Between the acts, p.16
Between the Acts, page 16
(He hobbles away.)
LADY H. H. (left alone.) All gone. Following the wind. He’s gone; she’s gone; and the old clock that the rascal made himself into a pendulum for is the only one of ’em all to stop. A pox on ’em—turning an honest woman’s house into a brothel. I that was Aurora Borealis am shrunk to a tar barrel. I that was Cassiopeia am turned to a she-ass. My head turns. There’s no trusting man nor woman; nor fine speeches; nor fine looks. Off comes the sheep’s skin; out creeps the serpent. Get ye to Gretna Green; couch on the wet grass and breed vipers. My head spins . . . Tar barrels, quotha. Cassiopeia . . . Chalk stones . . . Andromeda . . . Thorn trees. . . . Deb, I say, Deb. (She holloas.) Unlace me. I’m fit to burst . . . Bring me my green baize table and set the cards. . . . And my fur lined slippers, Deb. And a dish of chocolate. . . . I’ll be even with ’em . . . I’ll outlive ’em all . . . Deb, I say! Deb! A pox on the girl! Can’t she hear me? Deb, I say, you gipsy’s spawn that I snatched from the hedge and taught to sew samplers! Deb! Deb!
(She throws open the door leading to the maid’s closet.)
Empty! She’s gone too! . . . Hist, what’s that on the dresser?
(She picks up a scrap of paper and reads.)
“What care I for your goose feather bed? I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies, O! Signed; Deborah, one time your maid.” So! She that I fed on apple parings and crusts from my own table, she that I taught to play cribbage and sew chemises . . . she’s gone too. 0 ingratitude, thy name is Deborah! Who’s to wash the dishes now; who’s to bring me my posset now, suffer my temper and unlace my stays? . . . All gone. I’m alone then. Sans niece, sans lover; and sans maid.
And so to end the play, the moral is,
The God of love is full of tricks;
Into the foot his dart he sticks,
But the way of the will is plain to see;
Let holy virgins hymn perpetually:
“Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Good people all, farewell.
(Dropping a curtsey, Lady H. H. withdrew.)
The scene ended. Reason descended from her plinth. Gathering her robes about her, serenely acknowledging the applause of the audience, she passed across the stage; while Lords and Ladies in stars and garters followed after; Sir Spaniel limping escorted Lady Harraden smirking; and Valentine and Flavinda arm in arm bowed and curtsied.
“God’s truth!” cried Bartholomew, catching the infection of the language. “There’s a moral for you!”
He threw himself back in his chair and laughed, like a horse whinnying.
A moral. What? Giles supposed it was: Where there’s a Will there’s a Way. The words rose and pointed a finger of scorn at him. Off to Gretna Green with his girl; the deed done. Damn the consequences.
“Like to see the greenhouse?” he said abruptly, turning to Mrs. Manresa.
“Love to!” she exclaimed, and rose.
Was there an interval? Yes, the programme said so. The machine in the bushes went chuff, chuff, chuff. And the next scene?
“The Victorian Age,” Mrs. Elmhurst read out. Presumably there was time then for a stroll round the gardens, even for a look over the house. Yet somehow they felt—how could one put it—a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t settle. Not quite themselves, they felt Or was it simply that they felt clothes conscious? Skimpy out-of-date voile dresses; flannel trousers; panama hats; hats wreathed with raspberry-coloured net in the style of the Royal Duchess’s hat at Ascot seemed flimsy somehow.
“How lovely the clothes were,” said someone, casting a last look at Flavinda disappearing. “Most becoming. I wish . . .”
Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine in the bushes, accurately, insistently.
Clouds were passing across the sky. The weather looked a little unsettled. Hogben’s Folly was for a moment ashen white. Then the sun struck the gilt vane of Bolney Minster.
“Looks a little unsettled,” said someone.
“Up you get . . . Let’s stretch our legs,” said another voice. Soon the lawns were floating with little moving islands of coloured dresses. Yet some of the audience remained seated.
“Major and Mrs. Mayhew,” Page the reporter noted, licking his pencil. As for the play, he would collar Miss Whatshername and ask for a synopsis. But Miss La Trobe had vanished.
Down among the bushes she worked like a nigger. Flavinda was in her petticoats. Reason had thrown her mantle on a holly hedge. Sir Spaniel was tugging at his jack boots. Miss La Trobe was scattering and foraging.
“The Victorian mantle with the bead fringe . . . Where is the damned thing? Chuck it here . . . Now the whiskers . . .”
Ducking up and down she cast her quick bird’s eye over the bushes at the audience. The audience was on the move. The audience was strolling up and down. They kept their distance from the dressing-room; they respected the conventions. But if they wandered too far, if they began exploring the grounds, going over the house, then. . . . Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Time was passing. How long would time hold them together? It was a gamble; a risk. . . . And she laid about her energetically, flinging clothes on the grass.
Over the tops of the bushes came stray voices, voices without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeing nothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.
“It all looks very black.”
“No one wants it—save those damned Germans.”
There was a pause.
“I’d cut down those trees . . .”
“How they get their roses to grow!”
“They say there’s been a garden here for five hundred years . . .”
