on which he will be able, like Lincoln, to invoke
+      "the considerate judgment of mankind: and the gracious favor of Almighty
+      God." He led his people to destroy the militarism of Zabern; and the army
+      they rescued is busy in Cologne imprisoning every German who does not
+      salute a British officer; whilst the government at home, asked whether it
+      approves, replies that it does not propose even to discontinue this
+      Zabernism when the Peace is concluded, but in effect looks forward to
+      making Germans salute British officers until the end of the world. That is
+      what war makes of men and women. It will wear off; and the worst it
+      threatens is already proving impracticable; but before the humble and
+      contrite heart ceases to be despised, the President and I, being of the
+      same age, will be dotards. In the meantime there is, for him, another
+      history to write; for me, another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all,
+      that is what wars are for, and what historians and playwrights are for. If
+      men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood
+      they must have, their own for preference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the theatre
+      will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest Hohenzollern
+      languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of
+      fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to have
+      perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or
+      perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of
+      Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime
+      Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons
+      and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels
+      as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and Aristophanes, Shakespeare
+      and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in their everlasting seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about the
+      war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is significant. You cannot
+      make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. War cannot bear the
+      terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter that glares
+      on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their country, it is not
+      the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they
+      are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of
+      capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the electioneering of demagogues,
+      the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and lies and rancors and
+      bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their prison doors, and sets
+      them in the thrones of power and popularity. For unless these things are
+      mercilessly exposed they will hide under the mantle of the ideals on the
+      stage just as they do in real life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed
+      cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still
+      in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the
+      realm. We are just now reading the revelations of our generals and
+      admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. During the war, General A,
+      in his moving despatches from the field, told how General B had covered
+      himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us
+      that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying his
+      orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he ought
+      to have done. An excellent subject for comedy now that the war is over, no
+      doubt; but if General A had let this out at the time, what would have been
+      the effect on General B's soldiers? And had the stage made known what the
+      Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War who overruled General A
+      thought of him, and what he thought of them, as now revealed in raging
+      controversy, what would have been the effect on the nation? That is why
+      comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally silent; for the art of
+      the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth
+      to natural history; cares not whether Germany or England perish; is ready
+      to cry with Brynhild, "Lass'uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh'n" sooner
+      than deceive or be deceived; and thus becomes in time of war a greater
+      military danger than poison, steel, or trinitrotoluene. That is why I had
+      to withhold Heartbreak House from the footlights during the war; for the
+      Germans might on any night have turned the last act from play into
+      earnest, and even then might not have waited for their cues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June, 1919.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class="play">
+      <h2>
+        ACT I
+      </h2>
+      <p>
+        The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking
+        very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September, is seen through
+        the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after
+        part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the
+        windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the
+        room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. A row of
+        lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat
+        interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern
+        post and the sides. Another door strains the illusion a little by being
+        apparently in the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open
+        sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the
+        stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches beside
+        the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery.
+        Against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench. The vice has a board
+        in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a
+        waste-paper basket. A couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench.
+        In the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway
+        with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it
+        is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak
+        drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set squares,
+        mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler of
+        discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. The
+        drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has the window on
+        its left hand. On the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a
+        ship's fire bucket. On the port side of the room, near the bookshelves,
+        is a sofa with its back to the windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article,
+        oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of
+        blankets hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table
+        is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its
+        back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a round top and
+        gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the
+        bookcase. It is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all
+        convincingly) a woman's hand in the furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of
+        narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the
+        landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow is the
+        cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a
+        flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a
+        long garden seat on the west.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the
+        window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the view.
+        One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the
+        Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been
+        reading.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A clock strikes six.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an air of
+        one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. She is a pretty
+        girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively
+        dressed, evidently not a smart idler.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's chair;
+        sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the book sinks to
+        her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened
+        bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and disappears in the
+        pantry without noticing the young lady. She places the bottles on the
+        shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. As she returns with these,
+        the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the
+        womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book and
+        places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure; but you are
+        a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that
+        I have been invited here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you're invited, are you? And has nobody come?
+        Dear! dear!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at the
+        window; and I heard him calling out, "Nurse, there is a young and
+        attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what she wants." Are
+        you the nurse?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I'm Nurse Guinness. That was old Captain
+        Shotover, Mrs Hushabye's father. I heard him roaring; but I thought it
+        was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs Hushabye that invited you,
+        ducky?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I'd better
+        go.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs Hushabye
+        has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to
+        see you, won't it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find
+        that nobody expects me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. You'll get used to it, miss: this house is full of
+        surprises for them that don't know our ways.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but
+        still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a
+        whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag
+        on the front steps for everybody to fall over. Also a tennis racquet.
+        Who the devil left them there?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I'm afraid.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this
+        misguided and unfortunate young lady?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my
+        daughter's invitations? This is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! A
+        young and attractive lady is invited here. Her luggage is left on the
+        steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned,
+        tired and starving. This is our hospitality. These are our manners. No
+        room ready. No hot water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep
+        in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Now it's all right, Captain: I'll get the lady some tea;
+        and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [To the young
+        lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to
+        the door leading to the hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman, that
+        because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the
+        right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you have
+        brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social
+        intercourse?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she goes out
+        into the hall on her way to the kitchen].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits down in
+        the big wicker chair].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was
+        originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship's chandler with stores
+        which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No doubt he
+        became rich. Are you his daughter?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to say that
+        though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one
+        word to say against him. I think my father is the best man I have ever
+        known.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh
+        degree of concentration?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't understand.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have two
+        daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you here. I keep
+        this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the seventh degree of
+        concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them.
+        [Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak
+        table]. I have a second daughter who is, thank God, in a remote part of
+        the Empire with her numskull of a husband. As a child she thought the
+        figure-head of my ship, the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing on
+        earth. He resembled it. He had the same expression: wooden yet
+        enterprising. She married him, and will never set foot in this house
+        again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to
+        Ellie's side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in England
+        this very moment. You have been told three times this week that she is
+        coming home for a year for her health. And very glad you should be to
+        see your own daughter again after all these years.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of the
+        human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter Ariadne was
+        born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If she comes, I am not
+        at home. If she wants anything, let her take it. If she asks for me, let
+        her be informed that I am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. That's no talk to offer to a young lady. Here, ducky,
+        have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have given
+        this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather
+        insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into
+        the leathern bucket].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have been
+        glad of anything.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to drop.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that fly-blown
+        cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He disappears into the
+        pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. There's a man for you! They say he sold himself to the
+        devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the
+        more I believe them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A WOMAN'S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse! Papa!
+        Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It's Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs
+        Hushabye's sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling]. Coming,
+        Miss, coming.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        She carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out
+        when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who bursts in much flustered.
+        Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so
+        precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous)
+        is one of comic silliness.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don't look a
+        day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn't she expect me?
+        Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on the steps? Where's
+        papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh! I beg your pardon. I
+        suppose you are one of my nieces. [Approaching her with outstretched
+        arms]. Come and kiss your aunt, darling.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I'm only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. I'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes up the
+        tray].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he's forgotten what he went for already. His
+        mind wanders from one thing to another.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don't be silly, Nurse. Don't call me Miss.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what
+        you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after
+        twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the
+        steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive
+        anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always
+        gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the
+        same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was
+        used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and
+        longed all the time&mdash;oh, how I longed!&mdash;to be respectable, to
+        be a lady, to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for
+        myself. I married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir
+        Hastings Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in
+        succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House. I have
+        been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like this. I
+        wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought to,
+        you know), and I was looking forward to it. And now the state of the
+        house! the way I'm received! the casual impudence of that woman
+        Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione might at least have been here:
+        some preparation might have been made for me. You must excuse my going
+        on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and
+        disillusioned: and if I had realized it was to be like this, I wouldn't
+        have come. I have a great mind to go away without another word [she is
+        on the point of weeping].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me either.
+        I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady Utterword? My
+        luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese lacquer and a
+        very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally on the end of the
+        table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor
+        against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. Ellie
+        pours out a cup greedily.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must fetch
+        another cup [he makes for the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. Papa!
+        Don't you know me? I'm your daughter.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [He vanishes
+        through the half door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don't be so distressed. Have this cup
+        of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to
+        me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to
+        me. Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The captain returns with another cup.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can't have forgotten me. I am
+        Ariadne. I'm little Paddy Patkins. Won't you kiss me? [She goes to him
+        and throws her arms round his neck].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You
+        are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been away,
+        Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing
+        strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of
+        concentration.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. But I'm your daughter. You haven't seen me for years.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home, we have
+        to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure
+        them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by
+        dwelling on their vices. That is how I have come to think my absent
+        daughter Ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself
+        here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the
+        room].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very well,
+        papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for
+        herself].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn? Billy
+        Dunn?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on the
+        sofa].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [protesting]. No&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE. You've actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh, miss,
+        he didn't forget you after all! You HAVE made an impression.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in
+        this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her
+        children are not youthful.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this
+        house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that
+        might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were
+        certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady
+        Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? Do you
+        hear?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I'll tell them all they must call you My
+        Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having servants
+        with no manners?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. Lady
+        Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don't ask me. You can see for yourself that I've
+        just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years' absence! and it
+        seems that I am not expected.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or
+        not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I'll find a room for
+        her myself [he makes for the door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please&mdash;[He goes out]. Lady
+        Utterword, I don't know what to do. Your father persists in believing
+        that my father is some sailor who robbed him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My father is a
+        very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of
+        course he is worse. And I must warn you that it is sometimes very hard
+        to feel quite sure that he really forgets.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces Ellie. She
+        is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and even better looking.
+        She has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, and
+        a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders
+        in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a
+        rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque
+        contour.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long
+        have you been here? I've been at home all the time: I was putting
+        flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down for a moment
+        to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off to sleep. Papa woke
+        me and told me you were here. Fancy your finding no one, and being
+        neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her again]. My poor love! [She
+        deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile Ariadne has left the table and
+        come over to claim her share of attention]. Oh! you've brought someone
+        with you. Introduce me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don't know me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face quite
+        well. Where have we met?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Didn't Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is really too
+        much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [Rising
+        angrily]. I'll go straight to a hotel.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious
+        goodness, you don't mean to say that you're Addy!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don't think I can be so
+        changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real
+        affection for me. And Papa didn't think me even worth mentioning!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the chair
+        instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You DO look a
+        swell. You're much handsomer than you used to be. You've made the
+        acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to marry a perfect hog of
+        a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church
+        mouse; and you must help me to stop her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man's coming here today with your father
+        to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case
+        in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret of it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don't know how wonderfully good he
+        was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable man,
+        Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who
+        knew Ellie's grandparents. They were both poets, like the Brownings; and
+        when her father came into the world Mazzini said, "Another soldier born
+        for freedom!" So they christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting
+        for freedom in his quiet way ever since. That's why he is so poor.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in it, and
+        marry someone you love?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are you going
+        to kiss me or are you not?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I DON'T want to be kissed; but I do want you to behave
+        properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been separated for
+        twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate the
+        smell of powder.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling&mdash;[she is interrupted by the
+        return of the captain].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The sheets
+        were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the
+        port side].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or take
+        them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne's old room.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That little hole!
+        I am entitled to the best spare room.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She told me
+        she would marry anyone to get away from home.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I will
+        leave the house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man with
+        bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in a blue
+        serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a
+        soft black hat of clerical cut.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through
+        the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else.
+        I will have it out with Papa now, this instant. [To Mazzini]. Excuse me.
+        [She follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns
+        it].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come, Mr
+        Dunn! You don't mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter, you know,
+        but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have some delightful
+        talks with him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He draws
+        her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs Hushabye, for
+        your kindness to my daughter. I'm afraid she would have had no holiday
+        if you had not invited her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract young
+        people to the house for us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [smiling]. I'm afraid Ellie is not interested in young men, Mrs
+        Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. Won't
+        you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find a cupboard for coats
+        and hats and things in the corner of the hall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes&mdash;thank you&mdash;I had
+        better&mdash; [he goes out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Who?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. "Graver,
+        solider tastes," indeed!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [aghast]. You don't mean that you were speaking like that of my
+        father!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns to the
+        door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I'll tell your father why.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this, Mrs
+        Hushabye?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Certainly not now?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I'll tell your father.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair&mdash;if you take his part against me
+        and against your own heart for a moment, I'll give that born soldier of
+        freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head
+        for a week.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you'd like to know. Excuse
+        me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little confused by
+        his manner. He is making Mangan help him with something in the garden;
+        and he wants me too&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A powerful whistle is heard.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE CAPTAIN'S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me. [He
+        hurries out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don't understand. My father and Mr
+        Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I don't care what they were: we must sit down if you are
+        going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at Ellie's waist, and
+        makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. Now, pettikins, tell me all
+        about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss Mangan, don't they? He is a Napoleon
+        of industry and disgustingly rich, isn't he? Why isn't your father rich?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His parents
+        were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not
+        afford to give him a profession.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy
+        rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business. Hasn't he
+        succeeded in it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some
+        capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads and
+        bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same
+        difficulty of not having capital enough. I don't know how to describe it
+        to you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn't it? I shouldn't have
+        pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have pulled hard&mdash;[between
+        her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr Mangan
+        did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father
+        and respect for his character. He asked him how much capital he wanted,
+        and gave it to him. I don't mean that he lent it to him, or that he
+        invested it in his business. He just simply made him a present of it.
+        Wasn't that splendid of him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never even
+        seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely disinterested.
+        Pure generosity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman's pardon. Well, what became of the
+        money?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I went
+        to another school for two years.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly
+        ruined.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. How?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't know. I never could understand. But it was dreadful. When
+        we were poor my father had never been in debt. But when he launched out
+        into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. When the
+        business went into liquidation he owed more money than Mr Mangan had
+        given him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. I was
+        quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have picked up so
+        much slang from the children that I am really hardly presentable. I
+        suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. The
+        business turned out a great success. It now pays forty-four per cent
+        after deducting the excess profits tax.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren't you rolling in money?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my father was
+        made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded
+        several of his friends to put money into the business. He was sure it
+        would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. But they all
+        lost their money. It was dreadful. I don't know what we should have done
+        but for Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after all his
+        money being thrown away?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. He
+        bought what was left of the business&mdash;the buildings and the
+        machinery and things&mdash;from the official trustee for enough money to
+        enable my father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his
+        discharge. Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was
+        an honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead
+        of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan started a company to take up the
+        business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation;
+        for I wasn't earning anything then.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the tender
+        passion?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair one
+        night at a sort of people's concert. I was singing there. As an amateur,
+        you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores.
+        He was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with
+        me. I never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when I took him home and
+        introduced him to my father, his own manager. It was then that my father
+        told me how nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great
+        chance for me, as he is so rich. And&mdash;and&mdash;we drifted into a
+        sort of understanding&mdash;I suppose I should call it an engagement&mdash;[she
+        is distressed and cannot go on].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted into it;
+        but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to
+        do with it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it's no use. I am bound in honor and gratitude.
+        I will go through with it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know, of
+        course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don't
+        love. Do you love this Mangan man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes. At least&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I don't want to know about "at least": I want to know the
+        worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible
+        people, especially old people.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away
+        intolerantly to starboard]. &mdash;grateful to him for his kindness to
+        dear father. I know. Anybody else?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What do you mean?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Of course not.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She
+        picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at
+        Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you're not in love with an actor?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn't it? Why else should you be reading
+        Othello?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your father
+        does seem to be about the limit.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That seems to
+        me so extraordinary. I like Othello.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn't he?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is horrible.
+        But don't you think it must have been a wonderful experience for
+        Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been out
+        in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible
+        adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit
+        and talk with her and tell her about them?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. That's your idea of romance, is it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs
+        Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa
+        and resumes her seat beside her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories
+        that Othello told Desdemona couldn't have happened&mdash;?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But they
+        didn't.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a sphinx: I
+        never know what you mean.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you
+        know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who
+        have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white,
+        and very handsome, and&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew
+        there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about
+        Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don't want to
+        make a secret of it, though of course I don't tell everybody. Besides, I
+        don't know him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Don't know him! What does that mean?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite&mdash;almost intimately.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You don't know him; and you know him almost intimately.
+        How lucid!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I&mdash;I got into
+        conversation with him by chance at a concert.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts,
+        Ellie.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our
+        turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. But
+        he was only one of the committee. I happened to tell him that I was
+        copying a picture at the National Gallery. I make a little money that
+        way. I can't paint much; but as it's always the same picture I can do it
+        pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. It happened that he
+        came to the National Gallery one day.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. One students' day. Paid sixpence to stumble about through
+        a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and
+        found the floor clear! Quite by accident?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He knows
+        lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are all in love
+        with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the National Gallery
+        and persuade me to come with him for a drive round Richmond Park in a
+        taxi.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It's wonderful what
+        you good girls can do without anyone saying a word.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn't make acquaintances in
+        that way I shouldn't have any at all.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself.
+        May I ask his name?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid name!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, I'm so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was afraid it
+        was only a silly fancy of my own.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique chest&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. A what?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a
+        night of the most terrible thunderstorm.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get into
+        it because he was afraid of the lightning?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was
+        embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. &mdash;de Rougemont?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A vicomte.
+        His life has been one long romance. A tiger&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the tiger
+        from a hunting party: one of King Edward's hunting parties in India. The
+        King was furious: that was why he never had his military services
+        properly recognized. But he doesn't care. He is a Socialist and despises
+        rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You, Ellie, of
+        all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward,
+        good girl.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don't believe
+        me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don't believe you. You're inventing every word
+        of it. Do you take me for a fool?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye is
+        puzzled.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I'm very sorry. I see now that it sounds very
+        improbable as I tell it. But I can't stay if you think that way about
+        me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan't go. I couldn't be so
+        mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has really told
+        you all this.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don't say that you don't believe him. I
+        couldn't bear that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest. But you
+        should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back to her seat].
+        Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, no. I'm not so foolish. I don't fall in love with people. I'm
+        not so silly as you think.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about&mdash;to give some
+        interest and pleasure to life.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Just so. That's all, really.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? No tedious waiting
+        to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad
+        night. How delightful it makes waking up in the morning! How much better
+        than the happiest dream! All life transfigured! No more wishing one had
+        an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any
+        book! No desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be
+        alone and just think about it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know? Oh,
+        you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy you!
+        and how I pity you!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing a
+        rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate
+        walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at
+        sight of the women on the sofa.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this is Mr
+        Marcus Darnley.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. But now&mdash;[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa].
+        Steady, my pettikins.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his hat
+        and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is Hector
+        Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man
+        would care to confess to. I never use it when I can possibly help it. I
+        have been away for nearly a month; and I had no idea you knew my wife,
+        or that you were coming here. I am none the less delighted to find you
+        in our little house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [in great distress]. I don't know what to do. Please, may I speak
+        to papa? Do leave me. I can't bear it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.
+      </p>
+      HECTOR. I&mdash;
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. If you think it better&mdash;[he goes out, taking his hat with
+        him but leaving the stick on the table].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now, pettikins,
+        he is gone. There's nobody but me. You can let yourself go. Don't try to
+        control yourself. Have a good cry.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were going to
+        be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a fool.
+        [Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She begins prowling to
+        and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young women can
+        resist Hector. I couldn't when I was your age. He is really rather
+        splendid, you know.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But
+        how can you love a liar?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there
+        wouldn't be much love in the world.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you please.
+        If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector's courage, he will go straight
+        off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself that
+        he isn't a coward. He has a dreadful trick of getting out of one
+        third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. He
+        has a whole drawerful of Albert Medals for saving people's lives.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. He never told me that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can't bear
+        it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his stories are
+        made-up stories.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and really
+        has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and
+        that never happened?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don't have their virtues and
+        vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There's something odd about this
+        house, Hesione, and even about you. I don't know why I'm talking to you
+        so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that
+        heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It's only life educating you, pettikins.
+        How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh, how can
+        you remind me of him, Hesione?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You don't
+        mind now, do you, dear?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One second
+        more, and she would have been a dead woman!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye has
+        just been telling me the most extraordinary&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes, I've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I'll tell it to you after dinner.
+        I think you'll like it. The truth is I made it up for you, and was
+        looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. But in a moment of
+        impatience at being turned out of the room, I threw it away on your
+        father.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench, scornfully
+        self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes it. I should not
+        have believed it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of course
+        she does not really think that. [He goes to the bookshelves, and
+        inspects the titles of the volumes].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan,
+        carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs' meeting, is
+        about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing a
+        little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion,
+        straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it
+        is impossible to describe them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. Says his
+        name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. Men
+        seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the
+        pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own
+        way than try to explain.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she
+        indicates Hector].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. Very
+        pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have not found the
+        journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You haven't shown me my room yet, Hesione.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite at home,
+        Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the captain in the
+        pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You're going to marry Dunn's daughter. Don't. You're
+        too old.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That's fairly blunt, Captain.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's true.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. She doesn't think so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Older men than I have&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him].&mdash;made fools of
+        themselves. That, also, is true.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don't see that this is any business of
+        yours.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody's business. The stars in their courses
+        are shaken when such things happen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I'm going to marry her all the same.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I never
+        made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn't bring it off. That's the
+        sort of man I am; and there will be a better understanding between us
+        when you make up your mind to that, Captain.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you
+        make a hundred thousand a year.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I don't boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred
+        thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand
+        to him and call him brother.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. No. I can't say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from Mangan with
+        his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the Chinese
+        tray].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don't quite understand
+        my position here. I came here on your daughter's invitation. Am I in her
+        house or in yours?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of
+        God. What is true within these walls is true outside them. Go out on the
+        seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. She is still too
+        young.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [weakening]. But I'm very little over fifty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan, you will
+        not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away into the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate's child? What are
+        you talking about?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Who will stop me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door leading
+        to the hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she brought me
+        down here to break it off?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing more than
+        I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry a
+        West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one
+        myself for two years.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, I am damned!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The negress
+        redeemed me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of talking.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It's the other sort of talking that makes
+        quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners
+        proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has an
+        engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is
+        found to be at least over forty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no
+        knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the bell
+        ring? The door is open.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you [he makes
+        for the door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I'm afraid you don't know who I am.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make distinctions
+        between one fellow creature and another? [He goes out. Mangan and the
+        newcomer stare at one another].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. Very.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has arrived
+        and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione's feelings! May I ask are you a member of
+        the family?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. No.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mrs Hushabye comes back.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, Hesione.
+        [Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same moment the
+        captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my kissing your
+        daughter, Captain, when I tell you that&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as much
+        as you like [he makes for the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and
+        turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but
+        probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago&mdash; that your
+        younger daughter married a numskull?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she'd marry anybody to get away from
+        this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is no longer
+        like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been boiled in bread
+        and milk for years and years, like other married men. Poor devil! [He
+        disappears into the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him].
+        I don't believe you are Hastings Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am Randall
+        Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I was abroad
+        diplomatizing when he was married.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe
+        in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must lock it up&mdash;[recognizing
+        the stranger with a shock] Randall, how dare you? [She marches at him
+        past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and joins Mangan near the sofa].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at Claridge's;
+        so I followed you down here. You are looking extremely well.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Don't presume to tell me so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no right
+        to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the
+        window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and
+        looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie are now seen strolling
+        together].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I beg
+        your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a perfect fool of
+        myself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman walking in
+        the garden with Miss Dunn?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. She quarrelled mortally with my husband only
+        ten minutes ago; and I didn't know anyone else had come. It must be a
+        visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh, it is Hector. They've
+        made it up.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One's husband never is, Ariadne
+        [he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. One's sister's husband always is, Mr Randall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Don't be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are just as
+        bad.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. Randall
+        rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. Hector comes
+        forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very best.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful
+        admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought&mdash; [pulling himself
+        together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I am extremely glad to
+        welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave
+        courtesy].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law;
+        and have done with it. [She leaves them to themselves].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not only to
+        hospitality but to civilization.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands
+        cordially].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie]. Your
+        father has washed himself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the pantry
+        window.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and
+        brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and Mrs
+        Hushabye.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut&mdash;oh, I forgot:
+        you've met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie's hand, and beaming at
+        his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She is my daughter.
+        [He draws her arm through his caressingly].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister's&mdash;er&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn. How do
+        you do?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don't introduce us any more. [He moves away
+        to the big chair, and adds] Won't you sit down, Lady Utterword? [She
+        does so very graciously].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it's like making people show their
+        tickets.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The great
+        question is, not who we are, but what we are.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in?
+        Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance of a
+        city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through
+        the garden].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or a
+        murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must really go
+        and explain. [He follows the captain].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It's no use. You'd really better&mdash; [but
+        Dunn has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for some tea. We
+        never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the
+        servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen veranda is the best place
+        to ask. May I show you? [She goes to the starboard door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don't think I'll take any tea
+        this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. There's nothing to see in the garden except papa's
+        observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and
+        things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of doors; so come
+        along.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn't that rather risky?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a
+        thunderstorm.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERORRD. That's something new. What is the dynamite for?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is trying to
+        discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well
+        of a Mahatma.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. The captain's tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that you've
+        had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before you were ten
+        minutes in the house?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I did.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Won't you come, Miss Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I'm too tired. I'll take a book up to my room and rest a little.
+        [She goes to the bookshelf].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Right. You can't do better. But I'm disappointed. [He follows
+        Randall and Mrs Hushabye].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to Lady
+        Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of
+        adventure, Lady Utterword?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Then I'll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through the
+        hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I have to
+        tell her!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what did you
+        mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? What did you
+        think?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. May I
+        tell you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of saying, "I
+        thought you were a plain woman."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to notice
+        whether I am plain or not?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only photographs
+        of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the
+        daughters of that supernatural old man. There is some damnable quality
+        in them that destroys men's moral sense, and carries them beyond honor
+        and dishonor. You know that, don't you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once for all
+        that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think because I'm a
+        Shotover that I'm a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian.
+        But I'm not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No child brought up in a
+        strict Puritan household ever suffered from Puritanism as I suffered
+        from our Bohemianism.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in the
+        houses of their respectable schoolfellows.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. But
+        intelligent people can always manage, unless they are Bohemians.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your
+        attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count
+        yourself?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you
+        that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly
+        correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just
+        what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance.
+        An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of
+        any woman worth knowing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. You
+        are a dangerous woman.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am not
+        making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you had better
+        know how I feel if you are going to stay here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, Hector. And
+        terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself, at that game. Is it
+        quite understood that we are only playing?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer
+        worthlessness.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my brother-in-law,
+        Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in his arms and kisses her
+        strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [She
+        pushes him suddenly away]. You shall not do that again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don't let me disturb you; I
+        only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting; and he'll catch
+        cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has actually
+        condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the garden: it's cooler
+        now [she goes out by the port door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don't believe any man can kiss
+        Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain's cap.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. Where's Miss
+        Dunn!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. Addy
+        won't let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love
+        to her automatically. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't
+        hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with
+        me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get
+        landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm
+        not a bit in earnest.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in her
+        life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. She
+        is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such an
+        amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I believe that
+        is why I have never been able to repeat it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were frightfully in
+        love with one another, Hector. It was such an enchanting dream that I
+        have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. I have
+        invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving
+        you another turn. But it has never come off.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I don't know that I want it to come off. It was damned
+        dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven. This
+        sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is hell. I shall
+        kill her if she persists.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a horse.
+        [Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than by
+        Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it
+        with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there, daddiest?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You've been to the gravel pit. Don't drop it about the
+        house, there's a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the evening
+        light is now very red].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a feeling
+        without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of
+        your life?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes into the
+        pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. He
+        does not move for some time. Then he folds his arms. Then, throwing his
+        hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically
+        once to and fro. Suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak
+        table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate duel
+        with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him
+        through the body up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on
+        the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight
+        into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says in
+        a deep and thrilling tone, "Do you love me!" The captain comes out of
+        the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with his arms stretched
+        out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going
+        through a series of gymnastic exercises.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will never be as
+        strong as a gorilla.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite than you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. And that you can, eh?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of
+        concentration.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. What's the use of that? You never do attain it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept forever in
+        the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for
+        greasing their bristles and filling their snouts?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both.
+        I refuse to die until I have invented the means.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do,
+        unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They
+        know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves.
+        When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a very nice
+        daughter. Mangan's son may be a Plato: Randall's a Shelley. What was my
+        father?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces the
+        drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of
+        color].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Just so&mdash;we are members one of another. [He throws himself
+        carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought of this killing
+        of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel
+        in the lion's den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always
+        survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as
+        they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the
+        lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and
+        the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What
+        are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I'll
+        spare them in sheer&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that
+        my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their
+        door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can't spare them until you have the power to kill
+        them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions of
+        blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They're
+        going to do it. They're doing it already.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the
+        sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half
+        of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these
+        people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having
+        the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they
+        bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and
+        singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be such a
+        demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left you
+        nothing but dreams, as some women do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it
+        accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands of the shrew
+        and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [Walking
+        distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must think these things out.
+        [Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will
+        discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the
+        ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at
+        me. And I must hurry. I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is
+        about to go into the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when
+        Hesione comes back].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to
+        entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting about?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is madder
+        than usual.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back. [They
+        return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent
+        lifeboat I invented?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since Easter!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous
+        extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve
+        thousand for the invention before that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic
+        keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot
+        afford life-saving inventions. Can't you think of something that will
+        murder half Europe at one bang?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on
+        slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn't your husband invent
+        something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However, you are
+        right: I ought to support my wife.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should never
+        see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor
+        husbands?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is anyhow!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It sticks
+        in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you are.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You are your father's daughter, Hesione.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in generals:
+        they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel and wind in a
+        machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. Saved! You
+        are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these dreadful people
+        and entertain them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don't forget that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them.
+        The servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the
+        house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a house!
+        What a daughter!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their firesides,
+        their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. Why are they
+        not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them
+        into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to
+        be even with us?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].
+      </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors
+            thereof,
+      That men might come for their choosing, and their betters
+            spring from their love;
+      But one of them married a numskull;
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].
+      </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      The other a liar wed;
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].
+      </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where are
+        you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the
+        garden].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The captain goes back to his place at the table.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the
+        light.
+      </p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+      <div style="height: 4em;">
+        <br /><br /><br /><br />
+      </div>
+      <h2>
+        ACT II
+      </h2>
+      <p>
+        The same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn. Ellie
+        comes in, followed by Mangan. Both are dressed for dinner. She strolls
+        to the drawing-table. He comes between the table and the wicker chair.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. What a dinner! I don't call it a dinner: I call it a meal.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I am accustomed to meals, Mr Mangan, and very lucky to get them.
+        Besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [shuddering liverishly]. Too rich: I can't eat such things. I
+        suppose it's because I have to work so much with my brain. That's the
+        worst of being a man of business: you are always thinking, thinking,
+        thinking. By the way, now that we are alone, may I take the opportunity
+        to come to a little understanding with you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [settling into the draughtsman's seat]. Certainly. I should like
+        to.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [taken aback]. Should you? That surprises me; for I thought I
+        noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you could. Not for the
+        first time either.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I was very tired and upset. I wasn't used to the ways of this
+        extraordinary house. Please forgive me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Oh, that's all right: I don't mind. But Captain Shotover has
+        been talking to me about you. You and me, you know.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [interested]. The captain! What did he say?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, he noticed the difference between our ages.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. He notices everything.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. You don't mind, then?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Of course I know quite well that our engagement&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Oh! you call it an engagement.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well, isn't it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. This is the
+        first time you've used the word; and I didn't quite know where we stood:
+        that's all. [He sits down in the wicker chair; and resigns himself to
+        allow her to lead the conversation]. You were saying&mdash;?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Was I? I forget. Tell me. Do you like this part of the country? I
+        heard you ask Mr Hushabye at dinner whether there are any nice houses to
+        let down here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I like the place. The air suits me. I shouldn't be surprised if
+        I settled down here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Nothing would please me better. The air suits me too. And I want
+        to be near Hesione.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [with growing uneasiness]. The air may suit us; but the question
+        is, should we suit one another? Have you thought about that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Mr Mangan, we must be sensible, mustn't we? It's no use
+        pretending that we are Romeo and Juliet. But we can get on very well
+        together if we choose to make the best of it. Your kindness of heart
+        will make it easy for me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like deliberate
+        unpleasantness in his voice]. Kindness of heart, eh? I ruined your
+        father, didn't I?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, not intentionally.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Yes I did. Ruined him on purpose.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. On purpose!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Not out of ill-nature, you know. And you'll admit that I kept a
+        job for him when I had finished with him. But business is business; and
+        I ruined him as a matter of business.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't understand how that can be. Are you trying to make me
+        feel that I need not be grateful to you, so that I may choose freely?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [rising aggressively]. No. I mean what I say.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. But how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my father? The
+        money he lost was yours.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [with a sour laugh]. Was mine! It is mine, Miss Ellie, and all
+        the money the other fellows lost too. [He shoves his hands into his
+        pockets and shows his teeth]. I just smoked them out like a hive of
+        bees. What do you say to that? A bit of shock, eh?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. It would have been, this morning. Now! you can't think how little
+        it matters. But it's quite interesting. Only, you must explain it to me.
+        I don't understand it. [Propping her elbows on the drawingboard and her
+        chin on her hands, she composes herself to listen with a combination of
+        conscious curiosity with unconscious contempt which provokes him to more
+        and more unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Of course you don't understand: what do you know about business?
+        You just listen and learn. Your father's business was a new business;
+        and I don't start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They
+        put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. They
+        wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them.
+        They're what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing
+        is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In a
+        year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out
+        to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if
+        they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very
+        same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple
+        of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third
+        lot. If it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too,
+        and leave their work and their money behind them. And that's where the
+        real business man comes in: where I come in. But I'm cleverer than some:
+        I don't mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your
+        father's measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work
+        himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child in
+        business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too
+        great a hurry to wait for his market. I knew that the surest way to ruin
+        a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. I
+        explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money;
+        for I take no risks in ideas, even when they're my own. Your father and
+        the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a
+        heap of squeezed lemons. You've been wasting your gratitude: my kind
+        heart is all rot. I'm sick of it. When I see your father beaming at me
+        with his moist, grateful eyes, regularly wallowing in gratitude, I
+        sometimes feel I must tell him the truth or burst. What stops me is that
+        I know he wouldn't believe me. He'd think it was my modesty, as you did
+        just now. He'd think anything rather than the truth, which is that he's
+        a blamed fool, and I am a man that knows how to take care of himself.
+        [He throws himself back into the big chair with large self approval].
+        Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [dropping her hands]. How strange! that my mother, who knew
+        nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you!
+        She always said not before papa, of course, but to us children&mdash;that
+        you were just that sort of man.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [sitting up, much hurt]. Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you
+        marry me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well, you see, Mr Mangan, my mother married a very good man&mdash;for
+        whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul
+        of goodness&mdash;and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Anyhow, you don't want to marry me now, do you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. [very calmly]. Oh, I think so. Why not?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. [rising aghast]. Why not!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't see why we shouldn't get on very well together.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, but look here, you know&mdash;[he stops, quite at a loss].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. [patiently]. Well?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, I thought you were rather particular about people's
+        characters.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. If we women were particular about men's characters, we should
+        never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. A child like you talking of "we women"! What next! You're not in
+        earnest?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes, I am. Aren't you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. You mean to hold me to it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Do you wish to back out of it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Oh, no. Not exactly back out of it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        He has nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops into the
+        wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. But a
+        cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans over towards her on his
+        right elbow, and speaks in a low steady voice.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Suppose I told you I was in love with another woman!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [echoing him]. Suppose I told you I was in love with another man!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. I'm not joking.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Who told you I was?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I tell you I'm serious. You're too young to be serious; but
+        you'll have to believe me. I want to be near your friend Mrs Hushabye.
+        I'm in love with her. Now the murder's out.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I want to be near your friend Mr Hushabye. I'm in love with him.
+        [She rises and adds with a frank air] Now we are in one another's
+        confidence, we shall be real friends. Thank you for telling me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [almost beside himself]. Do you think I'll be made a convenience
+        of like this?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father.
+        Well, a woman's business is marriage. Why shouldn't I make a domestic
+        convenience of you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Because I don't choose, see? Because I'm not a silly gull like
+        your father. That's why.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [with serene contempt]. You are not good enough to clean my
+        father's boots, Mr Mangan; and I am paying you a great compliment in
+        condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. Of course
+        you are free to throw over our engagement if you like; but, if you do,
+        you'll never enter Hesione's house again: I will take care of that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [gasping]. You little devil, you've done me. [On the point of
+        collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. Wait a bit,
+        though: you're not so cute as you think. You can't beat Boss Mangan as
+        easy as that. Suppose I go straight to Mrs Hushabye and tell her that
+        you're in love with her husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. She knows it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. You told her!!!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. She told me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [clutching at his bursting temples]. Oh, this is a crazy house.
+        Or else I'm going clean off my chump. Is she making a swop with you&mdash;she
+        to have your husband and you to have hers?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well, you don't want us both, do you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. My brain won't
+        stand it. My head's going to split. Help! Help me to hold it. Quick:
+        hold it: squeeze it. Save me. [Ellie comes behind his chair; clasps his
+        head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her hands from his forehead
+        back to his ears]. Thank you. [Drowsily]. That's very refreshing.
+        [Waking a little]. Don't you hypnotize me, though. I've seen men made
+        fools of by hypnotism.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [steadily]. Be quiet. I've seen men made fools of without
+        hypnotism.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [humbly]. You don't dislike touching me, I hope. You never
+        touched me before, I noticed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice woman,
+        who will never expect you to make love to her. And I will never expect
+        him to make love to me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. He may, though.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [making her passes rhythmically]. Hush. Go to sleep. Do you hear?
+        You are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet, deeply
+        deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        He falls asleep. Ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes into
+        the garden.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Nurse Guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which comes in
+        from the hall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS [speaking to someone outside]. Mr Mangan's not here, duckie:
+        there's no one here. It's all dark.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [without]. Try the garden. Mr Dunn and I will be in my
+        boudoir. Show him the way.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. Yes, ducky. [She makes for the garden door in the dark;
+        stumbles over the sleeping Mangan and screams]. Ahoo! O Lord, Sir! I beg
+        your pardon, I'm sure: I didn't see you in the dark. Who is it? [She
+        goes back to the door and turns on the light]. Oh, Mr Mangan, sir, I
+        hope I haven't hurt you plumping into your lap like that. [Coming to
+        him]. I was looking for you, sir. Mrs Hushabye says will you please
+        [noticing that he remains quite insensible]. Oh, my good Lord, I hope I
+        haven't killed him. Sir! Mr Mangan! Sir! [She shakes him; and he is
+        rolling inertly off the chair on the floor when she holds him up and
+        props him against the cushion]. Miss Hessy! Miss Hessy! quick, doty
+        darling. Miss Hessy! [Mrs Hushabye comes in from the hall, followed by
+        Mazzini Dunn]. Oh, Miss Hessy, I've been and killed him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini runs round the back of the chair to Mangan's right hand, and
+        sees that the nurse's words are apparently only too true.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. What tempted you to commit such a crime, woman?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [trying not to laugh]. Do you mean, you did it on purpose?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. Now is it likely I'd kill any man on purpose? I fell over him
+        in the dark; and I'm a pretty tidy weight. He never spoke nor moved
+        until I shook him; and then he would have dropped dead on the floor.
+        Isn't it tiresome?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [going past the nurse to Mangan's side, and inspecting him
+        less credulously than Mazzini]. Nonsense! he is not dead: he is only
+        asleep. I can see him breathing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. But why won't he wake?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [speaking very politely into Mangan's ear]. Mangan! My dear
+        Mangan! [he blows into Mangan's ear].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. That's no good [she shakes him vigorously]. Mr Mangan,
+        wake up. Do you hear? [He begins to roll over]. Oh! Nurse, nurse: he's
+        falling: help me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Nurse Guinness rushes to the rescue. With Mazzini's assistance, Mangan
+        is propped safely up again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with her
+        nose]. Would he be drunk, do you think, pet?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Had he any of papa's rum?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. It can't be that: he is most abstemious. I am afraid he drank
+        too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. You know, Mrs
+        Hushabye, I really think he has been hypnotized.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. Hip no what, sir?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. One evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing
+        performance, the children began playing at it; and Ellie stroked my
+        head. I assure you I went off dead asleep; and they had to send for a
+        professional to wake me up after I had slept eighteen hours. They had to
+        carry me upstairs; and as the poor children were not very strong, they
+        let me slip; and I rolled right down the whole flight and never woke up.
+        [Mrs Hushabye splutters]. Oh, you may laugh, Mrs Hushabye; but I might
+        have been killed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I couldn't have helped laughing even if you had been, Mr
+        Dunn. So Ellie has hypnotized him. What fun!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. It was such a terrible lesson to her: nothing
+        would induce her to try such a thing again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Then who did it? I didn't.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I thought perhaps the captain might have done it
+        unintentionally. He is so fearfully magnetic: I feel vibrations whenever
+        he comes close to me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. The captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: I'll back him
+        for that. I'll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Wait a bit. [To Mazzini]. You say he is all right for
+        eighteen hours?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Well, I was asleep for eighteen hours.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Were you any the worse for it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I don't quite remember. They had poured brandy down my throat,
+        you see; and&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Quite. Anyhow, you survived. Nurse, darling: go and ask
+        Miss Dunn to come to us here. Say I want to speak to her particularly.
+        You will find her with Mr Hushabye probably.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. I think not, ducky: Miss Addy is with him. But I'll find her
+        and send her to you. [She goes out into the garden].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [calling Mazzini's attention to the figure on the chair].
+        Now, Mr Dunn, look. Just look. Look hard. Do you still intend to
+        sacrifice your daughter to that thing?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [troubled]. You have completely upset me, Mrs Hushabye, by all
+        you have said to me. That anyone could imagine that I&mdash;I, a
+        consecrated soldier of freedom, if I may say so&mdash;could sacrifice
+        Ellie to anybody or anyone, or that I should ever have dreamed of
+        forcing her inclinations in any way, is a most painful blow to my&mdash;well,
+        I suppose you would say to my good opinion of myself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rather stolidly]. Sorry.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [looking forlornly at the body]. What is your objection to poor
+        Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then I am so
+        accustomed to him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the brute!
+        Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver,
+        who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to
+        his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of
+        iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women and
+        girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry, I
+        think you call him, don't you? Are you going to fling your delicate,
+        sweet, helpless child into such a beast's claws just because he will
+        keep her in an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how
+        rich he is?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. Bless you, dear Mrs
+        Hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! Poor dear Mangan
+        isn't a bit like that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [scornfully]. Poor dear Mangan indeed!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But he doesn't know anything about machinery. He never goes
+        near the men: he couldn't manage them: he is afraid of them. I never can
+        get him to take the least interest in the works: he hardly knows more
+        about them than you do. People are cruelly unjust to Mangan: they think
+        he is all rugged strength just because his manners are bad.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do you mean to tell me he isn't strong enough to crush
+        poor little Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Of course it's very hard to say how any marriage will turn out;
+        but speaking for myself, I should say that he won't have a dog's chance
+        against Ellie. You know, Ellie has remarkable strength of character. I
+        think it is because I taught her to like Shakespeare when she was very
+        young.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [contemptuously]. Shakespeare! The next thing you will tell
+        me is that you could have made a great deal more money than Mangan. [She
+        retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port end of it in the worst of
+        humors].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [following her and taking the other end]. No: I'm no good at
+        making money. I don't care enough for it, somehow. I'm not ambitious!
+        that must be it. Mangan is wonderful about money: he thinks of nothing
+        else. He is so dreadfully afraid of being poor. I am always thinking of
+        other things: even at the works I think of the things we are doing and
+        not of what they cost. And the worst of it is, poor Mangan doesn't know
+        what to do with his money when he gets it. He is such a baby that he
+        doesn't know even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating
+        and drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all. Ellie
+        will diet him splendidly. You will be surprised when you come to know
+        him better: he is really the most helpless of mortals. You get quite a
+        protective feeling towards him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Then who manages his business, pray?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I do. And of course other people like me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Footling people, you mean.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I suppose you'd think us so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. And pray why don't you do without him if you're all so
+        much cleverer?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, we couldn't: we should ruin the business in a year. I've
+        tried; and I know. We should spend too much on everything. We should
+        improve the quality of the goods and make them too dear. We should be
+        sentimental about the hard cases among the work people. But Mangan keeps
+        us in order. He is down on us about every extra halfpenny. We could
+        never do without him. You see, he will sit up all night thinking of how
+        to save sixpence. Won't Ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his
+        house in hand!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of
+        industry!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I am afraid all the captains of industry are what you call
+        frauds, Mrs Hushabye. Of course there are some manufacturers who really
+        do understand their own works; but they don't make as high a rate of
+        profit as Mangan does. I assure you Mangan is quite a good fellow in his
+        way. He means well.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. He doesn't look well. He is not in his first youth, is he?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. After all, no husband is in his first youth for very long, Mrs
+        Hushabye. And men can't afford to marry in their first youth nowadays.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Now if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can't you
+        say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why don't you
+        inspire everybody with confidence? with respect?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [humbly]. I think that what is the matter with me is that I am
+        poor. You don't know what that means at home. Mind: I don't say they
+        have ever complained. They've all been wonderful: they've been proud of
+        my poverty. They've even joked about it quite often. But my wife has had
+        a very poor time of it. She has been quite resigned&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [shuddering involuntarily!]
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. There! You see, Mrs Hushabye. I don't want Ellie to live on
+        resignation.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want her to have to resign herself to living with a
+        man she doesn't love?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [wistfully]. Are you sure that would be worse than living with a
+        man she did love, if he was a footling person?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite interested in
+        Mazzini now]. You know, I really think you must love Ellie very much;
+        for you become quite clever when you talk about her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I didn't know I was so very stupid on other subjects.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You are, sometimes.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. I have learnt a
+        good deal about myself from you, Mrs Hushabye; and I'm afraid I shall
+        not be the happier for your plain speaking. But if you thought I needed
+        it to make me think of Ellie's happiness you were very much mistaken.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [leaning towards him kindly]. Have I been a beast?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [pulling himself together]. It doesn't matter about me, Mrs
+        Hushabye. I think you like Ellie; and that is enough for me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I'm beginning to like you a little. I perfectly loathed
+        you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome
+        elderly prig I ever met.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. I daresay I am all that. I
+        never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you. They always
+        frighten me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [pleased]. Am I a gorgeous woman, Mazzini? I shall fall in
+        love with you presently.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [with placid gallantry]. No, you won't, Hesione. But you would
+        be quite safe. Would you believe it that quite a lot of women have
+        flirted with me because I am quite safe? But they get tired of me for
+        the same reason.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. Take care. You may not be so safe as you
+        think.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh yes, quite safe. You see, I have been in love really: the
+        sort of love that only happens once. [Softly]. That's why Ellie is such
+        a lovely girl.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, really, you are coming out. Are you quite sure you
+        won't let me tempt you into a second grand passion?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Quite. It wouldn't be natural. The fact is, you don't strike on
+        my box, Mrs Hushabye; and I certainly don't strike on yours.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Your marriage was a safety match.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. What a very witty application of the expression I used! I
+        should never have thought of it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. Oh! here is Ellie at last. [She goes behind the
+        sofa].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [on the threshold of the starboard door]. Guinness said you wanted
+        me: you and papa.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You have kept us waiting so long that it almost came to&mdash;well,
+        never mind. Your father is a very wonderful man [she ruffles his hair
+        affectionately]: the only one I ever met who could resist me when I made
+        myself really agreeable. [She comes to the big chair, on Mangan's left].
+        Come here. I have something to show you. [Ellie strolls listlessly to
+        the other side of the chair]. Look.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [contemplating Mangan without interest]. I know. He is only
+        asleep. We had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the middle of
+        it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You did it, Ellie. You put him asleep.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. Oh, I hope
+        not. Did you, Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [wearily]. He asked me to.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But it's dangerous. You know what happened to me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [utterly indifferent]. Oh, I daresay I can wake him. If not,
+        somebody else can.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. It doesn't matter, anyhow, because I have at last
+        persuaded your father that you don't want to marry him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. But why did
+        you do that, Hesione? I do want to marry him. I fully intend to marry
+        him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Are you quite sure, Ellie? Mrs Hushabye has made me feel that I
+        may have been thoughtless and selfish about it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [very clearly and steadily]. Papa. When Mrs. Hushabye takes it on
+        herself to explain to you what I think or don't think, shut your ears
+        tight; and shut your eyes too. Hesione knows nothing about me: she
+        hasn't the least notion of the sort of person I am, and never will. I
+        promise you I won't do anything I don't want to do and mean to do for my
+        own sake.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. You are quite, quite sure?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Quite, quite sure. Now you must go away and leave me to talk to
+        Mrs Hushabye.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But I should like to hear. Shall I be in the way?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [inexorable]. I had rather talk to her alone.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [affectionately]. Oh, well, I know what a nuisance parents are,
+        dear. I will be good and go. [He goes to the garden door]. By the way,
+        do you remember the address of that professional who woke me up? Don't
+        you think I had better telegraph to him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [moving towards the sofa]. It's too late to telegraph
+        tonight.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I suppose so. I do hope he'll wake up in the course of the
+        night. [He goes out into the garden].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [turning vigorously on Hesione the moment her father is out of the
+        room]. Hesione, what the devil do you mean by making mischief with my
+        father about Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [promptly losing her temper]. Don't you dare speak to me
+        like that, you little minx. Remember that you are in my house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Stuff! Why don't you mind your own business? What is it to you
+        whether I choose to marry Mangan or not?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable little
+        matrimonial adventurer?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Every woman who hasn't any money is a matrimonial adventurer.
