________________________________________________
_ Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one
who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to
conceal the fact.
"One of these days," he said, "I shall write a really great
drama. No one will understand the drift of it, but everyone
will go back to their homes with a vague feeling of
dissatisfaction with their lives and surroundings. Then they
will put up new wall-papers and forget."
"But how about those that have oak panelling all over the
house?" said the Other.
"They can always put down new stair-carpets," pursued
Reginald, "and, anyhow, I'm not responsible for the audience
having a happy ending. The play would be quite sufficient
strain on one's energies. I should get a bishop to say it
was immoral and beautiful--no dramatist has thought of that
before, and everyone would come to condemn the bishop, and
they would stay on out of sheer nervousness. After all, it
requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a marked
manner in the middle of the second act, when your carriage
isn't ordered till twelve. And it would commence with wolves
worrying something on a lonely waste--you wouldn't see them,
of course; but you would hear them snarling and scrunching,
and I should arrange to have a wolfy fragrance suggested
across the footlights. It would look so well on the
programmes, 'Wolves in the first act, by Jamrach.' And old
Lady Whortleberry, who never misses a first night, would
scream. She's always been nervous since she lost her first
husband. He died quite abruptly while watching a county
cricket match; two and a half inches of rain had fallen for
seven runs, and it was supposed that the excitement killed
him. Anyhow, it gave her quite a shock; it was the first
husband she'd lost, you know, and now she always screams if
anything thrilling happens too soon after dinner. And after
the audience had heard the Whortleberry scream the thing
would be fairly launched."
"And the plot?"
"The plot," said Reginald, "would be one of those little
everyday tragedies that one sees going on all round one. In
my mind's eye there is the case of the Mudge-Jervises, which
in an unpretentious way has quite an Enoch Arden intensity
underlying it. They'd only been married some eighteen months
or so, and circumstances had prevented their seeing much of
each other. With him there was always a foursome or
something that had to be played and replayed in different
parts of the country, and she went in for slumming quite as
seriously as if it was a sport. With her, I suppose, it was.
She belonged to the Guild of the Poor Dear Souls, and they
hold the record for having nearly reformed a washerwoman. No
one has ever really reformed a washerwoman, and that is why
the competition is so keen. You can rescue charwomen by
fifties with a little tea and personal magnetism, but with
washerwomen it's different; wages are too high. This
particular laundress, who came from Bermondsey or some such
place, was really rather a hopeful venture, and they thought
at last that she might be safely put in the window as a
specimen of successful work. So they had her paraded at a
drawing-room "At Home" at Agatha Camelford's; it was sheer
bad luck that some liqueur chocolates had been turned loose
by mistake among the refreshments--really liqueur chocolates,
with very little chocolate. And of course the old soul found
them out, and cornered the entire stock. It was like finding
a whelk-stall in a desert, as she afterwards partially
expressed herself. When the liqueurs began to take effect,
she started to give them imitations of farmyard animals as
they know them in Bermondsey. She began with a dancing bear,
and you know Agatha doesn't approve of dancing, except at
Buckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she got
up on the piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather she
went in for realism rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment of
the subject Finally, she fell into the piano and said she was
a parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu performance I
believe she was very word--perfect; no one had heard anything
like it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attended
sittings of the Austrian Reichsrath. Agatha is trying the
Rest-cure at Buxton."
"But the tragedy?"
"Oh, the Mudge-Jervises. Well, they were getting along quite
happily, and their married life was one continuous exchange
of picture-postcards; and then one day they were thrown
together on some neutral ground where foursomes and
washerwomen overlapped, and discovered that they were
hopelessly divided on the Fiscal Question. They have thought
it best to separate, and she is to have the custody of the
Persian kittens for nine months in the year--they go back to
him for the winter, when she is abroad. There you have the
material for a tragedy drawn straight from life--and the
piece could be called 'The Price They Paid for Empire.' And
of course one would have to work in studies of the struggle
of hereditary tendency against environment and all that sort
of thing. The woman's father could have been an Envoy to
some of the smaller German Courts; that's where she'd get her
passion for visiting the poor, in spite of the most careful
upbringing. C'est le premier pa qui compte, as the cuckoo
said when it swallowed its foster-parent. That, I think, is
quite clever."
"And the wolves?"
"Oh, the wolves would be a sort of elusive undercurrent in
the background that would never be satisfactorily explained.
After all, life teems with things that have no earthly
reason. And whenever the characters could think of nothing
brilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they could
open a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. But
that would be very seldom." _
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