The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950

  CHARLES. Well, there’s no sort of use in any of us going —

  On a night like this — it’s a good three miles;

  There’s nothing we could do that Warburton can’t.

  If he’s worse than Winchell said, then he’ll let us know at once.

  GERALD. I am really more afraid of the shock for Amy;

  But I think that Warburton understands that.

  IVY. You are quite right, Gerald, the one thing that matters

  Is not to let her see that anyone is worried.

  We must carry on as if nothing had happened,

  And have the cake and presents.

  GERALD. But I’m worried about Arthur:

  He’s much more apt than John to get into trouble.

  CHARLES. Oh, but Arthur’s a brilliant driver.

  After all the experience he’s had at Brooklands,

  He’s not likely to get into trouble.

  GERALD. A brilliant driver, but more reckless.

  IVY. Yet I remember, when they were boys,

  Arthur was always the more adventurous

  But John was the one that had the accidents,

  Somehow, just because he was the slow one.

  He was always the one to fall off the pony,

  Or out of a tree — and always on his head.

  VIOLET. But a year ago, Arthur took me out in his car,

  And I told him I would never go out with him again.

  Not that I wanted to go with him at all —

  Though of course he meant well — but I think an open car

  Is so undignified: you’re blown about so,

  And you feel so conspicuous, lolling back

  And so near the street, and everyone staring;

  And the pace he went at was simply terrifying.

  I said I would rather walk: and I did.

  GERALD. Walk? where to?

  VIOLET. He started out to take me to Cheltenham;

  But I stopped him somewhere in Chiswick, I think.

  Anyway, the district was unfamiliar

  And I had the greatest trouble in getting home.

  I am sure he meant well. But I do think he is reckless.

  GERALD. I wonder how much Amy knows about Arthur?

  CHARLES. More than she cares to mention, I imagine.

  [Enter HARRY]

  HARRY. Mother is asleep, I think: it’s strange how the old

  Can drop off to sleep in the middle of calamity

  Like children, or like hardened campaigners. She looked

  Very much as she must have looked when she was a child.

  You’ve been holding a meeting — the usual family inquest

  On the characters of all the junior members?

  Or engaged in predicting the minor event,

  Engaged in foreseeing the minor disaster?

  You go on trying to think of each thing separately,

  Making small things important, so that everything

  May be unimportant, a slight deviation

  From some imaginary course that life ought to take,

  That you call normal. What you call the normal

  Is merely the unreal and the unimportant.

  I was like that in a way, so long as I could think

  Even of my own life as an isolated ruin,

  A casual bit of waste in an orderly universe.

  But it begins to seem just part of some huge disaster,

  Some monstrous mistake and aberration

  Of all men, of the world, which I cannot put in order.

  If you only knew the years that I have had to live

  Since I came home, a few hours ago, to Wishwood.

  VIOLET. I will make no observations on what you say, Harry;

  My comments are not always welcome in this family.

  [Enter DENMAN]

  DENMAN. Excuse me, Miss Ivy. There’s a trunk call for you.

  IVY. A trunk call? for me? why, who can want me?

  DENMAN. He wouldn’t give his name, Miss; but it’s Mr. Arthur.

  IVY. Arthur! Oh dear, I’m afraid he’s had an accident.

  [Exeunt IVY and DENMAN]

  VIOLET. When it’s Ivy that he’s asking for, I expect the worst.

  AGATHA. Whatever you have learned, Harry, you must remember

  That there is always more: we cannot rest in being

  The impatient spectators of malice or stupidity.

  We must try to penetrate the other private worlds

  Of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering

  Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

  VIOLET. Agatha’s remarks are invariably pointed.

  HARRY. Do you think that I believe what I said just now?

  That was only what I should like to believe.

  I was talking in abstractions: and you answered in abstractions.

  I have a private puzzle. Were they simply outside,

  I might escape somewhere, perhaps. Were they simply inside

  I could cheat them perhaps with the aid of Dr. Warburton —

  Or any other doctor, who would be another Warburton,

  If you decided to set another doctor on me.