+        It's easy for you to talk: you have never known what it is to want
+        money; and you can pick up men as if they were daisies. I am poor and
+        respectable&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [interrupting]. Ho! respectable! How did you pick up
+        Mangan? How did you pick up my husband? You have the audacity to tell me
+        that I am a&mdash;a&mdash;a&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. A siren. So you are. You were born to lead men by the nose: if
+        you weren't, Marcus would have waited for me, perhaps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [suddenly melting and half laughing]. Oh, my poor Ellie, my
+        pettikins, my unhappy darling! I am so sorry about Hector. But what can
+        I do? It's not my fault: I'd give him to you if I could.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't blame you for that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What a brute I was to quarrel with you and call you names!
+        Do kiss me and say you're not angry with me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [fiercely]. Oh, don't slop and gush and be sentimental. Don't you
+        see that unless I can be hard&mdash;as hard as nails&mdash;I shall go
+        mad? I don't care a damn about your calling me names: do you think a
+        woman in my situation can feel a few hard words?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Poor little woman! Poor little situation!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I suppose you think you're being sympathetic. You are just
+        foolish and stupid and selfish. You see me getting a smasher right in
+        the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best part that can
+        never come again; and you think you can help me over it by a little
+        coaxing and kissing. When I want all the strength I can get to lean on:
+        something iron, something stony, I don't care how cruel it is, you go
+        all mushy and want to slobber over me. I'm not angry; I'm not
+        unfriendly; but for God's sake do pull yourself together; and don't
+        think that because you're on velvet and always have been, women who are
+        in hell can take it as easily as you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [shrugging her shoulders]. Very well. [She sits down on the
+        sofa in her old place.] But I warn you that when I am neither coaxing
+        and kissing nor laughing, I am just wondering how much longer I can
+        stand living in this cruel, damnable world. You object to the siren:
+        well, I drop the siren. You want to rest your wounded bosom against a
+        grindstone. Well [folding her arms] here is the grindstone.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [sitting down beside her, appeased]. That's better: you really
+        have the trick of falling in with everyone's mood; but you don't
+        understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom there is only
+        one man and only one chance.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I certainly don't understand how your marrying that object
+        [indicating Mangan] will console you for not being able to marry Hector.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Perhaps you don't understand why I was quite a nice girl this
+        morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, yes, I do. It's because you have made up your mind to
+        do something despicable and wicked.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I don't think so, Hesione. I must make the best of my ruined
+        house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Pooh! You'll get over it. Your house isn't ruined.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Of course I shall get over it. You don't suppose I'm going to sit
+        down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a
+        pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Association. But my
+        heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that
+        what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. In
+        the world for me there is Marcus and a lot of other men of whom one is
+        just the same as another. Well, if I can't have love, that's no reason
+        why I should have poverty. If Mangan has nothing else, he has money.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. And are there no YOUNG men with money?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not within my reach. Besides, a young man would have the right to
+        expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he found I could
+        not give it to him. Rich young men can get rid of their wives, you know,
+        pretty cheaply. But this object, as you call him, can expect nothing
+        more from me than I am prepared to give him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. He will be your owner, remember. If he buys you, he will
+        make the bargain pay him and not you. Ask your father.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their subject].
+        You need not trouble on that score, Hesione. I have more to give Boss
+        Mangan than he has to give me: it is I who am buying him, and at a
+        pretty good price too, I think. Women are better at that sort of bargain
+        than men. I have taken the Boss's measure; and ten Boss Mangans shall
+        not prevent me doing far more as I please as his wife than I have ever
+        been able to do as a poor girl. [Stooping to the recumbent figure].
+        Shall they, Boss? I think not. [She passes on to the drawing-table, and
+        leans against the end of it, facing the windows]. I shall not have to
+        spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last, anyhow.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [rising superbly]. Ellie, you are a wicked, sordid little
+        beast. And to think that I actually condescended to fascinate that
+        creature there to save you from him! Well, let me tell you this: if you
+        make this disgusting match, you will never see Hector again if I can
+        help it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [unmoved]. I nailed Mangan by telling him that if he did not marry
+        me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on her wrists and
+        seats herself on the end of the table].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [recoiling]. Oh!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. So you see I am not unprepared for your playing that trump
+        against me. Well, you just try it: that's all. I should have made a man
+        of Marcus, not a household pet.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [flaming]. You dare!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [looking almost dangerous]. Set him thinking about me if you dare.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, of all the impudent little fiends I ever met! Hector
+        says there is a certain point at which the only answer you can give to a
+        man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down. What would you say if
+        I were to box your ears?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [calmly]. I should pull your hair.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. That wouldn't hurt me. Perhaps it comes
+        off at night.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to her]. Oh,
+        you don't mean to say, Hesione, that your beautiful black hair is false?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [patting it]. Don't tell Hector. He believes in it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [groaning]. Oh! Even the hair that ensnared him false! Everything
+        false!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Pull it and try. Other women can snare men in their hair;
+        but I can swing a baby on mine. Aha! you can't do that, Goldylocks.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [heartbroken]. No. You have stolen my babies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Pettikins, don't make me cry. You know what you said about
+        my making a household pet of him is a little true. Perhaps he ought to
+        have waited for you. Would any other woman on earth forgive you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself! [Pulling
+        herself together]. There! You couldn't help it: neither of us could help
+        it. He couldn't help it. No, don't say anything more: I can't bear it.
+        Let us wake the object. [She begins stroking Mangan's head, reversing
+        the movement with which she put him to sleep]. Wake up, do you hear? You
+        are to wake up at once. Wake up, wake up, wake&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them]. Wake
+        up! So you think I've been asleep, do you? [He kicks the chair violently
+        back out of his way, and gets between them]. You throw me into a trance
+        so that I can't move hand or foot&mdash;I might have been buried alive!
+        it's a mercy I wasn't&mdash;and then you think I was only asleep. If
+        you'd let me drop the two times you rolled me about, my nose would have
+        been flattened for life against the floor. But I've found you all out,
+        anyhow. I know the sort of people I'm among now. I've heard every word
+        you've said, you and your precious father, and [to Mrs Hushabye] you
+        too. So I'm an object, am I? I'm a thing, am I? I'm a fool that hasn't
+        sense enough to feed myself properly, am I? I'm afraid of the men that
+        would starve if it weren't for the wages I give them, am I? I'm nothing
+        but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience of by designing
+        women and fool managers of my works, am I? I'm&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [with the most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr Mangan,
+        you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while
+        you were pretending to be asleep. It was not meant for you to hear.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Pretending to be asleep! Do you think if I was only pretending
+        that I'd have sprawled there helpless, and listened to such unfairness,
+        such lies, such injustice and plotting and backbiting and slandering of
+        me, if I could have up and told you what I thought of you! I wonder I
+        didn't burst.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [sweetly]. You dreamt it all, Mr Mangan. We were only
+        saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep. That was all,
+        wasn't it, Ellie? Believe me, Mr Mangan, all those unpleasant things
+        came into your mind in the last half second before you woke. Ellie
+        rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the disagreeable sensation suggested
+        a disagreeable dream.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [doggedly]. I believe in dreams.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. So do I. But they go by contraries, don't they?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. I shan't forget,
+        to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in the
+        garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a dirty low mean thing to
+        do. You had no right to let me come near you if I disgusted you. It
+        isn't my fault if I'm old and haven't a moustache like a bronze
+        candlestick as your husband has. There are things no decent woman would
+        do to a man&mdash;like a man hitting a woman in the breast.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with
+        her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a
+        child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye, at the distressing sound he
+        makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. She rises and runs to him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Don't cry: I can't bear it. Have I broken your heart? I
+        didn't know you had one. How could I?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I'm a man, ain't I?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly]. Oh no:
+        not what I call a man. Only a Boss: just that and nothing else. What
+        business has a Boss with a heart?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Then you're not a bit sorry for what you did, nor ashamed?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I was ashamed for the first time in my life when you said
+        that about hitting a woman in the breast, and I found out what I'd done.
+        My very bones blushed red. You've had your revenge, Boss. Aren't you
+        satisfied?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Serve you right! Do you hear? Serve you right! You're just
+        cruel. Cruel.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only find
+        some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. By the way [sitting down
+        beside him on the arm of the chair], what's your name? It's not really
+        Boss, is it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [shortly]. If you want to know, my name's Alfred.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [springs up]. Alfred!! Ellie, he was christened after
+        Tennyson!!!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [rising]. I was christened after my uncle, and never had a penny
+        from him, damn him! What of it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that
+        you had a mother, like anyone else. [Putting her hands on his shoulders
+        and surveying him]. Little Alf!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little heart, but
+        a real one. [Releasing him suddenly]. Now run and make it up with Ellie.
+        She has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than I had
+        [she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of anything
+        about a man except what they can get out of him? You weren't even
+        thinking that about me. You were only thinking whether your gloves would
+        last.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I shall not have to think about that when we are married.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. And you think I am going to marry you after what I heard there!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You heard nothing from me that I did not tell you before.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Perhaps you think I can't do without you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after coming
+        to know us so well.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [with something like a yell of despair]. Am I never to have the
+        last word?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [appearing at the starboard garden door]. There is a
+        soul in torment here. What is the matter?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. This girl doesn't want to spend her life wondering how long her
+        gloves will last.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [passing through]. Don't wear any. I never do [he goes
+        into the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome dinner
+        dress]. Is anything the matter?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. This gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last word?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [coming forward to the sofa]. I should let him have it,
+        my dear. The important thing is not to have the last word, but to have
+        your own way.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. She wants both.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. She won't get them, Mr Mangan. Providence always has the
+        last word.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [desperately]. Now you are going to come religion over me. In
+        this house a man's mind might as well be a football. I'm going. [He
+        makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has
+        just emerged from his pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all
+        here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You were welcome to come: you are free to go. The wide
+        earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. But your things, Mr Mangan. Your bag, your comb and
+        brushes, your pyjamas&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome Arab
+        costume]. Why should the escaping slave take his chains with him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. That's right, Hushabye. Keep the pyjamas, my lady, and much good
+        may they do you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [advancing to Lady Utterword's left hand]. Let us all go out into
+        the night and leave everything behind us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company,
+        especially female company.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land
+        where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its
+        latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You will certainly not be comfortable without your
+        luggage, Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [impatient]. Go, go: why don't you go? It is a heavenly night: you
+        can sleep on the heath. Take my waterproof to lie on: it is hanging up
+        in the hall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with the
+        captain at six.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Good night, Alfred.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Alfred! [He runs back to the door and calls into the garden].
+        Randall, Mangan's Christian name is Alfred.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress]. Then
+        Hesione wins her bet.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mrs Hushabye appears in the port doorway. She throws her left arm round
+        Hector's neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa: and throws
+        her right arm round Lady Utterword's neck.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. They wouldn't believe me, Alf.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        They contemplate him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if I was
+        the latest thing in a menagerie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You are the latest thing in this menagerie.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Before Mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from upstairs:
+        then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. The staring group breaks up in
+        consternation.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI'S VOICE [from above]. Help! A burglar! Help!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [his eyes blazing]. A burglar!!!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. No, Hector: you'll be shot [but it is too late; he has
+        dashed out past Mangan, who hastily moves towards the bookshelves out of
+        his way].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [blowing his whistle]. All hands aloft! [He strides out
+        after Hector].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. My diamonds! [She follows the captain].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [rushing after her]. No. Ariadne. Let me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, is papa shot? [She runs out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Are you frightened, Alf?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. No. It ain't my house, thank God.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. If they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into court as
+        witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our private lives?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. You won't be believed if you tell the truth.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand, comes from
+        the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, my dear Mrs Hushabye, I might have killed him. [He throws
+        the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair]. I hope you
+        won't believe I really intended to.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man before him
+        by the collar. He plants him in the middle of the room and releases him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her father's
+        chair and pats his shoulders.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [entering with a poker]. Keep your eye on this door, Mangan.
+        I'll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door and stands on
+        guard there].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Lady Utterword comes in after Randall, and goes between Mrs Hushabye and
+        Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Nurse Guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on Mangan's
+        left.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What has happened?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs, and gave
+        me a pistol that Mr Hushabye had been practising with. I thought it
+        would frighten him; but it went off at a touch.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Yes, and took the skin off my ear. Precious near took the
+        top off my head. Why don't you have a proper revolver instead of a thing
+        like that, that goes off if you as much as blow on it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. One of my duelling pistols. Sorry.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. He put his hands up and said it was a fair cop.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. So it was. Send for the police.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No, by thunder! It was not a fair cop. We were four to one.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What will they do to him?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Ten years. Beginning with solitary. Ten years off my life.
+        I shan't serve it all: I'm too old. It will see me out.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You should have thought of that before you stole my
+        diamonds.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Well, you've got them back, lady, haven't you? Can you give
+        me back the years of my life you are going to take from me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, we can't bury a man alive for ten years for a few
+        diamonds.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Ten little shining diamonds! Ten long black years!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Think of what it is for us to be dragged through the
+        horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs in the
+        papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you a good
+        beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in England there
+        is no real protection for any respectable person.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. I'm too old to be giv a hiding, lady. Send for the police
+        and have done with it. It's only just and right you should.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so
+        pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker between his
+        fingers like a well folded umbrella]. It is neither just nor right that
+        we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to gratify your moral
+        enthusiasm, my friend. You had better get out, while you have the
+        chance.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [inexorably]. No. I must work my sin off my conscience. This
+        has come as a sort of call to me. Let me spend the rest of my life
+        repenting in a cell. I shall have my reward above.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can't behave naturally in this
+        house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. My good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody else's
+        expense. Nobody here is going to charge you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Oh, you won't charge me, won't you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No. I'm sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly leave the
+        house?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Right. I'll go to the police station and give myself up.
+        [He turns resolutely to the door: but Hector stops him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        { Oh, no. You mustn't do that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. [speaking together]&nbsp;{ No no. Clear out man, can't you; and
+        don't be a fool.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS. HUSHABYE&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        { Don't be so silly. Can't you repent at home?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You will have to do as you are told.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. It's compounding a felony, you know.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. This is utterly ridiculous. Are we to be forced to
+        prosecute this man when we don't want to?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Am I to be robbed of my salvation to save you the trouble
+        of spending a day at the sessions? Is that justice? Is it right? Is it
+        fair to me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if it were
+        a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. Come, come! let me show you how you
+        can turn your very crimes to account. Why not set up as a locksmith? You
+        must know more about locks than most honest men?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. That's true, sir. But I couldn't set up as a locksmith
+        under twenty pounds.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. You will find it in
+        the nearest bank.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [horrified]. Oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put into
+        the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it
+        were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He throws himself
+        into the big chair and covers his face as if in prayer].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Randall!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection for
+        this inopportunely contrite sinner.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. But twenty pounds is ridiculous.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [looking up quickly]. I shall have to buy a lot of tools,
+        lady.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense: you have your burgling kit.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. What's a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene welding
+        plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? I shall want a forge, and a smithy,
+        and a shop, and fittings. I can't hardly do it for twenty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. My worthy friend, we haven't got twenty pounds.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [now master of the situation]. You can raise it among you,
+        can't you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Give him a sovereign, Hector, and get rid of him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [giving him a pound]. There! Off with you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. I won't
+        promise nothing. You have more on you than a quid: all the lot of you, I
+        mean.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [vigorously]. Oh, let us prosecute him and have done with
+        it. I have a conscience too, I hope; and I do not feel at all sure that
+        we have any right to let him go, especially if he is going to be greedy
+        and impertinent.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [quickly]. All right, lady, all right. I've no wish to be
+        anything but agreeable. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen; and thank
+        you kindly.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        He is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by Captain
+        Shotover.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard]. What's
+        this? Are there two of you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [falling on his knees before the captain in abject terror].
+        Oh, my good Lord, what have I done? Don't tell me it's your house I've
+        broken into, Captain Shotover.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and leads
+        him to the middle of the group, Hector falling back beside his wife to
+        make way for them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [turning him towards Ellie]. Is that your daughter? [He
+        releases him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Well, how do I know, Captain? You know the sort of life you
+        and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere
+        in the wide world, as you might say.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mazzini]. You are not Billy Dunn. This is Billy
+        Dunn. Why have you imposed on me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [indignantly to Mazzini]. Have you been giving yourself out
+        to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting yourself, in a
+        manner of speaking!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. My dear Captain Shotover, ever since I came into this house I
+        have done hardly anything else but assure you that I am not Mr William
+        Dunn, but Mazzini Dunn, a very different person.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. He don't belong to my branch, Captain. There's two sets in
+        the family: the thinking Dunns and the drinking Dunns, each going their
+        own ways. I'm a drinking Dunn: he's a thinking Dunn. But that didn't
+        give him any right to shoot me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. So you've turned burglar, have you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. No, Captain: I wouldn't disgrace our old sea calling by
+        such a thing. I am no burglar.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. What were you doing with my diamonds?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. What did you break into the house for if you're no burglar?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong window,
+        eh?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Well, it's no use my telling you a lie: I can take in most
+        captains, but not Captain Shotover, because he sold himself to the devil
+        in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in
+        your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the
+        heart of man. But I'm no burglar.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Are you an honest man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. I don't set up to be better than my fellow-creatures, and
+        never did, as you well know, Captain. But what I do is innocent and
+        pious. I enquire about for houses where the right sort of people live. I
+        work it on them same as I worked it here. I break into the house; put a
+        few spoons or diamonds in my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take
+        up a collection. And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get caught
+        when you're actually trying to. I have knocked over all the chairs in a
+        room without a soul paying any attention to me. In the end I have had to
+        walk out and leave the job.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. When that happens, do you put back the spoons and diamonds?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Well, I don't fly in the face of Providence, if that's what
+        you want to know.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Guinness, you remember this man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. I should think I do, seeing I was married to him, the
+        blackguard!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HESIONE [exclaiming together] { Married to him!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        {Guinness!!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. It wasn't legal. I've been married to no end of women. No
+        use coming that over me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Take him to the forecastle [he flings him to the door
+        with a strength beyond his years].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. I suppose you mean the kitchen. They won't have him there. Do
+        you expect servants to keep company with thieves and all sorts?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Land-thieves and water-thieves are the same flesh and
+        blood. I'll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. Off with you both.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Yes, Captain. [He goes out humbly].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Will it be safe to have him in the house like that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        GUINNESS. Why didn't you shoot him, sir? If I'd known who he was, I'd
+        have shot him myself. [She goes out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Do sit down, everybody. [She sits down on the sofa].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        They all move except Ellie. Mazzini resumes his seat. Randall sits down
+        in the window-seat near the starboard door, again making a pendulum of
+        his poker, and studying it as Galileo might have done. Hector sits on
+        his left, in the middle. Mangan, forgotten, sits in the port corner.
+        Lady Utterword takes the big chair. Captain Shotover goes into the
+        pantry in deep abstraction. They all look after him: and Lady Utterword
+        coughs consciously.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. So Billy Dunn was poor nurse's little romance. I knew
+        there had been somebody.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. They will fight their battles over again and enjoy themselves
+        immensely.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [irritably]. You are not married; and you know nothing
+        about it, Randall. Hold your tongue.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Tyrant!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we have had a very exciting evening. Everything will
+        be an anticlimax after it. We'd better all go to bed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Another burglar may turn up.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, impossible! I hope not.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Why not? There is more than one burglar in England.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. What do you say, Alf?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [huffily]. Oh, I don't matter. I'm forgotten. The burglar has put
+        my nose out of joint. Shove me into a corner and have done with me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. Would you
+        like a walk on the heath, Alfred? With me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Go, Mr Mangan. It will do you good. Hesione will soothe you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [slipping her arm under his and pulling him upright]. Come,
+        Alfred. There is a moon: it's like the night in Tristan and Isolde. [She
+        caresses his arm and draws him to the port garden door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [writhing but yielding]. How you can have the face-the heart-[he
+        breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. What an extraordinary way to behave! What is the matter
+        with the man?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary distance].
+        His heart is breaking: that is all. [The captain appears at the pantry
+        door, listening]. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes
+        mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your
+        boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness
+        and the beginning of peace.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of the
+        rest]. How dare you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Good heavens! What's the matter?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [in a warning whisper]. Tch&mdash;tch-tch! Steady.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [surprised and haughty]. I was not addressing you particularly,
+        Lady Utterword. And I am not accustomed to being asked how dare I.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Of course not. Anyone can see how badly you have been
+        brought up.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, I hope not, Lady Utterword. Really!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I know very well what you meant. The impudence!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What on earth do you mean?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [advancing to the table]. She means that her heart will
+        not break. She has been longing all her life for someone to break it. At
+        last she has become afraid she has none to break.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her arms
+        round him]. Papa, don't say you think I've no heart.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising her with grim tenderness]. If you had no heart
+        how could you want to have it broken, child?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [rising with a bound]. Lady Utterword, you are not to be trusted.
+        You have made a scene [he runs out into the garden through the starboard
+        door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! Hector, Hector! [she runs out after him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Only nerves, I assure you. [He rises and follows her, waving
+        the poker in his agitation]. Ariadne! Ariadne! For God's sake, be
+        careful. You will&mdash;[he is gone].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [rising]. How distressing! Can I do anything, I wonder?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [promptly taking his chair and setting to work at the
+        drawing-board]. No. Go to bed. Good-night.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [bewildered]. Oh! Perhaps you are right.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Good-night, dearest. [She kisses him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Good-night, love. [He makes for the door, but turns aside to
+        the bookshelves]. I'll just take a book [he takes one]. Good-night. [He
+        goes out, leaving Ellie alone with the captain].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The captain is intent on his drawing. Ellie, standing sentry over his
+        chair, contemplates him for a moment.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Does nothing ever disturb you, Captain Shotover?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I've stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in a
+        typhoon. Life here is stormier; but I can stand it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Do you think I ought to marry Mr Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [never looking up]. One rock is as good as another to
+        be wrecked on.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I am not in love with him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Who said you were?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You are not surprised?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Surprised! At my age!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. It seems to me quite fair. He wants me for one thing: I want him
+        for another.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Money?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it. One
+        provides the cash: the other spends it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Who will have the best of the bargain, I wonder?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You. These fellows live in an office all day. You will
+        have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but you will both be
+        asleep most of that time. All day you will be quit of him; and you will
+        be shopping with his money. If that is too much for you, marry a
+        seafaring man: you will be bothered with him only three weeks in the
+        year, perhaps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. That would be best of all, I suppose.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the
+        hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a
+        damned soul in hell.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I never thought of that before.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you're marrying for business, you can't be too
+        businesslike.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Why do women always want other women's husbands?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in
+        to one that is wild?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [with a short laugh]. I suppose so. What a vile world it is!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It doesn't concern me. I'm nearly out of it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. And I'm only just beginning.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes; so look ahead.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Well, I think I am being very prudent.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I didn't say prudent. I said look ahead.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What's the difference?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own
+        soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it;
+        but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the
+        room]. I'm sorry, Captain Shotover; but it's no use talking like that to
+        me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me. Old-fashioned people think
+        you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have,
+        the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a
+        very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is it? How much does your soul eat?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and
+        lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this
+        country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls
+        are so horribly starved.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Mangan's soul lives on pig's food.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes: money is thrown away on him. I suppose his soul was starved
+        when he was young. But it will not be thrown away on me. It is just
+        because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the
+        women who are not fools do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are other ways of getting money. Why don't you
+        steal it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Because I don't want to go to prison.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is that the only reason? Are you quite sure honesty
+        has nothing to do with it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, you are very very old-fashioned, Captain. Does any modern
+        girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting money are the
+        honest and dishonest ways? Mangan robbed my father and my father's
+        friends. I should rob all the money back from Mangan if the police would
+        let me. As they won't, I must get it back by marrying him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't argue: I'm too old: my mind is made up and
+        finished. All I can tell you is that, old-fashioned or new-fashioned, if
+        you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow that all the books and
+        pictures and concerts and scenery in the world won't heal [he gets up
+        suddenly and makes for the pantry].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. Then why did
+        you sell yourself to the devil in Zanzibar?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping, startled]. What?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You shall not run away before you answer. I have found out that
+        trick of yours. If you sold yourself, why shouldn't I?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I had to deal with men so degraded that they wouldn't
+        obey me unless I swore at them and kicked them and beat them with my
+        fists. Foolish people took young thieves off the streets; flung them
+        into a training ship where they were taught to fear the cane instead of
+        fearing God; and thought they'd made men and sailors of them by private
+        subscription. I tricked these thieves into believing I'd sold myself to
+        the devil. It saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was
+        damning me by inches.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [releasing him]. I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss Mangan to
+        save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches won't
+        save even your body.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the body, and
+        the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to
+        persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our
+        bodies. I am afraid you are no use to me, Captain.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What did you expect? A Savior, eh? Are you
+        old-fashioned enough to believe in that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. No. But I thought you were very wise, and might help me. Now I
+        have found you out. You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to
+        say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away
+        before they can answer you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It confuses me to be answered. It discourages me. I
+        cannot bear men and women. I have to run away. I must run away now [he
+        tries to].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [again seizing his arm]. You shall not run away from me. I can
+        hypnotize you. You are the only person in the house I can say what I
+        like to. I know you are fond of me. Sit down. [She draws him to the
+        sofa].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [yielding]. Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are
+        dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the
+        world.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        They sit side by side on the sofa. She leans affectionately against him
+        with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half closed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [dreamily]. I should have thought nothing else mattered to old
+        men. They can't be very interested in what is going to happen to
+        themselves.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A man's interest in the world is only the overflow
+        from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not
+        yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow
+        up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or
+        an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no
+        overflow: you are a child again. I can give you the memories of my
+        ancient wisdom: mere scraps and leavings; but I no longer really care
+        for anything but my own little wants and hobbies. I sit here working out
+        my old ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. I see my
+        daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and sentiment
+        and snobbery. I see you, the younger generation, turning from their
+        romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common
+        sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen
+        into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been.
+        You are looking for a rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship,
+        danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more
+        intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward
+        was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your
+        life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [sitting up impatiently]. But what can I do? I am not a sea
+        captain: I can't stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering seals
+        and whales in Greenland's icy mountains. They won't let women be
+        captains. Do you want me to be a stewardess?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are worse lives. The stewardesses could come
+        ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What could they do ashore but marry for money? I don't want to be
+        a stewardess: I am too bad a sailor. Think of something else for me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't think so long and continuously. I am too old.
+        I must go in and out. [He tries to rise].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [pulling him back]. You shall not. You are happy here, aren't you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you it's dangerous to keep me. I can't keep
+        awake and alert.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What do you run away for? To sleep?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. To get a glass of rum.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [frightfully disillusioned]. Is that it? How disgusting! Do you
+        like being drunk?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No: I dread being drunk more than anything in the
+        world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily
+        pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does
+        that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very very old,
+        like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don't know how terrible that
+        is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later
+        on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in
+        the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be
+        free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every
+        ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep
+        sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had
+        ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. Go get me
+        another: Guinness knows where it is. You had better see for yourself the
+        horror of an old man drinking.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must never
+        be in the real world when we talk together.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my
+        second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can't remember
+        what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have
+        dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the
+        happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the
+        sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You dread it almost as much as I used to dread losing my dreams
+        and having to fight and do things. But that is all over for me: my
+        dreams are dashed to pieces. I should like to marry a very old, very
+        rich man. I should like to marry you. I had much rather marry you than
+        marry Mangan. Are you very rich?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Living from hand to mouth. And I have a wife
+        somewhere in Jamaica: a black one. My first wife. Unless she's dead.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What a pity! I feel so happy with you. [She takes his hand,
+        almost unconsciously, and pats it]. I thought I should never feel happy
+        again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Don't you know?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Heartbreak. I fell in love with Hector, and didn't know he was
+        married.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so sufficient
+        to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of
+        everything, even of hope?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [gripping the hand]. It seems so; for I feel now as if there was
+        nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That's the only real strength. That's genius. That's
+        better than rum.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [throwing away his hand]. Rum! Why did you spoil it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hector and Randall come in from the garden through the starboard door.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I beg your pardon. We did not know there was anyone here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [rising]. That means that you want to tell Mr Randall the story
+        about the tiger. Come, Captain: I want to talk to my father; and you had
+        better come with me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [rising]. Nonsense! the man is in bed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Aha! I've caught you. My real father has gone to bed; but the
+        father you gave me is in the kitchen. You knew quite well all along.
+        Come. [She draws him out into the garden with her through the port
+        door].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. That's an extraordinary girl. She has the Ancient Mariner on a
+        string like a Pekinese dog.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You are in what is supposed to be my house. I am at your
+        disposal.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Hector sits down in the draughtsman's chair, turning it to face Randall,
+        who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the carpenter's bench.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. I take it that we may be quite frank. I mean about Lady
+        Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You may. I have nothing to be frank about. I never met her until
+        this afternoon.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [straightening up]. What! But you are her sister's husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Well, if you come to that, you are her husband's brother.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. But you seem to be on intimate terms with her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. So do you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Yes: but I AM on intimate terms with her. I have known her for
+        years.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It took her years to get to the same point with you that she got
+        to with me in five minutes, it seems.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [vexed]. Really, Ariadne is the limit [he moves away huffishly
+        towards the windows].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [coolly]. She is, as I remarked to Hesione, a very enterprising
+        woman.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [returning, much troubled]. You see, Hushabye, you are what
+        women consider a good-looking man.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity; and
+        Hesione insists on my keeping it up. She makes me wear these ridiculous
+        things [indicating his Arab costume] because she thinks me absurd in
+        evening dress.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Still, you do keep it up, old chap. Now, I assure you I have
+        not an atom of jealousy in my disposition.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. The question would seem to be rather whether your brother has
+        any touch of that sort.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. What! Hastings! Oh, don't trouble about Hastings. He has the
+        gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest detail,
+        and actually likes it. That gets him to the top wherever he goes. As
+        long as Ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly, he is only too
+        thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor for him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. And as she has all the Shotover fascination, there is plenty of
+        competition for the job, eh?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [angrily]. She encourages them. Her conduct is perfectly
+        scandalous. I assure you, my dear fellow, I haven't an atom of jealousy
+        in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of every place she
+        goes to by her thoughtlessness. It's nothing more: she doesn't really
+        care for the men she keeps hanging about her; but how is the world to
+        know that? It's not fair to Hastings. It's not fair to me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Her theory is that her conduct is so correct
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Correct! She does nothing but make scenes from morning till
+        night. You be careful, old chap. She will get you into trouble: that is,
+        she would if she really cared for you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Doesn't she?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Not a scrap. She may want your scalp to add to her collection;
+        but her true affection has been engaged years ago. You had really better
+        be careful.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Do you suffer much from this jealousy?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Jealousy! I jealous! My dear fellow, haven't I told you that
+        there is not an atom of&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Yes. And Lady Utterword told me she never made scenes. Well,
+        don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste jealousy on a
+        real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long
+        run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world
+        pose, which you carry so well in other respects.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a
+        gentleman without being accused of posing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the
+        poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under
+        your pose is apparently Ellie's favorite, Othello.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me
+        tell you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe
+        under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned
+        to play them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. If it's all the same to you I had rather you didn't play them
+        on me. You evidently don't quite understand my character, or my notions
+        of good form.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Is it your notion of good form to give away Lady Utterword?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. I have not
+        said a word against Lady Utterword. This is just the conspiracy over
+        again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. What conspiracy?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. You know very well, sir. A conspiracy to make me out to be
+        pettish and jealous and childish and everything I am not. Everyone knows
+        I am just the opposite.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It
+        often does have that effect. [He goes to the garden door and calls Lady
+        Utterword with commanding emphasis]. Ariadne!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [at some distance]. Yes.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. What are you calling her for? I want to speak&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [arriving breathless]. Yes. You really are a terribly
+        commanding person. What's the matter?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I do not know how to manage your friend Randall. No doubt you
+        do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Randall: have you been making yourself ridiculous, as
+        usual? I can see it in your face. Really, you are the most pettish
+        creature.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. You know quite well, Ariadne, that I have not an ounce of
+        pettishness in my disposition. I have made myself perfectly pleasant
+        here. I have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable in the face of a
+        burglar. Imperturbability is almost too strong a point of mine. But
+        [putting his foot down with a stamp, and walking angrily up and down the
+        room] I insist on being treated with a certain consideration. I will not
+        allow Hushabye to take liberties with me. I will not stand your
+        encouraging people as you do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. The man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I know. He is jealous. As if he had any right to be! He
+        compromises me everywhere. He makes scenes all over the place. Randall:
+        I will not allow it. I simply will not allow it. You had no right to
+        discuss me with Hector. I will not be discussed by men.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Be reasonable, Ariadne. Your fatal gift of beauty forces men to
+        discuss you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Oh indeed! what about YOUR fatal gift of beauty?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. How can I help it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You could cut off your moustache: I can't cut off my
+        nose. I get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me.
+        And then Randall says I run after men.
+      </p>
+      RANDALL. I&mdash;
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Yes you do: you said it just now. Why can't you think of
+        something else than women? Napoleon was quite right when he said that
+        women are the occupation of the idle man. Well, if ever there was an
+        idle man on earth, his name is Randall Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. Ariad&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. Oh yes you
+        are: it's no use denying it. What have you ever done? What good are you?
+        You are as much trouble in the house as a child of three. You couldn't
+        live without your valet.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. This is&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are
+        selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth. You
+        can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and
+        your ailments and the people who have offended you. [Turning to Hector].
+        Do you know what they call him, Hector?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [speaking together] { Please don't tell me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL { I'll not stand it&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the Rotter: that is his name in good society.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [shouting]. I'll not bear it, I tell you. Will you listen to me,
+        you infernal&mdash;[he chokes].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Well: go on. What were you going to call me? An infernal
+        what? Which unpleasant animal is it to be this time?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [foaming]. There is no animal in the world so hateful as a woman
+        can be. You are a maddening devil. Hushabye, you will not believe me
+        when I tell you that I have loved this demon all my life; but God knows
+        I have paid for it [he sits down in the draughtsman's chair, weeping].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [standing over him with triumphant contempt]. Cry-baby!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [gravely, coming to him]. My friend, the Shotover sisters have
+        two strange powers over men. They can make them love; and they can make
+        them cry. Thank your stars that you are not married to one of them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [haughtily]. And pray, Hector&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her right
+        round him and away from Randall: and gripping her throat with the other
+        hand]. Ariadne, if you attempt to start on me, I'll choke you: do you
+        hear? The cat-and-mouse game with the other sex is a good game; but I
+        can play your head off at it. [He throws her, not at all gently, into
+        the big chair, and proceeds, less fiercely but firmly]. It is true that
+        Napoleon said that woman is the occupation of the idle man. But he added
+        that she is the relaxation of the warrior. Well, I am the warrior. So
+        take care.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by his
+        violence]. My dear Hector, I have only done what you asked me to do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. How do you make that out, pray?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You called me in to manage Randall, didn't you? You said
+        you couldn't manage him yourself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Well, what if I did? I did not ask you to drive the man mad.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. He isn't mad. That's the way to manage him. If you were
+        a mother, you'd understand.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Mother! What are you up to now?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. It's quite simple. When the children got nerves and were
+        naughty, I smacked them just enough to give them a good cry and a
+        healthy nervous shock. They went to sleep and were quite good
+        afterwards. Well, I can't smack Randall: he is too big; so when he gets
+        nerves and is naughty, I just rag him till he cries. He will be all
+        right now. Look: he is half asleep already [which is quite true].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [waking up indignantly]. I'm not. You are most cruel, Ariadne.
+        [Sentimentally]. But I suppose I must forgive you, as usual [he checks
+        himself in the act of yawning].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [to Hector]. Is the explanation satisfactory, dread
+        warrior?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Some day I shall kill you, if you go too far. I thought you were
+        a fool.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [laughing]. Everybody does, at first. But I am not such a
+        fool as I look. [She rises complacently]. Now, Randall, go to bed. You
+        will be a good boy in the morning.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [only very faintly rebellious]. I'll go to bed when I like. It
+        isn't ten yet.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. It is long past ten. See that he goes to bed at once,
+        Hector. [She goes into the garden].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of men to
+        women?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [rising resolutely]. I'll not speak to her tomorrow. I'll not
+        speak to her for another week. I'll give her such a lesson. I'll go
+        straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [He makes for the door
+        leading to the hall].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You are under a spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to the
+        devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and
+        these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I am tied to
+        Hesione's apron-string; but I'm her husband; and if I did go stark
+        staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. But why should
+        you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by Ariadne as a toy donkey
+        is dragged about and beaten by a child? What do you get by it? Are you
+        her lover?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. You must not misunderstand me. In a higher sense&mdash;in a
+        Platonic sense&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when
+        pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [feebly]. Well, if I don't mind, I don't see what business it is
+        of yours. Besides, I tell you I am going to punish her. You shall see: I
+        know how to deal with women. I'm really very sleepy. Say good-night to
+        Mrs Hushabye for me, will you, like a good chap. Good-night. [He hurries
+        out].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Poor wretch! Oh women! women! women! [He lifts his fists in
+        invocation to heaven]. Fall. Fall and crush. [He goes out into the
+        garden].
+      </p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+      <div style="height: 4em;">
+        <br /><br /><br /><br />
+      </div>
+      <h2>
+        ACT III
+      </h2>
+      <p>
+        In the garden, Hector, as he comes out through the glass door of the
+        poop, finds Lady Utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock on the east
+        side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by the electric arc,
+        which is like a moon in its opal globe. Beneath the head of the hammock,
+        a campstool. On the other side of the flagstaff, on the long garden
+        seat, Captain Shotover is asleep, with Ellie beside him, leaning
+        affectionately against him on his right hand. On his left is a deck
+        chair. Behind them in the gloom, Hesione is strolling about with Mangan.
+        It is a fine still night, moonless.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. What a lovely night! It seems made for us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night? [He
+        sits down moodily in the deck chair].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. Its beauty soaks into my
+        nerves. In the night there is peace for the old and hope for the young.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Is that remark your own?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. No. Only the last thing the captain said before he went to sleep.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I'm not asleep.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Randall is. Also Mr Mazzini Dunn. Mangan, too, probably.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. No.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Oh, you are there. I thought Hesione would have sent you to bed
+        by this time.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light,
+        with Mangan]. I think I shall. He keeps telling me he has a presentiment
+        that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [plaintively]. But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you
+        wouldn't listen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. I was listening for something else. There was a sort of
+        splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a
+        distance and then died away.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I tell you it was a train.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour. The
+        last is nine forty-five.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. But a goods train.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Not on our little line. They tack a truck on to the
+        passenger train. What can it have been, Hector?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Heaven's threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile
+        creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either
+        out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we
+        have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and
+        destroy us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing comfortably in
+        her hammock]. We have not supplanted the animals, Hector. Why do you ask
+        heaven to destroy this house, which could be made quite comfortable if
+        Hesione had any notion of how to live? Don't you know what is wrong with
+        it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. We are wrong with it. There is no sense in us. We are useless,
+        dangerous, and ought to be abolished.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense! Hastings told me the very first day he came
+        here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What! The numskull said there was something wrong with
+        my house!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I said Hastings said it; and he is not in the least a
+        numskull.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What's wrong with my house?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Just what is wrong with a ship, papa. Wasn't it clever
+        of Hastings to see that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The man's a fool. There's nothing wrong with a ship.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, there is.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. But what is it? Don't be aggravating, Addy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Guess.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Demons. Daughters of the witch of Zanzibar. Demons.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Not a bit. I assure you, all this house needs to make it
+        a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites and sound sleep
+        in it, is horses.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Horses! What rubbish!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Yes: horses. Why have we never been able to let this
+        house? Because there are no proper stables. Go anywhere in England where
+        there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people;
+        and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the
+        household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole
+        room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things
+        piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never
+        ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only two
+        classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the
+        neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the
+        people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the
+        wrong ones.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is some truth in this. My ship made a man of me;
+        and a ship is the horse of the sea.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Exactly how Hastings explained your being a gentleman.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Not bad for a numskull. Bring the man here with you
+        next time: I must talk to him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Why is Randall such an obvious rotter? He is well bred;
+        he has been at a public school and a university; he has been in the
+        Foreign Office; he knows the best people and has lived all his life
+        among them. Why is he so unsatisfactory, so contemptible? Why can't he
+        get a valet to stay with him longer than a few months? Just because he
+        is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano,
+        and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and
+        poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my
+        house. If he would only&mdash;[she is interrupted by the melancholy
+        strains of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself
+        indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have you
+        been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! Go to bed
+        instantly, Randall: how dare you? [The window is slammed down. She
+        subsides]. How can anyone care for such a creature!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Addy: do you think Ellie ought to marry poor Alfred merely
+        for his money?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [much alarmed]. What's that? Mrs Hushabye, are my affairs to be
+        discussed like this before everybody?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I don't think Randall is listening now.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Everybody is listening. It isn't right.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. But in the dark, what does it matter? Ellie doesn't mind.
+        Do you, Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Not in the least. What is your opinion, Lady Utterword? You have
+        so much good sense.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. But it isn't right. It&mdash;[Mrs Hushabye puts her hand on his
+        mouth]. Oh, very well.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. How much money have you, Mr. Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Really&mdash;No: I can't stand this.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense, Mr Mangan! It all turns on your income,
+        doesn't it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, if you come to that, how much money has she?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. None.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You are answered, Mr Mangan. And now, as you have made
+        Miss Dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to show your
+        own.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Come, Alf! out with it! How much?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [baited out of all prudence]. Well, if you want to know, I have
+        no money and never had any.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, you mustn't tell naughty stories.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I'm not telling you stories. I'm telling you the raw truth.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Then what do you live on, Mr Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Travelling expenses. And a trifle of commission.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling expenses for
+        our life's journey?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. People think I have. People think I'm an industrial Napoleon.
+        That's why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you I have nothing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus's tigers? That
+        they don't exist?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they're not mine. They belong
+        to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing
+        capitalists. I get money from such people to start the factories. I find
+        people like Miss Dunn's father to work them, and keep a tight hand so as
+        to make them pay. Of course I make them keep me going pretty well; but
+        it's a dog's life; and I don't own anything.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, Alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it to get
+        out of marrying Ellie.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I'm telling the truth about my money for the first time in my
+        life; and it's the first time my word has ever been doubted.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. How sad! Why don't you go in for politics, Mr Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Go in for politics! Where have you been living? I am in
+        politics.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I'm sure I beg your pardon. I never heard of you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Let me tell you, Lady Utterword, that the Prime Minister of this
+        country asked me to join the Government without even going through the
+        nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. As a Conservative or a Liberal?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all burst
+        out laughing]. What are you all laughing at?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all
+        the evening!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party funds,
+        Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the money:
+        they knew how useful I should be to them in the Government.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. This is most interesting and unexpected, Mr Mangan. And
+        what have your administrative achievements been, so far?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Achievements? Well, I don't know what you call achievements; but
+        I've jolly well put a stop to the games of the other fellows in the
+        other departments. Every man of them thought he was going to save the
+        country all by himself, and do me out of the credit and out of my chance
+        of a title. I took good care that if they wouldn't let me do it they
+        shouldn't do it themselves either. I may not know anything about my own
+        machinery; but I know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow's. And
+        now they all look the biggest fools going.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. And in heaven's name, what do you look like?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I look like the fellow that was too clever for all the others,
+        don't I? If that isn't a triumph of practical business, what is?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Do you expect to save the country, Mr Mangan?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, who else will? Will your Mr Randall save it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the rotter! Certainly not.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and his fine
+        talk?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Yes, if they will let me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [sneering]. Ah! Will they let you?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. No. They prefer you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Very well then, as you're in a world where I'm appreciated and
+        you're not, you'd best be civil to me, hadn't you? Who else is there but
+        me?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham
+        democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of
+        bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the
+        country with the greatest ease.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with a
+        stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God's way. The man
+        is a numskull.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What do you
+        say, Miss Dunn?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put upon
+        him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [contemptuously]. I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into
+        parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We've not come to
+        that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you governs the
+        country so long as we govern you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. We? Who is we, pray?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. The devil's granddaughters, dear. The lovely women.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say, and deliver us from
+        the lures of Satan!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and
+        Shakespeare. Marcus's tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false;
+        there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful
+        black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing
+        that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration;
+        and that turns out to be&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [placidly]. A good deal of my hair is quite genuine. The
+        Duchess of Dithering offered me fifty guineas for this [touching her
+        forehead] under the impression that it was a transformation; but it is
+        all natural except the color.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [wildly]. Look here: I'm going to take off all my clothes [he
+        begins tearing off his coat].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. [in consternation] { Mr. Mangan!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER { What's that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. { Ha! Ha! Do. Do.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE { Please don't.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [catching his arm and stopping him]. Alfred, for shame! Are
+        you mad?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Shame! What shame is there in this house? Let's all strip stark
+        naked. We may as well do the thing thoroughly when we're about it. We've
+        stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us strip ourselves
+        physically naked as well, and see how we like it. I tell you I can't
+        bear this. I was brought up to be respectable. I don't mind the women
+        dyeing their hair and the men drinking: it's human nature. But it's not
+        human nature to tell everybody about it. Every time one of you opens
+        your mouth I go like this [he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid
+        of what will come next. How are we to have any self-respect if we don't
+        keep it up that we're better than we really are?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I quite sympathize with you, Mr Mangan. I have been
+        through it all; and I know by experience that men and women are delicate
+        plants and must be cultivated under glass. Our family habit of throwing
+        stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably
+        rude, but positively dangerous. Still, there is no use catching physical
+        colds as well as moral ones; so please keep your clothes on.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I'll do as I like: not what you tell me. Am I a child or a grown
+        man? I won't stand this mothering tyranny. I'll go back to the city,
+        where I'm respected and made much of.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city. Think of
+        Ellie's youth!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Think of Hesione's eyes and hair!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog
+        barking to keep the truth out!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword's beauty! her good sense! her style!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can really do
+        any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn't
+        it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [surrendering]. All right: all right. I'm done. Have it your own
+        way. Only let me alone. I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels
+        when you all start on me like this. I'll stay. I'll marry her. I'll do
+        anything for a quiet life. Are you satisfied now?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. No. I never really intended to make you marry me, Mr Mangan.
+        Never in the depths of my soul. I only wanted to feel my strength: to
+        know that you could not escape if I chose to take you.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [indignantly]. What! Do you mean to say you are going to throw me
+        over after my acting so handsome?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I should not be too hasty, Miss Dunn. You can throw Mr
+        Mangan over at any time up to the last moment. Very few men in his
+        position go bankrupt. You can live very comfortably on his reputation
+        for immense wealth.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I cannot commit bigamy, Lady Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. { Bigamy! Whatever on earth are you talking about, Ellie?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [exclaiming altogether] { Bigamy! What do you mean, Miss
+        Dunn?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN { Bigamy! Do you mean to say you're married already?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR { Bigamy! This is some enigma.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover's white wife.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie! What nonsense! Where?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. In heaven, where all true marriages are made.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [quoting Shelley].
+      </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     "Their altar the grassy earth outspreads
+      And their priest the muttering wind."
+</pre>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul
+        to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        She draws the captain's arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain
+        remains fast asleep.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, that's very clever of you, pettikins. Very clever.
+        Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie. You must be content with
+        a little share of me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. It isn't kind&mdash;[his emotion
+        chokes him].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is the most
+        conceited young woman I have met since I came back to England.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Ellie isn't conceited. Are you, pettikins?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I know my strength now, Hesione.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Brazen, I call you. Brazen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Tut, tut, Alfred: don't be rude. Don't you feel how lovely
+        this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren't you happy, you and
+        Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful enough to please
+        the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the
+        world. We women have managed all that for you. Why in the name of common
+        sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you happiness is no good. You can be happy when
+        you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half dead than ever I was
+        in my prime. But there is no blessing on my happiness.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [her face lighting up]. Life with a blessing! that is what I want.
+        Now I know the real reason why I couldn't marry Mr Mangan: there would
+        be no blessing on our marriage. There is a blessing on my broken heart.
