University of Virginia Library

Scene I.—A Garden—Evening.

Enter Raymond and Vernon—afterwards Avice.
VERNON
You seem not like a man whom fortune crowns,
For whom suspense is satisfied, whose heart
Stays in that pleasant time before the dawn
When we long patiently, because we know
The sun must rise. These starts of gloom befit
A soul in fear.

RAYMOND
If you interpret me
You shall make blunders. Let me pass; we touch
At angles, and you cross me.

VERNON
Shall I say
I find you changed in friendship?

RAYMOND
Pshaw, you harp
Like women, with a burr of sentiment
Through all the strings. Staccato, friend! Life needs
A grasp—and then, a rest!

VERNON
Will the rest come?

RAYMOND
I am not weary yet.

VERNON
To weariness
Comes never rest; it comes but to content,
Which lies and contemplates the thing that is,
Needing no dreams.

RAYMOND
Even so you moralise,
But twenty other true moralities
May turn the self-same fact in twenty ways
And still be true. I'll tell you why. No fact
Has less than twenty faces. Unity
Belongs but to the clumsy counterfeits
Which must be stationed to a turn, and seen
By their due stroke of light, and never touched,
Lest from their semblance of reality
They crumble into chaos.

VERNON
Will you judge
Deeds by this measure? Hath the crystal Right
So many faces?

RAYMOND
Nay, I never judge.
I do not keep a conscience for my friends.
Enough—here comes a gentle disputant
For whom we talk too keenly.

[Enter Avice.
VERNON
Ah, sweet lady,
The moonlight is not paler than your cheeks.
Methinks you walk too late.

AVICE
O, no, too soon,
Because my quest is solitude and night.

VERNON
Will you dismiss us so?

AVICE
The garden's free,
And I can walk elsewhere.

VERNON
How languidly,
Unlike your vivid self, you make response;
Like the faint flutter of some wounded wing
That once did push and sweep the resonant air
From its undoubting way.

RAYMOND
This chemist, lady,
Hath hearts in his laboratory. Mine
Was analysed but now; your turn is come:
You shall learn how you ought to feel, and where
His science marks your failure. Well we know
The wheels of these triumphant theorists
Crush all the desperate facts that clog their path;
Will you fall down before him?

AVICE
(disregarding him—to Vernon)
Is it true
That you can do such things?

VERNON
What things, I pray you?

AVICE
Why, even as he says, divine the heart
In your sure microscope, and make us see
That all we trusted, lived for, leant upon,
Was the chance stir or stillness of a pulse?

RAYMOND
Chance should not rule such pulses.

AVICE
(turning upon him)
But it does!
Aye, chance so slight, that if a door but close,
Or a cloud darken, or a voice speak softly,
There comes an end and a forgetfulness
To what seemed everlasting.

RAYMOND
Were it so
This were a piteous world.

AVICE
Why so it is.
Could we read back the story of our lives,
Knowing the vain end and the helpless course
Before the bright beginning, I am sure
We might all die of pity.

RAYMOND
I can teach you
Fairer conclusions.

(She turns away angrily.)
VERNON
(aside)
I perceive myself
Superfluous—and depart.

[Exit Vernon.