  But this is too real for your words to alter.

  Oh, there must be another way of talking

  That would get us somewhere. You don’t understand me.

  You can’t understand me. It’s not being alone

  That is the horror — to be alone with the horror.

  What matters is the filthiness. I can clean my skin,

  Purify my life, void my mind,

  But always the filthiness, that lies a little deeper …

  [Enter IVY]

  IVY. Where is there an evening paper?

  GERALD. Why, what’s the matter.

  IVY. Somebody, look for Arthur in the evening paper.

  That was Arthur, ringing up from London:

  The connection was so bad, I could hardly hear him,

  And his voice was very queer. It seems that Arthur too

  Has had an accident. I don’t think he’s hurt,

  But he says that he hasn’t got the use of his car,

  And he missed the last train, so he’s coming up tomorrow;

  And he said there was something about it in the paper,

  But it’s all a mistake. And not to tell his mother.

  VIOLET. What’s the use of asking for an evening paper?

  You know as well as I do, at this distance from London

  Nobody’s likely to have this evening’s paper.

  CHARLES. Stop, I think I bought a lunch edition

  Before I left St. Pancras. If I did, it’s in my overcoat.

  I’ll see if it’s there. There might be something in that.

  [Exit]

  GERALD. Well, I said that Arthur was every bit as likely

  To have an accident as John. And it wasn’t John’s fault,

  I don’t believe. John is unlucky,

  But Arthur is definitely reckless.

  VIOLET. I think these racing cars ought to be prohibited.

  [Re-enter CHARLES, with a newspaper]

  CHARLES. Yes, there is a paragraph … I’m glad to say

  It’s not very conspicuous …

  GERALD. There’ll have been more in the later editions.

  You’d better read it to us.

  CHARLES [reads].

  ‘Peer’s Brother in Motor Smash

  The Hon. Arthur Gerald Charles Piper, younger brother of Lord Monchensey, who ran into and demolished a roundsman’s cart in Ebury Street early on the morning of January 1st, was fined £50 and costs to-day, and forbidden to drive a car for the next twelve months.

  While trying to extricate his car from the collision, Mr. Piper reversed into a shop-window. When challenged, Mr. Piper said: “I thought it was all open country about here” —’

  GERALD. Where?

  CHARLES. In Ebury Street. ‘The police stated that at the time of the accident Mr. Pipe
r was being pursued by a patrol, and was travelling at the rate of 66 miles an hour. When asked why he did not stop when signalled by the police car, he said: “I thought you were having a game with me.”’

  GERALD. This is what the Communists make capital out of.

  CHARLES. There’s a little more. ‘The Piper family …’ no, we needn’t read that.

  VIOLET. This is just what I expected. But if Agatha

  Is going to moralise about it, I shall scream.

  GERALD. It’s going to be awkward, explaining this to Amy.

  IVY. Poor Arthur! I’m sure that you’re being much too hard on him.

  CHARLES. In my time, these affairs were kept out of the papers;

  But nowadays, there’s no such thing as privacy.

  CHORUS. In an old house there is always listening, and more is heard than is spoken.

  And what is spoken remains in the room, waiting for the future to hear it.

  And whatever happens began in the past, and presses hard on the future.

  The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying,

  Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.

  The treble voices on the lawn

  The mowing of hay in summer

  The dogs and the old pony

  The stumble and the wail of little pain

  The chopping of wood in autumn

  And the singing in the kitchen

  And the steps at night in the corridor

  The moment of sudden loathing

  And the season of stifled sorrow

  The whisper, the transparent deception

  The keeping up of appearances

  The making the best of a bad job

  All twined and tangled together, all are recorded.

  There is no avoiding these things

  And we know nothing of exorcism

  And whether in Argos or England

  There are certain inflexible laws

  Unalterable, in the nature of music.

  There is nothing at all to be done about it,

  There is nothing to do about anything,

  And now it is nearly time for the news

  We must listen to the weather report

  And the international catastrophes.