+        There is a blessing on your beauty, Hesione. There is a blessing on your
+        father's spirit. Even on the lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on
+        Mr Mangan's money there is none.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. I don't understand a word of that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Neither do I. But I know it means something.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Don't say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I was
+        ready to get a bishop to marry us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Isn't he a fool, pettikins?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [fiercely]. Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown, comes from
+        the house, on Lady Utterword's side.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. What's
+        the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, no: nothing's the matter: but really it's impossible to go
+        to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one's
+        window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had to come down and
+        join you all. What has it all been about?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has tried to
+        undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an
+        idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I hope you don't mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye. [He
+        sits down on the campstool].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Your daughter's match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems that Mr
+        Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely
+        nothing.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if people
+        believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don't
+        believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask poor Ellie to depend
+        on what I can do for her?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Don't you run away with this idea that I have nothing. I&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Oh, don't explain. We understand. You have a couple of thousand
+        pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence a dozen, and
+        half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with
+        when you are found out. That's the reality of your millions.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are genuine
+        and perfectly legal.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [disgusted]. Yah! Not even a great swindler!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. So you think. But I've been too many for some honest men, for
+        all that.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are determined
+        to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I
+        have been made to look like a fool, though I'm as good a man in this
+        house as in the city.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [musically]. Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house,
+        this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it
+        Heartbreak House.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [breaks into a low snivelling]!!!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSAHBYE. There! you have set Alfred off.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. I like him best when he is howling.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Silence! [Mangan subsides into silence]. I say, let
+        the heart break in silence.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Do you accept that name for your house?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we
+        haunt it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [heart torn]. It is dreadful to think how you have been
+        here all these years while I have gone round the world. I escaped young;
+        but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my heart too. But it shan't.
+        I have left you and it behind. It was silly of me to come back. I felt
+        sentimental about papa and Hesione and the old place. I felt them
+        calling to me.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling,
+        Lady Utterword!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was only
+        the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered and not
+        wanted.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You left because you did not want us. Was there no
+        heartbreak in that for your father? You tore yourself up by the roots;
+        and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you.
+        What right had you to come back and probe old wounds?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You were a complete stranger to me at first, Addy; but now
+        I feel as if you had never been away.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Thank you, Hesione; but the influenza is quite cured.
+        The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this
+        gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to
+        me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any
+        stables.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Inhabited by&mdash;?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and
+        an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, really, Mrs Hushabye&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. A member of His Majesty's Government that everybody sets down as
+        a nincompoop: don't forget him, Lady Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation
+        is to be married to my sister.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. All heartbroken imbeciles.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable specimen of
+        what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people, most
+        advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic,
+        free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. You do us proud, Mazzini.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I am not flattering, really. Where else could I feel perfectly
+        at ease in my pyjamas? I sometimes dream that I am in very distinguished
+        society, and suddenly I have nothing on but my pyjamas! Sometimes I
+        haven't even pyjamas. And I always feel overwhelmed with confusion. But
+        here, I don't mind in the least: it seems quite natural.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. An infallible sign that you are now not in really
+        distinguished society, Mr Dunn. If you were in my house, you would feel
+        embarrassed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I shall take particular care to keep out of your house, Lady
+        Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You will be quite wrong, Mr Dunn. I should make you very
+        comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and anxiety of wondering
+        whether you should wear your purple and gold or your green and crimson
+        dressing-gown at dinner. You complicate life instead of simplifying it
+        by doing these ridiculous things.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor devil
+        upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as Mangan
+        howls when my wife twists his.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but have his
+        heart broken. It is a change from having his head shampooed. Catch
+        anyone breaking Hastings' heart!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest
+        satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. I forgot you, Mr Mangan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. Well, I don't see that quite, either.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are
+        successful.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN. But I don't want to be regarded merely as a successful man. I
+        have an imagination like anyone else. I have a presentiment.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting myself
+        to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. You
+        bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [She drags him away
+        into the darkness].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it's all very well to make
+        fun of me; but if you only knew&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting something. I
+        don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't have a
+        baby.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me: and
+        yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave
+        everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers
+        of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It's
+        madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play
+        at earthquakes with.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was young.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Think! What's the good of thinking about it? Why didn't you do
+        something?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote
+        pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in
+        the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't
+        have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any
+        money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a
+        revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we
+        could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of
+        course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to.
+        Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things
+        considered.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps somebody cleverer than you and Mr Mangan was at
+        work all the time.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Perhaps so. Though I was brought up not to believe in anything,
+        I often feel that there is a great deal to be said for the theory of an
+        over-ruling Providence, after all.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. Providence! I meant Hastings.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of
+        the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the
+        rocks.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure you,
+        they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to
+        the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The
+        moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until
+        she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. After
+        the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It's
+        amazing how they get along, all things considered. Nothing happens,
+        except something not worth mentioning.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. What is that, O Captain, O my captain?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [savagely]. Nothing but the smash of the drunken
+        skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the
+        tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a
+        trap.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Moral: don't take rum.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [vehemently]. That is a lie, child. Let a man drink ten
+        barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting
+        skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer
+        it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and
+        trusts to Providence that I call the drunken skipper, though he drank
+        nothing but the waters of the River Jordan.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Splendid! And you haven't had a drop for an hour. You see you
+        don't need it: your own spirit is not dead.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Echoes: nothing but echoes. The last shot was fired
+        years ago.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call
+        England?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled
+        ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike
+        and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in
+        favor of England because you were born in it?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still
+        have the will to live. What am I to do?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an
+        Englishman.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be
+        damned.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Quiet, quiet: you'll tire yourself.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I thought all that once, Captain; but I assure you nothing will
+        happen.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A dull distant explosion is heard.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [starting up]. What was that?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Something happening [he blows his whistle]. Breakers
+        ahead!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The light goes out.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [furiously]. Who put that light out? Who dared put that light
+        out?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [running in from the house to the middle of the
+        esplanade]. I did, sir. The police have telephoned to say we'll be
+        summoned if we don't put that light out: it can be seen for miles.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. It shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the house].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. The Rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they say.
+        Unless we can give the Rector a bed he has nowhere to lay his head this
+        night.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The Church is on the rocks, breaking up. I told him it
+        would unless it headed for God's open sea.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. And you are all to go down to the cellars.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go there yourself, you and all the crew. Batten down
+        the hatches.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. And hide beside the coward I married! I'll go on the
+        roof first. [The lamp lights up again]. There! Mr Hushabye's turned it
+        on again.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR [hurrying in and appealing to Nurse Guinness]. Here: where's
+        the way to that gravel pit? The boot-boy says there's a cave in the
+        gravel pit. Them cellars is no use. Where's the gravel pit, Captain?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall into it
+        and break your dirty neck. [She pushes him contemptuously towards the
+        flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the hammock and waits there,
+        as it were by Ariadne's cradle].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Another and louder explosion is heard. The burglar stops and stands
+        trembling.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [rising]. That was nearer.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The next one will get us. [He rises]. Stand by, all
+        hands, for judgment.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        THE BURGLAR. Oh my Lordy God! [He rushes away frantically past the
+        flagstaff into the gloom].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [emerging panting from the darkness]. Who was that running
+        away? [She comes to Ellie]. Did you hear the explosions? And the sound
+        in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra: it's like Beethoven.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        She and Hesione throw themselves into one another's arms in wild
+        excitement. The light increases.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [anxiously]. The light is getting brighter.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [looking up at the house]. It's Mr Hushabye turning on
+        all the lights in the house and tearing down the curtains.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute].
+        Ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: I beg and implore
+        you, go down to the cellars!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD [quite composed in her hammock]. The governor's wife in
+        the cellars with the servants! Really, Randall!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL. But what shall I do if you are killed?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. You will probably be killed, too, Randall. Now play your
+        flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good. Play us "Keep the
+        home fires burning."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [grimly]. THEY'LL keep the home fires burning for us:
+        them up there.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        RANDALL [having tried to play]. My lips are trembling. I can't get a
+        sound.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of God.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his former
+        place]. There is not half light enough. We should be blazing to the
+        skies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [tense with excitement]. Set fire to the house, Marcus.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save you; but
+        it will show that your souls are still live.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It's magnificent.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [gravely]. Miss Dunn, you can do no good here. We of this house
+        are only moths flying into the candle. You had better go down to the
+        cellar.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [scornfully]. I don't think.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. An
+        officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr Hushabye is behaving
+        like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it
+        is they who will survive.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should you run
+        any risk?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! What
+        next?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats,
+        or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered
+        glass from the windows.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Is anyone hurt?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Where did it fall?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        NURSE GUINNESS [in hideous triumph]. Right in the gravel pit: I seen it.
+        Serve un right! I seen it [she runs away towards the gravel pit,
+        laughing harshly].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. One husband gone.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. Oh, poor Mangan!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. Are you immortal that you need pity him? Our turn next.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        They wait in silence and intense expectation. Hesione and Ellie hold
+        each other's hand tight.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A distant explosion is heard.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]. Oh! they have passed us.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down
+        and goes asleep].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [disappointedly]. Safe!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR [disgustedly]. Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has
+        become again suddenly! [he sits down].
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI [sitting down]. I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have
+        survived; and Mangan and the burglar&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        HECTOR. &mdash;the two burglars&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        LADY UTTERWORD. &mdash;the two practical men of business&mdash;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MAZZINI. &mdash;both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new
+        house.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they'll come again
+        tomorrow night.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]. Oh, I hope so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute.
+      </p>
+      <br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Heartbreak House
+
+Author: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Posting Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #3543]
+Release Date: November, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEARTBREAK HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+
+A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES
+
+
+By Bernard Shaw
+
+
+1913-1916
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL
+
+
+Where Heartbreak House Stands
+
+Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this
+preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the
+play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional
+diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy
+even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had
+produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of
+which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been
+performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown
+us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did
+not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
+was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
+futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering
+the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and
+energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken
+it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house
+standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and
+amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated
+the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by
+seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they
+were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these
+charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold
+up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in
+exploiting and even flattering their charm.
+
+
+
+The Inhabitants
+
+Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts,
+got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial
+affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared
+and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just
+as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and
+professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays
+fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music,
+art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
+fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same
+utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could
+write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social
+opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and
+newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their
+activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They
+did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to
+realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when
+they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing
+to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety
+theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined
+by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our
+society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an
+economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as
+Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with
+all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its
+best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For
+prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.
+
+
+
+Horseback Hall
+
+But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative
+to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for
+horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted
+them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths
+of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,
+churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative
+electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two
+establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the
+music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the
+stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
+first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden
+of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers
+who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were
+apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had
+to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is
+hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.
+
+
+Revolution on the Shelf
+
+Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper.
+It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to
+church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.
+When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your
+bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary
+biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself
+and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
+Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the
+movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson,
+Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and,
+generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of
+the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious
+experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday
+morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been
+brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
+police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might
+not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful
+Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton
+liner.
+
+In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
+barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front
+bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible
+ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from
+the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets
+instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with
+money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other
+went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the
+medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
+going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as
+Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society
+going without any instruction in sociology.
+
+
+
+The Cherry Orchard
+
+The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.
+With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as
+the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of
+Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and
+would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds.
+Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through
+the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of
+Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious
+modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a
+vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public
+affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
+inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even those who
+lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors
+and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without
+continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things
+or starve.
+
+From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things
+could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government
+it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the
+electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or
+debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a
+vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.
+
+
+
+Nature's Long Credits
+
+Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not
+one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She
+demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls
+us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common
+domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly
+and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
+consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two
+generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and
+then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh
+air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for
+plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the
+city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital
+gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid
+for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to
+sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
+
+This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political
+science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates
+during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the
+Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless
+affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage,
+torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of
+ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
+through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or
+Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in
+1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the
+shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the
+appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens.
+In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against
+many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being
+slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow.
+Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But
+when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years
+she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never
+dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and
+came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
+winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the
+victors.
+
+
+
+The Wicked Half Century
+
+It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than
+false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately
+suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had
+been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a
+pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught
+that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do
+can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue
+as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
+him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and
+allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might
+be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the
+middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured
+the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are
+all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion,
+inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins
+and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions
+over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose,
+conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions,
+produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human
+machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process
+incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
+competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
+available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our
+instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted
+with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying
+us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent
+doubtfully reparable in our time.
+
+It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be
+accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully
+in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the
+subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons
+than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific
+career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless
+rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that
+this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in
+scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
+naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a
+barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all
+scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries
+of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless
+method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.
+Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and
+that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel
+Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."
+
+
+
+Hypochondria
+
+Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
+alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing
+of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the
+doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside.
+But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running
+after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds,
+but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would
+actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon
+named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
+materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the
+like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in
+the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered
+therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this
+half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and
+surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were
+not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of
+the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
+winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror
+of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations.
+Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily
+killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course)
+in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on
+to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. They
+explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could
+make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by
+cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
+the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was
+the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's
+shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was
+so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual
+creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces
+of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest
+off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they
+operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
+clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies
+of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever
+have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared
+to the General Medical Council.
+
+
+
+Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying
+
+Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from
+this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it
+believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that
+cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,
+whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's
+saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read
+about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which
+point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how
+to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
+gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the
+firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the
+hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.
+
+
+War Delirium
+
+Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
+field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
+the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this
+experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics,
+exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning
+millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do
+not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those
+who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand.
+I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at
+once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most
+serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did
+not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
+course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political
+and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But
+the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a
+conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All
+foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed.
+No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions
+must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be
+stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences
+about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an
+intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and
+schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was
+saved only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
+more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established
+by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized
+with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money.
+And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no
+discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing
+what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities,
+but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the
+presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the
+annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices;
+label themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that
+was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that they had
+nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live
+gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign
+of returning sanity, the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into
+prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting
+of the Flag Days was brought under some sort of regulation.
+
+
+
+Madness in Court
+
+The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were
+acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at
+last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the
+Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked
+with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a
+Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence.
+Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always
+manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged
+with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not
+smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were
+in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious
+objections to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament
+introducing Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these
+persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their
+convictions. Those who did so were very ill-advised from the point
+of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with
+savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence
+of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military
+training in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
+occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on
+behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act
+on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the
+Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their
+being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict
+would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of
+the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were
+gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,
+pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of
+war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly;
+and its law was set aside for Lynch law.
+
+The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest
+Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a
+gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was
+shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off
+no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed.
+The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M.
+Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that
+the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun
+with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
+unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.
+
+
+
+The Long Arm of War
+
+The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
+influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
+doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the
+battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India.
+But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence,
+reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever
+would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire,
+and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders,
+where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another
+as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it
+after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for
+relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
+shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for so many
+centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be
+more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected
+to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in
+cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst
+bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel
+on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly
+full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and
+mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a
+good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
+down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America
+where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went
+beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive
+illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me
+to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do
+that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,
+with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as
+unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying
+the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether
+our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
+newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on
+young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were
+being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England,
+and the more private records of the methods by which the American
+War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the
+possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.
+
+
+
+The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
+
+Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war
+maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of
+liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under
+which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by
+simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without
+any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence.
+Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased
+by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
+fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity
+of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory
+laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the
+loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances
+and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the
+formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
+that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless
+we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and
+beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not
+change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was
+that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that
+every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science
+and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying
+grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and
+most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
+been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the
+pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like
+hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us,
+the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek
+history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves
+into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest,
+joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first,
+and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with
+insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
+ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
+in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of
+civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the
+very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers,
+and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was
+crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that
+German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by
+journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in
+fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and
+our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they
+certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of
+German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German
+literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant
+abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth
+in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of
+such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the
+arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
+appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great
+realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily
+and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing
+the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the German dukes from the
+roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious and historically
+appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against
+Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a
+traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the
+Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving
+his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
+only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
+confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called
+themselves patriots.
+
+
+
+The Sufferings of the Sane
+
+The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
+carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane
+people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated
+by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The
+stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative
+were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that
+mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the
+hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true;
+for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should
+all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
+friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give
+them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously
+sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the
+heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We
+had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the
+sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat
+old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons
+they had "given" to their country.
+
+No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only
+embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth
+set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then
+think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about
+the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly
+repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really
+valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming
+fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public
+eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
+themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient
+soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment
+by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others.
+They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they
+would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship.
+They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back
+because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by
+its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
+fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away
+the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the
+blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to
+pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the
+effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic
+faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For
+it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were
+forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but
+even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found
+themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for
+it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
+themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They
+"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
+
+
+
+Evil in the Throne of Good
+
+This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
+in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or
+witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their
+own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not
+easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw
+away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of
+inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can
+answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of
+Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of
+Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
+are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a
+change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
+
+Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
+and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable
+loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on
+destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind
+might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors
+away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
+Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best
+harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the
+trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly
+civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth
+was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
+"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the
+death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!
+
+
+
+Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
+
+But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
+frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom
+an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage
+ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a
+child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they
+had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings
+day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious
+imprecations on "the Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and
+satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths
+they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
+cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be
+actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances
+of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as
+sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.
+
+For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of
+our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I
+will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have
+such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I
+noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling
+beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going
+splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly
+there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been
+torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including
+a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been
+drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had
+only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine
+arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing
+frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their
+heads now lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was
+the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase
+to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me,
+with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and
+the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a
+heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with
+the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than
+most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim
+satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the
+civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a
+sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
+impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and
+natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless
+paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything
+to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before,
+having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They
+were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too
+big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size
+for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just
+the same reason pass a vote for L30,000 without a word, and then spend
+three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
+shillings for refreshments?
+
+
+
+Little Minds and Big Battles
+
+Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during
+the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire
+magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive
+even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing
+but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of
+bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity
+of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the
+dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce
+any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
+Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of
+Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation"
+in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside
+trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end
+marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup,
+their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put
+a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in
+the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other
+that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the
+army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man
+would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for
+democracy." His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he
+would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud
+against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to
+his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to
+find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.
+
+It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out
+of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the
+light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt
+whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians.
+But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the
+comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to
+be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this
+could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess,
+and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice
+at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
+general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,
+"If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got me into
+khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary
+to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at.
+Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately
+propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense,
+which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war
+before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
+army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very
+serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane
+European State could afford to do.
+
+
+
+The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
+
+Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
+critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time
+was conducting a war which involved the organization of several
+millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with
+provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been
+done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass
+from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and
+suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to
+pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
+to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who
+still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency
+was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their
+business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the
+raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide
+of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from
+operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A
+precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "If
+you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out
+of the way," was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people
+went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the
+way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
+seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where
+the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and
+invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor
+and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately
+intimidating the Government by its blusterings into using the
+irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus
+enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of
+terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word
+from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
+courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much
+less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by
+criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the
+Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable
+moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a
+childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our
+great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind
+all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the
+effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
+activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its
+incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its
+endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season
+and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the
+conquest of Europe.
+
+
+
+The Practical Business Men
+
+From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical
+business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing
+their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the
+success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them
+and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The
+pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we
+tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the
+war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
+they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation
+they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.
+
+
+
+How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down
+
+Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of
+her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
+save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of
+the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent
+practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional
+rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination
+of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture
+posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing
+some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have
+shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the
+world by the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But
+in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and
+file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always
+inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot
+have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action,
+like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of
+himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what
+he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the
+writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not
+uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war
+work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter
+absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo
+the opinions of that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the
+prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of
+the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master
+spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could
+enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the
+whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of
+victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by
+very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if
+there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the
+war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total
+breakdown of its organization.
+
+
+
+The Mad Election
+
+Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days.
+The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in
+parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of
+action to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the
+armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers
+who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated
+by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that
+they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to
+apologize publicly for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent.
+Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk
+tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader
+will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called,
+in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the
+coupon." Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them
+without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be
+fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must
+necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and
+the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
+opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest
+bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the
+general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to
+pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually
+to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had,
+in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked,
+cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from
+this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet;
+but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the
+heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest
+necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded
+almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.
+
+
+
+The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
+
+Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no
+denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing
+Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the
+superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British
+can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the
+three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men,
+saying that "Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would
+ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for
+thunder: nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he
+had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
+every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters
+of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a
+finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a
+whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may have seen a Stratford cottage struck
+by one of Jove's thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted
+thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
+said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford, as
+French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find the old
+familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and at the end of
+the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a fragment of a broken
+churn here and there? Would not the spectacle of the angry ape endowed
+with powers of destruction that Jove never pretended to, have beggared
+even his command of words?
+
+And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human
+nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half
+a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for
+then the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and
+we should take greater care not to get into them. In truth, it is, as
+Byron said, "not difficult to die," and enormously difficult to live:
+that explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but
+infinitely more arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious
+risk of death more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious
+certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that he
+taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without some soldier
+who braved death in the field so recklessly that he was decorated or
+specially commended for it, being haled before our magistrates for
+having failed to resist the paltriest temptations of peace, with no
+better excuse than the old one that "a man must live." Strange that one
+who, sooner than do honest work, will sell his honor for a bottle of
+wine, a visit to the theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all
+obtained by passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on
+the most desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if,
+after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of life? If
+it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men attain it? At all
+events it is clear that the kingdom of the Prince of Peace has not yet
+become the kingdom of this world. His attempts at invasion have been
+resisted far more fiercely than the Kaiser's. Successful as that
+resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of National Debt that is not
+the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and do not intend
+to pay it. A blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the
+long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
+materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the
+blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am
+afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.
+
+
+
+Plague on Both your Houses!
+
+Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
+foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried
+in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately
+they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished
+many times by successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and
+Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of
+Vanity Fair. Another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient
+public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
+sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction
+of that generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian
+life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent.
+Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people who
+thought it could not last more than six months were very signally
+refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos
+lasted months instead of hours. But there would have been nothing
+surprising in its lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact
+that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe,
+which it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly organized
+for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the
+belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled
+to compel themselves to go on with it. Considering its magnitude, the
+war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. The
+end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it;
+and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the
+belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the
+situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she
+began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted.
+Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy
+as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed.
+And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether Germany
+and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are
+already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have struck from
+the limbs of the vanquished.
+
+
+
+How the Theatre fared
+
+Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European theatre
+of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the
+slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home
+to supper after washing off their rose-pink wounds. It is nearly twenty
+years since I was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a
+book for lack of an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a
+performance in a theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient.
+Heartbreak House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it
+because the war has completely upset the economic conditions which
+formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The change is
+not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor in the authors
+and actors, but in the audiences. For four years the London theatres
+were crowded every night with thousands of soldiers on leave from the
+front. These soldiers were not seasoned London playgoers. A childish
+experience of my own gave me a clue to their condition. When I was a
+small boy I was taken to the opera. I did not then know what an opera
+was, though I could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in
+my mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly
+in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded balcony
+filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be the opera
+singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni, and wondered how
+soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled by the fact that I was
+made to sit with my back to the singers instead of facing them. When the
+curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were unbounded.
+
+
+
+The Soldier at the Theatre Front
+
+In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same
+predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was
+evident that they had never been in a theatre before and did not know
+what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I sat beside a young
+officer, not at all a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain
+rose and enlightened him as to the place where he had to look for his
+entertainment, found the dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible.
+He did not know how to play his part of the game. He could understand
+the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic
+feats. He not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who
+imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended
+that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind
+them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very
+sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions
+of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama
+obvious to him.
+
+Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was
+established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers)
+often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It
+was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them
+on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the
+oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military
+spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far
+as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories
+of George Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
+would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were
+only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace
+would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen
+plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own
+astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly
+sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The author of some of the most
+grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the
+trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it
+gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see
+a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of
+hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial
+things gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
+having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to
+the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only
+to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and
+under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a
+mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty
+girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty
+and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.
+
+Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical
+comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a
+practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the
+bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples
+consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night;
+mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got
+into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting
+complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their
+equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
+astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in
+drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of
+his naked person to be descried from time to time.
+
+
+
+Heartbreak House
+
+Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and
+were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical
+comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade
+had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing:
+these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much
+pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what
+they thought fresh and clever.
+
+
+
+Commerce in the Theatre
+
+Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London
+theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must
+pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people:
+they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable
+rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a
+guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin
+flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the
+funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.
+
+
+
+Unser Shakespeare
+
+Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a
+national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of
+Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and
+influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national
+culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents
+of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single
+handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated
+swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods
+lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll
+in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this
+situation," and let it pass without another word.
+
+
+
+The Higher Drama put out of Action
+
+The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The
+beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents
+went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled
+everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of
+management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every
+night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained
+without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible
+to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its
+way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and
+three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a
+desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an
+artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare
+and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
+potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay
+might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise
+occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the beginning
+of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in
+England. In America I had already established myself, not as part of the
+ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius
+of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the
+system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
+of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the Emperor of
+Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole
+official attention paid me by the British Courts was the announcement
+to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for
+public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the
+British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to
+the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household.
+
+Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage,
+and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert
+Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold
+Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in
+the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a
+London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals
+of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of
+Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible
+solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much
+money as it cost to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work
+appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and
+therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators
+as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands
+of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not
+yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the
+commercial value of their time and energy too closely. The war struck
+this foundation away in the manner I have just described. The expenses
+of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded
+by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an
+ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher
+drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation,
+now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to
+provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory
+theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at last
+disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom
+it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly
+made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question
+altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.
+
+
+
+Church and Theatre
+
+I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to
+care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not
+born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the
+beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note
+that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what
+a church was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody
+had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women
+paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like
+Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were
+read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,
+Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by
+greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of
+pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass
+windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of
+painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes
+produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only
+enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous
+practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular
+troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed
+church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which
+the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in
+churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless
+rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on
+driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and
+partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the
+temple had become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions
+that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church
+were laid on the shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable
+place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the
+slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls.
+When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with
+the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the Little Theatre in
+the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived
+within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers.
+In point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the
+fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any
+operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture
+glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres.
+It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the Blondin
+Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian
+decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and care,
+the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the gloomiest of little
+conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the Puritan point of view,
+have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the Little
+Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's
+Magic or Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why
+the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact
+remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the national
+value of the theatre I owed the first regular public performance of
+a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime,
+whereas if she had given the money to the Church she would have worn
+a halo for it. And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of
+things may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners again
+and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can
+go to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible
+reply is that they want to see something new and possibly something
+wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a
+revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for
+admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the church door
+shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to one
+performance at any theatre he or she prefers. Thus shall the sensuous
+charms of the church service be made to subsidize the sterner virtue of
+the drama.
+
+
+
+The Next Phase
+
+The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I read at
+breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation
+that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to
+confirm the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction
+is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible
+years. Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the
+assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half
+full week in and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will
+be at no greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may
+benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the
+fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon
+the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost both faith in
+and patience with the theatrical pretences that had no root either in
+reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war
+in the distribution of income. It seems only the other day that a
+millionaire was a man with L50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his
+income tax and super tax, and insured his life for the amount of his
+death duties, he is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his
+nominal property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget
+which is called "a respite for the rich." At the other end of the scale
+millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in
+their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and
+taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also
+for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of women have
+been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and
+independence. The thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been
+pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an
+unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although
+the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make
+a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to
+his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to
+be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we
+were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only
+a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a
+possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in
+other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process
+anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.
+
+Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who
+was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how,
+after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other
+war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a
+heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years
+in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the
+task they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel
+was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn
+anything from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that
+we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for,
+are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years
+revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed
+by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how
+happy Lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired
+messages became scraps of paper. He knows well that from the Peace
+Conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will
+be able, like Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind:
+and the gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy
+the militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in Cologne
+imprisoning every German who does not salute a British officer; whilst
+the government at home, asked whether it approves, replies that it
+does not propose even to discontinue this Zabernism when the Peace is
+concluded, but in effect looks forward to making Germans salute British
+officers until the end of the world. That is what war makes of men and
+women. It will wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving
+impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to be
+despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be dotards.
+In the meantime there is, for him, another history to write; for me,
+another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that is what wars are for,
+and what historians and playwrights are for. If men will not learn until
+their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own
+for preference.
+
+
+
+The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
+
+To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the theatre
+will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest Hohenzollern
+languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of
+fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to
+have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps
+alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant;
+the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland;
+Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory
+as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one
+another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and
+Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in
+their everlasting seats.
+
+
+
+How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet
+
+As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about
+the war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is significant. You
+cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. War cannot
+bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter
+that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their
+country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers
+and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of
+boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the
+electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and
+lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their
+prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. For
+unless these things are mercilessly exposed they will hide under the
+mantle of the ideals on the stage just as they do in real life.
+
+And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed
+cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still
+in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of
+the realm. We are just now reading the revelations of our generals and
+admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. During the war, General A,
+in his moving despatches from the field, told how General B had covered
+himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us
+that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying
+his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he
+ought to have done. An excellent subject for comedy now that the war
+is over, no doubt; but if General A had let this out at the time, what
+would have been the effect on General B's soldiers? And had the stage
+made known what the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War
+who overruled General A thought of him, and what he thought of them, as
+now revealed in raging controversy, what would have been the effect on
+the nation? That is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally
+silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes
+no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany
+or England perish; is ready to cry with Brynhild, "Lass'uns verderben,
+lachend zu grunde geh'n" sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus
+becomes in time of war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or
+trinitrotoluene. That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from
+the footlights during the war; for the Germans might on any night have
+turned the last act from play into earnest, and even then might not have
+waited for their cues.
+
+June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+
+
+
+
+ACT I
+
+The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking
+very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September, is seen through
+the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after
+part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the
+windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the
+room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. A row
+of lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat
+interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern
+post and the sides. Another door strains the illusion a little by being
+apparently in the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open
+sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the
+stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches beside
+the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery.
+Against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench. The vice has a board
+in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a
+waste-paper basket. A couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench.
+In the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway
+with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it
+is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.
+
+On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak
+drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set
+squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler
+of discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. The
+drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has the window on
+its left hand. On the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a
+ship's fire bucket. On the port side of the room, near the bookshelves,
+is a sofa with its back to the windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article,
+oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of
+blankets hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table
+is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its
+back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a round top
+and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the
+bookcase. It is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all
+convincingly) a woman's hand in the furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of
+narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck.
+
+The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the
+landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow is the
+cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a
+flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a
+long garden seat on the west.
+
+A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the
+window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the
+view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the
+Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been
+reading.
+
+A clock strikes six.
+
+The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an air of
+one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. She is a pretty
+girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively
+dressed, evidently not a smart idler.
+
+With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's chair;
+sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the book sinks to
+her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber.
+
+An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened
+bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and disappears in the
+pantry without noticing the young lady. She places the bottles on the
+shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. As she returns with these,
+the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the
+womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book and
+places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure; but you are
+a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that
+I have been invited here.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you're invited, are you? And has nobody come?
+Dear! dear!
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at
+the window; and I heard him calling out, "Nurse, there is a young and
+attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what she wants." Are
+you the nurse?
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I'm Nurse Guinness. That was old Captain
+Shotover, Mrs Hushabye's father. I heard him roaring; but I thought it
+was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs Hushabye that invited you,
+ducky?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I'd better
+go.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs Hushabye
+has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to
+see you, won't it?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find
+that nobody expects me.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. You'll get used to it, miss: this house is full of
+surprises for them that don't know our ways.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but
+still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a
+whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag
+on the front steps for everybody to fall over. Also a tennis racquet.
+Who the devil left them there?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I'm afraid.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this
+misguided and unfortunate young lady?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my
+daughter's invitations? This is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! A
+young and attractive lady is invited here. Her luggage is left on the
+steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned,
+tired and starving. This is our hospitality. These are our manners. No
+room ready. No hot water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep
+in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Now it's all right, Captain: I'll get the lady some tea;
+and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [To the young
+lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to
+the door leading to the hall].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman, that
+because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the
+right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you
+have brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social
+intercourse?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she goes out
+into the hall on her way to the kitchen].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits down in
+the big wicker chair].
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was
+originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship's chandler with stores
+which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No doubt he
+became rich. Are you his daughter?
+
+ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to say that
+though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one
+word to say against him. I think my father is the best man I have ever
+known.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh
+degree of concentration?
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have two
+daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you here. I
+keep this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the seventh degree
+of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them.
+[Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak
+table]. I have a second daughter who is, thank God, in a remote part of
+the Empire with her numskull of a husband. As a child she thought the
+figure-head of my ship, the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing
+on earth. He resembled it. He had the same expression: wooden yet
+enterprising. She married him, and will never set foot in this house
+again.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to
+Ellie's side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in England
+this very moment. You have been told three times this week that she is
+coming home for a year for her health. And very glad you should be to
+see your own daughter again after all these years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of the
+human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter Ariadne was
+born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If she comes, I am not
+at home. If she wants anything, let her take it. If she asks for me, let
+her be informed that I am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. That's no talk to offer to a young lady. Here, ducky,
+have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have given
+this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather
+insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into
+the leathern bucket].
+
+ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have been
+glad of anything.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to drop.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that fly-blown
+cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He disappears into the
+pantry].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. There's a man for you! They say he sold himself to the
+devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the
+more I believe them.
+
+A WOMAN'S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse! Papa!
+Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.
+
+Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It's Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs
+Hushabye's sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling]. Coming,
+Miss, coming.
+
+She carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out
+when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who bursts in much flustered.
+Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so
+precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous)
+is one of comic silliness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don't look a
+day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn't she expect me?
+Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on the steps? Where's
+papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh! I beg your pardon. I
+suppose you are one of my nieces. [Approaching her with outstretched
+arms]. Come and kiss your aunt, darling.
+
+ELLIE. I'm only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. I'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes up the
+tray].
+
+ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he's forgotten what he went for already. His
+mind wanders from one thing to another.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don't be silly, Nurse. Don't call me Miss.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what
+you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after
+twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the
+steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive
+anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always
+gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the
+same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was
+used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and
+longed all the time--oh, how I longed!--to be respectable, to be a lady,
+to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself.
+I married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir Hastings
+Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in
+succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House. I
+have been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like this. I
+wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought
+to, you know), and I was looking forward to it. And now the state of
+the house! the way I'm received! the casual impudence of that woman
+Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione might at least have been here:
+some preparation might have been made for me. You must excuse my
+going on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and
+disillusioned: and if I had realized it was to be like this, I wouldn't
+have come. I have a great mind to go away without another word [she is
+on the point of weeping].
+
+ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me either.
+I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady Utterword? My
+luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone.
+
+The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese lacquer and
+a very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally on the end of the
+table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor
+against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. Ellie
+pours out a cup greedily.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must fetch
+another cup [he makes for the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. Papa!
+Don't you know me? I'm your daughter.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [He vanishes
+through the half door].
+
+Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.
+
+ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don't be so distressed. Have this cup
+of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to
+me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to
+me. Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
+
+The captain returns with another cup.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can't have forgotten me. I am
+Ariadne. I'm little Paddy Patkins. Won't you kiss me? [She goes to him
+and throws her arms round his neck].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You
+are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been away,
+Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing
+strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But I'm your daughter. You haven't seen me for years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home, we have
+to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure
+them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence
+by dwelling on their vices. That is how I have come to think my absent
+daughter Ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself
+here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the
+room].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very
+well, papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for
+herself].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn? Billy
+Dunn?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on the
+sofa].
+
+ELLIE [protesting]. No--
+
+Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?
+
+NURSE. You've actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh, miss,
+he didn't forget you after all! You HAVE made an impression.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in
+this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her
+children are not youthful.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this
+house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that
+might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were
+certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
+
+NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady
+Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? Do you
+hear?
+
+NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I'll tell them all they must call you My
+Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having servants
+with no manners?
+
+ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. Lady
+Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don't ask me. You can see for yourself that I've
+just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years' absence! and it
+seems that I am not expected.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or
+not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I'll find a room for
+her myself [he makes for the door].
+
+ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please--[He goes out]. Lady
+Utterword, I don't know what to do. Your father persists in believing
+that my father is some sailor who robbed him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My father is a
+very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of
+course he is worse. And I must warn you that it is sometimes very hard
+to feel quite sure that he really forgets.
+
+Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces Ellie. She
+is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and even better looking.
+She has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, and
+a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders
+in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a
+rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque
+contour.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long
+have you been here? I've been at home all the time: I was putting
+flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down for a moment
+to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off to sleep. Papa woke
+me and told me you were here. Fancy your finding no one, and being
+neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her again]. My poor love! [She
+deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile Ariadne has left the table and
+come over to claim her share of attention]. Oh! you've brought someone
+with you. Introduce me.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don't know me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face quite
+well. Where have we met?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Didn't Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is really too
+much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [Rising
+angrily]. I'll go straight to a hotel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious
+goodness, you don't mean to say that you're Addy!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don't think I can be so
+changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real
+affection for me. And Papa didn't think me even worth mentioning!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the chair
+instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You DO look
+a swell. You're much handsomer than you used to be. You've made the
+acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to marry a perfect hog
+of a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church
+mouse; and you must help me to stop her.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man's coming here today with your father
+to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case
+in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret of it?
+
+ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don't know how wonderfully good he
+was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable man,
+Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who
+knew Ellie's grandparents. They were both poets, like the Brownings; and
+when her father came into the world Mazzini said, "Another soldier born
+for freedom!" So they christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting
+for freedom in his quiet way ever since. That's why he is so poor.
+
+ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in it, and
+marry someone you love?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are you going
+to kiss me or are you not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I DON'T want to be kissed; but I do want you to behave
+properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been separated for
+twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate the
+smell of powder.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling--[she is interrupted by the return of
+the captain].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The sheets
+were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the
+port side].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or take
+them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne's old room.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That little hole!
+I am entitled to the best spare room.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She told me
+she would marry anyone to get away from home.
+
+LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I will
+leave the house.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man with
+bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in a blue
+serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a
+soft black hat of clerical cut.
+
+ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through
+the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else.
+I will have it out with Papa now, this instant. [To Mazzini]. Excuse me.
+[She follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns
+it].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come, Mr
+Dunn! You don't mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter, you know,
+but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have some delightful
+talks with him.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He draws
+her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs Hushabye, for
+your kindness to my daughter. I'm afraid she would have had no holiday
+if you had not invited her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract young
+people to the house for us.
+
+MAZZINI [smiling]. I'm afraid Ellie is not interested in young men, Mrs
+Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. Won't
+you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find a cupboard for coats
+and hats and things in the corner of the hall.
+
+MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes--thank you--I had better-- [he
+goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!
+
+ELLIE. Who?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. "Graver,
+solider tastes," indeed!
+
+ELLIE [aghast]. You don't mean that you were speaking like that of my
+father!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.
+
+ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns to the
+door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I'll tell your father why.
+
+ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this, Mrs
+Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.
+
+ELLIE. Certainly not now?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I'll tell your father.
+
+ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair--if you take his part against me and
+against your own heart for a moment, I'll give that born soldier of
+freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head
+for a week.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know--
+
+She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you'd like to know. Excuse
+me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little confused by
+his manner. He is making Mangan help him with something in the garden;
+and he wants me too--
+
+A powerful whistle is heard.
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].
+
+MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me. [He
+hurries out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don't understand. My father and Mr
+Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't care what they were: we must sit down if you are
+going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at Ellie's waist, and
+makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. Now, pettikins, tell me all
+about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss Mangan, don't they? He is a Napoleon
+of industry and disgustingly rich, isn't he? Why isn't your father rich?
+
+ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His parents
+were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not
+afford to give him a profession.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy
+rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business. Hasn't he
+succeeded in it?
+
+ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some
+capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads
+and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same
+difficulty of not having capital enough. I don't know how to describe it
+to you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.
+
+ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn't it? I shouldn't
+have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have pulled
+hard--[between her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.
+
+ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr Mangan
+did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father
+and respect for his character. He asked him how much capital he wanted,
+and gave it to him. I don't mean that he lent it to him, or that he
+invested it in his business. He just simply made him a present of it.
+Wasn't that splendid of him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never even
+seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely disinterested.
+Pure generosity.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman's pardon. Well, what became of the
+money?
+
+ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I went
+to another school for two years.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?
+
+ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly
+ruined.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. I never could understand. But it was dreadful. When
+we were poor my father had never been in debt. But when he launched out
+into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. When the
+business went into liquidation he owed more money than Mr Mangan had
+given him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.
+
+ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. I was
+quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have picked up
+so much slang from the children that I am really hardly presentable. I
+suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. The
+business turned out a great success. It now pays forty-four per cent
+after deducting the excess profits tax.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren't you rolling in money?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my father
+was made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded
+several of his friends to put money into the business. He was sure it
+would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. But they all
+lost their money. It was dreadful. I don't know what we should have done
+but for Mr Mangan.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after all his
+money being thrown away?
+
+ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. He
+bought what was left of the business--the buildings and the machinery
+and things--from the official trustee for enough money to enable my
+father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his discharge.
+Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was an
+honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead
+of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan started a company to take up the
+business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation;
+for I wasn't earning anything then.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the tender
+passion?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair one
+night at a sort of people's concert. I was singing there. As an amateur,
+you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores.
+He was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with
+me. I never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when I took him home and
+introduced him to my father, his own manager. It was then that my father
+told me how nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great
+chance for me, as he is so rich. And--and--we drifted into a sort
+of understanding--I suppose I should call it an engagement--[she is
+distressed and cannot go on].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted into it;
+but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to
+do with it.
+
+ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it's no use. I am bound in honor and gratitude.
+I will go through with it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know, of
+course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don't
+love. Do you love this Mangan man?
+
+ELLIE. Yes. At least--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't want to know about "at least": I want to know
+the worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible
+people, especially old people.
+
+ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away
+intolerantly to starboard]. --grateful to him for his kindness to dear
+father. I know. Anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. What do you mean?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. Of course not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She
+picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at
+Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you're not in love with an actor?
+
+ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn't it? Why else should you be reading
+Othello?
+
+ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.
+
+MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your father
+does seem to be about the limit.
+
+ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That seems to
+me so extraordinary. I like Othello.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn't he?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is horrible.
+But don't you think it must have been a wonderful experience for
+Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been
+out in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible
+adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit
+and talk with her and tell her about them?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's your idea of romance, is it?
+
+ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.
+
+Ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs
+Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa
+and resumes her seat beside her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories
+that Othello told Desdemona couldn't have happened--?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But they
+didn't.
+
+ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a sphinx: I
+never know what you mean.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you
+know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!
+
+ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?
+
+ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who
+have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white,
+and very handsome, and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew
+there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about
+Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him.
+
+ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don't want to
+make a secret of it, though of course I don't tell everybody. Besides, I
+don't know him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't know him! What does that mean?
+
+ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh?
+
+ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite--almost intimately.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You don't know him; and you know him almost intimately.
+How lucid!
+
+ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I--I got into conversation
+with him by chance at a concert.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts,
+Ellie.
+
+ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our
+turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. But
+he was only one of the committee. I happened to tell him that I was
+copying a picture at the National Gallery. I make a little money that
+way. I can't paint much; but as it's always the same picture I can do it
+pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. It happened that he
+came to the National Gallery one day.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One students' day. Paid sixpence to stumble about through
+a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and
+found the floor clear! Quite by accident?
+
+ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He knows
+lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are all in love
+with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the National Gallery
+and persuade me to come with him for a drive round Richmond Park in a
+taxi.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It's wonderful what
+you good girls can do without anyone saying a word.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn't make acquaintances in
+that way I shouldn't have any at all.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself.
+May I ask his name?
+
+ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid name!
+
+ELLIE. Oh, I'm so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was afraid it
+was only a silly fancy of my own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?
+
+ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique chest--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A what?
+
+ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a
+night of the most terrible thunderstorm.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get into
+it because he was afraid of the lightning?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was
+embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!
+
+ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. --de Rougemont?
+
+ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A vicomte.
+His life has been one long romance. A tiger--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the tiger
+from a hunting party: one of King Edward's hunting parties in India.
+The King was furious: that was why he never had his military services
+properly recognized. But he doesn't care. He is a Socialist and despises
+rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You, Ellie, of
+all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward,
+good girl.
+
+ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don't believe
+me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don't believe you. You're inventing every word
+of it. Do you take me for a fool?
+
+Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye is
+puzzled.
+
+ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I'm very sorry. I see now that it sounds very
+improbable as I tell it. But I can't stay if you think that way about
+me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan't go. I couldn't be so
+mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has really told
+you all this.
+
+ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don't say that you don't believe him. I
+couldn't bear that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest. But you
+should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back to her seat].
+Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. I'm not so foolish. I don't fall in love with people. I'm
+not so silly as you think.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about--to give some
+interest and pleasure to life.
+
+ELLIE. Just so. That's all, really.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? No tedious waiting
+to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad
+night. How delightful it makes waking up in the morning! How much better
+than the happiest dream! All life transfigured! No more wishing one had
+an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any
+book! No desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be
+alone and just think about it.
+
+ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know? Oh,
+you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy you!
+and how I pity you!
+
+ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?
+
+A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing
+a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate
+walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at
+sight of the women on the sofa.
+
+ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this is Mr
+Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.
+
+ELLIE. But now--[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa].
+Steady, my pettikins.
+
+THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his
+hat and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is Hector
+Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man
+would care to confess to. I never use it when I can possibly help it. I
+have been away for nearly a month; and I had no idea you knew my wife,
+or that you were coming here. I am none the less delighted to find you
+in our little house.
+
+ELLIE [in great distress]. I don't know what to do. Please, may I speak
+to papa? Do leave me. I can't bear it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. I--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.
+
+HECTOR. If you think it better--[he goes out, taking his hat with him
+but leaving the stick on the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now, pettikins,
+he is gone. There's nobody but me. You can let yourself go. Don't try to
+control yourself. Have a good cry.
+
+ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were going to
+be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.
+
+ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a fool.
+[Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She begins prowling to
+and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young women
+can resist Hector. I couldn't when I was your age. He is really rather
+splendid, you know.
+
+ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But
+how can you love a liar?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there
+wouldn't be much love in the world.
+
+ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you please.
+If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector's courage, he will go straight
+off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself
+that he isn't a coward. He has a dreadful trick of getting out of one
+third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. He
+has a whole drawerful of Albert Medals for saving people's lives.
+
+ELLIE. He never told me that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can't
+bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his stories are
+made-up stories.
+
+ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and really
+has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and
+that never happened?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don't have their virtues and
+vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.
+
+ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There's something odd about this
+house, Hesione, and even about you. I don't know why I'm talking to
+you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that
+heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It's only life educating you, pettikins.
+How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?
+
+ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh, how can
+you remind me of him, Hesione?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You don't
+mind now, do you, dear?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.
+
+Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.
+
+HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One second
+more, and she would have been a dead woman!
+
+MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye has
+just been telling me the most extraordinary--
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room].
+
+HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I'll tell it to you after dinner.
+I think you'll like it. The truth is I made it up for you, and was
+looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. But in a moment
+of impatience at being turned out of the room, I threw it away on your
+father.
+
+ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench, scornfully
+self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes it. I should not
+have believed it.
+
+MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of course
+she does not really think that. [He goes to the bookshelves, and
+inspects the titles of the volumes].
+
+Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan,
+carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs' meeting, is
+about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing
+a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion,
+straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it
+is impossible to describe them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. Says his
+name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. Men
+seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the
+pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own
+way than try to explain.
+
+MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she
+indicates Hector].
+
+MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. Very
+pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have not found the
+journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.
+
+HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].
+
+ELLIE. You haven't shown me my room yet, Hesione.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite at home,
+Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the captain in the
+pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr Mangan.
+
+She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You're going to marry Dunn's daughter. Don't. You're
+too old.
+
+MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That's fairly blunt, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's true.
+
+MANGAN. She doesn't think so.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.
+
+MANGAN. Older men than I have--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him].--made fools of
+themselves. That, also, is true.
+
+MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don't see that this is any business of
+yours.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody's business. The stars in their courses
+are shaken when such things happen.
+
+MANGAN. I'm going to marry her all the same.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?
+
+MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I never
+made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn't bring it off. That's the
+sort of man I am; and there will be a better understanding between us
+when you make up your mind to that, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you
+make a hundred thousand a year.
+
+MANGAN. I don't boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred
+thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand
+to him and call him brother.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?
+
+MANGAN. No. I can't say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from Mangan with
+his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the Chinese
+tray].
+
+MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don't quite understand
+my position here. I came here on your daughter's invitation. Am I in her
+house or in yours?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of
+God. What is true within these walls is true outside them. Go out on the
+seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. She is still too
+young.
+
+MANGAN [weakening]. But I'm very little over fifty.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan, you will
+not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away into the pantry].
+
+MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate's child? What are
+you talking about?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry her.
+
+MANGAN. Who will stop me?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door leading
+to the hall].
+
+MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she brought me
+down here to break it off?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing more than
+I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry
+a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one
+myself for two years.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I am damned!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The negress
+redeemed me.
+
+MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of talking.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It's the other sort of talking that makes
+quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.
+
+A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners
+proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has an
+engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is
+found to be at least over forty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no
+knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the bell
+ring? The door is open.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you [he makes
+for the door].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I'm afraid you don't know who I am.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make distinctions
+between one fellow creature and another? [He goes out. Mangan and the
+newcomer stare at one another].
+
+MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Very.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has arrived
+and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione's feelings! May I ask are you a member of
+the family?
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, Hesione.