“Why, even old Gladstone, to do him justice . . .”
Then there was silence. The voices passed the bushes. The trees rustled. Many eyes, Miss La Trobe knew, for every cell in her body was absorbent, looked at the view. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Hogben’s Folly; then the vane flashed.
“The glass is falling,” said a voice.
She could feel them slipping through her fingers, looking at the view.
“Where’s that damned woman, Mrs. Rogers? Who’s seen Mrs. Rogers?” she cried, snatching up a Victorian mantle.
Then, ignoring the conventions, a head popped up between the trembling sprays: Mrs. Swithin’s.
“Oh Miss La Trobe!” she exclaimed; and stopped. Then she began again: “Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you!”
She hesitated. “You’ve given me . . .” She skipped, then alighted—“Ever since I was a child I’ve felt . . .” A film fell over her eyes, shutting off the present. She tried to recall her childhood; then gave it up; and, with a little wave of her hand, as if asking Miss La Trobe to help her out, continued: “This daily round; this going up and down stairs; this saying ‘What am I going for? My specs? I have ’em on my nose.’ . . .”
She gazed at Miss La Trobe with a cloudless old-aged stare. Their eyes met in a common effort to bring a common meaning to birth. They failed; and Mrs. Swithin, laying hold desperately of a fraction of her meaning, said: “What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could have played . . . Cleopatra!”
She nodded between the trembling bushes and ambled off.
The villagers winked. “Batty” was the word for Old Flimsy, breaking through the bushes.
“I might have been—Cleopatra,” Miss La Trobe repeated. “You’ve stirred in me my unacted part,” she meant.
“Now for the skirt, Mrs. Rogers,” she said.
Mrs. Rogers stood grotesque in her black stockings. Miss La Trobe pulled the voluminous flounces of the Victorian age over her head. She tied the tapes. “You’ve twitched the invisible strings,” was what the old lady meant; and revealed—of all people—Cleopatra! Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a re-created world. Her moment was on her—her glory.
“There!” she said, tying the black ribbons under Mrs. Rogers’ chin. “That’s done it! Now for the gentleman. Hammond!”
She beckoned Hammond. Sheepishly he came forward, and submitted to the application of black side whiskers. With his eyes half shut, his head leant back, he looked, Miss La Trobe thought, like King Arthur—noble, knightly, thin.
“Where’s the Major’s old frock coat?” she asked, trusting to the effect of that to transform him.
Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick, tick of the gramophone held them together. There, sauntering solitary far away by the flower beds was Mrs. Giles escaping.
“The tune!” Miss La Trobe commanded. “Hurry up! The tune! The next tune! Number Ten!”
“Now may I pluck,” Isa murmured, picking a rose, “my single flower. The white or the pink? And press it so, twixt thumb and finger. . . .”
She looked among the passing faces for the face of the man in grey. There he was for one second; but surrounded, inaccessible. And now vanished.
She dropped her flower. What single, separate leaf could she press? None. Nor stray by the beds alone. She must go on; and she turned in the direction of the stable.
“Where do I wander?” she mused. “Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvesdess dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All’s equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.”
She had come into the stable yard where the dogs were chained; where the buckets stood; where the great pear tree spread its ladder of branches against the wall. The tree, whose roots went beneath the flags, was weighted with hard green pears. Fingering one of them she murmured: “How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey in the long caravanserai crossing the desert. ‘Kneel down,’ said the past. ‘Fill your pannier from our tree. Rise up, donkey. Go your way till your heels blister and your hoofs crack.’”
The pear was hard as stone. She looked down at the cracked flags beneath which the roots spread. “That was the burden,” she mused, “laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember: what we would forget.”
She looked up. The gilt hands of the stable clock pointed inflexibly at two minutes to the hour. The clock was about to strike.
“Now comes the lightning,” she muttered, “from the stone blue sky. The thongs are burst that the dead tied. Loosed are our possessions.”
Voices interrupted. People passed the stable yard, talking.
“It’s a good day, some say, the day we are stripped naked. Others, it’s the end of the day. They see the Inn and the Inn’s keeper. But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music. . . .”
More voices sounded. The audience was streaming back to the terrace. She roused herself. She encouraged herself. “On, little donkey, patiently stumble. Hear not the frantic cries of the leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us. Nor the chatter of china faces glazed and hard. Hear rather the shepherd, coughing by the farmyard wall; the withered tree that sighs when the Rider gallops; the brawl in the barrack room when they stripped her naked; or the cry which in London when I thrust the window open someone cries . . .” She had come out on to the path that led past the greenhouse. The door was kicked open. Out came Mrs. Manresa and Giles. Unseen, Isa followed them across the lawns to the front row of seats.
The chuff, chuff, chuff of the machine in the bushes had stopped. In obedience to Miss La Trobe’s command, another tune had been put on the gramophone. Number Ten. London street cries it was called. “A Pot Pourri.”
“Lavender, sweet lavender, who’ll buy my sweet lavender,” the tune trilled and tinkled, ineffectively shepherding the audience. Some ignored it. Some still wandered. Others stopped, but stood upright. Some, like Colonel and Mrs. Mayhew, who had never left their seats, brooded over the blurred carbon sheet which had been issued for their information.