  [Exeunt CHORUS]

  Scene II

  HARRY, AGATHA

  HARRY. John will recover, be what he always was;

  Arthur again be sober, though not for very long;

  And everything will go on as before. These mild surprises

  Should be in the routine of normal life at Wishwood.

  John is the only one of us I can conceive

  As settling down to make himself at home at Wishwood,

  Make a dull marriage, marry some woman stupider —

  Stupider than himself. He can resist the influence

  Of Wishwood, being unconscious, living in gentle motion

  Of horses, and right visits to the right neighbours

  At the right times; and be an excellent landlord.

  AGATHA. What is in your mind, Harry?

  I can guess about the past and what you mean about the future;

  But a present is missing, needed to connect them.

  You may be afraid that I would not understand you,

  You may also be afraid of being understood,

  Try not to regard it as an explanation.

  HARRY. I still have to learn exactly what their meaning is.

  At the beginning, eight years ago,

  I felt, at first, that sense of separation,

  Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable —

  It’s eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity,

  Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.

  Then the numbness came to cover it — that is another —

  That was the second hell of not being there,

  The degradation of being parted from my self,

  From the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing.

  All this last year, I could not fit myself together:

  When I was inside the old dream, I felt all the same emotion

  Or lack of emotion, as before: the same loathing

  Diffused, I not a person, in a world not of persons

  But only of contaminating presences.

  And then I had no horror of my action,

  I only felt the repetition of it

  Over and over. When I was outside,

  I could associate nothing of it with myself,

  Though nothing else was real. I thought foolishly

  That when I got back to Wishwood, as I had left it,

  Everything would fall into place. But they prevent it.

  I still have to find out what their meaning is.

  Here I have been finding

  A misery long forgotten, and a new torture,

  The shadow of something behind our meagre childhood,

  Some origin of wretchedness. Is that what they would show me?

  And now I want you to tell me about my father.

  AGATHA. What do you want to know about your father?

  HARRY. If I knew, then I should not have to ask.

  You know what I want to know, and that is enough:

  Warburton told me that, though he did not mean to.

  What I want to know is something I need to know,

  And only you can tell me. I know that much.

  AGATHA. I had to fight for many years to win my dispossession,

  And many years to keep it. What people know me as,

  The efficient principal of a women’s college —

  That is the surface. There is a deeper

  Organisation, which your question disturbs.

  HARRY. When I know, I know that in some way I shall find

  That I have always known it. And that will be better.

  AGATHA. I will try to tell you. I hope I have the strength.

  HARRY. I have thought of you as the completely strong,

  The liberated from the human wheel.

  So I looked to you for strength. Now I think it is

  A common pursuit of liberation.

  AGATHA. Your father might have lived — or so I see him —

  An exceptionally cultivated country squire,

  Reading, sketching, playing on the flute,

  Something of an oddity to his county neighbours,

  But not neglecting public duties.

  He hid his strength beneath unusual weakness,

  The diffidence of a solitary man:

  Where he was weak he recognised your mother’s power,

  And yielded to it.

  HARRY. There was no ecstasy.

  Tell me now, who were my parents?

  AGATHA. Your father and your mother.

  HARRY. You tell me nothing.

  AGATHA. The dead man whom you have assumed to be your father,

  And my sister whom you acknowledge as your mother:

  There is no mystery here.

  HARRY. What then?

  AGATHA. You see your mother as identified with this house —

  It was not always so. There were many years

  Before she succeeded in making terms with Wishwood,

  Until she took your father’s place, and reached the point where

  Wishwood supported her, and she supported Wishwood.

  At first it was a vacancy. A man and a woman

  Married, alone in a lonely country house together,

  For three years childless, learning the meaning

  Of loneliness. Your mother wanted a sister here

  Always. I was the youngest: I was then

  An undergraduate at Oxford. I came

  Once for a long vacation. I remember

  A summer day of unusual heat

  For this cold country.