+[Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same moment the
+captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my kissing your
+daughter, Captain, when I tell you that--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as much
+as you like [he makes for the pantry].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and
+turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but
+probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago-- that your younger
+daughter married a numskull?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she'd marry anybody to get away from
+this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is no longer
+like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been boiled in bread
+and milk for years and years, like other married men. Poor devil! [He
+disappears into the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him].
+I don't believe you are Hastings Utterword.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am Randall
+Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I was abroad
+diplomatizing when he was married.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe
+in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must lock it
+up--[recognizing the stranger with a shock] Randall, how dare you? [She
+marches at him past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and joins Mangan near the
+sofa].
+
+RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?
+
+RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at Claridge's;
+so I followed you down here. You are looking extremely well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't presume to tell me so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no right
+to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the
+window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and
+looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie are now seen strolling
+together].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I beg
+your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a perfect fool of
+myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.
+
+MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman walking in
+the garden with Miss Dunn?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. She quarrelled mortally with my husband only
+ten minutes ago; and I didn't know anyone else had come. It must be a
+visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh, it is Hector. They've
+made it up.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man?
+
+RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One's husband never is, Ariadne
+[he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One's sister's husband always is, Mr Randall.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are just as
+bad.
+
+Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. Randall
+rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. Hector comes
+forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very best.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.
+
+HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?
+
+HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful
+admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought-- [pulling himself
+together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I am extremely glad
+to welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave
+courtesy].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law;
+and have done with it. [She leaves them to themselves].
+
+HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not only to
+hospitality but to civilization.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands
+cordially].
+
+Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie]. Your
+father has washed himself.
+
+ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the pantry
+window.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and
+brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and Mrs
+Hushabye.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut--oh, I forgot:
+you've met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie's hand, and beaming at
+his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She is my daughter.
+[He draws her arm through his caressingly].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister's--er--
+
+RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn. How do
+you do?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.
+
+HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don't introduce us any more. [He moves away
+to the big chair, and adds] Won't you sit down, Lady Utterword? [She
+does so very graciously].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it's like making people show their
+tickets.
+
+MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The great
+question is, not who we are, but what we are.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?
+
+MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.
+
+MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in?
+Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance of a
+city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through
+the garden].
+
+DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or a
+murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must really go
+and explain. [He follows the captain].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It's no use. You'd really better-- [but Dunn
+has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for some tea. We
+never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the
+servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen veranda is the best place
+to ask. May I show you? [She goes to the starboard door].
+
+RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don't think I'll take any tea
+this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. There's nothing to see in the garden except papa's
+observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and
+things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of doors; so come
+along.
+
+RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn't that rather risky?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a
+thunderstorm.
+
+LADY UTTERORRD. That's something new. What is the dynamite for?
+
+HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is trying to
+discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well
+of a Mahatma.
+
+ELLIE. The captain's tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that you've
+had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before you were ten
+minutes in the house?
+
+ELLIE. I did.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].
+
+MANGAN. Won't you come, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. I'm too tired. I'll take a book up to my room and rest a little.
+[She goes to the bookshelf].
+
+MANGAN. Right. You can't do better. But I'm disappointed. [He follows
+Randall and Mrs Hushabye].
+
+Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to Lady
+Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.
+
+ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of
+adventure, Lady Utterword?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.
+
+ELLIE. Then I'll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through the
+hall].
+
+HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I have to
+tell her!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what did you
+mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? What did you
+think?
+
+HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. May I
+tell you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.
+
+HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of saying, "I
+thought you were a plain woman."
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to notice
+whether I am plain or not?
+
+HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only photographs
+of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the
+daughters of that supernatural old man. There is some damnable quality
+in them that destroys men's moral sense, and carries them beyond honor
+and dishonor. You know that, don't you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once for all
+that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think because I'm a
+Shotover that I'm a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian.
+But I'm not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No child brought up in a
+strict Puritan household ever suffered from Puritanism as I suffered
+from our Bohemianism.
+
+HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in the
+houses of their respectable schoolfellows.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.
+
+HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. But
+intelligent people can always manage, unless they are Bohemians.
+
+HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your
+attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count
+yourself?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure
+you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly
+correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just
+what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance.
+An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of
+any woman worth knowing.
+
+HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. You
+are a dangerous woman.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.
+
+HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am not
+making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you had better
+know how I feel if you are going to stay here.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, Hector. And
+terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself, at that game. Is it
+quite understood that we are only playing?
+
+HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer
+worthlessness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my brother-in-law,
+Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in his arms and kisses her
+strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [She
+pushes him suddenly away]. You shall not do that again.
+
+HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended.
+
+MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don't let me disturb you; I
+only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting; and he'll catch
+cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has actually
+condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the garden: it's cooler
+now [she goes out by the port door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don't believe any man can kiss
+Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the hall].
+
+HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain's cap.
+
+HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. Where's Miss
+Dunn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. Addy
+won't let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.
+
+HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love
+to her automatically. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't
+hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with
+me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get
+landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm
+not a bit in earnest.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in her
+life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. She
+is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me.
+
+HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such an
+amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I believe that
+is why I have never been able to repeat it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were frightfully in
+love with one another, Hector. It was such an enchanting dream that I
+have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. I have
+invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving
+you another turn. But it has never come off.
+
+HECTOR. I don't know that I want it to come off. It was damned
+dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven. This
+sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is hell. I shall
+kill her if she persists.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a horse.
+[Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.
+
+HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?
+
+HECTOR. I presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than by
+Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it
+with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there, daddiest?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You've been to the gravel pit. Don't drop it about the
+house, there's a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the evening
+light is now very red].
+
+HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a feeling
+without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of
+your life?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes into the
+pantry].
+
+Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. He
+does not move for some time. Then he folds his arms. Then, throwing his
+hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically
+once to and fro. Suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak
+table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate
+duel with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him
+through the body up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on
+the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight
+into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says
+in a deep and thrilling tone, "Do you love me!" The captain comes out
+of the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with his arms stretched
+out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going
+through a series of gymnastic exercises.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will never be as
+strong as a gorilla.
+
+HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.
+
+HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite than you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.
+
+HECTOR. And that you can, eh?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+HECTOR. What's the use of that? You never do attain it.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept forever in
+the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for
+greasing their bristles and filling their snouts?
+
+HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both.
+I refuse to die until I have invented the means.
+
+HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do,
+unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They
+know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves.
+When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them.
+
+HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a very nice
+daughter. Mangan's son may be a Plato: Randall's a Shelley. What was my
+father?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces the
+drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of
+color].
+
+HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.
+
+HECTOR. Just so--we are members one of another. [He throws himself
+carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought of this killing
+of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel
+in the lion's den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always
+survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as
+they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the
+lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and
+the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What
+are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I'll
+spare them in sheer--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?
+
+HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that
+my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their
+door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can't spare them until you have the power to kill
+them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions
+of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They're
+going to do it. They're doing it already.
+
+HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the
+sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half
+of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these
+people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having
+the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they
+bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and
+singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
+
+HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be such a
+demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left you
+nothing but dreams, as some women do.
+
+HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it
+accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands of the shrew
+and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [Walking
+distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must think these things out.
+[Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will
+discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the
+ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at
+me. And I must hurry. I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is
+about to go into the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when
+Hesione comes back].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to
+entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting about?
+
+HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is madder
+than usual.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.
+
+HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back. [They
+return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.
+
+HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent
+lifeboat I invented?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since Easter!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous
+extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve
+thousand for the invention before that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic
+keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot
+afford life-saving inventions. Can't you think of something that will
+murder half Europe at one bang?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on
+slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn't your husband invent
+something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
+
+HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However, you are
+right: I ought to support my wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should never
+see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.
+
+HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor
+husbands?
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is anyhow!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It sticks
+in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you are.
+
+HECTOR. You are your father's daughter, Hesione.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in generals:
+they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel and wind in a
+machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. Saved! You
+are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these dreadful people
+and entertain them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don't forget that.
+
+HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them.
+The servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the
+house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a house!
+What a daughter!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!
+
+HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?
+
+HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their firesides,
+their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. Why are they
+not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them
+into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to
+be even with us?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].
+
+      I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors
+            thereof,
+      That men might come for their choosing, and their betters
+            spring from their love;
+      But one of them married a numskull;
+
+HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].
+
+      The other a liar wed;
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].
+
+      And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where are
+you?
+
+HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the
+garden].
+
+The captain goes back to his place at the table.
+
+HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the
+light.
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn. Ellie
+comes in, followed by Mangan. Both are dressed for dinner. She strolls
+to the drawing-table. He comes between the table and the wicker chair.
+
+MANGAN. What a dinner! I don't call it a dinner: I call it a meal.
+
+ELLIE. I am accustomed to meals, Mr Mangan, and very lucky to get them.
+Besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me.
+
+MANGAN [shuddering liverishly]. Too rich: I can't eat such things. I
+suppose it's because I have to work so much with my brain. That's the
+worst of being a man of business: you are always thinking, thinking,
+thinking. By the way, now that we are alone, may I take the opportunity
+to come to a little understanding with you?
+
+ELLIE [settling into the draughtsman's seat]. Certainly. I should like
+to.
+
+MANGAN [taken aback]. Should you? That surprises me; for I thought I
+noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you could. Not for the
+first time either.
+
+ELLIE. I was very tired and upset. I wasn't used to the ways of this
+extraordinary house. Please forgive me.
+
+MANGAN. Oh, that's all right: I don't mind. But Captain Shotover has
+been talking to me about you. You and me, you know.
+
+ELLIE [interested]. The captain! What did he say?
+
+MANGAN. Well, he noticed the difference between our ages.
+
+ELLIE. He notices everything.
+
+MANGAN. You don't mind, then?
+
+ELLIE. Of course I know quite well that our engagement--
+
+MANGAN. Oh! you call it an engagement.
+
+ELLIE. Well, isn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. This is the
+first time you've used the word; and I didn't quite know where we stood:
+that's all. [He sits down in the wicker chair; and resigns himself to
+allow her to lead the conversation]. You were saying--?
+
+ELLIE. Was I? I forget. Tell me. Do you like this part of the country? I
+heard you ask Mr Hushabye at dinner whether there are any nice houses to
+let down here.
+
+MANGAN. I like the place. The air suits me. I shouldn't be surprised if
+I settled down here.
+
+ELLIE. Nothing would please me better. The air suits me too. And I want
+to be near Hesione.
+
+MANGAN [with growing uneasiness]. The air may suit us; but the question
+is, should we suit one another? Have you thought about that?
+
+ELLIE. Mr Mangan, we must be sensible, mustn't we? It's no use
+pretending that we are Romeo and Juliet. But we can get on very well
+together if we choose to make the best of it. Your kindness of heart
+will make it easy for me.
+
+MANGAN [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like deliberate
+unpleasantness in his voice]. Kindness of heart, eh? I ruined your
+father, didn't I?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not intentionally.
+
+MANGAN. Yes I did. Ruined him on purpose.
+
+ELLIE. On purpose!
+
+MANGAN. Not out of ill-nature, you know. And you'll admit that I kept a
+job for him when I had finished with him. But business is business; and
+I ruined him as a matter of business.
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand how that can be. Are you trying to make me
+feel that I need not be grateful to you, so that I may choose freely?
+
+MANGAN [rising aggressively]. No. I mean what I say.
+
+ELLIE. But how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my father? The
+money he lost was yours.
+
+MANGAN [with a sour laugh]. Was mine! It is mine, Miss Ellie, and all
+the money the other fellows lost too. [He shoves his hands into his
+pockets and shows his teeth]. I just smoked them out like a hive of
+bees. What do you say to that? A bit of shock, eh?
+
+ELLIE. It would have been, this morning. Now! you can't think how little
+it matters. But it's quite interesting. Only, you must explain it to me.
+I don't understand it. [Propping her elbows on the drawingboard and her
+chin on her hands, she composes herself to listen with a combination of
+conscious curiosity with unconscious contempt which provokes him to more
+and more unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance].
+
+MANGAN. Of course you don't understand: what do you know about business?
+You just listen and learn. Your father's business was a new business;
+and I don't start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They
+put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. They
+wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them.
+They're what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing
+is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In
+a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out
+to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if
+they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very
+same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple
+of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third
+lot. If it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too,
+and leave their work and their money behind them. And that's where the
+real business man comes in: where I come in. But I'm cleverer than some:
+I don't mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your
+father's measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work
+himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child
+in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too
+great a hurry to wait for his market. I knew that the surest way to
+ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. I
+explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money;
+for I take no risks in ideas, even when they're my own. Your father and
+the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than
+a heap of squeezed lemons. You've been wasting your gratitude: my kind
+heart is all rot. I'm sick of it. When I see your father beaming at
+me with his moist, grateful eyes, regularly wallowing in gratitude, I
+sometimes feel I must tell him the truth or burst. What stops me is that
+I know he wouldn't believe me. He'd think it was my modesty, as you did
+just now. He'd think anything rather than the truth, which is that he's
+a blamed fool, and I am a man that knows how to take care of himself.
+[He throws himself back into the big chair with large self approval].
+Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [dropping her hands]. How strange! that my mother, who knew
+nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you!
+She always said not before papa, of course, but to us children--that you
+were just that sort of man.
+
+MANGAN [sitting up, much hurt]. Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you
+marry me.
+
+ELLIE. Well, you see, Mr Mangan, my mother married a very good man--for
+whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul
+of goodness--and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
+
+MANGAN. Anyhow, you don't want to marry me now, do you?
+
+ELLIE. [very calmly]. Oh, I think so. Why not?
+
+MANGAN. [rising aghast]. Why not!
+
+ELLIE. I don't see why we shouldn't get on very well together.
+
+MANGAN. Well, but look here, you know--[he stops, quite at a loss].
+
+ELLIE. [patiently]. Well?
+
+MANGAN. Well, I thought you were rather particular about people's
+characters.
+
+ELLIE. If we women were particular about men's characters, we should
+never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. A child like you talking of "we women"! What next! You're not in
+earnest?
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I am. Aren't you?
+
+MANGAN. You mean to hold me to it?
+
+ELLIE. Do you wish to back out of it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, no. Not exactly back out of it.
+
+ELLIE. Well?
+
+He has nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops into
+the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. But a
+cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans over towards her on his
+right elbow, and speaks in a low steady voice.
+
+MANGAN. Suppose I told you I was in love with another woman!
+
+ELLIE [echoing him]. Suppose I told you I was in love with another man!
+
+MANGAN [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. I'm not joking.
+
+ELLIE. Who told you I was?
+
+MANGAN. I tell you I'm serious. You're too young to be serious; but
+you'll have to believe me. I want to be near your friend Mrs Hushabye.
+I'm in love with her. Now the murder's out.
+
+ELLIE. I want to be near your friend Mr Hushabye. I'm in love with
+him. [She rises and adds with a frank air] Now we are in one another's
+confidence, we shall be real friends. Thank you for telling me.
+
+MANGAN [almost beside himself]. Do you think I'll be made a convenience
+of like this?
+
+ELLIE. Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father.
+Well, a woman's business is marriage. Why shouldn't I make a domestic
+convenience of you?
+
+MANGAN. Because I don't choose, see? Because I'm not a silly gull like
+your father. That's why.
+
+ELLIE [with serene contempt]. You are not good enough to clean my
+father's boots, Mr Mangan; and I am paying you a great compliment in
+condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. Of course
+you are free to throw over our engagement if you like; but, if you do,
+you'll never enter Hesione's house again: I will take care of that.
+
+MANGAN [gasping]. You little devil, you've done me. [On the point of
+collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. Wait a bit,
+though: you're not so cute as you think. You can't beat Boss Mangan as
+easy as that. Suppose I go straight to Mrs Hushabye and tell her that
+you're in love with her husband.
+
+ELLIE. She knows it.
+
+MANGAN. You told her!!!
+
+ELLIE. She told me.
+
+MANGAN [clutching at his bursting temples]. Oh, this is a crazy house.
+Or else I'm going clean off my chump. Is she making a swop with you--she
+to have your husband and you to have hers?
+
+ELLIE. Well, you don't want us both, do you?
+
+MANGAN [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. My brain won't
+stand it. My head's going to split. Help! Help me to hold it. Quick:
+hold it: squeeze it. Save me. [Ellie comes behind his chair; clasps his
+head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her hands from his forehead
+back to his ears]. Thank you. [Drowsily]. That's very refreshing.
+[Waking a little]. Don't you hypnotize me, though. I've seen men made
+fools of by hypnotism.
+
+ELLIE [steadily]. Be quiet. I've seen men made fools of without
+hypnotism.
+
+MANGAN [humbly]. You don't dislike touching me, I hope. You never
+touched me before, I noticed.
+
+ELLIE. Not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice woman,
+who will never expect you to make love to her. And I will never expect
+him to make love to me.
+
+MANGAN. He may, though.
+
+ELLIE [making her passes rhythmically]. Hush. Go to sleep. Do you hear?
+You are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet, deeply
+deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+He falls asleep. Ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes into
+the garden.
+
+Nurse Guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which comes in
+from the hall.
+
+GUINNESS [speaking to someone outside]. Mr Mangan's not here, duckie:
+there's no one here. It's all dark.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [without]. Try the garden. Mr Dunn and I will be in my
+boudoir. Show him the way.
+
+GUINNESS. Yes, ducky. [She makes for the garden door in the dark;
+stumbles over the sleeping Mangan and screams]. Ahoo! O Lord, Sir! I
+beg your pardon, I'm sure: I didn't see you in the dark. Who is it? [She
+goes back to the door and turns on the light]. Oh, Mr Mangan, sir, I
+hope I haven't hurt you plumping into your lap like that. [Coming to
+him]. I was looking for you, sir. Mrs Hushabye says will you please
+[noticing that he remains quite insensible]. Oh, my good Lord, I hope
+I haven't killed him. Sir! Mr Mangan! Sir! [She shakes him; and he is
+rolling inertly off the chair on the floor when she holds him up and
+props him against the cushion]. Miss Hessy! Miss Hessy! quick, doty
+darling. Miss Hessy! [Mrs Hushabye comes in from the hall, followed by
+Mazzini Dunn]. Oh, Miss Hessy, I've been and killed him.
+
+Mazzini runs round the back of the chair to Mangan's right hand, and
+sees that the nurse's words are apparently only too true.
+
+MAZZINI. What tempted you to commit such a crime, woman?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [trying not to laugh]. Do you mean, you did it on purpose?
+
+GUINNESS. Now is it likely I'd kill any man on purpose? I fell over
+him in the dark; and I'm a pretty tidy weight. He never spoke nor moved
+until I shook him; and then he would have dropped dead on the floor.
+Isn't it tiresome?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past the nurse to Mangan's side, and inspecting him
+less credulously than Mazzini]. Nonsense! he is not dead: he is only
+asleep. I can see him breathing.
+
+GUINNESS. But why won't he wake?
+
+MAZZINI [speaking very politely into Mangan's ear]. Mangan! My dear
+Mangan! [he blows into Mangan's ear].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's no good [she shakes him vigorously]. Mr Mangan,
+wake up. Do you hear? [He begins to roll over]. Oh! Nurse, nurse: he's
+falling: help me.
+
+Nurse Guinness rushes to the rescue. With Mazzini's assistance, Mangan
+is propped safely up again.
+
+GUINNESS [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with her
+nose]. Would he be drunk, do you think, pet?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Had he any of papa's rum?
+
+MAZZINI. It can't be that: he is most abstemious. I am afraid he drank
+too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. You know, Mrs
+Hushabye, I really think he has been hypnotized.
+
+GUINNESS. Hip no what, sir?
+
+MAZZINI. One evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing
+performance, the children began playing at it; and Ellie stroked my
+head. I assure you I went off dead asleep; and they had to send for a
+professional to wake me up after I had slept eighteen hours. They had to
+carry me upstairs; and as the poor children were not very strong, they
+let me slip; and I rolled right down the whole flight and never woke up.
+[Mrs Hushabye splutters]. Oh, you may laugh, Mrs Hushabye; but I might
+have been killed.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I couldn't have helped laughing even if you had been, Mr
+Dunn. So Ellie has hypnotized him. What fun!
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. It was such a terrible lesson to her: nothing
+would induce her to try such a thing again.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who did it? I didn't.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought perhaps the captain might have done it
+unintentionally. He is so fearfully magnetic: I feel vibrations whenever
+he comes close to me.
+
+GUINNESS. The captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: I'll back him
+for that. I'll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Wait a bit. [To Mazzini]. You say he is all right for
+eighteen hours?
+
+MAZZINI. Well, I was asleep for eighteen hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Were you any the worse for it?
+
+MAZZINI. I don't quite remember. They had poured brandy down my throat,
+you see; and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quite. Anyhow, you survived. Nurse, darling: go and ask
+Miss Dunn to come to us here. Say I want to speak to her particularly.
+You will find her with Mr Hushabye probably.
+
+GUINNESS. I think not, ducky: Miss Addy is with him. But I'll find her
+and send her to you. [She goes out into the garden].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [calling Mazzini's attention to the figure on the chair].
+Now, Mr Dunn, look. Just look. Look hard. Do you still intend to
+sacrifice your daughter to that thing?
+
+MAZZINI [troubled]. You have completely upset me, Mrs Hushabye, by all
+you have said to me. That anyone could imagine that I--I, a consecrated
+soldier of freedom, if I may say so--could sacrifice Ellie to anybody or
+anyone, or that I should ever have dreamed of forcing her inclinations
+in any way, is a most painful blow to my--well, I suppose you would say
+to my good opinion of myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rather stolidly]. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI [looking forlornly at the body]. What is your objection to
+poor Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then I am so
+accustomed to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the brute!
+Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver,
+who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to
+his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of
+iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women
+and girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry,
+I think you call him, don't you? Are you going to fling your delicate,
+sweet, helpless child into such a beast's claws just because he will
+keep her in an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how
+rich he is?
+
+MAZZINI [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. Bless you, dear Mrs
+Hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! Poor dear Mangan
+isn't a bit like that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [scornfully]. Poor dear Mangan indeed!
+
+MAZZINI. But he doesn't know anything about machinery. He never goes
+near the men: he couldn't manage them: he is afraid of them. I never can
+get him to take the least interest in the works: he hardly knows more
+about them than you do. People are cruelly unjust to Mangan: they think
+he is all rugged strength just because his manners are bad.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you mean to tell me he isn't strong enough to crush
+poor little Ellie?
+
+MAZZINI. Of course it's very hard to say how any marriage will turn out;
+but speaking for myself, I should say that he won't have a dog's chance
+against Ellie. You know, Ellie has remarkable strength of character. I
+think it is because I taught her to like Shakespeare when she was very
+young.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [contemptuously]. Shakespeare! The next thing you will tell
+me is that you could have made a great deal more money than Mangan. [She
+retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port end of it in the worst of
+humors].
+
+MAZZINI [following her and taking the other end]. No: I'm no good at
+making money. I don't care enough for it, somehow. I'm not ambitious!
+that must be it. Mangan is wonderful about money: he thinks of nothing
+else. He is so dreadfully afraid of being poor. I am always thinking of
+other things: even at the works I think of the things we are doing and
+not of what they cost. And the worst of it is, poor Mangan doesn't know
+what to do with his money when he gets it. He is such a baby that he
+doesn't know even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating
+and drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all. Ellie
+will diet him splendidly. You will be surprised when you come to know
+him better: he is really the most helpless of mortals. You get quite a
+protective feeling towards him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who manages his business, pray?
+
+MAZZINI. I do. And of course other people like me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Footling people, you mean.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose you'd think us so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And pray why don't you do without him if you're all so
+much cleverer?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, we couldn't: we should ruin the business in a year. I've
+tried; and I know. We should spend too much on everything. We should
+improve the quality of the goods and make them too dear. We should be
+sentimental about the hard cases among the work people. But Mangan keeps
+us in order. He is down on us about every extra halfpenny. We could
+never do without him. You see, he will sit up all night thinking of how
+to save sixpence. Won't Ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his
+house in hand!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of
+industry!
+
+MAZZINI. I am afraid all the captains of industry are what you call
+frauds, Mrs Hushabye. Of course there are some manufacturers who really
+do understand their own works; but they don't make as high a rate of
+profit as Mangan does. I assure you Mangan is quite a good fellow in his
+way. He means well.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He doesn't look well. He is not in his first youth, is he?
+
+MAZZINI. After all, no husband is in his first youth for very long, Mrs
+Hushabye. And men can't afford to marry in their first youth nowadays.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can't you
+say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why don't you
+inspire everybody with confidence? with respect?
+
+MAZZINI [humbly]. I think that what is the matter with me is that I am
+poor. You don't know what that means at home. Mind: I don't say they
+have ever complained. They've all been wonderful: they've been proud of
+my poverty. They've even joked about it quite often. But my wife has had
+a very poor time of it. She has been quite resigned--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shuddering involuntarily!]
+
+MAZZINI. There! You see, Mrs Hushabye. I don't want Ellie to live on
+resignation.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want her to have to resign herself to living with a
+man she doesn't love?
+
+MAZZINI [wistfully]. Are you sure that would be worse than living with a
+man she did love, if he was a footling person?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite interested in
+Mazzini now]. You know, I really think you must love Ellie very much;
+for you become quite clever when you talk about her.
+
+MAZZINI. I didn't know I was so very stupid on other subjects.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are, sometimes.
+
+MAZZINI [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. I have learnt a
+good deal about myself from you, Mrs Hushabye; and I'm afraid I shall
+not be the happier for your plain speaking. But if you thought I needed
+it to make me think of Ellie's happiness you were very much mistaken.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [leaning towards him kindly]. Have I been a beast?
+
+MAZZINI [pulling himself together]. It doesn't matter about me, Mrs
+Hushabye. I think you like Ellie; and that is enough for me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I'm beginning to like you a little. I perfectly loathed
+you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome
+elderly prig I ever met.
+
+MAZZINI [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. I daresay I am all that.
+I never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you. They always
+frighten me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [pleased]. Am I a gorgeous woman, Mazzini? I shall fall in
+love with you presently.
+
+MAZZINI [with placid gallantry]. No, you won't, Hesione. But you would
+be quite safe. Would you believe it that quite a lot of women have
+flirted with me because I am quite safe? But they get tired of me for
+the same reason.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. Take care. You may not be so safe as you
+think.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh yes, quite safe. You see, I have been in love really: the
+sort of love that only happens once. [Softly]. That's why Ellie is such
+a lovely girl.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, really, you are coming out. Are you quite sure you
+won't let me tempt you into a second grand passion?
+
+MAZZINI. Quite. It wouldn't be natural. The fact is, you don't strike on
+my box, Mrs Hushabye; and I certainly don't strike on yours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Your marriage was a safety match.
+
+MAZZINI. What a very witty application of the expression I used! I
+should never have thought of it.
+
+Ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. Oh! here is Ellie at last. [She goes behind the
+sofa].
+
+ELLIE [on the threshold of the starboard door]. Guinness said you wanted
+me: you and papa.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You have kept us waiting so long that it almost came
+to--well, never mind. Your father is a very wonderful man [she ruffles
+his hair affectionately]: the only one I ever met who could resist me
+when I made myself really agreeable. [She comes to the big chair, on
+Mangan's left]. Come here. I have something to show you. [Ellie strolls
+listlessly to the other side of the chair]. Look.
+
+ELLIE [contemplating Mangan without interest]. I know. He is only
+asleep. We had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the middle of
+it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You did it, Ellie. You put him asleep.
+
+MAZZINI [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. Oh, I hope
+not. Did you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [wearily]. He asked me to.
+
+MAZZINI. But it's dangerous. You know what happened to me.
+
+ELLIE [utterly indifferent]. Oh, I daresay I can wake him. If not,
+somebody else can.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It doesn't matter, anyhow, because I have at last
+persuaded your father that you don't want to marry him.
+
+ELLIE [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. But why did
+you do that, Hesione? I do want to marry him. I fully intend to marry
+him.
+
+MAZZINI. Are you quite sure, Ellie? Mrs Hushabye has made me feel that I
+may have been thoughtless and selfish about it.
+
+ELLIE [very clearly and steadily]. Papa. When Mrs. Hushabye takes it on
+herself to explain to you what I think or don't think, shut your ears
+tight; and shut your eyes too. Hesione knows nothing about me: she
+hasn't the least notion of the sort of person I am, and never will. I
+promise you I won't do anything I don't want to do and mean to do for my
+own sake.
+
+MAZZINI. You are quite, quite sure?
+
+ELLIE. Quite, quite sure. Now you must go away and leave me to talk to
+Mrs Hushabye.
+
+MAZZINI. But I should like to hear. Shall I be in the way?
+
+ELLIE [inexorable]. I had rather talk to her alone.
+
+MAZZINI [affectionately]. Oh, well, I know what a nuisance parents are,
+dear. I will be good and go. [He goes to the garden door]. By the way,
+do you remember the address of that professional who woke me up? Don't
+you think I had better telegraph to him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [moving towards the sofa]. It's too late to telegraph
+tonight.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose so. I do hope he'll wake up in the course of the
+night. [He goes out into the garden].
+
+ELLIE [turning vigorously on Hesione the moment her father is out of the
+room]. Hesione, what the devil do you mean by making mischief with my
+father about Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [promptly losing her temper]. Don't you dare speak to me
+like that, you little minx. Remember that you are in my house.
+
+ELLIE. Stuff! Why don't you mind your own business? What is it to you
+whether I choose to marry Mangan or not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable little
+matrimonial adventurer?
+
+ELLIE. Every woman who hasn't any money is a matrimonial adventurer.
+It's easy for you to talk: you have never known what it is to want
+money; and you can pick up men as if they were daisies. I am poor and
+respectable--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [interrupting]. Ho! respectable! How did you pick up
+Mangan? How did you pick up my husband? You have the audacity to tell me
+that I am a--a--a--
+
+ELLIE. A siren. So you are. You were born to lead men by the nose: if
+you weren't, Marcus would have waited for me, perhaps.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [suddenly melting and half laughing]. Oh, my poor Ellie, my
+pettikins, my unhappy darling! I am so sorry about Hector. But what can
+I do? It's not my fault: I'd give him to you if I could.
+
+ELLIE. I don't blame you for that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a brute I was to quarrel with you and call you names!
+Do kiss me and say you're not angry with me.
+
+ELLIE [fiercely]. Oh, don't slop and gush and be sentimental. Don't you
+see that unless I can be hard--as hard as nails--I shall go mad? I don't
+care a damn about your calling me names: do you think a woman in my
+situation can feel a few hard words?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor little woman! Poor little situation!
+
+ELLIE. I suppose you think you're being sympathetic. You are just
+foolish and stupid and selfish. You see me getting a smasher right in
+the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best part that can
+never come again; and you think you can help me over it by a little
+coaxing and kissing. When I want all the strength I can get to lean on:
+something iron, something stony, I don't care how cruel it is, you
+go all mushy and want to slobber over me. I'm not angry; I'm not
+unfriendly; but for God's sake do pull yourself together; and don't
+think that because you're on velvet and always have been, women who are
+in hell can take it as easily as you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shrugging her shoulders]. Very well. [She sits down on the
+sofa in her old place.] But I warn you that when I am neither coaxing and
+kissing nor laughing, I am just wondering how much longer I can stand
+living in this cruel, damnable world. You object to the siren: well,
+I drop the siren. You want to rest your wounded bosom against a
+grindstone. Well [folding her arms] here is the grindstone.
+
+ELLIE [sitting down beside her, appeased]. That's better: you really
+have the trick of falling in with everyone's mood; but you don't
+understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom there is only
+one man and only one chance.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I certainly don't understand how your marrying that object
+[indicating Mangan] will console you for not being able to marry Hector.
+
+ELLIE. Perhaps you don't understand why I was quite a nice girl this
+morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, yes, I do. It's because you have made up your mind to
+do something despicable and wicked.
+
+ELLIE. I don't think so, Hesione. I must make the best of my ruined
+house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pooh! You'll get over it. Your house isn't ruined.
+
+ELLIE. Of course I shall get over it. You don't suppose I'm going to sit
+down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a
+pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Association. But my
+heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that
+what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. In
+the world for me there is Marcus and a lot of other men of whom one is
+just the same as another. Well, if I can't have love, that's no reason
+why I should have poverty. If Mangan has nothing else, he has money.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And are there no YOUNG men with money?
+
+ELLIE. Not within my reach. Besides, a young man would have the right
+to expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he found I could
+not give it to him. Rich young men can get rid of their wives, you know,
+pretty cheaply. But this object, as you call him, can expect nothing
+more from me than I am prepared to give him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He will be your owner, remember. If he buys you, he will
+make the bargain pay him and not you. Ask your father.
+
+ELLIE [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their subject].
+You need not trouble on that score, Hesione. I have more to give Boss
+Mangan than he has to give me: it is I who am buying him, and at a
+pretty good price too, I think. Women are better at that sort of bargain
+than men. I have taken the Boss's measure; and ten Boss Mangans shall
+not prevent me doing far more as I please as his wife than I have ever
+been able to do as a poor girl. [Stooping to the recumbent figure].
+Shall they, Boss? I think not. [She passes on to the drawing-table, and
+leans against the end of it, facing the windows]. I shall not have to
+spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last, anyhow.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising superbly]. Ellie, you are a wicked, sordid little
+beast. And to think that I actually condescended to fascinate that
+creature there to save you from him! Well, let me tell you this: if you
+make this disgusting match, you will never see Hector again if I can
+help it.
+
+ELLIE [unmoved]. I nailed Mangan by telling him that if he did not marry
+me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on her wrists and
+seats herself on the end of the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [recoiling]. Oh!
+
+ELLIE. So you see I am not unprepared for your playing that trump
+against me. Well, you just try it: that's all. I should have made a man
+of Marcus, not a household pet.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [flaming]. You dare!
+
+ELLIE [looking almost dangerous]. Set him thinking about me if you dare.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, of all the impudent little fiends I ever met! Hector
+says there is a certain point at which the only answer you can give to a
+man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down. What would you say if
+I were to box your ears?
+
+ELLIE [calmly]. I should pull your hair.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. That wouldn't hurt me. Perhaps it comes
+off at night.
+
+ELLIE [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to her]. Oh,
+you don't mean to say, Hesione, that your beautiful black hair is false?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [patting it]. Don't tell Hector. He believes in it.
+
+ELLIE [groaning]. Oh! Even the hair that ensnared him false! Everything
+false!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pull it and try. Other women can snare men in their hair;
+but I can swing a baby on mine. Aha! you can't do that, Goldylocks.
+
+ELLIE [heartbroken]. No. You have stolen my babies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pettikins, don't make me cry. You know what you said about
+my making a household pet of him is a little true. Perhaps he ought to
+have waited for you. Would any other woman on earth forgive you?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself! [Pulling
+herself together]. There! You couldn't help it: neither of us could help
+it. He couldn't help it. No, don't say anything more: I can't bear it.
+Let us wake the object. [She begins stroking Mangan's head, reversing
+the movement with which she put him to sleep]. Wake up, do you hear? You
+are to wake up at once. Wake up, wake up, wake--
+
+MANGAN [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them]. Wake
+up! So you think I've been asleep, do you? [He kicks the chair violently
+back out of his way, and gets between them]. You throw me into a trance
+so that I can't move hand or foot--I might have been buried alive! it's
+a mercy I wasn't--and then you think I was only asleep. If you'd let
+me drop the two times you rolled me about, my nose would have been
+flattened for life against the floor. But I've found you all out,
+anyhow. I know the sort of people I'm among now. I've heard every word
+you've said, you and your precious father, and [to Mrs Hushabye] you
+too. So I'm an object, am I? I'm a thing, am I? I'm a fool that hasn't
+sense enough to feed myself properly, am I? I'm afraid of the men that
+would starve if it weren't for the wages I give them, am I? I'm nothing
+but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience of by designing
+women and fool managers of my works, am I? I'm--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with the most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr Mangan,
+you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while
+you were pretending to be asleep. It was not meant for you to hear.
+
+MANGAN. Pretending to be asleep! Do you think if I was only pretending
+that I'd have sprawled there helpless, and listened to such unfairness,
+such lies, such injustice and plotting and backbiting and slandering of
+me, if I could have up and told you what I thought of you! I wonder I
+didn't burst.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [sweetly]. You dreamt it all, Mr Mangan. We were only
+saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep. That was all,
+wasn't it, Ellie? Believe me, Mr Mangan, all those unpleasant things
+came into your mind in the last half second before you woke. Ellie
+rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the disagreeable sensation suggested
+a disagreeable dream.
+
+MANGAN [doggedly]. I believe in dreams.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So do I. But they go by contraries, don't they?
+
+MANGAN [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. I shan't forget,
+to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in the
+garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a dirty low mean thing
+to do. You had no right to let me come near you if I disgusted you.
+It isn't my fault if I'm old and haven't a moustache like a bronze
+candlestick as your husband has. There are things no decent woman would
+do to a man--like a man hitting a woman in the breast.
+
+Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with
+her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a
+child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye, at the distressing sound he
+makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. She rises and runs to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't cry: I can't bear it. Have I broken your heart? I
+didn't know you had one. How could I?
+
+MANGAN. I'm a man, ain't I?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly]. Oh no:
+not what I call a man. Only a Boss: just that and nothing else. What
+business has a Boss with a heart?
+
+MANGAN. Then you're not a bit sorry for what you did, nor ashamed?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was ashamed for the first time in my life when you said
+that about hitting a woman in the breast, and I found out what I'd done.
+My very bones blushed red. You've had your revenge, Boss. Aren't you
+satisfied?
+
+MANGAN. Serve you right! Do you hear? Serve you right! You're just
+cruel. Cruel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only find
+some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. By the way [sitting down
+beside him on the arm of the chair], what's your name? It's not really
+Boss, is it?
+
+MANGAN [shortly]. If you want to know, my name's Alfred.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [springs up]. Alfred!! Ellie, he was christened after
+Tennyson!!!
+
+MANGAN [rising]. I was christened after my uncle, and never had a penny
+from him, damn him! What of it?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that
+you had a mother, like anyone else. [Putting her hands on his shoulders
+and surveying him]. Little Alf!
+
+MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little heart, but
+a real one. [Releasing him suddenly]. Now run and make it up with Ellie.
+She has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than I had
+[she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door].
+
+MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.
+
+ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?
+
+MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of anything
+about a man except what they can get out of him? You weren't even
+thinking that about me. You were only thinking whether your gloves would
+last.
+
+ELLIE. I shall not have to think about that when we are married.
+
+MANGAN. And you think I am going to marry you after what I heard there!
+
+ELLIE. You heard nothing from me that I did not tell you before.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps you think I can't do without you.
+
+ELLIE. I think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after coming
+to know us so well.
+
+MANGAN [with something like a yell of despair]. Am I never to have the
+last word?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [appearing at the starboard garden door]. There is a
+soul in torment here. What is the matter?
+
+MANGAN. This girl doesn't want to spend her life wondering how long her
+gloves will last.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [passing through]. Don't wear any. I never do [he goes
+into the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome dinner
+dress]. Is anything the matter?
+
+ELLIE. This gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last word?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [coming forward to the sofa]. I should let him have it,
+my dear. The important thing is not to have the last word, but to have
+your own way.
+
+MANGAN. She wants both.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. She won't get them, Mr Mangan. Providence always has the
+last word.
+
+MANGAN [desperately]. Now you are going to come religion over me. In
+this house a man's mind might as well be a football. I'm going. [He
+makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has
+just emerged from his pantry].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all
+here.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You were welcome to come: you are free to go. The wide
+earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But your things, Mr Mangan. Your bag, your comb and
+brushes, your pyjamas--
+
+HECTOR [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome Arab
+costume]. Why should the escaping slave take his chains with him?
+
+MANGAN. That's right, Hushabye. Keep the pyjamas, my lady, and much good
+may they do you.
+
+HECTOR [advancing to Lady Utterword's left hand]. Let us all go out into
+the night and leave everything behind us.
+
+MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company,
+especially female company.
+
+ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land
+where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its
+latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will certainly not be comfortable without your
+luggage, Mr Mangan.
+
+ELLIE [impatient]. Go, go: why don't you go? It is a heavenly night: you
+can sleep on the heath. Take my waterproof to lie on: it is hanging up
+in the hall.
+
+HECTOR. Breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with the
+captain at six.
+
+ELLIE. Good night, Alfred.
+
+HECTOR. Alfred! [He runs back to the door and calls into the garden].
+Randall, Mangan's Christian name is Alfred.
+
+RANDALL [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress]. Then
+Hesione wins her bet.
+
+Mrs Hushabye appears in the port doorway. She throws her left arm round
+Hector's neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa: and throws
+her right arm round Lady Utterword's neck.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. They wouldn't believe me, Alf.
+
+They contemplate him.
+
+MANGAN. Is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if I was
+the latest thing in a menagerie?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are the latest thing in this menagerie.
+
+Before Mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from upstairs:
+then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. The staring group breaks up in
+consternation.
+
+MAZZINI'S VOICE [from above]. Help! A burglar! Help!
+
+HECTOR [his eyes blazing]. A burglar!!!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. No, Hector: you'll be shot [but it is too late; he has
+dashed out past Mangan, who hastily moves towards the bookshelves out of
+his way].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [blowing his whistle]. All hands aloft! [He strides out
+after Hector].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. My diamonds! [She follows the captain].
+
+RANDALL [rushing after her]. No. Ariadne. Let me.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, is papa shot? [She runs out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Are you frightened, Alf?
+
+MANGAN. No. It ain't my house, thank God.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into court as
+witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our private lives?
+
+MANGAN. You won't be believed if you tell the truth.
+
+Mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand, comes from
+the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, my dear Mrs Hushabye, I might have killed him. [He throws
+the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair]. I hope you
+won't believe I really intended to.
+
+Hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man before him
+by the collar. He plants him in the middle of the room and releases him.
+
+Ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her father's
+chair and pats his shoulders.
+
+RANDALL [entering with a poker]. Keep your eye on this door, Mangan.
+I'll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door and stands on
+guard there].
+
+Lady Utterword comes in after Randall, and goes between Mrs Hushabye and
+Mangan.
+
+Nurse Guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on Mangan's
+left.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What has happened?
+
+MAZZINI. Your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs, and gave
+me a pistol that Mr Hushabye had been practising with. I thought it
+would frighten him; but it went off at a touch.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, and took the skin off my ear. Precious near took the
+top off my head. Why don't you have a proper revolver instead of a thing
+like that, that goes off if you as much as blow on it?
+
+HECTOR. One of my duelling pistols. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI. He put his hands up and said it was a fair cop.
+
+THE BURGLAR. So it was. Send for the police.
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! It was not a fair cop. We were four to one.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What will they do to him?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten years. Beginning with solitary. Ten years off my life.
+I shan't serve it all: I'm too old. It will see me out.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You should have thought of that before you stole my
+diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, you've got them back, lady, haven't you? Can you give
+me back the years of my life you are going to take from me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, we can't bury a man alive for ten years for a few
+diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten little shining diamonds! Ten long black years!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Think of what it is for us to be dragged through the
+horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs in the
+papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you a good
+beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in England there
+is no real protection for any respectable person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. I'm too old to be giv a hiding, lady. Send for the police
+and have done with it. It's only just and right you should.
+
+RANDALL [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so
+pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker between his
+fingers like a well folded umbrella]. It is neither just nor right
+that we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to gratify your moral
+enthusiasm, my friend. You had better get out, while you have the
+chance.
+
+THE BURGLAR [inexorably]. No. I must work my sin off my conscience.
+This has come as a sort of call to me. Let me spend the rest of my life
+repenting in a cell. I shall have my reward above.
+
+MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can't behave naturally in this
+house.
+
+HECTOR. My good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody else's
+expense. Nobody here is going to charge you.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh, you won't charge me, won't you?
+
+HECTOR. No. I'm sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly leave the
+house?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Right. I'll go to the police station and give myself up.
+[He turns resolutely to the door: but Hector stops him].
+
+HECTOR.                      { Oh, no. You mustn't do that.
+
+RANDALL. [speaking together] { No no. Clear out man, can't you; and
+                               don't be a fool.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE                { Don't be so silly. Can't you repent at
+                               home?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will have to do as you are told.
+
+THE BURGLAR. It's compounding a felony, you know.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is utterly ridiculous. Are we to be forced to
+prosecute this man when we don't want to?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Am I to be robbed of my salvation to save you the trouble
+of spending a day at the sessions? Is that justice? Is it right? Is it
+fair to me?
+
+MAZZINI [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if it were
+a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. Come, come! let me show you how you
+can turn your very crimes to account. Why not set up as a locksmith? You
+must know more about locks than most honest men?
+
+THE BURGLAR. That's true, sir. But I couldn't set up as a locksmith
+under twenty pounds.
+
+RANDALL. Well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. You will find it in
+the nearest bank.
+
+THE BURGLAR [horrified]. Oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put into
+the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it
+were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He throws himself
+into the big chair and covers his face as if in prayer].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Randall!
+
+HECTOR. It seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection for
+this inopportunely contrite sinner.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But twenty pounds is ridiculous.
+
+THE BURGLAR [looking up quickly]. I shall have to buy a lot of tools,
+lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense: you have your burgling kit.
+
+THE BURGLAR. What's a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene welding
+plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? I shall want a forge, and a smithy,
+and a shop, and fittings. I can't hardly do it for twenty.
+
+HECTOR. My worthy friend, we haven't got twenty pounds.
+
+THE BURGLAR [now master of the situation]. You can raise it among you,
+can't you?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Give him a sovereign, Hector, and get rid of him.
+
+HECTOR [giving him a pound]. There! Off with you.
+
+THE BURGLAR [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. I won't
+promise nothing. You have more on you than a quid: all the lot of you, I
+mean.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vigorously]. Oh, let us prosecute him and have done with
+it. I have a conscience too, I hope; and I do not feel at all sure that
+we have any right to let him go, especially if he is going to be greedy
+and impertinent.
+
+THE BURGLAR [quickly]. All right, lady, all right. I've no wish to be
+anything but agreeable. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen; and thank
+you kindly.
+
+He is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by Captain
+Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard]. What's
+this? Are there two of you?
+
+THE BURGLAR [falling on his knees before the captain in abject terror].
+Oh, my good Lord, what have I done? Don't tell me it's your house I've
+broken into, Captain Shotover.
+
+The captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and leads
+him to the middle of the group, Hector falling back beside his wife to
+make way for them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [turning him towards Ellie]. Is that your daughter? [He
+releases him].
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, how do I know, Captain? You know the sort of life you
+and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere
+in the wide world, as you might say.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mazzini]. You are not Billy Dunn. This is Billy
+Dunn. Why have you imposed on me?
+
+THE BURGLAR [indignantly to Mazzini]. Have you been giving yourself
+out to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting yourself, in a
+manner of speaking!
+
+MAZZINI. My dear Captain Shotover, ever since I came into this house I
+have done hardly anything else but assure you that I am not Mr William
+Dunn, but Mazzini Dunn, a very different person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. He don't belong to my branch, Captain. There's two sets in
+the family: the thinking Dunns and the drinking Dunns, each going their
+own ways. I'm a drinking Dunn: he's a thinking Dunn. But that didn't
+give him any right to shoot me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. So you've turned burglar, have you?
+
+THE BURGLAR. No, Captain: I wouldn't disgrace our old sea calling by
+such a thing. I am no burglar.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What were you doing with my diamonds?
+
+GUINNESS. What did you break into the house for if you're no burglar?
+
+RANDALL. Mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong window,
+eh?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, it's no use my telling you a lie: I can take in most
+captains, but not Captain Shotover, because he sold himself to the devil
+in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in
+your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the
+heart of man. But I'm no burglar.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Are you an honest man?
+
+THE BURGLAR. I don't set up to be better than my fellow-creatures, and
+never did, as you well know, Captain. But what I do is innocent and
+pious. I enquire about for houses where the right sort of people live. I
+work it on them same as I worked it here. I break into the house; put a
+few spoons or diamonds in my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take
+up a collection. And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get caught
+when you're actually trying to. I have knocked over all the chairs in a
+room without a soul paying any attention to me. In the end I have had to
+walk out and leave the job.
+
+RANDALL. When that happens, do you put back the spoons and diamonds?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, I don't fly in the face of Providence, if that's what
+you want to know.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Guinness, you remember this man?
+
+GUINNESS. I should think I do, seeing I was married to him, the
+blackguard!
+
+HESIONE } [exclaiming { Married to him! LADY UTTERWORD } together] {
+Guinness!!
+
+THE BURGLAR. It wasn't legal. I've been married to no end of women. No
+use coming that over me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Take him to the forecastle [he flings him to the door
+with a strength beyond his years].
+
+GUINNESS. I suppose you mean the kitchen. They won't have him there. Do
+you expect servants to keep company with thieves and all sorts?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Land-thieves and water-thieves are the same flesh and
+blood. I'll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. Off with you both.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, Captain. [He goes out humbly].
+
+MAZZINI. Will it be safe to have him in the house like that?
+
+GUINNESS. Why didn't you shoot him, sir? If I'd known who he was, I'd
+have shot him myself. [She goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do sit down, everybody. [She sits down on the sofa].