“The Nineteenth Century.” Colonel Mayhew did not dispute the producer’s right to skip two hundred years in less than fifteen minutes. But the choice of scenes baffled him.
“Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?” he mused. Inclining her head, Mrs. Mayhew protested after all one mustn’t ask too much. Besides, very likely there would be a Grand Ensemble, round the Union Jack, to end with. Meanwhile, there was the view. They looked at the view.
“Sweet lavender . . . sweet lavender. . . .” Humming the tune old Mrs. Lynn Jones (of the Mount) pushed a chair forward. “Here, Etty,” she said, and plumped down, with Etty Springett, with whom, since both were widows now, she shared a house.
“I remember . . .” she nodded in time to the tune. “You remember too—how they used to cry it down the streets.” They remembered—the curtains blowing, and the men crying: “All a blowing, all a growing,” as they came with geraniums, sweet william, in pots, down the street.
“A harp, I remember, and a hansom and a growler. So quiet the street was then. Two for a hansom, was it? One for a growler? And Ellen, in cap and apron, whistling in the street? D’you remember? And the runners, my dear, who followed, all the way from the station, if one had a box.”
The tune changed. “Any old iron, any old iron to sell?” “D’you remember? That was what the men shouted in the fog. Seven Dials they came from. Men with red handkerchiefs. Garrotters, did they call them? You couldn’t walk—Oh, dear me, no—home from the play. Regent Street. Piccadilly. Hyde Park Corner. The loose women . . . And everywhere loaves of bread in the gutter. The Irish you know round Covent Garden . . . Coming back from a Ball, past the clock at Hyde Park Corner, d’you remember the feel of white gloves? . . . My father remembered the old Duke in the Park. Two fingers like that—he’d touch his hat . . . I’ve got my mother’s album. A lake and two lovers. She’d copied out Byron, I suppose, in what was called then the Italian hand. . . .”
“What’s that? ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road.’ I remember the bootboy whistled it. Oh, my dear, the servants . . . Old Ellen . . . Sixteen pound a year wages . . . And the cans of hot water! And the crinolines! And the stays! D’you remember the Crystal Palace, and the fireworks, and how Mira’s slipper got lost in the mud?”
“That’s young Mrs. Giles . . . I remember her mother. She died in India . . . We wore, I suppose, a great many petticoats then. Unhygienic? I dare say . . . Well, look at my daughter. To the right, just behind you. Forty, but slim as a wand. Each flat has its refrigerator . . . It took my mother half the morning to order dinner. . . . We were eleven. Counting servants, eighteen in family. . . . Now they simply ring up the Stores . . . That’s Giles coming, with Mrs. Manresa. She’s a type I don’t myself fancy. I may be wrong . . . And Colonel Mayhew, as spruce as ever . . . And Mr. Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, there, under the monkey puzzle tree. One don’t see him often . . . That’s what’s so nice—it brings people together. These days, when we’re all so busy, that’s what one wants . . . The programme? Have you got it? Let’s see what comes next . . . The Nineteenth Century . . . Look, there’s the chorus, the villagers, coming on now, between the trees. First, there’s a prologue. . . .”
A great box, draped in red baize festooned with heavy gold tassels, had been moved into the middle of the stage. There was a swish of dresses, a stir of chairs. The audience seated themselves, hastily, guiltily. Miss La Trobe’s eye was on them. She gave them ten seconds to settle their faces. Then she flicked her hand. A pompous march tune brayed. “Firm, elatant, bold and blatant,” etc. . . . And once more a huge symbolical figure emerged from the bushes. It was Budge the publican; but so disguised that even cronies who drank with him nightly failed to recognize him; and a little titter of enquiry as to his identity ran about among the villagers. He wore a long black many-caped cloak; waterproof; shiny; of the substance of a statue in Parliament Square; a helmet which suggested a policeman; a row of medals crossed his breast; and in his right hand he held extended a special constable’s baton (loaned by Mr. Willert of the Hall). It was his voice, husky and rusty, issuing from a thick black cotton-wool beard that gave him away.
“Budge, Budge. That’s Mr. Budge,” the audience whispered.
Budge extended his truncheon and spoke:
It ain’t an easy job, directing the traffic at ’Yde Park Corner. Buses and ’ansom cabs. All a-clatter on the cobbles. Keep to the right, can’t you? Hi there, Stop!
(He waved his truncheon.)
There she goes, the old party with the umbrella right under the ’orse’s nose.
(The truncheon pointed markedly at Mrs. Swithin.)
She raised her skinny hand as if in truth she had fluttered off the pavement on the impulse of the moment to the just rage of authority. Got her, Giles thought, taking sides with authority against his aunt.
Fog or fine weather, I does my duty (Budge continued). At Piccadilly Circus; at ’Yde Park Corner, directing the traffic of ’Er Majesty’s Empire. The Shah of Persia; Sultan of Morocco; or it may be ’Er Majesty in person; or Cook’s tourists; black men; white men; sailors, soldiers; crossing the ocean; to proclaim her Empire; all of ’em Obey the Rule of my truncheon.
