REGINALD'S DRAMA
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
every one wiII 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 every one 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."