+
+They all move except Ellie. Mazzini resumes his seat. Randall sits down
+in the window-seat near the starboard door, again making a pendulum of
+his poker, and studying it as Galileo might have done. Hector sits on
+his left, in the middle. Mangan, forgotten, sits in the port corner.
+Lady Utterword takes the big chair. Captain Shotover goes into the
+pantry in deep abstraction. They all look after him: and Lady Utterword
+coughs consciously.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So Billy Dunn was poor nurse's little romance. I knew
+there had been somebody.
+
+RANDALL. They will fight their battles over again and enjoy themselves
+immensely.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [irritably]. You are not married; and you know nothing
+about it, Randall. Hold your tongue.
+
+RANDALL. Tyrant!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we have had a very exciting evening. Everything will
+be an anticlimax after it. We'd better all go to bed.
+
+RANDALL. Another burglar may turn up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, impossible! I hope not.
+
+RANDALL. Why not? There is more than one burglar in England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you say, Alf?
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. Oh, I don't matter. I'm forgotten. The burglar has put
+my nose out of joint. Shove me into a corner and have done with me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. Would you
+like a walk on the heath, Alfred? With me?
+
+ELLIE. Go, Mr Mangan. It will do you good. Hesione will soothe you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [slipping her arm under his and pulling him upright]. Come,
+Alfred. There is a moon: it's like the night in Tristan and Isolde. [She
+caresses his arm and draws him to the port garden door].
+
+MANGAN [writhing but yielding]. How you can have the face-the heart-[he
+breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What an extraordinary way to behave! What is the matter
+with the man?
+
+ELLIE [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary distance].
+His heart is breaking: that is all. [The captain appears at the pantry
+door, listening]. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes
+mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your
+boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness
+and the beginning of peace.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of the
+rest]. How dare you?
+
+HECTOR. Good heavens! What's the matter?
+
+RANDALL [in a warning whisper]. Tch--tch-tch! Steady.
+
+ELLIE [surprised and haughty]. I was not addressing you particularly,
+Lady Utterword. And I am not accustomed to being asked how dare I.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course not. Anyone can see how badly you have been
+brought up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I hope not, Lady Utterword. Really!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know very well what you meant. The impudence!
+
+ELLIE. What on earth do you mean?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [advancing to the table]. She means that her heart will
+not break. She has been longing all her life for someone to break it. At
+last she has become afraid she has none to break.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her arms
+round him]. Papa, don't say you think I've no heart.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising her with grim tenderness]. If you had no heart
+how could you want to have it broken, child?
+
+HECTOR [rising with a bound]. Lady Utterword, you are not to be trusted.
+You have made a scene [he runs out into the garden through the starboard
+door].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! Hector, Hector! [she runs out after him].
+
+RANDALL. Only nerves, I assure you. [He rises and follows her, waving
+the poker in his agitation]. Ariadne! Ariadne! For God's sake, be
+careful. You will--[he is gone].
+
+MAZZINI [rising]. How distressing! Can I do anything, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [promptly taking his chair and setting to work at the
+drawing-board]. No. Go to bed. Good-night.
+
+MAZZINI [bewildered]. Oh! Perhaps you are right.
+
+ELLIE. Good-night, dearest. [She kisses him].
+
+MAZZINI. Good-night, love. [He makes for the door, but turns aside to
+the bookshelves]. I'll just take a book [he takes one]. Good-night. [He
+goes out, leaving Ellie alone with the captain].
+
+The captain is intent on his drawing. Ellie, standing sentry over his
+chair, contemplates him for a moment.
+
+ELLIE. Does nothing ever disturb you, Captain Shotover?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I've stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in a
+typhoon. Life here is stormier; but I can stand it.
+
+ELLIE. Do you think I ought to marry Mr Mangan?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [never looking up]. One rock is as good as another to
+be wrecked on.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in love with him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Who said you were?
+
+ELLIE. You are not surprised?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Surprised! At my age!
+
+ELLIE. It seems to me quite fair. He wants me for one thing: I want him
+for another.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Money?
+
+ELLIE. Yes.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it. One
+provides the cash: the other spends it.
+
+ELLIE. Who will have the best of the bargain, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You. These fellows live in an office all day. You will
+have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but you will both be
+asleep most of that time. All day you will be quit of him; and you
+will be shopping with his money. If that is too much for you, marry a
+seafaring man: you will be bothered with him only three weeks in the
+year, perhaps.
+
+ELLIE. That would be best of all, I suppose.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the
+hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a
+damned soul in hell.
+
+ELLIE. I never thought of that before.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you're marrying for business, you can't be too
+businesslike.
+
+ELLIE. Why do women always want other women's husbands?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in
+to one that is wild?
+
+ELLIE [with a short laugh]. I suppose so. What a vile world it is!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It doesn't concern me. I'm nearly out of it.
+
+ELLIE. And I'm only just beginning.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes; so look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. Well, I think I am being very prudent.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I didn't say prudent. I said look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. What's the difference?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own
+soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it;
+but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.
+
+ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the
+room]. I'm sorry, Captain Shotover; but it's no use talking like that
+to me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me. Old-fashioned people think
+you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have,
+the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a
+very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is it? How much does your soul eat?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and
+lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this
+country you can't have them without lots of money: that is why our souls
+are so horribly starved.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Mangan's soul lives on pig's food.
+
+ELLIE. Yes: money is thrown away on him. I suppose his soul was starved
+when he was young. But it will not be thrown away on me. It is just
+because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the
+women who are not fools do.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are other ways of getting money. Why don't you
+steal it?
+
+ELLIE. Because I don't want to go to prison.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is that the only reason? Are you quite sure honesty
+has nothing to do with it?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, you are very very old-fashioned, Captain. Does any modern
+girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting money are the
+honest and dishonest ways? Mangan robbed my father and my father's
+friends. I should rob all the money back from Mangan if the police would
+let me. As they won't, I must get it back by marrying him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't argue: I'm too old: my mind is made up and
+finished. All I can tell you is that, old-fashioned or new-fashioned,
+if you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow that all the books and
+pictures and concerts and scenery in the world won't heal [he gets up
+suddenly and makes for the pantry].
+
+ELLIE [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. Then why did
+you sell yourself to the devil in Zanzibar?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping, startled]. What?
+
+ELLIE. You shall not run away before you answer. I have found out that
+trick of yours. If you sold yourself, why shouldn't I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I had to deal with men so degraded that they wouldn't
+obey me unless I swore at them and kicked them and beat them with my
+fists. Foolish people took young thieves off the streets; flung them
+into a training ship where they were taught to fear the cane instead of
+fearing God; and thought they'd made men and sailors of them by private
+subscription. I tricked these thieves into believing I'd sold myself
+to the devil. It saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was
+damning me by inches.
+
+ELLIE [releasing him]. I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss Mangan to
+save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches won't
+save even your body.
+
+ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the body, and
+the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to
+persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our
+bodies. I am afraid you are no use to me, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What did you expect? A Savior, eh? Are you
+old-fashioned enough to believe in that?
+
+ELLIE. No. But I thought you were very wise, and might help me. Now I
+have found you out. You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to
+say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away
+before they can answer you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It confuses me to be answered. It discourages me. I
+cannot bear men and women. I have to run away. I must run away now [he
+tries to].
+
+ELLIE [again seizing his arm]. You shall not run away from me. I can
+hypnotize you. You are the only person in the house I can say what I
+like to. I know you are fond of me. Sit down. [She draws him to the
+sofa].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [yielding]. Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are
+dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the
+world.
+
+They sit side by side on the sofa. She leans affectionately against him
+with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half closed.
+
+ELLIE [dreamily]. I should have thought nothing else mattered to
+old men. They can't be very interested in what is going to happen to
+themselves.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A man's interest in the world is only the overflow
+from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not
+yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow
+up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or
+an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is
+no overflow: you are a child again. I can give you the memories of my
+ancient wisdom: mere scraps and leavings; but I no longer really care
+for anything but my own little wants and hobbies. I sit here working
+out my old ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. I see my
+daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and sentiment
+and snobbery. I see you, the younger generation, turning from their
+romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common
+sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen
+into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been.
+You are looking for a rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship,
+danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more
+intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward
+was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your
+life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
+
+ELLIE [sitting up impatiently]. But what can I do? I am not a sea
+captain: I can't stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering
+seals and whales in Greenland's icy mountains. They won't let women be
+captains. Do you want me to be a stewardess?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are worse lives. The stewardesses could come
+ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail.
+
+ELLIE. What could they do ashore but marry for money? I don't want to be
+a stewardess: I am too bad a sailor. Think of something else for me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't think so long and continuously. I am too old.
+I must go in and out. [He tries to rise].
+
+ELLIE [pulling him back]. You shall not. You are happy here, aren't you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you it's dangerous to keep me. I can't keep
+awake and alert.
+
+ELLIE. What do you run away for? To sleep?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. To get a glass of rum.
+
+ELLIE [frightfully disillusioned]. Is that it? How disgusting! Do you
+like being drunk?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No: I dread being drunk more than anything in the
+world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily
+pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does
+that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very very old,
+like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don't know how terrible that
+is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later
+on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in
+the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be
+free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every
+ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep
+sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have
+had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. Go get me
+another: Guinness knows where it is. You had better see for yourself the
+horror of an old man drinking.
+
+ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must never
+be in the real world when we talk together.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my
+second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can't remember
+what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have
+dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the
+happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the
+sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
+
+ELLIE. You dread it almost as much as I used to dread losing my dreams
+and having to fight and do things. But that is all over for me: my
+dreams are dashed to pieces. I should like to marry a very old, very
+rich man. I should like to marry you. I had much rather marry you than
+marry Mangan. Are you very rich?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Living from hand to mouth. And I have a wife
+somewhere in Jamaica: a black one. My first wife. Unless she's dead.
+
+ELLIE. What a pity! I feel so happy with you. [She takes his hand,
+almost unconsciously, and pats it]. I thought I should never feel happy
+again.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+ELLIE. Don't you know?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No.
+
+ELLIE. Heartbreak. I fell in love with Hector, and didn't know he was
+married.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so sufficient
+to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of
+everything, even of hope?
+
+ELLIE [gripping the hand]. It seems so; for I feel now as if there was
+nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That's the only real strength. That's genius. That's
+better than rum.
+
+ELLIE [throwing away his hand]. Rum! Why did you spoil it?
+
+Hector and Randall come in from the garden through the starboard door.
+
+HECTOR. I beg your pardon. We did not know there was anyone here.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That means that you want to tell Mr Randall the story
+about the tiger. Come, Captain: I want to talk to my father; and you had
+better come with me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [rising]. Nonsense! the man is in bed.
+
+ELLIE. Aha! I've caught you. My real father has gone to bed; but the
+father you gave me is in the kitchen. You knew quite well all along.
+Come. [She draws him out into the garden with her through the port
+door].
+
+HECTOR. That's an extraordinary girl. She has the Ancient Mariner on a
+string like a Pekinese dog.
+
+RANDALL. Now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat?
+
+HECTOR. You are in what is supposed to be my house. I am at your
+disposal.
+
+Hector sits down in the draughtsman's chair, turning it to face Randall,
+who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the carpenter's bench.
+
+RANDALL. I take it that we may be quite frank. I mean about Lady
+Utterword.
+
+HECTOR. You may. I have nothing to be frank about. I never met her until
+this afternoon.
+
+RANDALL [straightening up]. What! But you are her sister's husband.
+
+HECTOR. Well, if you come to that, you are her husband's brother.
+
+RANDALL. But you seem to be on intimate terms with her.
+
+HECTOR. So do you.
+
+RANDALL. Yes: but I AM on intimate terms with her. I have known her for
+years.
+
+HECTOR. It took her years to get to the same point with you that she got
+to with me in five minutes, it seems.
+
+RANDALL [vexed]. Really, Ariadne is the limit [he moves away huffishly
+towards the windows].
+
+HECTOR [coolly]. She is, as I remarked to Hesione, a very enterprising
+woman.
+
+RANDALL [returning, much troubled]. You see, Hushabye, you are what
+women consider a good-looking man.
+
+HECTOR. I cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity; and
+Hesione insists on my keeping it up. She makes me wear these ridiculous
+things [indicating his Arab costume] because she thinks me absurd in
+evening dress.
+
+RANDALL. Still, you do keep it up, old chap. Now, I assure you I have
+not an atom of jealousy in my disposition.
+
+HECTOR. The question would seem to be rather whether your brother has
+any touch of that sort.
+
+RANDALL. What! Hastings! Oh, don't trouble about Hastings. He has the
+gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest detail,
+and actually likes it. That gets him to the top wherever he goes. As
+long as Ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly, he is only too
+thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor for him.
+
+HECTOR. And as she has all the Shotover fascination, there is plenty of
+competition for the job, eh?
+
+RANDALL [angrily]. She encourages them. Her conduct is perfectly
+scandalous. I assure you, my dear fellow, I haven't an atom of jealousy
+in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of every place she
+goes to by her thoughtlessness. It's nothing more: she doesn't really
+care for the men she keeps hanging about her; but how is the world to
+know that? It's not fair to Hastings. It's not fair to me.
+
+HECTOR. Her theory is that her conduct is so correct
+
+RANDALL. Correct! She does nothing but make scenes from morning till
+night. You be careful, old chap. She will get you into trouble: that is,
+she would if she really cared for you.
+
+HECTOR. Doesn't she?
+
+RANDALL. Not a scrap. She may want your scalp to add to her collection;
+but her true affection has been engaged years ago. You had really better
+be careful.
+
+HECTOR. Do you suffer much from this jealousy?
+
+RANDALL. Jealousy! I jealous! My dear fellow, haven't I told you that
+there is not an atom of--
+
+HECTOR. Yes. And Lady Utterword told me she never made scenes. Well,
+don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste jealousy on a
+real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long
+run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world
+pose, which you carry so well in other respects.
+
+RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a
+gentleman without being accused of posing.
+
+HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the
+poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under
+your pose is apparently Ellie's favorite, Othello.
+
+RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me
+tell you.
+
+HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe
+under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned
+to play them.
+
+RANDALL. If it's all the same to you I had rather you didn't play them
+on me. You evidently don't quite understand my character, or my notions
+of good form.
+
+HECTOR. Is it your notion of good form to give away Lady Utterword?
+
+RANDALL [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. I have
+not said a word against Lady Utterword. This is just the conspiracy over
+again.
+
+HECTOR. What conspiracy?
+
+RANDALL. You know very well, sir. A conspiracy to make me out to be
+pettish and jealous and childish and everything I am not. Everyone knows
+I am just the opposite.
+
+HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It
+often does have that effect. [He goes to the garden door and calls Lady
+Utterword with commanding emphasis]. Ariadne!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [at some distance]. Yes.
+
+RANDALL. What are you calling her for? I want to speak--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [arriving breathless]. Yes. You really are a terribly
+commanding person. What's the matter?
+
+HECTOR. I do not know how to manage your friend Randall. No doubt you
+do.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall: have you been making yourself ridiculous,
+as usual? I can see it in your face. Really, you are the most pettish
+creature.
+
+RANDALL. You know quite well, Ariadne, that I have not an ounce of
+pettishness in my disposition. I have made myself perfectly pleasant
+here. I have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable in the face of
+a burglar. Imperturbability is almost too strong a point of mine. But
+[putting his foot down with a stamp, and walking angrily up and down the
+room] I insist on being treated with a certain consideration. I will
+not allow Hushabye to take liberties with me. I will not stand your
+encouraging people as you do.
+
+HECTOR. The man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know. He is jealous. As if he had any right to be! He
+compromises me everywhere. He makes scenes all over the place. Randall:
+I will not allow it. I simply will not allow it. You had no right to
+discuss me with Hector. I will not be discussed by men.
+
+HECTOR. Be reasonable, Ariadne. Your fatal gift of beauty forces men to
+discuss you.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh indeed! what about YOUR fatal gift of beauty?
+
+HECTOR. How can I help it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You could cut off your moustache: I can't cut off my
+nose. I get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me.
+And then Randall says I run after men.
+
+RANDALL. I--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes you do: you said it just now. Why can't you think
+of something else than women? Napoleon was quite right when he said that
+women are the occupation of the idle man. Well, if ever there was an
+idle man on earth, his name is Randall Utterword.
+
+RANDALL. Ariad--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. Oh yes you
+are: it's no use denying it. What have you ever done? What good are you?
+You are as much trouble in the house as a child of three. You couldn't
+live without your valet.
+
+RANDALL. This is--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are
+selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth. You
+can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and
+your ailments and the people who have offended you. [Turning to Hector].
+Do you know what they call him, Hector?
+
+HECTOR } [speaking { Please don't tell me. RANDALL } together] { I'll
+not stand it--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the Rotter: that is his name in good society.
+
+RANDALL [shouting]. I'll not bear it, I tell you. Will you listen to me,
+you infernal--[he chokes].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Well: go on. What were you going to call me? An infernal
+what? Which unpleasant animal is it to be this time?
+
+RANDALL [foaming]. There is no animal in the world so hateful as a woman
+can be. You are a maddening devil. Hushabye, you will not believe me
+when I tell you that I have loved this demon all my life; but God knows
+I have paid for it [he sits down in the draughtsman's chair, weeping].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [standing over him with triumphant contempt]. Cry-baby!
+
+HECTOR [gravely, coming to him]. My friend, the Shotover sisters have
+two strange powers over men. They can make them love; and they can make
+them cry. Thank your stars that you are not married to one of them.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [haughtily]. And pray, Hector--
+
+HECTOR [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her right
+round him and away from Randall: and gripping her throat with the other
+hand]. Ariadne, if you attempt to start on me, I'll choke you: do you
+hear? The cat-and-mouse game with the other sex is a good game; but I
+can play your head off at it. [He throws her, not at all gently, into
+the big chair, and proceeds, less fiercely but firmly]. It is true that
+Napoleon said that woman is the occupation of the idle man. But he added
+that she is the relaxation of the warrior. Well, I am the warrior. So
+take care.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by his
+violence]. My dear Hector, I have only done what you asked me to do.
+
+HECTOR. How do you make that out, pray?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You called me in to manage Randall, didn't you? You said
+you couldn't manage him yourself.
+
+HECTOR. Well, what if I did? I did not ask you to drive the man mad.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. He isn't mad. That's the way to manage him. If you were
+a mother, you'd understand.
+
+HECTOR. Mother! What are you up to now?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It's quite simple. When the children got nerves and
+were naughty, I smacked them just enough to give them a good cry and
+a healthy nervous shock. They went to sleep and were quite good
+afterwards. Well, I can't smack Randall: he is too big; so when he gets
+nerves and is naughty, I just rag him till he cries. He will be all
+right now. Look: he is half asleep already [which is quite true].
+
+RANDALL [waking up indignantly]. I'm not. You are most cruel, Ariadne.
+[Sentimentally]. But I suppose I must forgive you, as usual [he checks
+himself in the act of yawning].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [to Hector]. Is the explanation satisfactory, dread
+warrior?
+
+HECTOR. Some day I shall kill you, if you go too far. I thought you were
+a fool.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [laughing]. Everybody does, at first. But I am not such
+a fool as I look. [She rises complacently]. Now, Randall, go to bed. You
+will be a good boy in the morning.
+
+RANDALL [only very faintly rebellious]. I'll go to bed when I like. It
+isn't ten yet.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It is long past ten. See that he goes to bed at once,
+Hector. [She goes into the garden].
+
+HECTOR. Is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of men to
+women?
+
+RANDALL [rising resolutely]. I'll not speak to her tomorrow. I'll not
+speak to her for another week. I'll give her such a lesson. I'll go
+straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [He makes for the door
+leading to the hall].
+
+HECTOR. You are under a spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to the
+devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and
+these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I am tied to
+Hesione's apron-string; but I'm her husband; and if I did go stark
+staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. But why should
+you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by Ariadne as a toy donkey
+is dragged about and beaten by a child? What do you get by it? Are you
+her lover?
+
+RANDALL. You must not misunderstand me. In a higher sense--in a Platonic
+sense--
+
+HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when
+pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean.
+
+RANDALL [feebly]. Well, if I don't mind, I don't see what business it is
+of yours. Besides, I tell you I am going to punish her. You shall see:
+I know how to deal with women. I'm really very sleepy. Say good-night to
+Mrs Hushabye for me, will you, like a good chap. Good-night. [He hurries
+out].
+
+HECTOR. Poor wretch! Oh women! women! women! [He lifts his fists in
+invocation to heaven]. Fall. Fall and crush. [He goes out into the
+garden].
+
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+In the garden, Hector, as he comes out through the glass door of the
+poop, finds Lady Utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock on the east
+side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by the electric arc,
+which is like a moon in its opal globe. Beneath the head of the hammock,
+a campstool. On the other side of the flagstaff, on the long garden
+seat, Captain Shotover is asleep, with Ellie beside him, leaning
+affectionately against him on his right hand. On his left is a deck
+chair. Behind them in the gloom, Hesione is strolling about with Mangan.
+It is a fine still night, moonless.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What a lovely night! It seems made for us.
+
+HECTOR. The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night? [He
+sits down moodily in the deck chair].
+
+ELLIE [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. Its beauty soaks into my
+nerves. In the night there is peace for the old and hope for the young.
+
+HECTOR. Is that remark your own?
+
+ELLIE. No. Only the last thing the captain said before he went to sleep.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I'm not asleep.
+
+HECTOR. Randall is. Also Mr Mazzini Dunn. Mangan, too, probably.
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+HECTOR. Oh, you are there. I thought Hesione would have sent you to bed
+by this time.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light,
+with Mangan]. I think I shall. He keeps telling me he has a presentiment
+that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
+
+MANGAN [plaintively]. But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you
+wouldn't listen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was listening for something else. There was a sort of
+splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a
+distance and then died away.
+
+MANGAN. I tell you it was a train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour. The
+last is nine forty-five.
+
+MANGAN. But a goods train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not on our little line. They tack a truck on to the
+passenger train. What can it have been, Hector?
+
+HECTOR. Heaven's threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile
+creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either
+out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we
+have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and
+destroy us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing comfortably in
+her hammock]. We have not supplanted the animals, Hector. Why do you ask
+heaven to destroy this house, which could be made quite comfortable if
+Hesione had any notion of how to live? Don't you know what is wrong with
+it?
+
+HECTOR. We are wrong with it. There is no sense in us. We are useless,
+dangerous, and ought to be abolished.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense! Hastings told me the very first day he came
+here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What! The numskull said there was something wrong with
+my house!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I said Hastings said it; and he is not in the least a
+numskull.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What's wrong with my house?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Just what is wrong with a ship, papa. Wasn't it clever
+of Hastings to see that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The man's a fool. There's nothing wrong with a ship.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, there is.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what is it? Don't be aggravating, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Guess.
+
+HECTOR. Demons. Daughters of the witch of Zanzibar. Demons.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Not a bit. I assure you, all this house needs to make it
+a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites and sound sleep
+in it, is horses.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Horses! What rubbish!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes: horses. Why have we never been able to let this
+house? Because there are no proper stables. Go anywhere in England where
+there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people;
+and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of
+the household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole
+room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things
+piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never
+ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only
+two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the
+neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the
+people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the
+wrong ones.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is some truth in this. My ship made a man of me;
+and a ship is the horse of the sea.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Exactly how Hastings explained your being a gentleman.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Not bad for a numskull. Bring the man here with you
+next time: I must talk to him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Why is Randall such an obvious rotter? He is well bred;
+he has been at a public school and a university; he has been in the
+Foreign Office; he knows the best people and has lived all his life
+among them. Why is he so unsatisfactory, so contemptible? Why can't he
+get a valet to stay with him longer than a few months? Just because he
+is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano,
+and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and
+poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my
+house. If he would only--[she is interrupted by the melancholy strains
+of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself
+indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have
+you been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! Go to bed
+instantly, Randall: how dare you? [The window is slammed down. She
+subsides]. How can anyone care for such a creature!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Addy: do you think Ellie ought to marry poor Alfred merely
+for his money?
+
+MANGAN [much alarmed]. What's that? Mrs Hushabye, are my affairs to be
+discussed like this before everybody?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I don't think Randall is listening now.
+
+MANGAN. Everybody is listening. It isn't right.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But in the dark, what does it matter? Ellie doesn't mind.
+Do you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. What is your opinion, Lady Utterword? You have
+so much good sense.
+
+MANGAN. But it isn't right. It--[Mrs Hushabye puts her hand on his
+mouth]. Oh, very well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How much money have you, Mr. Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Really--No: I can't stand this.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense, Mr Mangan! It all turns on your income,
+doesn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Well, if you come to that, how much money has she?
+
+ELLIE. None.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are answered, Mr Mangan. And now, as you have made
+Miss Dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to show your
+own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Come, Alf! out with it! How much?
+
+MANGAN [baited out of all prudence]. Well, if you want to know, I have
+no money and never had any.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, you mustn't tell naughty stories.
+
+MANGAN. I'm not telling you stories. I'm telling you the raw truth.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Then what do you live on, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Travelling expenses. And a trifle of commission.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling expenses for
+our life's journey?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?
+
+MANGAN. People think I have. People think I'm an industrial Napoleon.
+That's why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you I have nothing.
+
+ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus's tigers? That
+they don't exist?
+
+MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they're not mine. They belong
+to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing
+capitalists. I get money from such people to start the factories. I find
+people like Miss Dunn's father to work them, and keep a tight hand so as
+to make them pay. Of course I make them keep me going pretty well; but
+it's a dog's life; and I don't own anything.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, Alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it to get
+out of marrying Ellie.
+
+MANGAN. I'm telling the truth about my money for the first time in my
+life; and it's the first time my word has ever been doubted.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How sad! Why don't you go in for politics, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Go in for politics! Where have you been living? I am in
+politics.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I'm sure I beg your pardon. I never heard of you.
+
+MANGAN. Let me tell you, Lady Utterword, that the Prime Minister of this
+country asked me to join the Government without even going through the
+nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. As a Conservative or a Liberal?
+
+MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all burst
+out laughing]. What are you all laughing at?
+
+MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!
+
+ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!
+
+HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all
+the evening!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party funds,
+Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the money:
+they knew how useful I should be to them in the Government.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. This is most interesting and unexpected, Mr Mangan. And
+what have your administrative achievements been, so far?
+
+MANGAN. Achievements? Well, I don't know what you call achievements;
+but I've jolly well put a stop to the games of the other fellows in the
+other departments. Every man of them thought he was going to save the
+country all by himself, and do me out of the credit and out of my chance
+of a title. I took good care that if they wouldn't let me do it they
+shouldn't do it themselves either. I may not know anything about my own
+machinery; but I know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow's. And
+now they all look the biggest fools going.
+
+HECTOR. And in heaven's name, what do you look like?
+
+MANGAN. I look like the fellow that was too clever for all the others,
+don't I? If that isn't a triumph of practical business, what is?
+
+HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Do you expect to save the country, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Well, who else will? Will your Mr Randall save it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the rotter! Certainly not.
+
+MANGAN. Will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and his fine
+talk?
+
+HECTOR. Yes, if they will let me.
+
+MANGAN [sneering]. Ah! Will they let you?
+
+HECTOR. No. They prefer you.
+
+MANGAN. Very well then, as you're in a world where I'm appreciated and
+you're not, you'd best be civil to me, hadn't you? Who else is there but
+me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham
+democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply
+of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the
+country with the greatest ease.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with a
+stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God's way. The man
+is a numskull.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What do you
+say, Miss Dunn?
+
+ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put upon
+him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.
+
+MANGAN [contemptuously]. I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into
+parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We've not come to
+that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you governs the
+country so long as we govern you.
+
+HECTOR. We? Who is we, pray?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. The devil's granddaughters, dear. The lovely women.
+
+HECTOR [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say, and deliver us from
+the lures of Satan!
+
+ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and
+Shakespeare. Marcus's tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false;
+there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful
+black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing
+that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration;
+and that turns out to be--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [placidly]. A good deal of my hair is quite genuine. The
+Duchess of Dithering offered me fifty guineas for this [touching her
+forehead] under the impression that it was a transformation; but it is
+all natural except the color.
+
+MANGAN [wildly]. Look here: I'm going to take off all my clothes [he
+begins tearing off his coat].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD.  [in consternation]   { Mr. Mangan!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER                      { What's that?
+
+HECTOR.                               { Ha! Ha! Do. Do.
+
+ELLIE                                 { Please don't.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching his arm and stopping him]. Alfred, for shame! Are
+you mad?
+
+MANGAN. Shame! What shame is there in this house? Let's all strip stark
+naked. We may as well do the thing thoroughly when we're about it.
+We've stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us strip ourselves
+physically naked as well, and see how we like it. I tell you I can't
+bear this. I was brought up to be respectable. I don't mind the women
+dyeing their hair and the men drinking: it's human nature. But it's not
+human nature to tell everybody about it. Every time one of you opens
+your mouth I go like this [he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid
+of what will come next. How are we to have any self-respect if we don't
+keep it up that we're better than we really are?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I quite sympathize with you, Mr Mangan. I have been
+through it all; and I know by experience that men and women are delicate
+plants and must be cultivated under glass. Our family habit of throwing
+stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably
+rude, but positively dangerous. Still, there is no use catching physical
+colds as well as moral ones; so please keep your clothes on.
+
+MANGAN. I'll do as I like: not what you tell me. Am I a child or a grown
+man? I won't stand this mothering tyranny. I'll go back to the city,
+where I'm respected and made much of.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city. Think of
+Ellie's youth!
+
+ELLIE. Think of Hesione's eyes and hair!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog
+barking to keep the truth out!
+
+HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword's beauty! her good sense! her style!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can really do
+any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn't
+it?
+
+MANGAN [surrendering]. All right: all right. I'm done. Have it your own
+way. Only let me alone. I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels
+when you all start on me like this. I'll stay. I'll marry her. I'll do
+anything for a quiet life. Are you satisfied now?
+
+ELLIE. No. I never really intended to make you marry me, Mr Mangan.
+Never in the depths of my soul. I only wanted to feel my strength: to
+know that you could not escape if I chose to take you.
+
+MANGAN [indignantly]. What! Do you mean to say you are going to throw me
+over after my acting so handsome?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I should not be too hasty, Miss Dunn. You can throw
+Mr Mangan over at any time up to the last moment. Very few men in his
+position go bankrupt. You can live very comfortably on his reputation
+for immense wealth.
+
+ELLIE. I cannot commit bigamy, Lady Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE.                         { Bigamy! Whatever on earth are
+                                        you talking about, Ellie?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [exclaiming altogether { Bigamy! What do you mean, Miss
+                                        Dunn?
+
+MANGAN                                { Bigamy! Do you mean to say
+                                        you're married already?
+
+HECTOR                                { Bigamy! This is some enigma.
+
+ELLIE. Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover's white wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie! What nonsense! Where?
+
+ELLIE. In heaven, where all true marriages are made.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!
+
+MANGAN. He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!
+
+HECTOR [quoting Shelley].
+
+     "Their altar the grassy earth outspreads
+      And their priest the muttering wind."
+
+ELLIE. Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul
+to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father.
+
+She draws the captain's arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain
+remains fast asleep.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, that's very clever of you, pettikins. Very clever.
+Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie. You must be content with
+a little share of me.
+
+MANGAN [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. It isn't kind--[his emotion
+chokes him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is the most
+conceited young woman I have met since I came back to England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Ellie isn't conceited. Are you, pettikins?
+
+ELLIE. I know my strength now, Hesione.
+
+MANGAN. Brazen, I call you. Brazen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Tut, tut, Alfred: don't be rude. Don't you feel how
+lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren't you happy, you and
+Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful enough to please
+the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the
+world. We women have managed all that for you. Why in the name of common
+sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you happiness is no good. You can be happy when
+you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half dead than ever I was
+in my prime. But there is no blessing on my happiness.
+
+ELLIE [her face lighting up]. Life with a blessing! that is what I want.
+Now I know the real reason why I couldn't marry Mr Mangan: there would
+be no blessing on our marriage. There is a blessing on my broken heart.
+There is a blessing on your beauty, Hesione. There is a blessing on your
+father's spirit. Even on the lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on
+Mr Mangan's money there is none.
+
+MANGAN. I don't understand a word of that.
+
+ELLIE. Neither do I. But I know it means something.
+
+MANGAN. Don't say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I was
+ready to get a bishop to marry us.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Isn't he a fool, pettikins?
+
+HECTOR [fiercely]. Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.
+
+Mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown, comes from
+the house, on Lady Utterword's side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. What's
+the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, no: nothing's the matter: but really it's impossible to
+go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one's
+window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had to come down and
+join you all. What has it all been about?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.
+
+HECTOR. For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has tried
+to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an
+idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope you don't mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye. [He
+sits down on the campstool].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your daughter's match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems that Mr
+Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely
+nothing.
+
+MAZZINI. Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if people
+believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don't
+believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask poor Ellie to depend
+on what I can do for her?
+
+MANGAN. Don't you run away with this idea that I have nothing. I--
+
+HECTOR. Oh, don't explain. We understand. You have a couple of thousand
+pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence a dozen, and
+half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with
+when you are found out. That's the reality of your millions.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are genuine
+and perfectly legal.
+
+HECTOR [disgusted]. Yah! Not even a great swindler!
+
+MANGAN. So you think. But I've been too many for some honest men, for
+all that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are determined
+to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.
+
+MANGAN. There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I
+have been made to look like a fool, though I'm as good a man in this
+house as in the city.
+
+ELLIE [musically]. Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house,
+this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it
+Heartbreak House.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal.
+
+MANGAN [breaks into a low snivelling]!!!
+
+MRS HUSAHBYE. There! you have set Alfred off.
+
+ELLIE. I like him best when he is howling.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Silence! [Mangan subsides into silence]. I say, let
+the heart break in silence.
+
+HECTOR. Do you accept that name for your house?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
+
+HECTOR. We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we
+haunt it.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [heart torn]. It is dreadful to think how you have been
+here all these years while I have gone round the world. I escaped young;
+but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my heart too. But it shan't.
+I have left you and it behind. It was silly of me to come back. I
+felt sentimental about papa and Hesione and the old place. I felt them
+calling to me.
+
+MAZZINI. But what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling,
+Lady Utterword!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was only
+the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered and not
+wanted.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You left because you did not want us. Was there no
+heartbreak in that for your father? You tore yourself up by the roots;
+and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you.
+What right had you to come back and probe old wounds?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You were a complete stranger to me at first, Addy; but now
+I feel as if you had never been away.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Thank you, Hesione; but the influenza is quite cured.
+The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this
+gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to
+me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any
+stables.
+
+HECTOR. Inhabited by--?
+
+ELLIE. A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and
+an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, really, Mrs Hushabye--
+
+MANGAN. A member of His Majesty's Government that everybody sets down as
+a nincompoop: don't forget him, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation
+is to be married to my sister.
+
+HECTOR. All heartbroken imbeciles.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable specimen of
+what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people,
+most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic,
+free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You do us proud, Mazzini.
+
+MAZZINI. I am not flattering, really. Where else could I feel perfectly
+at ease in my pyjamas? I sometimes dream that I am in very distinguished
+society, and suddenly I have nothing on but my pyjamas! Sometimes I
+haven't even pyjamas. And I always feel overwhelmed with confusion. But
+here, I don't mind in the least: it seems quite natural.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. An infallible sign that you are now not in really
+distinguished society, Mr Dunn. If you were in my house, you would feel
+embarrassed.
+
+MAZZINI. I shall take particular care to keep out of your house, Lady
+Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will be quite wrong, Mr Dunn. I should make you very
+comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and anxiety of wondering
+whether you should wear your purple and gold or your green and crimson
+dressing-gown at dinner. You complicate life instead of simplifying it
+by doing these ridiculous things.
+
+ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?
+
+HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor devil
+upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as Mangan
+howls when my wife twists his.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but have
+his heart broken. It is a change from having his head shampooed. Catch
+anyone breaking Hastings' heart!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest
+satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I forgot you, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I don't see that quite, either.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are
+successful.
+
+MANGAN. But I don't want to be regarded merely as a successful man. I
+have an imagination like anyone else. I have a presentiment.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting myself
+to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. You
+bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [She drags him away
+into the darkness].
+
+MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it's all very well to make
+fun of me; but if you only knew--
+
+HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?
+
+MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting something. I
+don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.
+
+HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't have a
+baby.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me:
+and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave
+everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers
+of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It's
+madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play
+at earthquakes with.
+
+MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was young.
+
+HECTOR. Think! What's the good of thinking about it? Why didn't you do
+something?
+
+MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote
+pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in
+the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't
+have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had
+any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a
+revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we
+could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except,
+of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to.
+Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things
+considered.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps somebody cleverer than you and Mr Mangan was at
+work all the time.
+
+MAZZINI. Perhaps so. Though I was brought up not to believe in anything,
+I often feel that there is a great deal to be said for the theory of an
+over-ruling Providence, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Providence! I meant Hastings.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one
+of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the
+rocks.
+
+MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure you,
+they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to
+the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The
+moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until
+she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. After
+the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It's
+amazing how they get along, all things considered. Nothing happens,
+except something not worth mentioning.
+
+ELLIE. What is that, O Captain, O my captain?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [savagely]. Nothing but the smash of the drunken
+skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the
+tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a
+trap.
+
+ELLIE. Moral: don't take rum.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [vehemently]. That is a lie, child. Let a man drink ten
+barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting
+skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer
+it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and
+trusts to Providence that I call the drunken skipper, though he drank
+nothing but the waters of the River Jordan.
+
+ELLIE. Splendid! And you haven't had a drop for an hour. You see you
+don't need it: your own spirit is not dead.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Echoes: nothing but echoes. The last shot was fired
+years ago.
+
+HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call
+England?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled
+ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike
+and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in
+favor of England because you were born in it?
+
+HECTOR. Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still
+have the will to live. What am I to do?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an
+Englishman.
+
+HECTOR. And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be
+damned.
+
+ELLIE. Quiet, quiet: you'll tire yourself.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought all that once, Captain; but I assure you nothing will
+happen.
+
+A dull distant explosion is heard.
+
+HECTOR [starting up]. What was that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Something happening [he blows his whistle]. Breakers
+ahead!
+
+The light goes out.
+
+HECTOR [furiously]. Who put that light out? Who dared put that light
+out?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [running in from the house to the middle of the
+esplanade]. I did, sir. The police have telephoned to say we'll be
+summoned if we don't put that light out: it can be seen for miles.
+
+HECTOR. It shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the house].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. The Rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they say.
+Unless we can give the Rector a bed he has nowhere to lay his head this
+night.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The Church is on the rocks, breaking up. I told him it
+would unless it headed for God's open sea.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And you are all to go down to the cellars.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go there yourself, you and all the crew. Batten down
+the hatches.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And hide beside the coward I married! I'll go on the
+roof first. [The lamp lights up again]. There! Mr Hushabye's turned it
+on again.
+
+THE BURGLAR [hurrying in and appealing to Nurse Guinness]. Here: where's
+the way to that gravel pit? The boot-boy says there's a cave in the
+gravel pit. Them cellars is no use. Where's the gravel pit, Captain?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall into
+it and break your dirty neck. [She pushes him contemptuously towards the
+flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the hammock and waits there,
+as it were by Ariadne's cradle].
+
+Another and louder explosion is heard. The burglar stops and stands
+trembling.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That was nearer.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The next one will get us. [He rises]. Stand by, all
+hands, for judgment.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh my Lordy God! [He rushes away frantically past the
+flagstaff into the gloom].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emerging panting from the darkness]. Who was that running
+away? [She comes to Ellie]. Did you hear the explosions? And the sound
+in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra: it's like Beethoven.
+
+ELLIE. By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.
+
+She and Hesione throw themselves into one another's arms in wild
+excitement. The light increases.
+
+MAZZINI [anxiously]. The light is getting brighter.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [looking up at the house]. It's Mr Hushabye turning on
+all the lights in the house and tearing down the curtains.
+
+RANDALL [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute].
+Ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: I beg and implore
+you, go down to the cellars!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [quite composed in her hammock]. The governor's wife in
+the cellars with the servants! Really, Randall!
+
+RANDALL. But what shall I do if you are killed?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will probably be killed, too, Randall. Now play your
+flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good. Play us "Keep the
+home fires burning."
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [grimly]. THEY'LL keep the home fires burning for us:
+them up there.
+
+RANDALL [having tried to play]. My lips are trembling. I can't get a
+sound.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of God.
+
+HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his former
+place]. There is not half light enough. We should be blazing to the
+skies.
+
+ELLIE [tense with excitement]. Set fire to the house, Marcus.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.
+
+HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save you; but
+it will show that your souls are still live.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It's magnificent.
+
+They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.
+
+HECTOR [gravely]. Miss Dunn, you can do no good here. We of this house
+are only moths flying into the candle. You had better go down to the
+cellar.
+
+ELLIE [scornfully]. I don't think.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. An
+officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr Hushabye is behaving
+like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it
+is they who will survive.
+
+ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should you run
+any risk?
+
+MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running!
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! What
+next?
+
+A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats,
+or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered
+glass from the windows.
+
+MAZZINI. Is anyone hurt?
+
+HECTOR. Where did it fall?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [in hideous triumph]. Right in the gravel pit: I seen
+it. Serve un right! I seen it [she runs away towards the gravel pit,
+laughing harshly].
+
+HECTOR. One husband gone.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, poor Mangan!
+
+HECTOR. Are you immortal that you need pity him? Our turn next.
+
+They wait in silence and intense expectation. Hesione and Ellie hold
+each other's hand tight.
+
+A distant explosion is heard.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]. Oh! they have passed us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down
+and goes asleep].
+
+ELLIE [disappointedly]. Safe!
+
+HECTOR [disgustedly]. Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has
+become again suddenly! [he sits down].
+
+MAZZINI [sitting down]. I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have
+survived; and Mangan and the burglar--
+
+HECTOR. --the two burglars--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. --the two practical men of business--
+
+MAZZINI. --both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new
+house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they'll come again
+tomorrow night.
+
+ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]. Oh, I hope so.
+
+Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
+#16 in our series by George Bernard Shaw.
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+Title: Heartbreak House
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+Author: George Bernard Shaw
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+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE: A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES
+
+by BERNARD SHAW
+
+1913-1916
+
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL
+
+
+Where Heartbreak House Stands
+
+Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows
+this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war.
+When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the
+professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby
+is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian
+playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic
+studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard,
+Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England.
+Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it
+in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not
+waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
+was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
+futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was
+delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless
+cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have
+now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed
+to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the
+ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the
+pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of
+opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly
+and exercising them violently until they were broad awake.
+Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming
+people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up
+and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple
+in exploiting and even flattering their charm.
+
+
+
+The Inhabitants
+
+Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and
+roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only
+ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the
+Stage Society. We stared and said, "How Russian!" They did not
+strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays
+exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in
+Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country
+houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art,
+literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
+fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people,
+the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them
+could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who
+had social opportunities of contact with our politicians,
+administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of
+sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from
+that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize
+Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their
+favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they
+could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did
+nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look
+like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types
+of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They
+took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for
+high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as
+practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum,
+immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined
+pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments
+of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime
+ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.
+
+
+
+Horseback Hall
+
+But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The
+alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of
+a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen
+who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and
+sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing
+the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for
+religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for
+politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed at
+the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the
+picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables,
+miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
+first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the
+garden of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and
+heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule,
+however, the two were apart and knew little of one another; so
+the prime minister folk had to choose between barbarism and
+Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which was the
+more fatal to statesmanship.
+
+
+Revolution on the Shelf
+
+Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on
+paper. It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly
+ever went to church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra
+fun at weekends. When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you
+found on the shelf in your bedroom not only the books of poets
+and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and even
+economists. Without at least a few plays by myself and Mr
+Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
+Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of
+the movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside
+him Bergson, Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and
+Thomas Hardy, and, generally speaking, all the literary
+implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern Socialist
+and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious experience to spend
+Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday morning to
+read in the daily paper that the country had just been brought to
+the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
+police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother
+might not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize"
+some powerful Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to
+recognize a 20,000-ton liner.
+
+In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
+barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the
+front bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their
+incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but
+upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives
+furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however,
+were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as
+acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although
+this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval
+robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
+going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it,
+just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep
+fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.
+
+
+
+The Cherry Orchard
+
+The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the
+sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
+Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
+anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
+drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
+if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
+allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
+hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
+get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
+equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
+would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
+Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
+inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
+those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
+their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
+run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
+learn how to do such things or starve.
+
+>From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of
+things could be hoped. It is said that every people has the
+Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every
+Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the
+front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will.
+Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal
+worthiness and unworthiness.
+
+
+
+Nature's Long Credits
+
+Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is
+unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent
+hygiene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits and
+reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with
+catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common domestic
+sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and
+scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
+consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital
+two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and
+carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the
+doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set
+up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her
+revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the
+hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering
+right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty
+old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep
+again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
+
+This is what has just happened in our political hygiene.
+Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments
+and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the
+days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy
+has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues,
+commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of
+pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious
+activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
+through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France
+or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their
+beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London
+from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than
+a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes
+in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens
+we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass;
+but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own
+doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit;
+and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she
+struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn
+and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were
+all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and came solely
+because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
+winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies
+of the victors.
+
+
+
+The Wicked Half Century
+
+It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse
+than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall
+unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century before the
+war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately
+under the influence of a pseudo-science as disastrous as the
+blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught that as we are
+predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can alter
+our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue as
+to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
+him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of
+salvation and allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one
+of the elect might be expected to behave rather than as one of
+the reprobate. But in the middle of the nineteenth century
+naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of
+Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that
+predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as
+human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and
+good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical
+reactions over which they have no control. Such figments as mind,
+choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they
+taught, mere illusions, produced because they are useful in the
+continual struggle of the human machine to maintain its
+environment in a favorable condition, a process incidentally
+involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
+competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
+available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered
+our instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves
+confronted with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent
+Prussia destroying us. And that has just ended in each destroying
+the other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time.
+
+It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came
+to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question
+more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely
+devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that
+there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham
+science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men,
+and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they
+were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated
+very powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific
+doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
+naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction
+against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably
+obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as
+it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics,
+chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its
+investigators called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only
+one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the
+banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler
+vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."
+
+
+
+Hypochondria
+
+Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
+alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say
+nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely
+blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the
+uncultured world outside. But being an idle house it was a
+hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop
+eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to get
+rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you
+pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named Pyorrhea.
+It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
+materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing
+and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether
+ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers,
+astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all
+sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift
+to the abyss. The registered doctors and surgeons were hard put
+to it to compete with the unregistered. They were not clever
+enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of the
+Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
+winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the
+terror of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and
+operations. Whatever part of a human being could be cut out
+without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died
+(unnecessarily of course) in consequence. From such trifles as
+uvulas and tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until
+at last no one's inside was safe. They explained that the human
+intestine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of
+Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting a
+length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
+the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine
+was the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the
+carpenter's shop, and also that Science (by which they meant
+their practices) was so important that no consideration for the
+interests of any individual creature, whether frog or
+philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces of sentimental
+ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest off-chance
+of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated
+and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
+clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the
+bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor
+parliament dare ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a
+Liberal institution compared to the General Medical Council.
+
+
+
+Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying
+
+Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself
+from this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love;
+but it believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people;
+and it saw that cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did
+things that made money, whereas Love did nothing but prove the
+soundness of Larochefoucauld's saying that very few people would
+fall in love if they had never read about it. Heartbreak House,
+in short, did not know how to live, at which point all that was
+left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to die: a
+melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
+gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus
+were the firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young,
+the innocent, the hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness
+of their elders.
+
+
+War Delirium
+
+Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
+field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
+the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through
+this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when
+the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions
+of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame
+in comparison. I do not know whether anyone really kept his head
+completely except those who had to keep it because they had to
+conduct the war at first hand. I should not have kept my own (as
+far as I did keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a
+scribe and speaker I too was under the most serious public
+obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me
+from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
+course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all
+political and general matters lying outside their little circle
+of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad,
+the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of
+nature had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be
+adulterated. All schools must be closed. No advertisements must
+be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must appear and
+be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be stopped, or,
+that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences about fine
+art and culture and the like must be flung off as an intolerable
+affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and schools at
+once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was saved
+only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
+more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be
+established by one conclusive instance of the general craziness.
+Men were seized with the illusion that they could win the war by
+giving away money. And they not only subscribed millions to Funds
+of all sorts with no discoverable object, and to ridiculous
+voluntary organizations for doing what was plainly the business
+of the civil and military authorities, but actually handed out
+money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind to
+pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the annihilation
+of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices; label
+themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that
+was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that
+they had nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in
+hand, and live gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed
+before, as a first sign of returning sanity, the police swept an
+Anti-Enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les autres, and
+the passionate penny collecting of the Flag Days was brought
+under some sort of regulation.
+
+
+
+Madness in Court
+
+The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were
+acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder,
+until at last the judges and magistrates had to announce that
+what was called the Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a
+soldier could do what he liked with impunity in civil life, was
+not the law of the land, and that a Victoria Cross did not carry
+with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. Unfortunately the
+insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest
+itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged with
+any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did
+not smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal.
+There were in the country, too, a certain number of people who
+had conscientious objections to war as criminal or unchristian.
+The Act of Parliament introducing Compulsory Military Service
+thoughtlessly exempted these persons, merely requiring them to
+prove the genuineness of their convictions. Those who did so were
+very ill-advised from the point of view of their own personal
+interest; for they were persecuted with savage logicality in
+spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence of having any
+objection to war at all, and had not only had military training
+in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
+occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war
+on behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit
+of the Act on the ground that they did not approve of this
+particular war. For the Christians there was no mercy. In cases
+where the evidence as to their being killed by ill treatment was
+so unequivocal that the verdict would certainly have been one of
+wilful murder had the prejudice of the coroner's jury been on the
+other side, their tormentors were gratuitously declared to be
+blameless. There was only one virtue, pugnacity: only one vice,
+pacifism. That is an essential condition of war; but the
+Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly; and its
+law was set aside for Lynch law.
+
+The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The
+greatest Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and
+killed by a gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war.
+M. Clemenceau was shot by another gentleman of less popular
+opinions, and happily came off no worse than having to spend a
+precautionary couple of days in bed. The slayer of Jaures was
+recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M. Clemenceau was
+carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that the same
+thing would have happened in England if the war had begun with a
+successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
+unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.
+
+
+
+The Long Arm of War
+
+The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
+influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
+doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from
+the battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and
+in India. But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a
+war pestilence, reproduced this phenomenon. One would have
+supposed that the war fever would have raged most furiously in
+the countries actually under fire, and that the others would be
+more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts
+literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed
+armies drove each other back and forward over it after terrific
+preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving
+their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
+shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for
+so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had
+long ceased to be more credible than a return of the Flood, could
+hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last
+what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations,
+or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and
+aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until
+certain shop windows in London, formerly full of fashionable
+hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women
+and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal
+of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
+down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of
+America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war
+fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there
+was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving
+lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an
+Ally: let some candid American do that. I can only say that to us
+sitting in our gardens in England, with the guns in France making
+themselves felt by a throb in the air as unmistakeable as an
+audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying the phases of
+the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether our
+houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
+newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing
+on young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions
+which were being uttered amid thundering applause before huge
+audiences in England, and the more private records of the methods
+by which the American War Loans were raised, were so amazing that
+they put the guns and the possibilities of a raid clean out of
+our heads for the moment.
+
+
+
+The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
+
+Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the
+war maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional
+guarantees of liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was
+superseded by Acts under which newspapers were seized and their
+printing machinery destroyed by simple police raids a la Russe,
+and persons arrested and shot without any pretence of trial by
+jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. Though it was
+urgently necessary that production should be increased by the
+most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
+fact was better established than that excessive duration and
+intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of
+increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women
+recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became
+too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and warnings were met
+either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the formula,
+"Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
+that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost
+unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found
+necessary and beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than
+that. The war did not change men's minds in any such impossible
+way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death
+and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand,
+tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from
+our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in
+the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most
+abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
+been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet
+the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the
+mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was
+fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because
+a few students of Greek history were not surprised by it. Indeed
+these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as
+the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance
+without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable
+school governor expelling the German professor with insult and
+bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
+ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
+in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency
+of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the
+part of the very persons who, as university professors,
+historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited
+custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps
+necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and
+German dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and
+recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in fact they
+are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our
+own political constitution are millennially democratic (which
+they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic
+denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German poetry,
+German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even
+German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards
+British and French chemistry and so forth in the relation of
+heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous
+ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and
+sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
+appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers
+in the great realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of
+that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of
+the battle-field. Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser's leg,
+striking the German dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing
+the King's illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for
+the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline, with the
+Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a traditionless locality.
+One felt that the figure of St. George and the Dragon on our
+coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving his
+spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
+only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
+confidently as the people who were disgracing their country
+called themselves patriots.
+
+
+
+The Sufferings of the Sane
+
+The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
+carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on
+sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain,
+complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the
+casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the
+callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "Blood and
+destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when
+they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a
+Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; for when
+nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all
+have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
+friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary
+to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily
+and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind,
+instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their
+fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the
+parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at
+last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men,
+sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they
+had "given" to their country.
+
+No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they
+only embittered those who knew that the young men were having
+their teeth set on edge because their parents had eaten sour
+political grapes. Then think of the young men themselves! Many of
+them had no illusions about the policy that led to the war: they
+went clear-sighted to a horribly repugnant duty. Men essentially
+gentle and essentially wise, with really valuable work in hand,
+laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming fours in the
+barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so
+that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
+themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most
+efficient soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not
+duped for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled
+and stimulated the others. They left their creative work to
+drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take
+their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not, like
+some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship
+had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers.
+The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
+fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw
+away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took
+up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing
+themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic
+execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things,
+and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of
+ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy
+that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the
+prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that
+some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually
+becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like
+Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
+themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation.
+They "stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
+
+
+
+Evil in the Throne of Good
+
+This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
+in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands,
+or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to
+obtrude their own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home
+in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak
+about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and
+deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to
+the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one
+person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St.
+Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don
+Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
+are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really
+a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
+
+Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to
+fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the
+inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a
+generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making
+works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed
+by taking their authors away from their natural work for four
+critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being
+killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors
+had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was
+no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the
+good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as
+disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
+"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting
+in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death
+blow!
+
+
+
+Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
+
+But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
+frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at
+bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths
+and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a
+bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people
+who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness
+of thousands of such happenings day after day in their
+newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the
+Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying
+vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths they
+had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
+cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should
+be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under
+circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it
+home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been
+actually visible.
+
+For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling
+slaughter of our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the
+Gallipoli landing. I will not go so far as to say that our
+civilians were delighted to have such exciting news to read at
+breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I noticed either in the
+papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the usual
+one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and
+that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly there came
+the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been
+torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers,
+including a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular
+farce, had been drowned, among others. The others included Sir
+Hugh Lane; but as he had only laid the country under great
+obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was
+laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing frenzy swept through
+the country. Men who up to that time had kept their heads now
+lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was
+the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a
+phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed
+us. To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve
+Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the
+Lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was
+well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and
+understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of
+the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very
+intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who
+found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp
+taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
+impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward
+and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and
+heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether
+they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they
+gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather,
+having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than I
+was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and
+the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not
+surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason
+pass a vote for œ30,000 without a word, and then spend three
+special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
+shillings for refreshments?
+
+
+
+Little Minds and Big Battles
+
+Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling
+during the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war
+in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian.
+He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the
+suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner
+and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German
+champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond
+most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a
+railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any
+effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
+Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle
+of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery
+preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but
+when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at
+breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a
+bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no
+bounds. They declared that this would put a new spirit into the
+army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches
+roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other that
+it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what
+the army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was
+pathetic. A man would work at home regardless of the call "to
+make the world safe for democracy." His brother would be killed
+at the front. Immediately he would throw up his work and take up
+the war as a family blood feud against the Germans. Sometimes it
+was comic. A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return
+to the trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had
+wounded him and pay him out for it.
+
+It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or
+out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a
+whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of
+what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of
+higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt that it was
+prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and
+childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to make
+the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be
+done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a
+comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice at
+last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
+general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was
+supporting, "If I had known all that in 1914, they would never
+have got me into khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why
+it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any
+diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confusion of
+ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of
+nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last
+overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war before
+we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
+army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made
+the very serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing
+that no sane European State could afford to do.
+
+
+
+The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
+
+Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
+critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all
+this time was conducting a war which involved the organization of
+several millions of fighting men and of the workers who were
+supplying them with provisions, munitions, and transport, and
+that this could not have been done by a mob of hysterical
+ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the newspaper
+offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban
+drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass
+from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
+to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of
+those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of
+this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all
+their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its
+heart's content. Indeed the raving was useful to the efficient,
+because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted
+attention very conveniently from operations that would have been
+defeated or hindered by publicity. A precept which I endeavored
+vainly to popularize early in the war, "If you have anything to
+do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out of the way,"
+was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people went and
+did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the way:
+they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
+seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew
+where the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was
+silent and invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the
+heavens with its clamor and blotting out the sun with its dust.
+It was also unfortunately intimidating the Government by its
+blusterings into using the irresistible powers of the State to
+intimidate the sensible people, thus enabling a despicable
+minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of terror which
+could at any time have been broken by a single stern word from a
+responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
+courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it,
+much less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting
+of shops by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police
+force and not the Government that put its foot down. There was
+even one deplorable moment, during the submarine scare, in which
+the Government yielded to a childish cry for the maltreatment of
+naval prisoners of war, and, to our great disgrace, was forced by
+the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind all this public
+blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective
+England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
+activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with
+its incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics,
+and its endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national
+anthems in season and out. The esoteric England was proceeding
+irresistibly to the conquest of Europe.
+
+
+
+The Practical Business Men
+
+>From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for
+"practical business men." By this they meant men who had become
+rich by placing their personal interests before those of the
+country, and measuring the success of every activity by the
+pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they
+depended for their supplies of capital. The pitiable failure of
+some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these
+poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an
+air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
+they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered
+nation they would never have been allowed to control private
+enterprise.
+
+
+
+How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down
+
+Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no
+sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all
+her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her
+littleness. Most of the men of action, occupied to the last hour
+of their time with urgent practical work, had to leave to idler
+people, or to professional rhetoricians, the presentation of the
+war to the reason and imagination of the country and the world in
+speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture posters, and newspaper
+articles. I have had the privilege of hearing some of our ablest
+commanders talking about their work; and I have shared the common
+lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the world by
+the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But
+in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the
+rank and file of the men of action; for though the great men of
+action are always inveterate talkers and often very clever
+writers, and therefore cannot have their minds formed for them by
+others, the average man of action, like the average fighter with
+the bayonet, can give no account of himself in words even to
+himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what he reads about
+himself and other people in the papers, except when the writer is
+rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not
+uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged
+on war work, describing events within his own experience that
+reduced to utter absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his
+daily paper, and yet echo the opinions of that paper like a
+parrot. Thus, to escape from the prevailing confusion and folly,
+it was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of
+action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. This
+was a privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. For
+the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the whole
+country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of
+victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only
+by very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure
+himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their
+appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for
+a single day without a total breakdown of its organization.
+
+
+
+The Mad Election
+
+Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those
+days. The worst of it was that the fools  were very strongly
+represented in parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can
+persuade men of action to elect them too. The election that
+immediately followed the armistice was perhaps the maddest that
+has ever taken place. Soldiers who had done voluntary and heroic
+service in the field were defeated by persons who had apparently
+never run a risk or spent a farthing that they could avoid, and
+who even had in the course of the election to apologize publicly
+for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent. Party
+leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to
+walk tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided
+the leader will make their seats safe for them by the process
+which was called, in derisive reference to the war rationing
+system, "giving them the coupon." Other incidents were so
+grotesque that I cannot mention them without enabling the reader
+to identify the parties, which would not be fair, as they were no
+more to blame than thousands of others who must necessarily be
+nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and the
+electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
+opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the
+earliest bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the
+mischief of the general election could not be undone; and the
+Government had not only to pretend to abuse its European victory
+as it had promised, but actually to do it by starving the enemies
+who had thrown down their arms. It had, in short, won the
+election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and
+vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this
+pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not
+yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil
+on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by
+the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe
+we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to complete
+her destruction.
+
+
+
+The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
+
+Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that
+no denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare
+comparing Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo
+rebuked by the superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington
+declaring that the British can behave themselves neither in
+victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen war as we have
+seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "Could great
+men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet; for
+every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder:
+nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he had
+seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
+every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the
+craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at
+the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger
+without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may
+have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's
+thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch
+and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
+said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford,
+as French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find
+the old familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and
+at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a
+fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the
+spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction
+that Jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of
+words?
+
+And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on
+human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes
+the worse half a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it
+down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties
+would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get
+into them. In truth, it is, as Byron said, "not difficult to
+die," and enormously difficult to live: that explains why, at
+bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more
+arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death
+more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious
+certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that
+he taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without
+some soldier who braved death in the field so recklessly that he
+was decorated or specially commended for it, being haled before
+our magistrates for having failed to resist the paltriest
+temptations of peace, with no better excuse than the old one that
+"a man must live." Strange that one who, sooner than do honest
+work, will sell his honor for a bottle of wine, a visit to the
+theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all obtained by
+passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on the most
+desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if,
+after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of
+life? If it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men
+attain it? At all events it is clear that the kingdom of the
+Prince of Peace has not yet become the kingdom of this world. His
+attempts at invasion have been resisted far more fiercely than
+the Kaiser's. Successful as that resistance has been, it has
+piled up a sort of National Debt that is not the less oppressive
+because we have no figures for it and do not intend to pay it. A
+blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the long run
+less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
+materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In
+the blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many
+mansions; but I am afraid they do not include either Heartbreak
+House or Horseback Hall.
+
+
+
+Plague on Both your Houses!
+
+Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
+foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be
+buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices.
+Unfortunately they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they
+have been demolished many times by successive Greathearts, and
+rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, by Feeble Mind and
+Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of Vanity Fair. Another
+generation of "secondary education" at our ancient public schools
+and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
+sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the
+instruction of that generation I leave these pages as a record of
+what civilian life was during the war: a matter on which history
+is usually silent. Fortunately it was a very short war. It is
+true that the people who thought it could not last more than six
+months were very signally refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas
+Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos lasted months instead of
+hours. But there would have been nothing surprising in its
+lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact that the
+blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe, which
+it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly
+organized for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted
+until the belligerents were so tired of it that they could no
+longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it.
+Considering its magnitude, the war of 1914-18 will certainly be
+classed as the shortest in history. The end came so suddenly that
+the combatant literally stumbled over it; and yet it came a full
+year later than it should have come if the belligerents had not
+been far too afraid of one another to face the situation
+sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she
+began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously
+exhausted. Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too
+close to bankruptcy as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at
+which both were bluffed. And, with the usual irony of war, it
+remains doubtful whether Germany and Russia, the defeated, will
+not be the gainers; for the victors are already busy fastening on
+themselves the chains they have struck from the limbs of the
+vanquished.
+
+
+
+How the Theatre fared
+
+Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European
+theatre of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham
+fights, and the slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen,
+go comfortably home to supper after washing off their rose-pink
+wounds. It is nearly twenty years since I was last obliged to
+introduce a play in the form of a book for lack of an opportunity
+of presenting it in its proper mode by a performance in a
+theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient. Heartbreak
+House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it because
+the war has completely upset the economic conditions which
+formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The
+change is not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor
+in the authors and actors, but in the audiences. For four years
+the London theatres were crowded every night with thousands of
+soldiers on leave from the front. These soldiers were not
+seasoned London playgoers. A childish experience of my own gave
+me a clue to their condition. When I was a small boy I was taken
+to the opera. I did not then know what an opera was, though I
+could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in my
+mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly
+in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded
+balcony filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be
+the opera singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni,
+and wondered how soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled
+by the fact that I was made to sit with my back to the singers
+instead of facing them. When the curtain went up, my astonishment
+and delight were unbounded.
+
+
+
+The Soldier at the Theatre Front
+
+In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same
+predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind
+it was evident that they had never been in a theatre before and
+did not know what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I
+sat beside a young officer, not at all a rough specimen, who,
+even when the curtain rose and enlightened him as to the place
+where he had to look for his entertainment, found the dramatic
+part of it utterly incomprehensible. He did not know how to play
+his part of the game. He could understand the people on the stage
+singing and dancing and performing gymnastic feats. He not only
+understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who imitated cocks
+crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended that
+they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind them
+was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very
+sophisticated the natural man has to become before the
+conventions of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the
+purpose of the drama obvious to him.
+
+Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers
+was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called
+flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres
+to the doors. It was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude
+enough to nurse them on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked
+their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics
+to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. I
+believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were
+concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of George
+Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
+would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices
+were only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in
+time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most
+advanced postIbsen plays in the most artistic settings, found
+himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes,
+dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The
+author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time told
+me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse
+of the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent
+but delightful pleasure merely to see a flapper. The reaction
+from the battle-field produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in
+which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial things
+gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
+having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven
+them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of
+distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who
+were no longer under fire and under military discipline, but
+actually clean and comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with
+anything and everything that a bevy of pretty girls and a funny
+man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty and a man
+pretending to be funny, could do for them.
+
+Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned
+farcical comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each
+side and a practicable window in the middle, was understood to
+resemble exactly the bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all
+three inhabited by couples consumed with jealousy. When these
+people came home drunk at night; mistook their neighbor's flats
+for their own; and in due course got into the wrong beds, it was
+not only the novices who found the resulting complications and
+scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their equally
+verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
+astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just
+come in drunk through the window pretended to undress, and
+allowed glimpses of his naked person to be descried from time to
+time.
+
+
+
+Heartbreak House
+
+Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying,
+and were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent
+of farcical comedies that followed it in his heyday until every
+trick of that trade had become so stale that the laughter they
+provoked turned to loathing: these veterans also, when they
+returned from the field, were as much pleased by what they knew
+to be stale and foolish as the novices by what they thought fresh
+and clever.
+
+
+
+Commerce in the Theatre
+
+Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London
+theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays
+he must pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare
+of the people: they are all for the sole purpose of producing the
+utmost obtainable rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and
+twin beds produce a guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes
+Shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin beds. If the
+brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid Mozart,
+out goes Mozart.
+
+
+
+Unser Shakespeare
+
+Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing
+a national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the
+death of Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of
+illustrious and influential persons lent their names to a grand
+appeal to our national culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The
+Sonnets, was one of the incidents of that appeal. After some
+years of effort the result was a single handsome subscription
+from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated swearer in the
+anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost
+its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in
+ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this
+situation," and let it pass without another word.
+
+
+
+The Higher Drama put out of Action
+
+The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined.
+The beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it.
+Rents went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices
+doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised
+the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the
+houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. Even
+bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide
+popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited
+extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if
+the theatre were only half full until Saturday and three-quarters
+full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard
+worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically
+disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and
+happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
+potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time
+a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus
+and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British
+drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as
+a playwright possible in England. In America I had already
+established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system,
+but in association with the exceptional genius of Richard
+Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the system
+of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
+of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the
+Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a
+time when the sole official attention paid me by the British
+Courts was the announcement to the English-speaking world that
+certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a
+substantial set-off against this being that the British Court, in
+the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad
+character given me by the chief officer of its household.
+
+Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London
+stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville
+Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence
+Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and
+others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather
+less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues
+of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama
+and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
+them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of
+theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost
+to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work appealing to a
+relatively small class of cultivated persons, and therefore
+attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators as
+the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the
+hands of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake,
+and had not yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities
+to consider the commercial value of their time and energy too
+closely. The war struck this foundation away in the manner I have
+just described. The expenses of running the cheapest west-end
+theatres rose to a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the
+utmost that the higher drama can, as an ascertained matter of
+fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher drama, which has
+never really been a commercially sound speculation, now became an
+impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to provide a
+refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory
+theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at
+last disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic
+pioneers whom it swallowed, they find that the economic
+conditions which formerly made their work no worse than
+precarious now put it out of the question altogether, as far as
+the west end of London is concerned.
+
+
+
+Church and Theatre
+
+I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not
+brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the
+theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of
+the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not know what a
+theatre is. But please note that all these soldiers who did not
+know what a theatre was, knew what a church was. And they had
+been taught to respect churches. Nobody had ever warned them
+against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in
+their best clothes; where stories of improper females like
+Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were
+read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,
+Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe
+music by greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty
+pictures of pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses
+through stained-glass windows; and where sculpture and
+architecture came to the help of painting. Nobody ever reminded
+them that these things had sometimes produced such developments
+of erotic idolatry that men who were not only enthusiastic
+amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous
+practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even
+regular troops under express command had mutilated church
+statues, smashed church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn
+up the sheets from which the church music was read and sung. When
+they saw broken statues in churches, they were told that this was
+the work of wicked, godless rioters, instead of, as it was, the
+work partly of zealots bent on driving the world, the flesh, and
+the devil out of the temple, and partly of insurgent men who had
+become intolerably poor because the temple had become a den of
+thieves. But all the sins and perversions that were so carefully
+hidden from them in the history of the Church were laid on the
+shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of
+penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the
+slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving
+souls. When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world
+rang with the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the
+Little Theatre in the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two
+writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it, the fact was
+not even mentioned in the papers. In point of appeal to the
+senses no theatre ever built could touch the fane at Rheims: no
+actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any operatic tenor
+look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture glass
+was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres. It
+was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the
+Blondin Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the
+Adam-Adelphian decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so
+much taste and care, the Little Theatre was in comparison with
+Rheims the gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral
+must, from the Puritan point of view, have debauched a million
+voluptuaries for every one whom the Little Theatre had sent home
+thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's Magic or
+Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why the
+Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact
+remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the
+national value of the theatre I owed the first regular public
+performance of a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it
+had been a crime, whereas if she had given the money to the
+Church she would have worn a halo for it. And I admit, as I have
+always done, that this state of things may have been a very
+sensible one. I have asked Londoners again and again why they pay
+half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can go to St. Paul's
+or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible reply is
+that they want to see something new and possibly something
+wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a
+revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge
+for admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the
+church door shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free
+admission to one performance at any theatre he or she prefers.
+Thus shall the sensuous charms of the church service be made to
+subsidize the sterner virtue of the drama.
+
+
+
+The Next Phase
+
+The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I
+read at breakfast this morning before writing these words
+contains a calculation that no less than twenty-three wars are at
+present being waged to confirm the peace, England is no longer in
+khaki; and a violent reaction is setting in against the crude
+theatrical fare of the four terrible years. Soon the rents of
+theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that they
+cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in
+and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will be at no
+greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may
+benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from
+the fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and
+thrust upon the sternest realities and necessities until we have
+lost both faith in and patience with the theatrical pretences
+that had no root either in reality or necessity; second, by the
+startling change made by the war in the distribution of income.
+It seems only the other day that a millionaire was a man with
+œ50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his income tax and super
+tax, and insured his life for the amount of his death duties, he
+is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his nominal
+property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget
+which is called "a respite for the rich." At the other end of the
+scale millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first
+time in their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed,
+fed, lodged, and taught to make up their minds that certain
+things have to be done, also for the first time in their lives.
+Hundreds of thousands of women have been taken out of their
+domestic cages and tasted both discipline and independence. The
+thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been pulled up short
+by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an
+unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and
+although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would
+automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog
+would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in
+the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more
+conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to
+submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in
+history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent
+that hardly by trying to suppress it in other countries by arms
+and defamation, and calling the process anti-Bolshevism, can our
+Government stave it off at home.
+
+Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American
+President who was once a historian. In those days it became his
+task to tell us how, after that great war in America which was
+more clearly than any other war of our time a war for an idea,
+the conquerors, confronted with a heroic task of reconstruction,
+turned recreant, and spent fifteen years in abusing their victory
+under cover of pretending to accomplish the task they were doing
+what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel was right when he
+said that we learn from history that men never learn anything
+from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that
+we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to
+fight for, are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square
+meal of ten years revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate
+foe, can only be guessed by those who know, as he does, how
+hopeless is remonstrance, and how happy Lincoln was in perishing
+from the earth before his inspired messages became scraps of
+paper. He knows well that from the Peace Conference will come, in
+spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will be able, like
+Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind: and the
+gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy the
+militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in
+Cologne imprisoning every German who does not salute a British
+officer; whilst the government at home, asked whether it
+approves, replies that it does not propose even to discontinue
+this Zabernism when the Peace is concluded, but in effect looks
+forward to making Germans salute British officers until the end
+of the world. That is what war makes of men and women. It will
+wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving
+impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to
+be despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be
+dotards. In the meantime there is, for him, another history to
+write; for me, another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that
+is what wars are for, and what historians and playwrights are
+for. If men will not learn until their lessons are written in
+blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference.
+
+
+
+The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
+
+To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the
+theatre will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest
+Hohenzollern languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a
+capital charge of fighting for his country against England;
+Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more
+summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead:
+nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of
+Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime
+Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory
+as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on
+one another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides
+and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen
+remain fixed in their everlasting seats.
+
+
+
+How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet
+
+As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays
+about the war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is
+significant. You cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at
+the same time. War cannot bear the terrible castigation of
+comedy, the ruthless light of laughter that glares on the stage.
+When men are heroically dying for their country, it is not the
+time to show their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how
+they are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the
+cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the
+electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the
+lusts and lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because
+it opens their prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of
+power and popularity. For unless these things are mercilessly
+exposed they will hide under the mantle of the ideals on the
+stage just as they do in real life.
+
+And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and
+indeed cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the
+issue is still in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible
+with the defence of the realm. We are just now reading the
+revelations of our generals and admirals, unmuzzled at last by
+the armistice. During the war, General A, in his moving
+despatches from the field, told how General B had covered himself
+with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us
+that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by
+disobeying his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of
+running away as he ought to have done. An excellent subject for
+comedy now that the war is over, no doubt; but if General A had
+let this out at the time, what would have been the effect on
+General B's soldiers? And had the stage made known what the Prime
+Minister and the Secretary of State for War who overruled General
+A thought of him, and what he thought of them, as now revealed in
+raging controversy, what would have been the effect on the
+nation? That is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be
+loyally silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no
+patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth to natural
+history; cares not whether Germany or England perish; is ready to
+cry with Brynhild, "Lass'uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh'n"
+sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus becomes in time of
+war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or
+trinitrotoluene. That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House
+from the footlights during the war; for the Germans might on any
+night have turned the last act from play into earnest, and even
+then might not have waited for their cues.
+
+June, 1919.
+
+
+
+HEARTBREAK HOUSE
+
+ACT I
+
+The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex,
+looking very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September,
+is seen through the windows of a room which has been built so as
+to resemble the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship,
+with a stern gallery; for the windows are ship built with heavy
+timbering, and run right across the room as continuously as the
+stability of the wall allows. A row of lockers under the windows
+provides an unupholstered windowseat interrupted by twin glass
+doors, respectively halfway between the stern post and the sides.
+Another door strains the illusion a little by being apparently in
+the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open sea, but
+to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the
+stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches
+beside the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the
+stern gallery. Against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench.
+The vice has a board in its jaws; and the floor is littered with
+shavings, overflowing from a waste-paper basket. A couple of
+planes and a centrebit are on the bench. In the same wall,
+between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway with a
+half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it
+is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.
+
+On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak
+drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set
+squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a
+tumbler of discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on
+it. The drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has
+the window on its left hand. On the floor at the end of the
+table, on its right, is a ship's fire bucket. On the port side of
+the room, near the bookshelves, is a sofa with its back to the
+windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article, oddly upholstered in
+sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of blankets
+hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table is
+a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with
+its back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a
+round top and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the
+door and the bookcase. It is the only article in the room that
+suggests (not at all convincingly) a woman's hand in the
+furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of narrow boards is caulked and
+holystoned like a deck.
+
+The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before
+the landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow
+is the cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the
+house is a flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the
+east side and a long garden seat on the west.
+
+A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting
+in the window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look
+out at the view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down
+with a volume of the Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger
+stuck in the page she has been reading.
+
+A clock strikes six.
+
+The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an
+air of one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience.
+She is a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking,
+nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler.
+
+With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's
+chair; sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the
+book sinks to her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a
+slumber.
+
+An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three
+unopened bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and
+disappears in the pantry without noticing the young lady. She
+places the bottles on the shelf and fills her tray with empty
+bottles. As she returns with these, the young lady lets her book
+drop, awakening herself, and startling the womanservant so that
+she all but lets the tray fall.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book
+and places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure;
+but you are a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for
+now?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of
+knowing that I have been invited here.
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you're invited, are you? And has nobody
+come? Dear! dear!
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in
+at the window; and I heard him calling out, "Nurse, there is a
+young and attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what
+she wants." Are you the nurse?
+
+THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I'm Nurse Guinness. That was old
+Captain Shotover, Mrs Hushabye's father. I heard him roaring; but
+I thought it was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs
+Hushabye that invited you, ducky?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I'd
+better go.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs
+Hushabye has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant
+surprise for her to see you, won't it?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to
+find that nobody expects me.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. You'll get used to it, miss: this house is full
+of surprises for them that don't know our ways.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient
+but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer
+jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a
+hold-all and a handbag on the front steps for everybody to fall
+over. Also a tennis racquet. Who the devil left them there?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I'm afraid.
+
+TAE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this
+misguided and unfortunate young lady?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her
+against my daughter's invitations? This is a pretty sort of
+house, by heavens! A young and attractive lady is invited here.
+Her luggage is left on the steps for hours; and she herself is
+deposited in the poop and abandoned, tired and starving. This is
+our hospitality. These are our manners. No room ready. No hot
+water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep in the
+toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Now it's all right, Captain: I'll get the lady
+some tea; and her room shall be ready before she has finished it.
+[To the young lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself
+at home [she goes to the door leading to the hall].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman,
+that because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you
+have the right to address her as you address my wretched
+children, whom you have brought up in ignorance of the commonest
+decencies of social intercourse?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she
+goes out into the hall on her way to the kitchen].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits
+down in the big wicker chair].
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was
+originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship's chandler with
+stores which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No
+doubt he became rich. Are you his daughter?
+
+ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to
+say that though my father has not been a successful man, nobody
+has ever had one word to say against him. I think my father is
+the best man I have ever known.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the
+seventh degree of concentration?
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have
+two daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you
+here. I keep this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the
+seventh degree of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves
+me to entertain them. [Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray,
+which she places on the teak table]. I have a second daughter who
+is, thank God, in a remote part of the Empire with her numskull
+of a husband. As a child she thought the figure-head of my ship,
+the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing on earth. He resembled
+it. He had the same expression: wooden yet enterprising. She
+married him, and will never set foot in this house again.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to
+Ellie's side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in
+England this very moment. You have been told three times this
+week that she is coming home for a year for her health. And very
+glad you should be to see your own daughter again after all these
+years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of
+the human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter
+Ariadne was born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If
+she comes, I am not at home. If she wants anything, let her take
+it. If she asks for me, let her be informed that I am extremely
+old, and have totally forgotten her.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. That's no talk to offer to a young lady. Here,
+ducky, have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a
+cup of tea].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have
+given this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their
+own leather insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and
+empties both into the leathern bucket].
+
+ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have
+been glad of anything.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to
+drop.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that
+fly-blown cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He
+disappears into the pantry].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. There's a man for you! They say he sold himself
+to the devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older
+he grows the more I believe them.
+
+A WOMAN'S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse!
+Papa! Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.
+
+Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It's Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs
+Hushabye's sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling].
+Coming, Miss, coming.
+
+She carries the table back to its place by the door and is
+harrying out when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who
+bursts in much flustered. Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very
+handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and
+action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic
+silliness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don't
+look a day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn't
+she expect me? Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on
+the steps? Where's papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh!
+I beg your pardon. I suppose you are one of my nieces.
+[Approaching her with outstretched arms]. Come and kiss your
+aunt, darling.
+
+ELLIE. I'm only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. I'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes
+up the tray].
+
+ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he's forgotten what he went for
+already. His mind wanders from one thing to another.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don't be silly, Nurse. Don't call me
+Miss.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the
+tea-tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know
+what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it
+after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage
+lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at
+home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry
+because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching
+apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk,
+in feeling. When I was a child I was used to it: I had never
+known anything better, though I was unhappy, and longed all the
+time--oh, how I longed!--to be respectable, to be a lady, to live
+as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself. I
+married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir Hastings
+Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in
+succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House.
+I have been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like
+this. I wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces
+(one ought to, you know), and I was looking forward to it. And
+now the state of the house! the way I'm received! the casual
+impudence of that woman Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione
+might at least have been here: some preparation might have been
+made for me. You must excuse my going on in this way; but I am
+really very much hurt and annoyed and disillusioned: and if I had
+realized it was to be like this, I wouldn't have come. I have a
+great mind to go away without another word [she is on the point
+of weeping].
+
+ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me
+either. I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady
+Utterword? My luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has
+gone.
+
+The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese
+lacquer and a very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally
+on the end of the table; snatches away the drawing-board, which
+he stands on the floor against table legs; and puts the tray in
+the space thus cleared. Ellie pours out a cup greedily.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must
+fetch another cup [he makes for the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion].
+Papa! Don't you know me? I'm your daughter.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [He
+vanishes through the half door].
+
+Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.
+
+ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don't be so distressed. Have
+this cup of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been
+just like that to me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own
+father is all the world to me. Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
+
+The captain returns with another cup.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can't have forgotten me.
+I am Ariadne. I'm little Paddy Patkins. Won't you kiss me? [She
+goes to him and throws her arms round his neck].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be
+Ariadne? You are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but
+no longer young.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been
+away, Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing
+strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But I'm your daughter. You haven't seen me for
+years.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home,
+we have to think of all their good points or it would be
+impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console
+ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices. That is
+how I have come to think my absent daughter Ariadne a perfect
+fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself here by impersonating
+her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the room].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very
+well, papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea
+for herself].
+
+THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn?
+Billy Dunn?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed
+you?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on
+the sofa].
+
+ELLIE [protesting]. No--
+
+Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?
+
+NURSE. You've actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh,
+miss, he didn't forget you after all! You HAVE made an
+impression.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly
+wanted in this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only
+moderately young. Her children are not youthful.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in
+this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with
+notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers
+of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people
+of any age.
+
+NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady
+Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty?
+Do you hear?
+
+NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I'll tell them all they must call
+you My Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having
+servants with no manners?
+
+ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup].
+Lady Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don't ask me. You can see for yourself that
+I've just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years'
+absence! and it seems that I am not expected.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is
+expected or not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food.
+I'll find a room for her myself [he makes for the door].
+
+ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please--[He goes out].
+Lady Utterword, I don't know what to do. Your father persists in
+believing that my father is some sailor who robbed him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My
+father is a very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now
+that he is old, of course he is worse. And I must warn you that
+it is sometimes very hard to feel quite sure that he really
+forgets.
+
+Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces
+Ellie. She is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and
+even better looking. She has magnificent black hair, eyes like
+the fishpools of Heshbon, and a nobly modelled neck, short at the
+back and low between her shoulders in front. Unlike her sister
+she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a rich robe of black pile
+that shows off her white skin and statuesque contour.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how
+long have you been here? I've been at home all the time: I was
+putting flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down
+for a moment to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off
+to sleep. Papa woke me and told me you were here. Fancy your
+finding no one, and being neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her
+again]. My poor love! [She deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile
+Ariadne has left the table and come over to claim her share of
+attention]. Oh! you've brought someone with you. Introduce me.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don't know me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face
+quite well. Where have we met?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Didn't Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is
+really too much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch!
+[Rising angrily]. I'll go straight to a hotel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious
+goodness, you don't mean to say that you're Addy!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don't think I can be
+so changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any
+real affection for me. And Papa didn't think me even worth
+mentioning!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the
+chair instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You
+DO look a swell. You're much handsomer than you used to be.
+You've made the acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to
+marry a perfect hog of a millionaire for the sake of her father,
+who is as poor as a church mouse; and you must help me to stop
+her.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man's coming here today with your
+father to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state
+of the case in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret
+of it?
+
+ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don't know how wonderfully
+good he was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable
+man, Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of
+some kind who knew Ellie's grandparents. They were both poets,
+like the Brownings; and when her father came into the world
+Mazzini said, "Another soldier born for freedom!" So they
+christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting for freedom in
+his quiet way ever since. That's why he is so poor.
+
+ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in
+it, and marry someone you love?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are
+you going to kiss me or are you not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I DON'T want to be kissed; but I do want you to
+behave properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been
+separated for twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate
+the smell of powder.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling--[she is interrupted by the
+return of the captain].
+
+THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The
+sheets were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the
+garden door on the port side].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?
+
+THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or
+take them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne's
+old room.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That
+little hole! I am entitled to the best spare room.
+
+THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She
+told me she would marry anyone to get away from home.
+
+LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I
+will leave the house.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man
+with bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in
+a blue serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it,
+and carries a soft black hat of clerical cut.
+
+ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.
+
+THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away
+through the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be
+somebody else. I will have it out with Papa now, this instant.
+[To Mazzini]. Excuse me. [She follows the captain out, making a
+hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns it].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come,
+Mr Dunn! You don't mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter,
+you know, but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have
+some delightful talks with him.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He
+draws her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs
+Hushabye, for your kindness to my daughter. I'm afraid she would
+have had no holiday if you had not invited her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract
+young people to the house for us.
+
+MAZZINI [smiling]. I'm afraid Ellie is not interested in young
+men, Mrs Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her
+manner]. Won't you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find
+a cupboard for coats and hats and things in the corner of the
+hall.
+
+MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes--thank you--I had better--
+[he goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!
+
+ELLIE. Who?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. "Graver,
+solider tastes," indeed!
+
+ELLIE [aghast]. You don't mean that you were speaking like that
+of my father!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.
+
+ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns
+to the door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I'll tell your father why.
+
+ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this,
+Mrs Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.
+
+ELLIE. Certainly not now?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I'll tell your father.
+
+ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair--if you take his part against me
+and against your own heart for a moment, I'll give that born
+soldier of freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his
+selfish old head for a week.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know--
+
+She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and
+perspiring.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you'd like to know.
+Excuse me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little
+confused by his manner. He is making Mangan help him with
+something in the garden; and he wants me too--
+
+A powerful whistle is heard.
+
+THE CAPTAIN'S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].
+
+MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me.
+[He hurries out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.
+
+ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don't understand. My father and
+Mr Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't care what they were: we must sit down if
+you are going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at
+Ellie's waist, and makes her sit down on the sofa beside her].
+Now, pettikins, tell me all about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss
+Mangan, don't they? He is a Napoleon of industry and disgustingly
+rich, isn't he? Why isn't your father rich?
+
+ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His
+parents were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they
+could not afford to give him a profession.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine
+frenzy rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business.
+Hasn't he succeeded in it?
+
+ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some
+capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads
+and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the
+same difficulty of not having capital enough. I don't know how to
+describe it to you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.
+
+ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn't it? I shouldn't
+have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have
+pulled hard--[between her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.
+
+ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr
+Mangan did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship
+for my father and respect for his character. He asked him how
+much capital he wanted, and gave it to him. I don't mean that he
+lent it to him, or that he invested it in his business. He just
+simply made him a present of it. Wasn't that splendid of him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never
+even seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely
+disinterested. Pure generosity.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman's pardon. Well, what became
+of the money?
+
+ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I
+went to another school for two years.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?
+
+ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was
+utterly ruined.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. I never could understand. But it was
+dreadful. When we were poor my father had never been in debt. But
+when he launched out into business on a large scale, he had to
+incur liabilities. When the business went into liquidation he
+owed more money than Mr Mangan had given him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.
+
+ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. I
+was quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have
+picked up so much slang from the children that I am really hardly
+presentable. I suppose your father had no head for business, and
+made a mess of it.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about
+him. The business turned out a great success. It now pays
+forty-four per cent after deducting the excess profits tax.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren't you rolling in money?
+
+ELLIE. I don't know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my
+father was made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he
+had persuaded several of his friends to put money into the
+business. He was sure it would succeed; and events proved that he
+was quite right. But they all lost their money. It was dreadful.
+I don't know what we should have done but for Mr Mangan.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after
+all his money being thrown away?
+
+ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father.
+He bought what was left of the business--the buildings and the
+machinery and things--from the official trustee for enough money
+to enable my father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and
+get his discharge. Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so
+plainly that he was an honorable man, that they let him off at
+six-and-eight-pence instead of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan
+started a company to take up the business, and made my father a
+manager in it to save us from starvation; for I wasn't earning
+anything then.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the
+tender passion?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair
+one night at a sort of people's concert. I was singing there. As
+an amateur, you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs
+with three encores. He was so pleased with my singing that he
+asked might he walk home with me. I never saw anyone so taken
+aback as he was when I took him home and introduced him to my
+father, his own manager. It was then that my father told me how
+nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great chance
+for me, as he is so rich. And--and--we drifted into a sort of
+understanding--I suppose I should call it an engagement--[she is
+distressed and cannot go on].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted
+into it; but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to
+have anything to do with it.
+
+ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it's no use. I am bound in honor and
+gratitude. I will go through with it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know,
+of course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you
+don't love. Do you love this Mangan man?
+
+ELLIE. Yes. At least--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't want to know about "at least": I want to
+know the worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of
+impossible people, especially old people.
+
+ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing
+away intolerantly to starboard]. --grateful to him for his
+kindness to dear father. I know. Anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. What do you mean?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?
+
+ELLIE. Of course not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her
+eye. She picks it up, and evidently finds the title very
+unexpected. She looks at Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure
+you're not in love with an actor?
+
+ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn't it? Why else should you be
+reading Othello?
+
+ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.
+
+MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your
+father does seem to be about the limit.
+
+ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That
+seems to me so extraordinary. I like Othello.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn't he?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is
+horrible. But don't you think it must have been a wonderful
+experience for Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet
+a man who had been out in the world doing all sorts of brave
+things and having terrible adventures, and yet finding something
+in her that made him love to sit and talk with her and tell her
+about them?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's your idea of romance, is it?
+
+ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.
+
+Ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs
+Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to
+the sofa and resumes her seat beside her.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those
+stories that Othello told Desdemona couldn't have happened--?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But
+they didn't.
+
+ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a
+sphinx: I never know what you mean.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had
+lived, you know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!
+
+ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?
+
+ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are
+men who have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of
+course, white, and very handsome, and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him.
+I knew there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so
+miserable about Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to
+marry him.
+
+ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don't
+want to make a secret of it, though of course I don't tell
+everybody. Besides, I don't know him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't know him! What does that mean?
+
+ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more
+intimately, eh?
+
+ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite--almost intimately.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You don't know him; and you know him almost
+intimately. How lucid!
+
+ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I--I got into
+conversation with him by chance at a concert.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your
+concerts, Ellie.
+
+ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting
+for our turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so
+splendid. But he was only one of the committee. I happened to
+tell him that I was copying a picture at the National Gallery. I
+make a little money that way. I can't paint much; but as it's
+always the same picture I can do it pretty quickly and get two or
+three pounds for it. It happened that he came to the National
+Gallery one day.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One students' day. Paid sixpence to stumble about
+through a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day
+for nothing and found the floor clear! Quite by accident?
+
+ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He
+knows lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are
+all in love with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the
+National Gallery and persuade me to come with him for a drive
+round Richmond Park in a taxi.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It's
+wonderful what you good girls can do without anyone saying a
+word.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn't make
+acquaintances in that way I shouldn't have any at all.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of
+yourself. May I ask his name?
+
+ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid
+name!
+
+ELLIE. Oh, I'm so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was
+afraid it was only a silly fancy of my own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?
+
+ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique
+chest--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A what?
+
+ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden,
+after a night of the most terrible thunderstorm.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get
+into it because he was afraid of the lightning?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was
+embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!
+
+ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. --de Rougemont?
+
+ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A
+vicomte. His life has been one long romance. A tiger--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the
+tiger from a hunting party: one of King Edward's hunting parties
+in India. The King was furious: that was why he never had his
+military services properly recognized. But he doesn't care. He is
+a Socialist and despises rank, and has been in three revolutions
+fighting on the barricades.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You,
+Ellie, of all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple,
+straightforward, good girl.
+
+ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don't
+believe me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don't believe you. You're inventing
+every word of it. Do you take me for a fool?
+
+Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye
+is puzzled.
+
+ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I'm very sorry. I see now that it sounds
+very improbable as I tell it. But I can't stay if you think that
+way about me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan't go. I couldn't be
+so mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has
+really told you all this.
+
+ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don't say that you don't believe him.
+I couldn't bear that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest.
+But you should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back
+to her seat]. Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with
+him?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, no. I'm not so foolish. I don't fall in love with
+people. I'm not so silly as you think.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about--to give some
+interest and pleasure to life.
+
+ELLIE. Just so. That's all, really.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? No tedious
+waiting to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will
+have a bad night. How delightful it makes waking up in the
+morning! How much better than the happiest dream! All life
+transfigured! No more wishing one had an interesting book to
+read, because life is so much happier than any book! No desire
+but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be alone
+and just think about it.
+
+ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know?
+Oh, you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy
+you! and how I pity you!
+
+ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?
+
+A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches,
+wearing a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an
+elaborate walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and
+stops short at sight of the women on the sofa.
+
+ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this
+is Mr Marcus Darnley.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.
+
+ELLIE. But now--[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the
+sofa]. Steady, my pettikins.
+
+THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing
+his hat and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is
+Hector Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any
+sensitive man would care to confess to. I never use it when I can
+possibly help it. I have been away for nearly a month; and I had
+no idea you knew my wife, or that you were coming here. I am none
+the less delighted to find you in our little house.
+
+ELLIE [in great distress]. I don't know what to do. Please, may I
+speak to papa? Do leave me. I can't bear it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. I--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.
+
+HECTOR. If you think it better--[he goes out, taking his hat with
+him but leaving the stick on the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now,
+pettikins, he is gone. There's nobody but me. You can let
+yourself go. Don't try to control yourself. Have a good cry.
+
+ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were
+going to be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.
+
+ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a
+fool. [Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She
+begins prowling to and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously
+older and harder].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young
+women can resist Hector. I couldn't when I was your age. He is
+really rather splendid, you know.
+
+ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of
+course. But how can you love a liar?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise
+there wouldn't be much love in the world.
+
+ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you
+please. If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector's courage, he
+will go straight off and do the most horribly dangerous things to
+convince himself that he isn't a coward. He has a dreadful trick
+of getting out of one third-floor window and coming in at
+another, just to test his nerve. He has a whole drawerful of
+Albert Medals for saving people's lives.
+
+ELLIE. He never told me that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can't
+bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his
+stories are made-up stories.
+
+ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and
+really has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he
+never did and that never happened?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don't have their
+virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.
+
+ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There's something odd about
+this house, Hesione, and even about you. I don't know why I'm
+talking to you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is
+broken, but that heartbreak is not like what I thought it must
+be.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It's only life educating you,
+pettikins. How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?
+
+ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh,
+how can you remind me of him, Hesione?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You
+don't mind now, do you, dear?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.
+
+Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.
+
+HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One
+second more, and she would have been a dead woman!
+
+MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye
+has just been telling me the most extraordinary--
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the
+room].
+
+HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I'll tell it to you after
+dinner. I think you'll like it. The truth is I made it up for
+you, and was looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to
+you. But in a moment of impatience at being turned out of the
+room, I threw it away on your father.
+
+ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench,
+scornfully self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes
+it. I should not have believed it.
+
+MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of
+course she does not really think that. [He goes to the
+bookshelves, and inspects the titles of the volumes].
+
+Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain.
+Mangan, carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs'
+meeting, is about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful
+expression, standing a little on an entirely imaginary dignity,
+with a dull complexion, straight, lustreless hair, and features
+so entirely commonplace that it is impossible to describe them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer].
+Says his name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his
+nerve. Men seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he
+goes into the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have
+his own way than try to explain.
+
+MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she
+indicates Hector].
+
+MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand].
+Very pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have
+not found the journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.
+
+HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].
+
+ELLIE. You haven't shown me my room yet, Hesione.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite
+at home, Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the
+captain in the pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr
+Mangan.
+
+She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You're going to marry Dunn's daughter. Don't.
+You're too old.
+
+MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That's fairly blunt, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's true.
+
+MANGAN. She doesn't think so.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.
+
+MANGAN. Older men than I have--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him].--made fools of
+themselves. That, also, is true.
+
+MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don't see that this is any business
+of yours.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody's business. The stars in their
+courses are shaken when such things happen.
+
+MANGAN. I'm going to marry her all the same.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?
+
+MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I
+never made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn't bring it
+off. That's the sort of man I am; and there will be a better
+understanding between us when you make up your mind to that,
+Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean
+that you make a hundred thousand a year.
+
+MANGAN. I don't boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred
+thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out
+my hand to him and call him brother.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year,
+hey?
+
+MANGAN. No. I can't say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from
+Mangan with his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups
+on the Chinese tray].
+
+MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don't quite
+understand my position here. I came here on your daughter's
+invitation. Am I in her house or in yours?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the
+house of God. What is true within these walls is true outside
+them. Go out on the seas; climb the mountains; wander through the
+valleys. She is still too young.
+
+MANGAN [weakening]. But I'm very little over fifty.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan,
+you will not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away
+into the pantry].
+
+MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate's child?
+What are you talking about?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry
+her.
+
+MANGAN. Who will stop me?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door
+leading to the hall].
+
+MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she
+brought me down here to break it off?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing
+more than I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my
+advice: marry a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I
+was married to one myself for two years.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I am damned!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The
+negress redeemed me.
+
+MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this
+house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of
+talking.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It's the other sort of talking that
+makes quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.
+
+A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners
+proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has
+an engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close
+inspection is found to be at least over forty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is
+no knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the
+bell ring? The door is open.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you
+[he makes for the door].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I'm afraid you don't know who I
+am.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make
+distinctions between one fellow creature and another? [He goes
+out. Mangan and the newcomer stare at one another].
+
+MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Very.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has
+arrived and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione's feelings! May I ask are you a
+member of the family?
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance,
+Hesione. [Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same
+moment the captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my
+kissing your daughter, Captain, when I tell you that--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as
+much as you like [he makes for the pantry].
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts
+and turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to
+remember but probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago--
+that your younger daughter married a numskull?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she'd marry anybody to get away
+from this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is
+no longer like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been
+boiled in bread and milk for years and years, like other married
+men. Poor devil! [He disappears into the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing
+him]. I don't believe you are Hastings Utterword.
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?
+
+THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am
+Randall Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I
+was abroad diplomatizing when he was married.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the
+wardrobe in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must
+lock it up--[recognizing the stranger with a shock] Randall, how
+dare you? [She marches at him past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and
+joins Mangan near the sofa].
+
+RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?
+
+RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at
+Claridge's; so I followed you down here. You are looking
+extremely well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't presume to tell me so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no
+right to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she
+goes to the window-seat and sits down, turning away from them
+ill-humoredly and looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie
+are now seen strolling together].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I
+beg your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a
+perfect fool of myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.
+
+MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman
+walking in the garden with Miss Dunn?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. She quarrelled mortally with my
+husband only ten minutes ago; and I didn't know anyone else had
+come. It must be a visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh,
+it is Hector. They've made it up.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man?
+
+RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One's husband never is,
+Ariadne [he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. One's sister's husband always is, Mr Randall.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Don't be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are
+just as bad.
+
+Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door.
+Randall rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry.
+Hector comes forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very
+best.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.
+
+HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?
+
+HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but
+respectful admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought--
+[pulling himself together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I
+am extremely glad to welcome you at last under our roof [he
+offers his hand with grave courtesy].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good
+brother-in-law; and have done with it. [She leaves them to
+themselves].
+
+HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not
+only to hospitality but to civilization.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands
+cordially].
+
+Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie].
+Your father has washed himself.
+
+ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the
+pantry window.
+
+Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed
+and brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and
+Mrs Hushabye.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut--oh, I
+forgot: you've met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.
+
+MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie's hand, and
+beaming at his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She
+is my daughter. [He draws her arm through his caressingly].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister's--
+er--
+
+RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn.
+How do you do?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.
+
+HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don't introduce us any more. [He moves
+away to the big chair, and adds] Won't you sit down, Lady
+Utterword? [She does so very graciously].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it's like making people show
+their tickets.
+
+MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The
+great question is, not who we are, but what we are.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?
+
+MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.
+
+MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in?
+Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance
+of a city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes
+out through the garden].
+
+DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or
+a murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must
+really go and explain. [He follows the captain].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It's no use. You'd really better--
+[but Dunn has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for
+some tea. We never have regular tea; but you can always get some
+when you want: the servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen
+veranda is the best place to ask. May I show you? [She goes to
+the starboard door].
+
+RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don't think I'll take any
+tea this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. There's nothing to see in the garden except papa's
+observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite
+and things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of doors;
+so come along.
+
+RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn't that rather risky?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a
+thunderstorm.
+
+LADY UTTERORRD. That's something new. What is the dynamite for?
+
+HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is
+trying to discover a psychic ray that will explode all the
+explosive at the well of a Mahatma.
+
+ELLIE. The captain's tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that
+you've had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before
+you were ten minutes in the house?
+
+ELLIE. I did.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].
+
+MANGAN. Won't you come, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. I'm too tired. I'll take a book up to my room and rest a
+little. [She goes to the bookshelf].
+
+MANGAN. Right. You can't do better. But I'm disappointed. [He
+follows Randall and Mrs Hushabye].
+
+Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to
+Lady Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.
+
+ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of
+adventure, Lady Utterword?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.
+
+ELLIE. Then I'll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through
+the hall].
+
+HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I
+have to tell her!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what
+did you mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short?
+What did you think?
+
+HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically].
+May I tell you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.
+
+HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of
+saying, "I thought you were a plain woman."
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to
+notice whether I am plain or not?
+
+HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only
+photographs of you; and no photograph can give the strange
+fascination of the daughters of that supernatural old man. There
+is some damnable quality in them that destroys men's moral sense,
+and carries them beyond honor and dishonor. You know that, don't
+you?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once
+for all that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think
+because I'm a Shotover that I'm a Bohemian, because we are all so
+horribly Bohemian. But I'm not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No
+child brought up in a strict Puritan household ever suffered from
+Puritanism as I suffered from our Bohemianism.
+
+HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in
+the houses of their respectable schoolfellows.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.
+
+HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural
+chaperones.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient
+sometimes. But intelligent people can always manage, unless they
+are Bohemians.
+
+HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your
+attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count
+yourself?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can
+assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do
+the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct
+thing, you can do just what you like. An ill-conducted, careless
+woman gets simply no chance. An ill-conducted, careless man is
+never allowed within arm's length of any woman worth knowing.
+
+HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan
+woman. You are a dangerous woman.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.
+
+HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am
+not making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you
+had better know how I feel if you are going to stay here.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer,
+Hector. And terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself,
+at that game. Is it quite understood that we are only playing?
+
+HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer
+worthlessness.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my
+brother-in-law, Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in
+his arms and kisses her strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more
+than play, brother-in-law. [She pushes him suddenly away]. You
+shall not do that again.
+
+HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I
+intended.
+
+MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don't let me disturb
+you; I only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting;
+and he'll catch cold [she makes for the door leading to the
+hall].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has
+actually condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the
+garden: it's cooler now [she goes out by the port door].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don't believe any man can
+kiss Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the
+hall].
+
+HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!
+
+Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain's cap.
+
+HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl.
+Where's Miss Dunn!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap.
+Addy won't let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.
+
+HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making
+love to her automatically. What am I to do? I can't fall in love;
+and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she
+falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love
+with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and
+terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in
+her life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over
+ears. She is worse than you, because you had one real go at
+least, with me.
+
+HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such
+an amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I
+believe that is why I have never been able to repeat it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were
+frightfully in love with one another, Hector. It was such an
+enchanting dream that I have never been able to grudge it to you
+or anyone else since. I have invited all sorts of pretty women to
+the house on the chance of giving you another turn. But it has
+never come off.
+
+HECTOR. I don't know that I want it to come off. It was damned
+dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven.
+This sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is
+hell. I shall kill her if she persists.
+
+MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a
+horse. [Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.
+
+HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?
+
+HECTOR. I presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than
+by Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in
+from it with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there,
+daddiest?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You've been to the gravel pit. Don't drop it about
+the house, there's a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the
+evening light is now very red].
+
+HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a
+feeling without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all
+the rest of your life?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes
+into the pantry].
+
+Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a
+day-dream. He does not move for some time. Then he folds his
+arms. Then, throwing his hands behind him, and gripping one with
+the other, he strides tragically once to and fro. Suddenly he
+snatches his walking stick from the teak table, and draws it; for
+it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate duel with an imaginary
+antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him through the body
+up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on the sofa,
+falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight
+into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and
+says in a deep and thrilling tone, "Do you love me!" The captain
+comes out of the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with
+his arms stretched out and his fists clenched, has to account for
+his attitude by going through a series of gymnastic exercises.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will
+never be as strong as a gorilla.
+
+HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.
+
+HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite
+than you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.
+
+HECTOR. And that you can, eh?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of
+concentration.
+
+HECTOR. What's the use of that? You never do attain it.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept
+forever in the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing
+but a machine for greasing their bristles and filling their
+snouts?
+
+HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them
+both. I refuse to die until I have invented the means.
+
+HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet
+they do, unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and
+their seed. They know it and act on it, strangling our souls.
+They believe in themselves. When we believe in ourselves, we
+shall kill them.
+
+HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a
+very nice daughter. Mangan's son may be a Plato: Randall's a
+Shelley. What was my father?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces
+the drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a
+wash of color].
+
+HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent
+grandchildren?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.
+
+HECTOR. Just so--we are members one of another. [He throws
+himself carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought
+of this killing of human vermin. Many men have thought of it.
+Decent men are like Daniel in the lion's den: their survival is a
+miracle; and they do not always survive. We live among the
+Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as they, poor devils, live
+among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the
+parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the
+servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What
+are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and
+I'll spare them in sheer--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?
+
+HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must
+believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the
+red light over their door is hell fire. I should spare them in
+simple magnanimous pity.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can't spare them until you have the power
+to kill them. At present they have the power to kill you. There
+are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let
+loose on us. They're going to do it. They're doing it already.
+
+HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end
+of the sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill
+the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The
+knowledge that these people are there to render all our
+aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. And when
+we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons
+to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and
+poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
+
+HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be
+such a demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left
+you nothing but dreams, as some women do.
+
+HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and
+lose it accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands
+of the shrew and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the
+flesh. [Walking distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must
+think these things out. [Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the
+dynamite none the less. I will discover a ray mightier than any
+X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of
+my adversary before he can point his gun at me. And I must hurry.
+I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is about to go into
+the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when Hesione comes
+back].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to
+entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting
+about?
+
+HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is
+madder than usual.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.
+
+HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back.
+[They return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.
+
+HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent
+lifeboat I invented?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since
+Easter!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous
+extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve
+thousand for the invention before that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the
+magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we
+do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Can't you think of
+something that will murder half Europe at one bang?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on
+slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn't your husband
+invent something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
+
+HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However,
+you are right: I ought to support my wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should
+never see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.
+
+HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other
+poor husbands?
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is
+anyhow!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It
+sticks in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you
+are.
+
+HECTOR. You are your father's daughter, Hesione.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in
+generals: they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel
+and wind in a machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. Saved!
+You are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these
+dreadful people and entertain them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don't forget that.
+
+HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for
+them. The servants always take jolly good care that there is food
+in the house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a
+house! What a daughter!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!
+
+HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?
+
+HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their
+firesides, their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the
+day. Why are they not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain
+with which we bring them into the world, and make strange dangers
+and torments for themselves to be even with us?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].
+      I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors
+            thereof,
+      That men might come for their choosing, and their betters
+            spring from their love;
+      But one of them married a numskull;
+
+HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].
+      The other a liar wed;
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].
+      And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where
+are you?
+
+HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the
+garden].
+
+The captain goes back to his place at the table.
+
+HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for
+you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made
+in the light.
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn.
+Ellie comes in, followed by Mangan. Both are dressed for dinner.
+She strolls to the drawing-table. He comes between the table and
+the wicker chair.
+
+MANGAN. What a dinner! I don't call it a dinner: I call it a
+meal.
+
+ELLIE. I am accustomed to meals, Mr Mangan, and very lucky to get
+them. Besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me.
+
+MANGAN [shuddering liverishly]. Too rich: I can't eat such
+things. I suppose it's because I have to work so much with my
+brain. That's the worst of being a man of business: you are
+always thinking, thinking, thinking. By the way, now that we are
+alone, may I take the opportunity to come to a little
+understanding with you?
+
+ELLIE [settling into the draughtsman's seat]. Certainly. I should
+like to.
+
+MANGAN [taken aback]. Should you? That surprises me; for I
+thought I noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you
+could. Not for the first time either.
+
+ELLIE. I was very tired and upset. I wasn't used to the ways of
+this extraordinary house. Please forgive me.
+
+MANGAN. Oh, that's all right: I don't mind. But Captain Shotover
+has been talking to me about you. You and me, you know.
+
+ELLIE [interested]. The captain! What did he say?
+
+MANGAN. Well, he noticed the difference between our ages.
+
+ELLIE. He notices everything.
+
+MANGAN. You don't mind, then?
+
+ELLIE. Of course I know quite well that our engagement--
+
+MANGAN. Oh! you call it an engagement.
+
+ELLIE. Well, isn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. This is
+the first time you've used the word; and I didn't quite know
+where we stood: that's all. [He sits down in the wicker chair;
+and resigns himself to allow her to lead the conversation]. You
+were saying--?
+
+ELLIE. Was I? I forget. Tell me. Do you like this part of the
+country? I heard you ask Mr Hushabye at dinner whether there are
+any nice houses to let down here.
+
+MANGAN. I like the place. The air suits me. I shouldn't be
+surprised if I settled down here.
+
+ELLIE. Nothing would please me better. The air suits me too. And
+I want to be near Hesione.
+
+MANGAN [with growing uneasiness]. The air may suit us; but the
+question is, should we suit one another? Have you thought about
+that?
+
+ELLIE. Mr Mangan, we must be sensible, mustn't we? It's no use
+pretending that we are Romeo and Juliet. But we can get on very
+well together if we choose to make the best of it. Your kindness
+of heart will make it easy for me.
+
+MANGAN [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like
+deliberate unpleasantness in his voice]. Kindness of heart, eh? I
+ruined your father, didn't I?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, not intentionally.
+
+MANGAN. Yes I did. Ruined him on purpose.
+
+ELLIE. On purpose!
+
+MANGAN. Not out of ill-nature, you know. And you'll admit that I
+kept a job for him when I had finished with him. But business is
+business; and I ruined him as a matter of business.
+
+ELLIE. I don't understand how that can be. Are you trying to make
+me feel that I need not be grateful to you, so that I may choose
+freely?
+
+MANGAN [rising aggressively]. No. I mean what I say.
+
+ELLIE. But how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my
+father? The money he lost was yours.
+
+MANGAN [with a sour laugh]. Was mine! It is mine, Miss Ellie, and
+all the money the other fellows lost too. [He shoves his hands
+into his pockets and shows his teeth]. I just smoked them out
+like a hive of bees. What do you say to that? A bit of shock, eh?
+
+ELLIE. It would have been, this morning. Now! you can't think how
+little it matters. But it's quite interesting. Only, you must
+explain it to me. I don't understand it. [Propping her elbows on
+the drawingboard and her chin on her hands, she composes herself
+to listen with a combination of conscious curiosity with
+unconscious contempt which provokes him to more and more
+unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance].
+
+MANGAN. Of course you don't understand: what do you know about
+business? You just listen and learn. Your father's business was a
+new business; and I don't start new businesses: I let other
+fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends'
+money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies
+trying to make a success of them. They're what you call
+enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for
+them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In a year or
+so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to
+a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is,
+if they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not
+the very same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more
+money and a couple of years' more work; and then perhaps they
+have to sell out to a third lot. If it's really a big thing the
+third lot will have to sell out too, and leave their work and
+their money behind them. And that's where the real business man
+comes in: where I come in. But I'm cleverer than some: I don't
+mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your
+father's measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he
+would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that
+he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his
+expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. I
+knew that the surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to
+handle money is to give him some. I explained my idea to some
+friends in the city, and they found the money; for I take no
+risks in ideas, even when they're my own. Your father and the
+friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me
+than a heap of squeezed lemons. You've been wasting your
+gratitude: my kind heart is all rot. I'm sick of it. When I see
+your father beaming at me with his moist, grateful eyes,
+regularly wallowing in gratitude, I sometimes feel I must tell
+him the truth or burst. What stops me is that I know he wouldn't
+believe me. He'd think it was my modesty, as you did just now.
+He'd think anything rather than the truth, which is that he's a
+blamed fool, and I am a man that knows how to take care of
+himself. [He throws himself back into the big chair with large
+self approval]. Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [dropping her hands]. How strange! that my mother, who knew
+nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about
+you! She always said not before papa, of course, but to us
+children--that you were just that sort of man.
+
+MANGAN [sitting up, much hurt]. Oh! did she? And yet she'd have
+let you marry me.
+
+ELLIE. Well, you see, Mr Mangan, my mother married a very good
+man--for whatever you may think of my father as a man of
+business, he is the soul of goodness--and she is not at all keen
+on my doing the same.
+
+MANGAN. Anyhow, you don't want to marry me now, do you?
+
+ELLIE. [very calmly]. Oh, I think so. Why not?
+
+MANGAN. [rising aghast]. Why not!
+
+ELLIE. I don't see why we shouldn't get on very well together.
+
+MANGAN. Well, but look here, you know--[he stops, quite at a
+loss].
+
+ELLIE. [patiently]. Well?
+
+MANGAN. Well, I thought you were rather particular about people's
+characters.
+
+ELLIE. If we women were particular about men's characters, we
+should never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. A child like you talking of "we women"! What next! You're
+not in earnest?
+
+ELLIE. Yes, I am. Aren't you?
+
+MANGAN. You mean to hold me to it?
+
+ELLIE. Do you wish to back out of it?
+
+MANGAN. Oh, no. Not exactly back out of it.
+
+ELLIE. Well?
+
+He has nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops
+into the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared
+gambler. But a cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans
+over towards her on his right elbow, and speaks in a low steady
+voice.
+
+MANGAN. Suppose I told you I was in love with another woman!
+
+ELLIE [echoing him]. Suppose I told you I was in love with
+another man!
+
+MANGAN [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. I'm not joking.
+
+ELLIE. Who told you I was?
+
+MANGAN. I tell you I'm serious. You're too young to be serious;
+but you'll have to believe me. I want to be near your friend Mrs
+Hushabye. I'm in love with her. Now the murder's out.
+
+ELLIE. I want to be near your friend Mr Hushabye. I'm in love
+with him. [She rises and adds with a frank air] Now we are in one
+another's confidence, we shall be real friends. Thank you for
+telling me.
+
+MANGAN [almost beside himself]. Do you think I'll be made a
+convenience of like this?
+
+ELLIE. Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my
+father. Well, a woman's business is marriage. Why shouldn't I
+make a domestic convenience of you?
+
+MANGAN. Because I don't choose, see? Because I'm not a silly gull
+like your father. That's why.
+
+ELLIE [with serene contempt]. You are not good enough to clean my
+father's boots, Mr Mangan; and I am paying you a great compliment
+in condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. Of
+course you are free to throw over our engagement if you like;
+but, if you do, you'll never enter Hesione's house again: I will
+take care of that.
+
+MANGAN [gasping]. You little devil, you've done me. [On the point
+of collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. Wait
+a bit, though: you're not so cute as you think. You can't beat
+Boss Mangan as easy as that. Suppose I go straight to Mrs
+Hushabye and tell her that you're in love with her husband.
+
+ELLIE. She knows it.
+
+MANGAN. You told her!!!
+
+ELLIE. She told me.
+
+MANGAN [clutching at his bursting temples]. Oh, this is a crazy
+house. Or else I'm going clean off my chump. Is she making a swop
+with you--she to have your husband and you to have hers?
+
+ELLIE. Well, you don't want us both, do you?
+
+MANGAN [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. My brain
+won't stand it. My head's going to split. Help! Help me to hold
+it. Quick: hold it: squeeze it. Save me. [Ellie comes behind his
+chair; clasps his head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her
+hands from his forehead back to his ears]. Thank you. [Drowsily].
+That's very refreshing. [Waking a little]. Don't you hypnotize
+me, though. I've seen men made fools of by hypnotism.
+
+ELLIE [steadily]. Be quiet. I've seen men made fools of without
+hypnotism.
+
+MANGAN [humbly]. You don't dislike touching me, I hope. You never
+touched me before, I noticed.
+
+ELLIE. Not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice
+woman, who will never expect you to make love to her. And I will
+never expect him to make love to me.
+
+MANGAN. He may, though.
+
+ELLIE [making her passes rhythmically]. Hush. Go to sleep. Do you
+hear? You are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet,
+deeply deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
+
+He falls asleep. Ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes
+into the garden.
+
+Nurse Guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which
+comes in from the hall.
+
+GUINNESS [speaking to someone outside]. Mr Mangan's not here,
+duckie: there's no one here. It's all dark.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [without]. Try the garden. Mr Dunn and I will be in
+my boudoir. Show him the way.
+
+GUINNESS. Yes, ducky. [She makes for the garden door in the dark;
+stumbles over the sleeping Mangan and screams]. Ahoo! O Lord,
+Sir! I beg your pardon, I'm sure: I didn't see you in the dark.
+Who is it? [She goes back to the door and turns on the light].
+Oh, Mr Mangan, sir, I hope I haven't hurt you plumping into your
+lap like that. [Coming to him]. I was looking for you, sir. Mrs
+Hushabye says will you please [noticing that he remains quite
+insensible]. Oh, my good Lord, I hope I haven't killed him. Sir!
+Mr Mangan! Sir! [She shakes him; and he is rolling inertly off
+the chair on the floor when she holds him up and props him
+against the cushion]. Miss Hessy! Miss Hessy! [quick, doty
+darling. Miss Hessy! [Mrs Hushabye comes in from the hall,
+followed by Mazzini Dunn]. Oh, Miss Hessy, I've been and killed
+him.
+
+Mazzini runs round the back of the chair to Mangan's right hand,
+and sees that the nurse's words are apparently only too true.
+
+MAZZINI. What tempted you to commit such a crime, woman?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [trying not to laugh]. Do you mean, you did it on
+purpose?
+
+GUINNESS. Now is it likely I'd kill any man on purpose? I fell
+over him in the dark; and I'm a pretty tidy weight. He never
+spoke nor moved until I shook him; and then he would have dropped
+dead on the floor. Isn't it tiresome?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [going past the nurse to Mangan's side, and
+inspecting him less credulously than Mazzini]. Nonsense! he is
+not dead: he is only asleep. I can see him breathing.
+
+GUINNESS. But why won't he wake?
+
+MAZZINI [speaking very politely into Mangan's ear]. Mangan! My
+dear Mangan! [he blows into Mangan's ear].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. That's no good [she shakes him vigorously]. Mr
+Mangan, wake up. Do you hear? [He begins to roll over]. Oh!
+Nurse, nurse: he's falling: help me.
+
+Nurse Guinness rushes to the rescue. With Mazzini's assistance,
+Mangan is propped safely up again.
+
+GUINNESS [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with
+her nose]. Would he be drunk, do you think, pet?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Had he any of papa's rum?
+
+MAZZINI. It can't be that: he is most abstemious. I am afraid he
+drank too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. You
+know, Mrs Hushabye, I really think he has been hypnotized.
+
+GUINNESS. Hip no what, sir?
+
+MAZZINI. One evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing
+performance, the children began playing at it; and Ellie stroked
+my head. I assure you I went off dead asleep; and they had to
+send for a professional to wake me up after I had slept eighteen
+hours. They had to carry me upstairs; and as the poor children
+were not very strong, they let me slip; and I rolled right down
+the whole flight and never woke up. [Mrs Hushabye splutters]. Oh,
+you may laugh, Mrs Hushabye; but I might have been killed.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I couldn't have helped laughing even if you had
+been, Mr Dunn. So Ellie has hypnotized him. What fun!
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. It was such a terrible lesson to her:
+nothing would induce her to try such a thing again.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who did it? I didn't.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought perhaps the captain might have done it
+unintentionally. He is so fearfully magnetic: I feel vibrations
+whenever he comes close to me.
+
+GUINNESS. The captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: I'll
+back him for that. I'll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Wait a bit. [To Mazzini]. You say he is all right
+for eighteen hours?
+
+MAZZINI. Well, I was asleep for eighteen hours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Were you any the worse for it?
+
+MAZZINI. I don't quite remember. They had poured brandy down my
+throat, you see; and--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Quite. Anyhow, you survived. Nurse, darling: go and
+ask Miss Dunn to come to us here. Say I want to speak to her
+particularly. You will find her with Mr Hushabye probably.
+
+GUINNESS. I think not, ducky: Miss Addy is with him. But I'll
+find her and send her to you. [She goes out into the garden].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [calling Mazzini's attention to the figure on the
+chair]. Now, Mr Dunn, look. Just look. Look hard. Do you still
+intend to sacrifice your daughter to that thing?
+
+MAZZINI [troubled]. You have completely upset me, Mrs Hushabye,
+by all you have said to me. That anyone could imagine that I--I,
+a consecrated soldier of freedom, if I may say so--could
+sacrifice Ellie to anybody or anyone, or that I should ever have
+dreamed of forcing her inclinations in any way, is a most painful
+blow to my--well, I suppose you would say to my good opinion of
+myself.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rather stolidly]. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI [looking forlornly at the body]. What is your objection
+to poor Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then
+I am so accustomed to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the
+brute! Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this
+slavedriver, who spends his life making thousands of rough
+violent workmen bend to his will and sweat for him: a man
+accustomed to have great masses of iron beaten into shape for him
+by steam-hammers! to fight with women and girls over a halfpenny
+an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry, I think you call him,
+don't you? Are you going to fling your delicate, sweet, helpless
+child into such a beast's claws just because he will keep her in
+an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how rich he
+is?
+
+MAZZINI [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. Bless you, dear
+Mrs Hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! Poor dear
+Mangan isn't a bit like that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [scornfully]. Poor dear Mangan indeed!
+
+MAZZINI. But he doesn't know anything about machinery. He never
+goes near the men: he couldn't manage them: he is afraid of them.
+I never can get him to take the least interest in the works: he
+hardly knows more about them than you do. People are cruelly
+unjust to Mangan: they think he is all rugged strength just
+because his manners are bad.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you mean to tell me he isn't strong enough to
+crush poor little Ellie?
+
+MAZZINI. Of course it's very hard to say how any marriage will
+turn out; but speaking for myself, I should say that he won't
+have a dog's chance against Ellie. You know, Ellie has remarkable
+strength of character. I think it is because I taught her to like
+Shakespeare when she was very young.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [contemptuously]. Shakespeare! The next thing you
+will tell me is that you could have made a great deal more money
+than Mangan. [She retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port
+end of it in the worst of humors].
+
+MAZZINI [following her and taking the other end]. No: I'm no good
+at making money. I don't care enough for it, somehow. I'm not
+ambitious! that must be it. Mangan is wonderful about money: he
+thinks of nothing else. He is so dreadfully afraid of being poor.
+I am always thinking of other things: even at the works I think
+of the things we are doing and not of what they cost. And the
+worst of it is, poor Mangan doesn't know what to do with his
+money when he gets it. He is such a baby that he doesn't know
+even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating and
+drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all.
+Ellie will diet him splendidly. You will be surprised when you
+come to know him better: he is really the most helpless of
+mortals. You get quite a protective feeling towards him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then who manages his business, pray?
+
+MAZZINI. I do. And of course other people like me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Footling people, you mean.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose you'd think us so.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And pray why don't you do without him if you're all
+so much cleverer?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, we couldn't: we should ruin the business in a year.
+I've tried; and I know. We should spend too much on everything.
+We should improve the quality of the goods and make them too
+dear. We should be sentimental about the hard cases among the
+work people. But Mangan keeps us in order. He is down on us about
+every extra halfpenny. We could never do without him. You see, he
+will sit up all night thinking of how to save sixpence. Won't
+Ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his house in hand!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of
+industry!
+
+MAZZINI. I am afraid all the captains of industry are what you
+call frauds, Mrs Hushabye. Of course there are some manufacturers
+who really do understand their own works; but they don't make as
+high a rate of profit as Mangan does. I assure you Mangan is
+quite a good fellow in his way. He means well.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He doesn't look well. He is not in his first youth,
+is he?
+
+MAZZINI. After all, no husband is in his first youth for very
+long, Mrs Hushabye. And men can't afford to marry in their first
+youth nowadays.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Now if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can't
+you say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why
+don't you inspire everybody with confidence? with respect?
+
+MAZZINI [humbly]. I think that what is the matter with me is that
+I am poor. You don't know what that means at home. Mind: I don't
+say they have ever complained. They've all been wonderful:
+they've been proud of my poverty. They've even joked about it
+quite often. But my wife has had a very poor time of it. She has
+been quite resigned--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shuddering involuntarily!!
+
+MAZZINI. There! You see, Mrs Hushabye. I don't want Ellie to live
+on resignation.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want her to have to resign herself to living
+with a man she doesn't love?
+
+MAZZINI [wistfully]. Are you sure that would be worse than living
+with a man she did love, if he was a footling person?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite
+interested in Mazzini now]. You know, I really think you must
+love Ellie very much; for you become quite clever when you talk
+about her.
+
+MAZZINI. I didn't know I was so very stupid on other subjects.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are, sometimes.
+
+MAZZINI [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. I have
+learnt a good deal about myself from you, Mrs Hushabye; and I'm
+afraid I shall not be the happier for your plain speaking. But if
+you thought I needed it to make me think of Ellie's happiness you
+were very much mistaken.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [leaning towards him kindly]. Have I been a beast?
+
+MAZZINI [pulling himself together]. It doesn't matter about me,
+Mrs Hushabye. I think you like Ellie; and that is enough for me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I'm beginning to like you a little. I perfectly
+loathed you at first. I thought you the most odious,
+self-satisfied, boresome elderly prig I ever met.
+
+MAZZINI [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. I daresay I am all
+that. I never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you.
+They always frighten me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [pleased]. Am I a gorgeous woman, Mazzini? I shall
+fall in love with you presently.
+
+MAZZINI [with placid gallantry]. No, you won't, Hesione. But you
+would be quite safe. Would you believe it that quite a lot of
+women have flirted with me because I am quite safe? But they get
+tired of me for the same reason.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. Take care. You may not be so safe
+as you think.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh yes, quite safe. You see, I have been in love really:
+the sort of love that only happens once. [Softly]. That's why
+Ellie is such a lovely girl.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, really, you are coming out. Are you quite
+sure you won't let me tempt you into a second grand passion?
+
+MAZZINI. Quite. It wouldn't be natural. The fact is, you don't
+strike on my box, Mrs Hushabye; and I certainly don't strike on
+yours.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Your marriage was a safety match.
+
+MAZZINI. What a very witty application of the expression I used!
+I should never have thought of it.
+
+Ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. Oh! here is Ellie at last. [She goes
+behind the sofa].
+
+ELLIE [on the threshold of the starboard door]. Guinness said you
+wanted me: you and papa.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You have kept us waiting so long that it almost
+came to--well, never mind. Your father is a very wonderful man
+[she ruffles his hair affectionately]: the only one I ever met
+who could resist me when I made myself really agreeable. [She
+comes to the big chair, on Mangan's left]. Come here. I have
+something to show you. [Ellie strolls listlessly to the other
+side of the chair]. Look.
+
+ELLIE [contemplating Mangan without interest]. I know. He is only
+asleep. We had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the
+middle of it.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You did it, Ellie. You put him asleep.
+
+MAZZINI [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. Oh,
+I hope not. Did you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE [wearily]. He asked me to.
+
+MAZZINI. But it's dangerous. You know what happened to me.
+
+ELLIE [utterly indifferent]. Oh, I daresay I can wake him. If
+not, somebody else can.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It doesn't matter, anyhow, because I have at last
+persuaded your father that you don't want to marry him.
+
+ELLIE [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. But
+why did you do that, Hesione? I do want to marry him. I fully
+intend to marry him.
+
+MAZZINI. Are you quite sure, Ellie? Mrs Hushabye has made me feel
+that I may have been thoughtless and selfish about it.
+
+ELLIE [very clearly and steadily]. Papa. When Mrs. Hushabye takes
+it on herself to explain to you what I think or don't think, shut
+your ears tight; and shut your eyes too. Hesione knows nothing
+about me: she hasn't the least notion of the sort of person I am,
+and never will. I promise you I won't do anything I don't want to
+do and mean to do for my own sake.
+
+MAZZINI. You are quite, quite sure?
+
+ELLIE. Quite, quite sure. Now you must go away and leave me to
+talk to Mrs Hushabye.
+
+MAZZINI. But I should like to hear. Shall I be in the way?
+
+ELLIE [inexorable]. I had rather talk to her alone.
+
+MAZZINI [affectionately]. Oh, well, I know what a nuisance
+parents are, dear. I will be good and go. [He goes to the garden
+door]. By the way, do you remember the address of that
+professional who woke me up? Don't you think I had better
+telegraph to him?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [moving towards the sofa]. It's too late to
+telegraph tonight.
+
+MAZZINI. I suppose so. I do hope he'll wake up in the course of
+the night. [He goes out into the garden].
+
+ELLIE [turning vigorously on Hesione the moment her father is out
+of the room]. Hesione, what the devil do you mean by making
+mischief with my father about Mangan?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [promptly losing her temper]. Don't you dare speak
+to me like that, you little minx. Remember that you are in my
+house.
+
+ELLIE. Stuff! Why don't you mind your own business? What is it to
+you whether I choose to marry Mangan or not?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable
+little matrimonial adventurer?
+
+ELLIE. Every woman who hasn't any money is a matrimonial
+adventurer. It's easy for you to talk: you have never known what
+it is to want money; and you can pick up men as if they were
+daisies. I am poor and respectable--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [interrupting]. Ho! respectable! How did you pick up
+Mangan? How did you pick up my husband? You have the audacity to
+tell me that I am a--a--a--
+
+ELLIE. A siren. So you are. You were born to lead men by the
+nose: if you weren't, Marcus would have waited for me, perhaps.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [suddenly melting and half laughing]. Oh, my poor
+Ellie, my pettikins, my unhappy darling! I am so sorry about
+Hector. But what can I do? It's not my fault: I'd give him to you
+if I could.
+
+ELLIE. I don't blame you for that.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What a brute I was to quarrel with you and call you
+names! Do kiss me and say you're not angry with me.
+
+ELLIE [fiercely]. Oh, don't slop and gush and be sentimental.
+Don't you see that unless I can be hard--as hard as nails--I
+shall go mad? I don't care a damn about your calling me names: do
+you think a woman in my situation can feel a few hard words?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Poor little woman! Poor little situation!
+
+ELLIE. I suppose you think you're being sympathetic. You are just
+foolish and stupid and selfish. You see me getting a smasher
+right in the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best
+part that can never come again; and you think you can help me
+over it by a little coaxing and kissing. When I want all the
+strength I can get to lean on: something iron, something stony, I
+don't care how cruel it is, you go all mushy and want to slobber
+over me. I'm not angry; I'm not unfriendly; but for God's sake do
+pull yourself together; and don't think that because you're on
+velvet and always have been, women who are in hell can take it as
+easily as you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [shrugging her shoulders]. Very well. [She sits down
+on the sofa in her old place. But I warn you that when I am
+neither coaxing and kissing nor laughing, I am just wondering how
+much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world. You
+object to the siren: well, I drop the siren. You want to rest
+your wounded bosom against a grindstone. Well [folding her arms]
+here is the grindstone.
+
+ELLIE [sitting down beside her, appeased]. That's better: you
+really have the trick of falling in with everyone's mood; but you
+don't understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom
+there is only one man and only one chance.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I certainly don't understand how your marrying that
+object [indicating Mangan] will console you for not being able to
+marry Hector.
+
+ELLIE. Perhaps you don't understand why I was quite a nice girl
+this morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, yes, I do. It's because you have made up your
+mind to do something despicable and wicked.
+
+ELLIE. I don't think so, Hesione. I must make the best of my
+ruined house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pooh! You'll get over it. Your house isn't ruined.
+
+ELLIE. Of course I shall get over it. You don't suppose I'm going
+to sit down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid
+living on a pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers'
+Association. But my heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by
+that is that I know that what has happened to me with Marcus will
+not happen to me ever again. In the world for me there is Marcus
+and a lot of other men of whom one is just the same as another.
+Well, if I can't have love, that's no reason why I should have
+poverty. If Mangan has nothing else, he has money.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And are there no YOUNG men with money?
+
+ELLIE. Not within my reach. Besides, a young man would have the
+right to expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he
+found I could not give it to him. Rich young men can get rid of
+their wives, you know, pretty cheaply. But this object, as you
+call him, can expect nothing more from me than I am prepared to
+give him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He will be your owner, remember. If he buys you, he
+will make the bargain pay him and not you. Ask your father.
+
+ELLIE [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their
+subject]. You need not trouble on that score, Hesione. I have
+more to give Boss Mangan than he has to give me: it is I who am
+buying him, and at a pretty good price too, I think. Women are
+better at that sort of bargain than men. I have taken the Boss's
+measure; and ten Boss Mangans shall not prevent me doing far more
+as I please as his wife than I have ever been able to do as a
+poor girl. [Stooping to the recumbent figure]. Shall they, Boss?
+I think not. [She passes on to the drawing-table, and leans
+against the end of it, facing the windows]. I shall not have to
+spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last,
+anyhow.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [rising superbly]. Ellie, you are a wicked, sordid
+little beast. And to think that I actually condescended to
+fascinate that creature there to save you from him! Well, let me
+tell you this: if you make this disgusting match, you will never
+see Hector again if I can help it.
+
+ELLIE [unmoved]. I nailed Mangan by telling him that if he did
+not marry me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on
+her wrists and seats herself on the end of the table].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [recoiling]. Oh!
+
+ELLIE. So you see I am not unprepared for your playing that trump
+against me. Well, you just try it: that's all. I should have made
+a man of Marcus, not a household pet.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [flaming]. You dare!
+
+ELLIE [looking almost dangerous]. Set him thinking about me if
+you dare.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, of all the impudent little fiends I ever met!
+Hector says there is a certain point at which the only answer you
+can give to a man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down.
+What would you say if I were to box your ears?
+
+ELLIE [calmly]. I should pull your hair.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. That wouldn't hurt me. Perhaps it
+comes off at night.
+
+ELLIE [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to
+her]. Oh, you don't mean to say, Hesione, that your beautiful
+black hair is false?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [patting it]. Don't tell Hector. He believes in it.
+
+ELLIE [groaning]. Oh! Even the hair that ensnared him false!
+Everything false!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pull it and try. Other women can snare men in their
+hair; but I can swing a baby on mine. Aha! you can't do that,
+Goldylocks.
+
+ELLIE [heartbroken]. No. You have stolen my babies.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Pettikins, don't make me cry. You know what you
+said about my making a household pet of him is a little true.
+Perhaps he ought to have waited for you. Would any other woman on
+earth forgive you?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself!
+[Pulling herself together]. There! You couldn't help it: neither
+of us could help it. He couldn't help it. No, don't say anything
+more: I can't bear it. Let us wake the object. [She begins
+stroking Mangan's head, reversing the movement with which she put
+him to sleep]. Wake up, do you hear? You are to wake up at once.
+Wake up, wake up, wake--
+
+MANGAN [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them].
+Wake up! So you think I've been asleep, do you? [He kicks the
+chair violently back out of his way, and gets between them]. You
+throw me into a trance so that I can't move hand or foot--I might
+have been buried alive! it's a mercy I wasn't--and then you think
+I was only asleep. If you'd let me drop the two times you rolled
+me about, my nose would have been flattened for life against the
+floor. But I've found you all out, anyhow. I know the sort of
+people I'm among now. I've heard every word you've said, you and
+your precious father, and [to Mrs Hushabye] you too. So I'm an
+object, am I? I'm a thing, am I? I'm a fool that hasn't sense
+enough to feed myself properly, am I? I'm afraid of the men that
+would starve if it weren't for the wages I give them, am I? I'm
+nothing but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience
+of by designing women and fool managers of my works, am I? I'm--
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [with the most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr
+Mangan, you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all
+you heard while you were pretending to be asleep. It was not
+meant for you to hear.
+
+MANGAN. Pretending to be asleep! Do you think if I was only
+pretending that I'd have sprawled there helpless, and listened to
+such unfairness, such lies, such injustice and plotting and
+backbiting and slandering of me, if I could have up and told you
+what I thought of you! I wonder I didn't burst.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [sweetly]. You dreamt it all, Mr Mangan. We were
+only saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep.
+That was all, wasn't it, Ellie? Believe me, Mr Mangan, all those
+unpleasant things came into your mind in the last half second
+before you woke. Ellie rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the
+disagreeable sensation suggested a disagreeable dream.
+
+MANGAN [doggedly]. I believe in dreams.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So do I. But they go by contraries, don't they?
+
+MANGAN [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. I shan't
+forget, to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that
+time in the garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a
+dirty low mean thing to do. You had no right to let me come near
+you if I disgusted you. It isn't my fault if I'm old and haven't
+a moustache like a bronze candlestick as your husband has. There
+are things no decent woman would do to a man--like a man hitting
+a woman in the breast.
+
+Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her
+face with her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and
+begins to cry like a child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye,
+at the distressing sound he makes, takes down her hands and looks
+at him. She rises and runs to him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Don't cry: I can't bear it. Have I broken your
+heart? I didn't know you had one. How could I?
+
+MANGAN. I'm a man, ain't I?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly].
+Oh no: not what I call a man. Only a Boss: just that and nothing
+else. What business has a Boss with a heart?
+
+MANGAN. Then you're not a bit sorry for what you did, nor
+ashamed?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was ashamed for the first time in my life when
+you said that about hitting a woman in the breast, and I found
+out what I'd done. My very bones blushed red. You've had your
+revenge, Boss. Aren't you satisfied?
+
+MANGAN. Serve you right! Do you hear? Serve you right! You're
+just cruel. Cruel.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only
+find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. By the way
+[sitting down beside him on the arm of the chair], what's your
+name? It's not really Boss, is it?
+
+MANGAN [shortly]. If you want to know, my name's Alfred.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [springs up]. Alfred!! Ellie, he was christened
+after Tennyson!!!
+
+MANGAN [rising]. I was christened after my uncle, and never had a
+penny from him, damn him! What of it?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person:
+that you had a mother, like anyone else. [Putting her hands on
+his shoulders and surveying him]. Little Alf!
+
+MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little
+heart, but a real one. [Releasing him suddenly]. Now run and make
+it up with Ellie. She has had time to think what to say to you,
+which is more than I had [she goes out quickly into the garden by
+the port door].
+
+MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.
+
+ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?
+
+MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of
+anything about a man except what they can get out of him? You
+weren't even thinking that about me. You were only thinking
+whether your gloves would last.
+
+ELLIE. I shall not have to think about that when we are married.
+
+MANGAN. And you think I am going to marry you after what I heard
+there!
+
+ELLIE. You heard nothing from me that I did not tell you before.
+
+MANGAN. Perhaps you think I can't do without you.
+
+ELLIE. I think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after
+coming to know us so well.
+
+MANGAN [with something like a yell of despair]. Am I never to
+have the last word?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [appearing at the starboard garden door]. There
+is a soul in torment here. What is the matter?
+
+MANGAN. This girl doesn't want to spend her life wondering how
+long her gloves will last.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [passing through]. Don't wear any. I never do
+[he goes into the pantry].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome
+dinner dress]. Is anything the matter?
+
+ELLIE. This gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last
+word?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [coming forward to the sofa]. I should let him
+have it, my dear. The important thing is not to have the last
+word, but to have your own way.
+
+MANGAN. She wants both.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. She won't get them, Mr Mangan. Providence always
+has the last word.
+
+MANGAN [desperately]. Now you are going to come religion over me.
+In this house a man's mind might as well be a football. I'm
+going. [He makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the
+Captain, who has just emerged from his pantry].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and
+all here.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You were welcome to come: you are free to go.
+The wide earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for
+you outside.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But your things, Mr Mangan. Your bag, your comb
+and brushes, your pyjamas--
+
+HECTOR [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome
+Arab costume]. Why should the escaping slave take his chains with
+him?
+
+MANGAN. That's right, Hushabye. Keep the pyjamas, my lady, and
+much good may they do you.
+
+HECTOR [advancing to Lady Utterword's left hand]. Let us all go
+out into the night and leave everything behind us.
+
+MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no
+company, especially female company.
+
+ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the
+land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send
+me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will certainly not be comfortable without
+your luggage, Mr Mangan.
+
+ELLIE [impatient]. Go, go: why don't you go? It is a heavenly
+night: you can sleep on the heath. Take my waterproof to lie on:
+it is hanging up in the hall.
+
+HECTOR. Breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with
+the captain at six.
+
+ELLIE. Good night, Alfred.
+
+HECTOR. Alfred! [He runs back to the door and calls into the
+garden]. Randall, Mangan's Christian name is Alfred.
+
+RANDALL [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress].
+Then Hesione wins her bet.
+
+Mrs Hushabye appears in the port doorway. She throws her left arm
+round Hector's neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa:
+and throws her right arm round Lady Utterword's neck.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. They wouldn't believe me, Alf.
+
+They contemplate him.
+
+MANGAN. Is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if I
+was the latest thing in a menagerie?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You are the latest thing in this menagerie.
+
+Before Mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from
+upstairs: then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. The staring
+group breaks up in consternation.
+
+MAZZINI'S VOICE [from above]. Help! A burglar! Help!
+
+HECTOR [his eyes blazing]. A burglar!!!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. No, Hector: you'll be shot [but it is too late; he
+has dashed out past Mangan, who hastily moves towards the
+bookshelves out of his way].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [blowing his whistle]. All hands aloft! [He
+strides out after Hector].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. My diamonds! [She follows the captain].
+
+RANDALL [rushing after her]. No. Ariadne. Let me.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, is papa shot? [She runs out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Are you frightened, Alf?
+
+MANGAN. No. It ain't my house, thank God.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. If they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into
+court as witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our
+private lives?
+
+MANGAN. You won't be believed if you tell the truth.
+
+Mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand,
+comes from the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, my dear Mrs Hushabye, I might have killed him. [He
+throws the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair].
+I hope you won't believe I really intended to.
+
+Hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man
+before him by the collar. He plants him in the middle of the room
+and releases him.
+
+Ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her
+father's chair and pats his shoulders.
+
+RANDALL [entering with a poker]. Keep your eye on this door,
+Mangan. I'll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door
+and stands on guard there].
+
+Lady Utterword comes in after Randall, and goes between Mrs
+Hushabye and Mangan.
+
+Nurse Guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on
+Mangan's left.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What has happened?
+
+MAZZINI. Your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs,
+and gave me a pistol that Mr Hushabye had been practising with. I
+thought it would frighten him; but it went off at a touch.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, and took the skin off my ear. Precious near
+took the top off my head. Why don't you have a proper revolver
+instead of a thing like that, that goes off if you as much as
+blow on it?
+
+HECTOR. One of my duelling pistols. Sorry.
+
+MAZZINI. He put his hands up and said it was a fair cop.
+
+THE BURGLAR. So it was. Send for the police.
+
+HECTOR. No, by thunder! It was not a fair cop. We were four to
+one.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What will they do to him?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten years. Beginning with solitary. Ten years off my
+life. I shan't serve it all: I'm too old. It will see me out.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You should have thought of that before you stole
+my diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, you've got them back, lady, haven't you? Can
+you give me back the years of my life you are going to take from
+me?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, we can't bury a man alive for ten years for a
+few diamonds.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Ten little shining diamonds! Ten long black years!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
+the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
+in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
+a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
+England there is no real protection for any respectable person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. I'm too old to be giv a hiding, lady. Send for the
+police and have done with it. It's only just and right you
+should.
+
+RANDALL [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so
+pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker
+between his fingers like a well folded umbrella]. It is neither
+just nor right that we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to
+gratify your moral enthusiasm, my friend. You had better get out,
+while you have the chance.
+
+THE BURGLAR [inexorably]. No. I must work my sin off my
+conscience. This has come as a sort of call to me. Let me spend
+the rest of my life repenting in a cell. I shall have my reward
+above.
+
+MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can't behave naturally in
+this house.
+
+HECTOR. My good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody
+else's expense. Nobody here is going to charge you.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh, you won't charge me, won't you?
+
+HECTOR. No. I'm sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly
+leave the house?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Right. I'll go to the police station and give myself
+up. [He turns resolutely to the door: but Hector stops him].
+
+HECTOR.                  { Oh, no. You mustn't do that.
+RANDALL.    [speaking    { No no. Clear out man, can't you; and
+             together]      don't be a fool.
+MRS. HUSHABYE            { Don't be so silly. Can't you repent at
+                           home?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will have to do as you are told.
+
+THE BURGLAR. It's compounding a felony, you know.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. This is utterly ridiculous. Are we to be forced to
+prosecute this man when we don't want to?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Am I to be robbed of my salvation to save you the
+trouble of spending a day at the sessions? Is that justice? Is it
+right? Is it fair to me?
+
+MAZZINI [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if
+it were a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. Come, come! let me show
+you how you can turn your very crimes to account. Why not set up
+as a locksmith? You must know more about locks than most honest
+men?
+
+THE BURGLAR. That's true, sir. But I couldn't set up as a
+locksmith under twenty pounds.
+
+RANDALL. Well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. You will find
+it in the nearest bank.
+
+THE BURGLAR [horrified]. Oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put
+into the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless
+pit as it were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He
+throws himself into the big chair and covers his face as if in
+prayer].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Randall!
+
+HECTOR. It seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection
+for this inopportunely contrite sinner.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. But twenty pounds is ridiculous.
+
+THE BURGLAR [looking up quickly]. I shall have to buy a lot of
+tools, lady.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense: you have your burgling kit.
+
+THE BURGLAR. What's a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene
+welding plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? I shall want a forge,
+and a smithy, and a shop, and fittings. I can't hardly do it for
+twenty.
+
+HECTOR. My worthy friend, we haven't got twenty pounds.
+
+THE BURGLAR [now master of the situation]. You can raise it among
+you, can't you?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Give him a sovereign, Hector, and get rid of him.
+
+HECTOR [giving him a pound]. There! Off with you.
+
+THE BURGLAR [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. I
+won't promise nothing. You have more on you than a quid: all the
+lot of you, I mean.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [vigorously]. Oh, let us prosecute him and have
+done with it. I have a conscience too, I hope; and I do not feel
+at all sure that we have any right to let him go, especially if
+he is going to be greedy and impertinent.
+
+THE BURGLAR [quickly]. All right, lady, all right. I've no wish
+to be anything but agreeable. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen;
+and thank you kindly.
+
+He is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by
+Captain Shotover.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard].
+What's this? Are there two of you?
+
+THE BURGLAR [falling on his knees before the captain in abject
+terror]. Oh, my good Lord, what have I done? Don't tell me it's
+your house I've broken into, Captain Shotover.
+
+The captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and
+leads him to the middle of the group, Hector falling back beside
+his wife to make way for them.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [turning him towards Ellie]. Is that your
+daughter? [He releases him].
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, how do I know, Captain? You know the sort of
+life you and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my
+daughter anywhere in the wide world, as you might say.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mazzini]. You are not Billy Dunn. This is
+Billy Dunn. Why have you imposed on me?
+
+THE BURGLAR [indignantly to Mazzini]. Have you been giving
+yourself out to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting
+yourself, in a manner of speaking!
+
+MAZZINI. My dear Captain Shotover, ever since I came into this
+house I have done hardly anything else but assure you that I am
+not Mr William Dunn, but Mazzini Dunn, a very different person.
+
+THE BURGLAR. He don't belong to my branch, Captain. There's two
+sets in the family: the thinking Dunns and the drinking Dunns,
+each going their own ways. I'm a drinking Dunn: he's a thinking
+Dunn. But that didn't give him any right to shoot me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. So you've turned burglar, have you?
+
+THE BURGLAR. No, Captain: I wouldn't disgrace our old sea calling
+by such a thing. I am no burglar.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What were you doing with my diamonds?
+
+GUINNESS. What did you break into the house for if you're no
+burglar?
+
+RANDALL. Mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong
+window, eh?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, it's no use my telling you a lie: I can take
+in most captains, but not Captain Shotover, because he sold
+himself to the devil in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot
+gold, explode a cartridge in your pocket with a glance of his
+eye, and see the truth hidden in the heart of man. But I'm no
+burglar.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Are you an honest man?
+
+THE BURGLAR. I don't set up to be better than my
+fellow-creatures, and never did, as you well know, Captain. But
+what I do is innocent and pious. I enquire about for houses where
+the right sort of people live. I work it on them same as I worked
+it here. I break into the house; put a few spoons or diamonds in
+my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take up a collection.
+And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get caught when you're
+actually trying to. I have knocked over all the chairs in a room
+without a soul paying any attention to me. In the end I have had
+to walk out and leave the job.
+
+RANDALL. When that happens, do you put back the spoons and
+diamonds?
+
+THE BURGLAR. Well, I don't fly in the face of Providence, if
+that's what you want to know.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Guinness, you remember this man?
+
+GUINNESS. I should think I do, seeing I was married to him, the
+blackguard!
+
+HESIONE         }  [exclaiming  { Married to him!
+LADY UTTERWORD  }  together]    { Guinness!!
+
+THE BURGLAR. It wasn't legal. I've been married to no end of
+women. No use coming that over me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Take him to the forecastle [he flings him to
+the door with a strength beyond his years].
+
+GUINNESS. I suppose you mean the kitchen. They won't have him
+there. Do you expect servants to keep company with thieves and
+all sorts?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Land-thieves and water-thieves are the same
+flesh and blood. I'll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. Off
+with you both.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Yes, Captain. [He goes out humbly].
+
+MAZZINI. Will it be safe to have him in the house like that?
+
+GUINNESS. Why didn't you shoot him, sir? If I'd known who he was,
+I'd have shot him myself. [She goes out].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Do sit down, everybody. [She sits down on the
+sofa].
+
+They all move except Ellie. Mazzini resumes his seat. Randall
+sits down in the window-seat near the starboard door, again
+making a pendulum of his poker, and studying it as Galileo might
+have done. Hector sits on his left, in the middle. Mangan,
+forgotten, sits in the port corner. Lady Utterword takes the big
+chair. Captain Shotover goes into the pantry in deep abstraction.
+They all look after him: and Lady Utterword coughs consciously.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. So Billy Dunn was poor nurse's little romance. I
+knew there had been somebody.
+
+RANDALL. They will fight their battles over again and enjoy
+themselves immensely.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [irritably]. You are not married; and you know
+nothing about it, Randall. Hold your tongue.
+
+RANDALL. Tyrant!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we have had a very exciting evening.
+Everything will be an anticlimax after it. We'd better all go to
+bed.
+
+RANDALL. Another burglar may turn up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, impossible! I hope not.
+
+RANDALL. Why not? There is more than one burglar in England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. What do you say, Alf?
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. Oh, I don't matter. I'm forgotten. The burglar
+has put my nose out of joint. Shove me into a corner and have
+done with me.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. Would
+you like a walk on the heath, Alfred? With me?
+
+ELLIE. Go, Mr Mangan. It will do you good. Hesione will soothe
+you.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [slipping her arm under his and pulling him
+upright]. Come, Alfred. There is a moon: it's like the night in
+Tristan and Isolde. [She caresses his arm and draws him to the
+port garden door].
+
+MANGAN [writhing but yielding]. How you can have the face-the
+heart-[he breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What an extraordinary way to behave! What is the
+matter with the man?
+
+ELLIE [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary
+distance]. His heart is breaking: that is all. [The captain
+appears at the pantry door, listening]. It is a curious
+sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our
+powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are
+burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and
+the beginning of peace.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of
+the rest]. How dare you?
+
+HECTOR. Good heavens! What's the matter?
+
+RANDALL [in a warning whisper]. Tch--tch-tch! Steady.
+
+ELLIE [surprised and haughty]. I was not addressing you
+particularly, Lady Utterword. And I am not accustomed to being
+asked how dare I.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Of course not. Anyone can see how badly you have
+been brought up.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I hope not, Lady Utterword. Really!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know very well what you meant. The impudence!
+
+ELLIE. What on earth do you mean?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [advancing to the table]. She means that her
+heart will not break. She has been longing all her life for
+someone to break it. At last she has become afraid she has none
+to break.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her
+arms round him]. Papa, don't say you think I've no heart.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising her with grim tenderness]. If you had
+no heart how could you want to have it broken, child?
+
+HECTOR [rising with a bound]. Lady Utterword, you are not to be
+trusted. You have made a scene [he runs out into the garden
+through the starboard door].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! Hector, Hector! [she runs out after him].
+
+RANDALL. Only nerves, I assure you. [He rises and follows her,
+waving the poker in his agitation]. Ariadne! Ariadne! For God's
+sake, be careful. You will--[he is gone].
+
+MAZZINI [rising]. How distressing! Can I do anything, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [promptly taking his chair and setting to work
+at the drawing-board]. No. Go to bed. Good-night.
+
+MAZZINI [bewildered]. Oh! Perhaps you are right.
+
+ELLIE. Good-night, dearest. [She kisses him].
+
+MAZZINI. Good-night, love. [He makes for the door, but turns
+aside to the bookshelves]. I'll just take a book [he takes one].
+Good-night. [He goes out, leaving Ellie alone with the captain].
+
+The captain is intent on his drawing. Ellie, standing sentry over
+his chair, contemplates him for a moment.
+
+ELLIE. Does nothing ever disturb you, Captain Shotover?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I've stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in
+a typhoon. Life here is stormier; but I can stand it.
+
+ELLIE. Do you think I ought to marry Mr Mangan?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [never looking up]. One rock is as good as
+another to be wrecked on.
+
+ELLIE. I am not in love with him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Who said you were?
+
+ELLIE. You are not surprised?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Surprised! At my age!
+
+ELLIE. It seems to me quite fair. He wants me for one thing: I
+want him for another.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Money?
+
+ELLIE. Yes.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it.
+One provides the cash: the other spends it.
+
+ELLIE. Who will have the best of the bargain, I wonder?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You. These fellows live in an office all day.
+You will have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but
+you will both be asleep most of that time. All day you will be
+quit of him; and you will be shopping with his money. If that is
+too much for you, marry a seafaring man: you will be bothered
+with him only three weeks in the year, perhaps.
+
+ELLIE. That would be best of all, I suppose.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's a dangerous thing to be married right up
+to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all
+day, like a damned soul in hell.
+
+ELLIE. I never thought of that before.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you're marrying for business, you can't be
+too businesslike.
+
+ELLIE. Why do women always want other women's husbands?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is
+broken-in to one that is wild?
+
+ELLIE [with a short laugh]. I suppose so. What a vile world it
+is!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It doesn't concern me. I'm nearly out of it.
+
+ELLIE. And I'm only just beginning.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes; so look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. Well, I think I am being very prudent.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I didn't say prudent. I said look ahead.
+
+ELLIE. What's the difference?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose
+your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if
+you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your
+fingers.
+
+ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly
+about the room]. I'm sorry, Captain Shotover; but it's no use
+talking like that to me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me.
+Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money.
+They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young
+people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to
+keep: much more so than a motor car.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is it? How much does your soul eat?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and
+mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people
+to be with. In this country you can't have them without lots of
+money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Mangan's soul lives on pig's food.
+
+ELLIE. Yes: money is thrown away on him. I suppose his soul was
+starved when he was young. But it will not be thrown away on me.
+It is just because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for
+money. All the women who are not fools do.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are other ways of getting money. Why
+don't you steal it?
+
+ELLIE. Because I don't want to go to prison.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is that the only reason? Are you quite sure
+honesty has nothing to do with it?
+
+ELLIE. Oh, you are very very old-fashioned, Captain. Does any
+modern girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting
+money are the honest and dishonest ways? Mangan robbed my father
+and my father's friends. I should rob all the money back from
+Mangan if the police would let me. As they won't, I must get it
+back by marrying him.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't argue: I'm too old: my mind is made up
+and finished. All I can tell you is that, old-fashioned or
+new-fashioned, if you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow
+that all the books and pictures and concerts and scenery in the
+world won't heal [he gets up suddenly and makes for the pantry].
+
+ELLIE [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. Then why
+did you sell yourself to the devil in Zanzibar?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping, startled]. What?
+
+ELLIE. You shall not run away before you answer. I have found out
+that trick of yours. If you sold yourself, why shouldn't I?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I had to deal with men so degraded that they
+wouldn't obey me unless I swore at them and kicked them and beat
+them with my fists. Foolish people took young thieves off the
+streets; flung them into a training ship where they were taught
+to fear the cane instead of fearing God; and thought they'd made
+men and sailors of them by private subscription. I tricked these
+thieves into believing I'd sold myself to the devil. It saved my
+soul from the kicking and swearing that was damning me by inches.
+
+ELLIE [releasing him]. I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss
+Mangan to save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by
+inches.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches
+won't save even your body.
+
+ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the
+body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different
+because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we
+let them make slaves of our bodies. I am afraid you are no use to
+me, Captain.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What did you expect? A Savior, eh? Are you
+old-fashioned enough to believe in that?
+
+ELLIE. No. But I thought you were very wise, and might help me.
+Now I have found you out. You pretend to be busy, and think of
+fine things to say, and run in and out to surprise people by
+saying them, and get away before they can answer you.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It confuses me to be answered. It discourages
+me. I cannot bear men and women. I have to run away. I must run
+away now [he tries to].
+
+ELLIE [again seizing his arm]. You shall not run away from me. I
+can hypnotize you. You are the only person in the house I can say
+what I like to. I know you are fond of me. Sit down. [She draws
+him to the sofa].
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [yielding]. Take care: I am in my dotage. Old
+men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to
+happen to the world.
+
+They sit side by side on the sofa. She leans affectionately
+against him with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half
+closed.
+
+ELLIE [dreamily]. I should have thought nothing else mattered to
+old men. They can't be very interested in what is going to happen
+to themselves.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A man's interest in the world is only the
+overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your
+vessel is not yet full; so you care for nothing but your own
+affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a
+politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old
+age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child
+again. I can give you the memories of my ancient wisdom: mere
+scraps and leavings; but I no longer really care for anything but
+my own little wants and hobbies. I sit here working out my old
+ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. I see my
+daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and
+sentiment and snobbery. I see you, the younger generation,
+turning from their romance and sentiment and snobbery to money
+and comfort and hard common sense. I was ten times happier on the
+bridge in the typhoon, or frozen into Arctic ice for months in
+darkness, than you or they have ever been. You are looking for a
+rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror,
+and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did
+not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I
+had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your
+life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not
+live.
+
+ELLIE [sitting up impatiently]. But what can I do? I am not a sea
+captain: I can't stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering
+seals and whales in Greenland's icy mountains. They won't let
+women be captains. Do you want me to be a stewardess?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are worse lives. The stewardesses could
+come ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail.
+
+ELLIE. What could they do ashore but marry for money? I don't
+want to be a stewardess: I am too bad a sailor. Think of
+something else for me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can't think so long and continuously. I am
+too old. I must go in and out. [He tries to rise].
+
+ELLIE [pulling him back]. You shall not. You are happy here,
+aren't you?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you it's dangerous to keep me. I can't
+keep awake and alert.
+
+ELLIE. What do you run away for? To sleep?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. To get a glass of rum.
+
+ELLIE [frightfully disillusioned]. Is that it? How disgusting! Do
+you like being drunk?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No: I dread being drunk more than anything in
+the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be
+easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women.
+Drink does that for you when you are young. But when you are old:
+very very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don't
+know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night
+only, and sleep soundly. But later on you will sleep in the
+afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in the morning; and
+you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be free from
+dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten
+minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to
+keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it
+was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so
+much water. Go get me another: Guinness knows where it is. You
+had better see for yourself the horror of an old man drinking.
+
+ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must
+never be in the real world when we talk together.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in
+my second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can't
+remember what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed
+happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that
+comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming
+instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that
+is going rotten.
+
+ELLIE. You dread it almost as much as I used to dread losing my
+dreams and having to fight and do things. But that is all over
+for me: my dreams are dashed to pieces. I should like to marry a
+very old, very rich man. I should like to marry you. I had much
+rather marry you than marry Mangan. Are you very rich?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Living from hand to mouth. And I have a
+wife somewhere in Jamaica: a black one. My first wife. Unless
+she's dead.
+
+ELLIE. What a pity! I feel so happy with you. [She takes his
+hand, almost unconsciously, and pats it]. I thought I should
+never feel happy again.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?
+
+ELLIE. Don't you know?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No.
+
+ELLIE. Heartbreak. I fell in love with Hector, and didn't know he
+was married.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so
+sufficient to themselves that they are only happy when they are
+stripped of everything, even of hope?
+
+ELLIE [gripping the hand]. It seems so; for I feel now as if
+there was nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That's the only real strength. That's genius.
+That's better than rum.
+
+ELLIE [throwing away his hand]. Rum! Why did you spoil it?
+
+Hector and Randall come in from the garden through the starboard
+door.
+
+HECTOR. I beg your pardon. We did not know there was anyone here.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That means that you want to tell Mr Randall the
+story about the tiger. Come, Captain: I want to talk to my
+father; and you had better come with me.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [rising]. Nonsense! the man is in bed.
+
+ELLIE. Aha! I've caught you. My real father has gone to bed; but
+the father you gave me is in the kitchen. You knew quite well all
+along. Come. [She draws him out into the garden with her through
+the port door].
+
+HECTOR. That's an extraordinary girl. She has the Ancient Mariner
+on a string like a Pekinese dog.
+
+RANDALL. Now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat?
+
+HECTOR. You are in what is supposed to be my house. I am at your
+disposal.
+
+Hector sits down in the draughtsman's chair, turning it to face
+Randall, who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the
+carpenter's bench.
+
+RANDALL. I take it that we may be quite frank. I mean about Lady
+Utterword.
+
+HECTOR. You may. I have nothing to be frank about. I never met
+her until this afternoon.
+
+RANDALL [straightening up]. What! But you are her sister's
+husband.
+
+HECTOR. Well, if you come to that, you are her husband's brother.
+
+RANDALL. But you seem to be on intimate terms with her.
+
+HECTOR. So do you.
+
+RANDALL. Yes: but I AM on intimate terms with her. I have known
+her for years.
+
+HECTOR. It took her years to get to the same point with you that
+she got to with me in five minutes, it seems.
+
+RANDALL [vexed]. Really, Ariadne is the limit [he moves away
+huffishly towards the windows].
+
+HECTOR [coolly]. She is, as I remarked to Hesione, a very
+enterprising woman.
+
+RANDALL [returning, much troubled]. You see, Hushabye, you are
+what women consider a good-looking man.
+
+HECTOR. I cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity;
+and Hesione insists on my keeping it up. She makes me wear these
+ridiculous things [indicating his Arab costume] because she
+thinks me absurd in evening dress.
+
+RANDALL. Still, you do keep it up, old chap. Now, I assure you I
+have not an atom of jealousy in my disposition
+
+HECTOR. The question would seem to be rather whether your brother
+has any touch of that sort.
+
+RANDALL. What! Hastings! Oh, don't trouble about Hastings. He has
+the gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest
+detail, and actually likes it. That gets him to the top wherever
+he goes. As long as Ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly,
+he is only too thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor
+for him.
+
+HECTOR. And as she has all the Shotover fascination, there is
+plenty of competition for the job, eh?
+
+RANDALL [angrily]. She encourages them. Her conduct is perfectly
+scandalous. I assure you, my dear fellow, I haven't an atom of
+jealousy in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of
+every place she goes to by her thoughtlessness. It's nothing
+more: she doesn't really care for the men she keeps hanging about
+her; but how is the world to know that? It's not fair to
+Hastings. It's not fair to me.
+
+HECTOR. Her theory is that her conduct is so correct
+
+RANDALL. Correct! She does nothing but make scenes from morning
+till night. You be careful, old chap. She will get you into
+trouble: that is, she would if she really cared for you.
+
+HECTOR. Doesn't she?
+
+RANDALL. Not a scrap. She may want your scalp to add to her
+collection; but her true affection has been engaged years ago.
+You had really better be careful.
+
+HECTOR. Do you suffer much from this jealousy?
+
+RANDALL. Jealousy! I jealous! My dear fellow, haven't I told you
+that there is not an atom of--
+
+HECTOR. Yes. And Lady Utterword told me she never made scenes.
+Well, don't waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste
+jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants
+us all in the long run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your
+easy man-of-the-world pose, which you carry so well in other
+respects.
+
+RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a
+gentleman without being accused of posing.
+
+HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all
+the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The
+man under your pose is apparently Ellie's favorite, Othello.
+
+RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying,
+let me tell you.
+
+HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to
+writhe under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At
+last I learned to play them.
+
+RANDALL. If it's all the same to you I had rather you didn't play
+them on me. You evidently don't quite understand my character, or
+my notions of good form.
+
+HECTOR. Is it your notion of good form to give away Lady
+Utterword?
+
+RANDALL [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. I
+have not said a word against Lady Utterword. This is just the
+conspiracy over again.
+
+HECTOR. What conspiracy?
+
+RANDALL. You know very well, sir. A conspiracy to make me out to
+be pettish and jealous and childish and everything I am not.
+Everyone knows I am just the opposite.
+
+HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you.
+It often does have that effect. [He goes to the garden door and
+calls Lady Utterword with commanding emphasis]. Ariadne!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [at some distance]. Yes.
+
+RANDALL. What are you calling her for? I want to speak--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [arriving breathless]. Yes. You really are a
+terribly commanding person. What's the matter?
+
+HECTOR. I do not know how to manage your friend Randall. No doubt
+you do.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall: have you been making yourself
+ridiculous, as usual? I can see it in your face. Really, you are
+the most pettish creature.
+
+RANDALL. You know quite well, Ariadne, that I have not an ounce
+of pettishness in my disposition. I have made myself perfectly
+pleasant here. I have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable
+in the face of a burglar. Imperturbability is almost too strong a
+point of mine. But [putting his foot down with a stamp, and
+walking angrily up and down the room] I insist on being treated
+with a certain consideration. I will not allow Hushabye to take
+liberties with me. I will not stand your encouraging people as
+you do.
+
+HECTOR. The man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I know. He is jealous. As if he had any right to
+be! He compromises me everywhere. He makes scenes all over the
+place. Randall: I will not allow it. I simply will not allow it.
+You had no right to discuss me with Hector. I will not be
+discussed by men.
+
+HECTOR. Be reasonable, Ariadne. Your fatal gift of beauty forces
+men to discuss you.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Oh indeed! what about YOUR fatal gift of beauty?
+
+HECTOR. How can I help it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You could cut off your moustache: I can't cut off
+my nose. I get my whole life messed up with people falling in
+love with me. And then Randall says I run after men.
+
+RANDALL. I--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes you do: you said it just now. Why can't you
+think of something else than women? Napoleon was quite right when
+he said that women are the occupation of the idle man. Well, if
+ever there was an idle man on earth, his name is Randall
+Utterword.
+
+RANDALL. Ariad--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. Oh yes
+you are: it's no use denying it. What have you ever done? What
+good are you? You are as much trouble in the house as a child of
+three. You couldn't live without your valet.
+
+RANDALL. This is--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are
+selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth.
+You can't even gossip about anything but yourself and your
+grievances and your ailments and the people who have offended
+you. [Turning to Hector]. Do you know what they call him, Hector?
+
+HECTOR  }  [speaking   { Please don't tell me.
+RANDALL }   together]  { I'll not stand it--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the Rotter: that is his name in good
+society.
+
+RANDALL [shouting]. I'll not bear it, I tell you. Will you listen
+to me, you infernal--[he chokes].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Well: go on. What were you going to call me? An
+infernal what? Which unpleasant animal is it to be this time?
+
+RANDALL [foaming]. There is no animal in the world so hateful as
+a woman can be. You are a maddening devil. Hushabye, you will not
+believe me when I tell you that I have loved this demon all my
+life; but God knows I have paid for it [he sits down in the
+draughtsman's chair, weeping].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [standing over him with triumphant contempt].
+Cry-baby!
+
+HECTOR [gravely, coming to him]. My friend, the Shotover sisters
+have two strange powers over men. They can make them love; and
+they can make them cry. Thank your stars that you are not married
+to one of them.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [haughtily]. And pray, Hector--
+
+HECTOR [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her
+right round him and away from Randall: and gripping her throat
+with the other hand]. Ariadne, if you attempt to start on me,
+I'll choke you: do you hear? The cat-and-mouse game with the
+other sex is a good game; but I can play your head off at it. [He
+throws her, not at all gently, into the big chair, and proceeds,
+less fiercely but firmly]. It is true that Napoleon said that
+woman is the occupation of the idle man. But he added that she is
+the relaxation of the warrior. Well, I am the warrior. So take
+care.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by
+his violence]. My dear Hector, I have only done what you asked me
+to do.
+
+HECTOR. How do you make that out, pray?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You called me in to manage Randall, didn't you?
+You said you couldn't manage him yourself.
+
+HECTOR. Well, what if I did? I did not ask you to drive the man
+mad.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. He isn't mad. That's the way to manage him. If
+you were a mother, you'd understand.
+
+HECTOR. Mother! What are you up to now?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It's quite simple. When the children got nerves
+and were naughty, I smacked them just enough to give them a good
+cry and a healthy nervous shock. They went to sleep and were
+quite good afterwards. Well, I can't smack Randall: he is too
+big; so when he gets nerves and is naughty, I just rag him till
+he cries. He will be all right now. Look: he is half asleep
+already [which is quite true].
+
+RANDALL [waking up indignantly]. I'm not. You are most cruel,
+Ariadne. [Sentimentally]. But I suppose I must forgive you, as
+usual [he checks himself in the act of yawning].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [to Hector]. Is the explanation satisfactory,
+dread warrior?
+
+HECTOR. Some day I shall kill you, if you go too far. I thought
+you were a fool.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [laughing]. Everybody does, at first. But I am not
+such a fool as I look. [She rises complacently]. Now, Randall, go
+to bed. You will be a good boy in the morning.
+
+RANDALL [only very faintly rebellious]. I'll go to bed when I
+like. It isn't ten yet.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. It is long past ten. See that he goes to bed at
+once, Hector. [She goes into the garden].
+
+HECTOR. Is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of
+men to women?
+
+RANDALL [rising resolutely]. I'll not speak to her tomorrow. I'll
+not speak to her for another week. I'll give her such a lesson.
+I'll go straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [He makes
+for the door leading to the hall].
+
+HECTOR. You are under a spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to
+the devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a
+wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I
+am tied to Hesione's apron-string; but I'm her husband; and if I
+did go stark staring mad about her, at least we became man and
+wife. But why should you let yourself be dragged about and beaten
+by Ariadne as a toy donkey is dragged about and beaten by a
+child? What do you get by it? Are you her lover?
+
+RANDALL. You must not misunderstand me. In a higher sense--in a
+Platonic sense--
+
+HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when
+pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean.
+
+RANDALL [feebly]. Well, if I don't mind, I don't see what
+business it is of yours. Besides, I tell you I am going to punish
+her. You shall see: I know how to deal with women. I'm really
+very sleepy. Say good-night to Mrs Hushabye for me, will you,
+like a good chap. Good-night. [He hurries out].
+
+HECTOR. Poor wretch! Oh women! women! women! [He lifts his fists
+in invocation to heaven]. Fall. Fall and crush. [He goes out into
+the garden].
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+In the garden, Hector, as he comes out through the glass door of
+the poop, finds Lady Utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock
+on the east side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by
+the electric arc, which is like a moon in its opal globe. Beneath
+the head of the hammock, a campstool. On the other side of the
+flagstaff, on the long garden seat, Captain Shotover is asleep,
+with Ellie beside him, leaning affectionately against him on his
+right hand. On his left is a deck chair. Behind them in the
+gloom, Hesione is strolling about with Mangan. It is a fine still
+night, moonless.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. What a lovely night! It seems made for us.
+
+HECTOR. The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the
+night? [He sits down moodily in the deck chair].
+
+ELLIE [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. Its beauty soaks
+into my nerves. In the night there is peace for the old and hope
+for the young.
+
+HECTOR. Is that remark your own?
+
+ELLIE. No. Only the last thing the captain said before he went to
+sleep.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I'm not asleep.
+
+HECTOR. Randall is. Also Mr Mazzini Dunn. Mangan, too, probably.
+
+MANGAN. No.
+
+HECTOR. Oh, you are there. I thought Hesione would have sent you
+to bed by this time.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the
+light, with Mangan]. I think I shall. He keeps telling me he has
+a presentiment that he is going to die. I never met a man so
+greedy for sympathy.
+
+MANGAN [plaintively]. But I have a presentiment. I really have.
+And you wouldn't listen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. I was listening for something else. There was a
+sort of splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It
+came from a distance and then died away.
+
+MANGAN. I tell you it was a train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this
+hour. The last is nine forty-five.
+
+MANGAN. But a goods train.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Not on our little line. They tack a truck on to the
+passenger train. What can it have been, Hector?
+
+HECTOR. Heaven's threatening growl of disgust at us useless
+futile creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must
+happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come
+to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens
+will fall in thunder and destroy us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing
+comfortably in her hammock]. We have not supplanted the animals,
+Hector. Why do you ask heaven to destroy this house, which could
+be made quite comfortable if Hesione had any notion of how to
+live? Don't you know what is wrong with it?
+
+HECTOR. We are wrong with it. There is no sense in us. We are
+useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense! Hastings told me the very first day he
+came here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the
+house.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What! The numskull said there was something
+wrong with my house!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I said Hastings said it; and he is not in the
+least a numskull.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What's wrong with my house?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Just what is wrong with a ship, papa. Wasn't it
+clever of Hastings to see that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The man's a fool. There's nothing wrong with a
+ship.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, there is.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what is it? Don't be aggravating, Addy.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Guess.
+
+HECTOR. Demons. Daughters of the witch of Zanzibar. Demons.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Not a bit. I assure you, all this house needs to
+make it a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites
+and sound sleep in it, is horses.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Horses! What rubbish!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Yes: horses. Why have we never been able to let
+this house? Because there are no proper stables. Go anywhere in
+England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really
+nice English people; and what do you always find? That the
+stables are the real centre of the household; and that if any
+visitor wants to play the piano the whole room has to be upset
+before it can be opened, there are so many things piled on it. I
+never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never ride
+really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only two
+classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and
+the neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see
+that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who
+don't are the wrong ones.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is some truth in this. My ship made a man
+of me; and a ship is the horse of the sea.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Exactly how Hastings explained your being a
+gentleman.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Not bad for a numskull. Bring the man here with
+you next time: I must talk to him.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Why is Randall such an obvious rotter? He is well
+bred; he has been at a public school and a university; he has
+been in the Foreign Office; he knows the best people and has
+lived all his life among them. Why is he so unsatisfactory, so
+contemptible? Why can't he get a valet to stay with him longer
+than a few months? Just because he is too lazy and
+pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano, and
+sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books
+and poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring
+it into my house. If he would only--[she is interrupted by the
+melancholy strains of a flute coming from an open window above.
+She raises herself indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have
+not gone to bed. Have you been listening? [The flute replies
+pertly]. How vulgar! Go to bed instantly, Randall: how dare you?
+[The window is slammed down. She subsides]. How can anyone care
+for such a creature!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Addy: do you think Ellie ought to marry poor Alfred
+merely for his money?
+
+MANGAN [much alarmed]. What's that? Mrs Hushabye, are my affairs
+to be discussed like this before everybody?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I don't think Randall is listening now.
+
+MANGAN. Everybody is listening. It isn't right.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But in the dark, what does it matter? Ellie doesn't
+mind. Do you, Ellie?
+
+ELLIE. Not in the least. What is your opinion, Lady Utterword?
+You have so much good sense.
+
+MANGAN. But it isn't right. It--[Mrs Hushabye puts her hand on
+his mouth]. Oh, very well.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How much money have you, Mr. Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Really--No: I can't stand this.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense, Mr Mangan! It all turns on your income,
+doesn't it?
+
+MANGAN. Well, if you come to that, how much money has she?
+
+ELLIE. None.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are answered, Mr Mangan. And now, as you have
+made Miss Dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to
+show your own.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Come, Alf! out with it! How much?
+
+MANGAN [baited out of all prudence]. Well, if you want to know, I
+have no money and never had any.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, you mustn't tell naughty stories.
+
+MANGAN. I'm not telling you stories. I'm telling you the raw
+truth.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Then what do you live on, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Travelling expenses. And a trifle of commission.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling
+expenses for our life's journey?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?
+
+MANGAN. People think I have. People think I'm an industrial
+Napoleon. That's why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you
+I have nothing.
+
+ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus's tigers?
+That they don't exist?
+
+MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they're not mine. They
+belong to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy
+good-for-nothing capitalists. I get money from such people to
+start the factories. I find people like Miss Dunn's father to
+work them, and keep a tight hand so as to make them pay. Of
+course I make them keep me going pretty well; but it's a dog's
+life; and I don't own anything.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, Alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it
+to get out of marrying Ellie.
+
+MANGAN. I'm telling the truth about my money for the first time
+in my life; and it's the first time my word has ever been
+doubted.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. How sad! Why don't you go in for politics, Mr
+Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Go in for politics! Where have you been living? I am in
+politics.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I'm sure I beg your pardon. I never heard of you.
+
+MANGAN. Let me tell you, Lady Utterword, that the Prime Minister
+of this country asked me to join the Government without even
+going through the nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a
+great public department.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. As a Conservative or a Liberal?
+
+MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all
+burst out laughing]. What are you all laughing at?
+
+MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!
+
+ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!
+
+HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and
+mouse all the evening!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party
+funds, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the
+money: they knew how useful I should be to them in the
+Government.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. This is most interesting and unexpected, Mr
+Mangan. And what have your administrative achievements been, so
+far?
+
+MANGAN. Achievements? Well, I don't know what you call
+achievements; but I've jolly well put a stop to the games of the
+other fellows in the other departments. Every man of them thought
+he was going to save the country all by himself, and do me out of
+the credit and out of my chance of a title. I took good care that
+if they wouldn't let me do it they shouldn't do it themselves
+either. I may not know anything about my own machinery; but I
+know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow's. And now they
+all look the biggest fools going.
+
+HECTOR. And in heaven's name, what do you look like?
+
+MANGAN. I look like the fellow that was too clever for all the
+others, don't I? If that isn't a triumph of practical business,
+what is?
+
+HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Do you expect to save the country, Mr Mangan?
+
+MANGAN. Well, who else will? Will your Mr Randall save it?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the rotter! Certainly not.
+
+MANGAN. Will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and
+his fine talk?
+
+HECTOR. Yes, if they will let me.
+
+MANGAN [sneering]. Ah! Will they let you?
+
+HECTOR. No. They prefer you.
+
+MANGAN. Very well then, as you're in a world where I'm
+appreciated and you're not, you'd best be civil to me, hadn't
+you? Who else is there but me?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous
+sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a
+good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses:
+he will save the country with the greatest ease.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with
+a stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God's
+way. The man is a numskull.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What
+do you say, Miss Dunn?
+
+ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put
+upon him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.
+
+MANGAN [contemptuously]. I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into
+parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We've not come
+to that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you
+governs the country so long as we govern you.
+
+HECTOR. We? Who is we, pray?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. The devil's granddaughters, dear. The lovely women.
+
+HECTOR [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say, and deliver us
+from the lures of Satan!
+
+ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my
+father and Shakespeare. Marcus's tigers are false; Mr Mangan's
+millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about
+Hesione but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too
+pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the
+Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to
+be--
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [placidly]. A good deal of my hair is quite
+genuine. The Duchess of Dithering offered me fifty guineas for
+this [touching her forehead] under the impression that it was a
+transformation; but it is all natural except the color.
+
+MANGAN [wildly]. Look here: I'm going to take off all my clothes
+[he begins tearing off his coat].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD.  }    [in     { Mr. Mangan!
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER } consterna- { What's that?
+HECTOR.          }    tion]   { Ha! Ha! Do. Do
+ELLIE            }            { Please don't.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [catching his arm and stopping him]. Alfred, for
+shame! Are you mad?
+
+MANGAN. Shame! What shame is there in this house? Let's all strip
+stark naked. We may as well do the thing thoroughly when we're
+about it. We've stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us
+strip ourselves physically naked as well, and see how we like it.
+I tell you I can't bear this. I was brought up to be respectable.
+I don't mind the women dyeing their hair and the men drinking:
+it's human nature. But it's not human nature to tell everybody
+about it. Every time one of you opens your mouth I go like this
+[he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid of what will come
+next. How are we to have any self-respect if we don't keep it up
+that we're better than we really are?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I quite sympathize with you, Mr Mangan. I have
+been through it all; and I know by experience that men and women
+are delicate plants and must be cultivated under glass. Our
+family habit of throwing stones in all directions and letting the
+air in is not only unbearably rude, but positively dangerous.
+Still, there is no use catching physical colds as well as moral
+ones; so please keep your clothes on.
+
+MANGAN. I'll do as I like: not what you tell me. Am I a child or
+a grown man? I won't stand this mothering tyranny. I'll go back
+to the city, where I'm respected and made much of.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city.
+Think of Ellie's youth!
+
+ELLIE. Think of Hesione's eyes and hair!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog
+barking to keep the truth out!
+
+HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword's beauty! her good sense! her
+style!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can
+really do any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the
+essential point, isn't it?
+
+MANGAN [surrendering]. All right: all right. I'm done. Have it
+your own way. Only let me alone. I don't know whether I'm on my
+head or my heels when you all start on me like this. I'll stay.
+I'll marry her. I'll do anything for a quiet life. Are you
+satisfied now?
+
+ELLIE. No. I never really intended to make you marry me, Mr
+Mangan. Never in the depths of my soul. I only wanted to feel my
+strength: to know that you could not escape if I chose to take
+you.
+
+MANGAN [indignantly]. What! Do you mean to say you are going to
+throw me over after my acting so handsome?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I should not be too hasty, Miss Dunn. You can
+throw Mr Mangan over at any time up to the last moment. Very few
+men in his position go bankrupt. You can live very comfortably on
+his reputation for immense wealth.
+
+ELLIE. I cannot commit bigamy, Lady Utterword.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE.  }              { Bigamy! Whatever on earth are you
+               }              {  talking about, Ellie?
+LADY UTTERWORD } [exclaiming  { Bigamy! What do you mean, Miss
+               }              {  Dunn?
+MANGAN         }  altogether] { Bigamy! Do you mean to say you're
+               }              {  married already?
+HECTOR         }              { Bigamy! This is some enigma.
+
+ELLIE. Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover's white
+wife.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie! What nonsense! Where?
+
+ELLIE. In heaven, where all true marriages are made.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!
+
+MANGAN. He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!
+
+HECTOR [quoting Shelley].
+
+"Their altar the grassy earth outspreads
+ And their priest the muttering wind."
+
+ELLIE. Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong
+sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and
+second father.
+
+She draws the captain's arm through hers, and pats his hand. The
+captain remains fast asleep.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, that's very clever of you, pettikins. Very
+clever. Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie. You must
+be content with a little share of me.
+
+MANGAN [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. It isn't kind--[his
+emotion chokes him].
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is
+the most conceited young woman I have met since I came back to
+England.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Ellie isn't conceited. Are you, pettikins?
+
+ELLIE. I know my strength now, Hesione.
+
+MANGAN. Brazen, I call you. Brazen.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Tut, tut, Alfred: don't be rude. Don't you feel how
+lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren't you happy,
+you and Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful
+enough to please the most fastidious man: we live and love and
+have not a care in the world. We women have managed all that for
+you. Why in the name of common sense do you go on as if you were
+two miserable wretches?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you happiness is no good. You can be
+happy when you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half
+dead than ever I was in my prime. But there is no blessing on my
+happiness.
+
+ELLIE [her face lighting up]. Life with a blessing! that is what
+I want. Now I know the real reason why I couldn't marry Mr
+Mangan: there would be no blessing on our marriage. There is a
+blessing on my broken heart. There is a blessing on your beauty,
+Hesione. There is a blessing on your father's spirit. Even on the
+lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on Mr Mangan's money
+there is none.
+
+MANGAN. I don't understand a word of that.
+
+ELLIE. Neither do I. But I know it means something.
+
+MANGAN. Don't say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I
+was ready to get a bishop to marry us.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Isn't he a fool, pettikins?
+
+HECTOR [fiercely]. Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.
+
+Mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown,
+comes from the house, on Lady Utterword's side.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me.
+What's the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, no: nothing's the matter: but really it's impossible
+to go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on
+under one's window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had
+to come down and join you all. What has it all been about?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.
+
+HECTOR. For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has
+tried to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst
+you, as an idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope you don't mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye.
+[He sits down on the campstool].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Your daughter's match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems
+that Mr Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property,
+owns absolutely nothing.
+
+MAZZINI. Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if
+people believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas
+they don't believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask
+poor Ellie to depend on what I can do for her?
+
+MANGAN. Don't you run away with this idea that I have nothing.
+I--
+
+HECTOR. Oh, don't explain. We understand. You have a couple of
+thousand pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence
+a dozen, and half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to
+poison yourself with when you are found out. That's the reality
+of your millions.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are
+genuine and perfectly legal.
+
+HECTOR [disgusted]. Yah! Not even a great swindler!
+
+MANGAN. So you think. But I've been too many for some honest men,
+for all that.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are
+determined to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.
+
+MANGAN. There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly
+house I have been made to look like a fool, though I'm as good a
+man in this house as in the city.
+
+ELLIE [musically]. Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy
+house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I
+shall call it Heartbreak House.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal.
+
+MANGAN [breaks into a low snivelling]!!!
+
+MRS HUSAHBYE. There! you have set Alfred off.
+
+ELLIE. I like him best when he is howling.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Silence! [Mangan subsides into silence]. I say,
+let the heart break in silence.
+
+HECTOR. Do you accept that name for your house?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
+
+HECTOR. We have been too long here. We do not live in this house:
+we haunt it.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [heart torn]. It is dreadful to think how you have
+been here all these years while I have gone round the world. I
+escaped young; but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my
+heart too. But it shan't. I have left you and it behind. It was
+silly of me to come back. I felt sentimental about papa and
+Hesione and the old place. I felt them calling to me.
+
+MAZZINI. But what a very natural and kindly and charming human
+feeling, Lady Utterword!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was
+only the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered
+and not wanted.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You left because you did not want us. Was there
+no heartbreak in that for your father? You tore yourself up by
+the roots; and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh
+plants and forgot you. What right had you to come back and probe
+old wounds?
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You were a complete stranger to me at first, Addy;
+but now I feel as if you had never been away.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Thank you, Hesione; but the influenza is quite
+cured. The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and
+to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little
+self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and
+rather untidy villa without any stables.
+
+HECTOR. Inhabited by--?
+
+ELLIE. A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double
+chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of
+freedom.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, really, Mrs Hushabye--
+
+MANGAN. A member of His Majesty's Government that everybody sets
+down as a nincompoop: don't forget him, Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief
+occupation is to be married to my sister.
+
+HECTOR. All heartbroken imbeciles.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable
+specimen of what is best in our English culture. You are very
+charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane,
+unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is
+delightful to thoughtful people.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. You do us proud, Mazzini.
+
+MAZZINI. I am not flattering, really. Where else could I feel
+perfectly at ease in my pyjamas? I sometimes dream that I am in
+very distinguished society, and suddenly I have nothing on but my
+pyjamas! Sometimes I haven't even pyjamas. And I always feel
+overwhelmed with confusion. But here, I don't mind in the least:
+it seems quite natural.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. An infallible sign that you are now not in really
+distinguished society, Mr Dunn. If you were in my house, you
+would feel embarrassed.
+
+MAZZINI. I shall take particular care to keep out of your house,
+Lady Utterword.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will be quite wrong, Mr Dunn. I should make
+you very comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and
+anxiety of wondering whether you should wear your purple and gold
+or your green and crimson dressing-gown at dinner. You complicate
+life instead of simplifying it by doing these ridiculous things.
+
+ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?
+
+HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor
+devil upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart,
+just as Mangan howls when my wife twists his.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but
+have his heart broken. It is a change from having his head
+shampooed. Catch anyone breaking Hastings' heart!
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest
+satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.
+
+MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. I forgot you, Mr Mangan.
+
+MANGAN. Well, I don't see that quite, either.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are
+successful.
+
+MANGAN. But I don't want to be regarded merely as a successful
+man. I have an imagination like anyone else. I have a
+presentiment
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting
+myself to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous
+presentiment. You bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the
+stars. [She drags him away into the darkness].
+
+MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it's all very well to
+make fun of me; but if you only knew--
+
+HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?
+
+MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
+
+ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting
+something. I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point
+sometime.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a
+baby.
+
+HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't
+have a baby.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.
+
+HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for
+me: and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking,
+and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil.
+Think of the powers of destruction that Mangan and his mutual
+admiration gang wield! It's madness: it's like giving a torpedo
+to a badly brought up child to play at earthquakes with.
+
+MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was
+young.
+
+HECTOR. Think! What's the good of thinking about it? Why didn't
+you do something?
+
+MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and
+wrote pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though
+the people in the societies thought they knew more than Mangan,
+most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You
+see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage.
+Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up:
+it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any
+longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual
+poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever
+does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things
+considered.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps somebody cleverer than you and Mr Mangan
+was at work all the time.
+
+MAZZINI. Perhaps so. Though I was brought up not to believe in
+anything, I often feel that there is a great deal to be said for
+the theory of an over-ruling Providence, after all.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. Providence! I meant Hastings.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But
+one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run
+them on the rocks.
+
+MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure
+you, they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing
+happens to the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down
+to the west. The moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and
+comes later and later until she is lost in the light as other
+things are lost in the darkness. After the typhoon, the
+flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It's amazing how
+they get along, all things considered. Nothing happens, except
+something not worth mentioning.
+
+ELLIE. What is that, O Captain, O my captain?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [savagely]. Nothing but the smash of the drunken
+skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten
+timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the
+crew like rats in a trap.
+
+ELLIE. Moral: don't take rum.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [vehemently]. That is a lie, child. Let a man
+drink ten barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until
+he is a drifting skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand
+on his bridge and steer it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who
+lies drinking in his bunk and trusts to Providence that I call
+the drunken skipper, though he drank nothing but the waters of
+the River Jordan.
+
+ELLIE. Splendid! And you haven't had a drop for an hour. You see
+you don't need it: your own spirit is not dead.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Echoes: nothing but echoes. The last shot was
+fired years ago.
+
+HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we
+call England?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled
+ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will
+strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be
+suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?
+
+HECTOR. Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I
+still have the will to live. What am I to do?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an
+Englishman.
+
+HECTOR. And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and
+be damned.
+
+ELLIE. Quiet, quiet: you'll tire yourself.
+
+MAZZINI. I thought all that once, Captain; but I assure you
+nothing will happen.
+
+A dull distant explosion is heard.
+
+HECTOR [starting up]. What was that?
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Something happening [he blows his whistle].
+Breakers ahead!
+
+The light goes out.
+
+HECTOR [furiously]. Who put that light out? Who dared put that
+light out?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [running in from the house to the middle of the
+esplanade]. I did, sir. The police have telephoned to say we'll
+be summoned if we don't put that light out: it can be seen for
+miles.
+
+HECTOR. It shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the
+house].
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. The Rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they
+say. Unless we can give the Rector a bed he has nowhere to lay
+his head this night.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The Church is on the rocks, breaking up. I told
+him it would unless it headed for God's open sea.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And you are all to go down to the cellars.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go there yourself, you and all the crew. Batten
+down the hatches.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. And hide beside the coward I married! I'll go on
+the roof first. [The lamp lights up again]. There! Mr Hushabye's
+turned it on again.
+
+THE BURGLAR [hurrying in and appealing to Nurse Guinness]. Here:
+where's the way to that gravel pit? The boot-boy says there's a
+cave in the gravel pit. Them cellars is no use. Where's the
+gravel pit, Captain?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall
+into it and break your dirty neck. [She pushes him contemptuously
+towards the flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the
+hammock and waits there, as it were by Ariadne's cradle].
+
+Another and louder explosion is heard. The burglar stops and
+stands trembling.
+
+ELLIE [rising]. That was nearer.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The next one will get us. [He rises]. Stand by,
+all hands, for judgment.
+
+THE BURGLAR. Oh my Lordy God! [He rushes away frantically past
+the flagstaff into the gloom].
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [emerging panting from the darkness]. Who was that
+running away? [She comes to Ellie]. Did you hear the explosions?
+And the sound in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra:
+it's like Beethoven.
+
+ELLIE. By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.
+
+She and Hesione throw themselves into one another's arms in wild
+excitement. The light increases.
+
+MAZZINI [anxiously]. The light is getting brighter.
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [looking up at the house]. It's Mr Hushabye
+turning on all the lights in the house and tearing down the
+curtains.
+
+RANDALL [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute].
+Ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: I beg and
+implore you, go down to the cellars!
+
+LADY UTTERWORD [quite composed in her hammock]. The governor's
+wife in the cellars with the servants! Really, Randall!
+
+RANDALL. But what shall I do if you are killed?
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. You will probably be killed, too, Randall. Now
+play your flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good.
+Play us "Keep the home fires burning."
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [grimly]. THEY'LL keep the home fires burning for
+us: them up there.
+
+RANDALL [having tried to play]. My lips are trembling. I can't
+get a sound.
+
+MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of
+God.
+
+HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his
+former place]. There is not half light enough. We should be
+blazing to the skies.
+
+ELLIE [tense with excitement]. Set fire to the house, Marcus.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.
+
+HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save
+you; but it will show that your souls are still live.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It's
+magnificent.
+
+They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.
+
+HECTOR [gravely]. Miss Dunn, you can do no good here. We of this
+house are only moths flying into the candle. You had better go
+down to the cellar.
+
+ELLIE [scornfully]. I don't think.
+
+MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the
+cellar. An officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr
+Hushabye is behaving like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are
+acting very sensibly; and it is they who will survive.
+
+ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should
+you run any risk?
+
+MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are
+running!
+
+NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards!
+What next?
+
+A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their
+seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of
+the shattered glass from the windows.
+
+MAZZINI. Is anyone hurt?
+
+HECTOR. Where did it fall?
+
+NURSE GUINNESS [in hideous triumph]. Right in the gravel pit: I
+seen it. Serve un right! I seen it [she runs away towards the
+gravel pit, laughing harshly].
+
+HECTOR. One husband gone.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted.
+
+MAZZINI. Oh, poor Mangan!
+
+HECTOR. Are you immortal that you need pity him? Our turn next.
+
+They wait in silence and intense expectation. Hesione and Ellie
+hold each other's hand tight.
+
+A distant explosion is heard.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]. Oh! they have passed us.
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
+
+CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits
+down and goes asleep].
+
+ELLIE [disappointedly]. Safe!
+
+HECTOR [disgustedly]. Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world
+has become again suddenly! [he sits down].
+
+MAZZINI [sitting down]. I was quite wrong, after all. It is we
+who have survived; and Mangan and the burglar-
+
+HECTOR. --the two burglars--
+
+LADY UTTERWORD. --the two practical men of business--
+
+MAZZINI. --both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a
+new house.
+
+MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they'll come
+again tomorrow night.
+
+ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]. Oh, I hope so.
+
+Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw
+
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