CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound not only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the excesses and extravagances which the Christian movement acquired in its earlier days as a violent reaction against what it still calls paganism. By far the most dangerous of these, because it is a blasphemy against life, and, to put it in Christian terms, an accusation of indecency against God, is the notion that sex, with all its operations, is in itself absolutely an obscene thing, and that an immaculate conception is a miracle. So unwholesome an absurdity could only have gained ground under two conditions: one, a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury had been carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the world was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions, made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of its propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in these directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming from the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the great disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of Christians seriously prepared for the end of the world, the prophet who announces that the end is at hand is still popular. Many of the people who ridicule his demonstrations that the fantastic monsters of the book of Revelation are among us in the persons of our own political contemporaries, and who proceed sanely in all their affairs on the assumption that the world is going to last, really do believe that there will be a Judgment Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time. A thunderstorm, an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them apprehensive and uncomfortable.
This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused to have anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the abolition of sex, but its excommunication. And, of course, the consequences of persuading people that matrimony was an unholy state were so grossly carnal, that the Church had to execute a complete right-about-face, and try to make people understand that it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could not be validly inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by this teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this or that practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the whole scheme of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen contradictory doctrines to suit half-a-dozen different emergencies. The Church solemnized and sanctified marriage without ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine on the subject. And it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at which it took up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was, as it still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price between a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet with this difference in value between human beings, we may know that we are in the slave-market, where the conception of our relations to the persons sold is neither religious nor natural nor human nor superhuman, but simply commercial. The Church, when it finally gave its blessing to marriage, did not, in its innocence, fathom these commercial traditions. Consequently it tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The slave-dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church, instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and, helped by its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave virginity a heavenly value to ennoble its commercial pretensions. In short, Mammon, always mighty, put the Church in his pocket, where he keeps it to this day, in spite of the occasional saints and martyrs who contrive from time to time to get their heads and souls free to testify against him.
DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY
But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this inhuman doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming, and rightly claiming, that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but that is exactly what makes divorce a duty when the marriage has lost the inward and spiritual grace of which the marriage ceremony is the outward and visible sign. In vain do bishops stoop to pick up the discarded arguments of the atheists of fifty years ago by pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure Aramaic dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think, could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless they are prepared to add that the statement that those who take the sacrament with their lips but not with their hearts eat and drink their own damnation is also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation, not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it compulsory in certain cases as the Chinese do.
When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely a rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so many fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged, would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.
OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA
How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article of property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not to be used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt from Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers are Antony and Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and proprietary instinct the moment they lose their tempers. "I found you," says Antony, reproaching Cleopatra, "as a morsel cold upon dead Caesar's trencher." Othello's worst agony is the thought of "keeping a corner in the thing he loves for others' uses." But this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about the thing he owns. I never understood the full significance of Othello's outburst until I one day heard a lady, in the course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of "group marriage," say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of lending her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense of outraged manhood with which I felt myself and all other husbands thus reduced to the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a very unpleasant taste of what Desdemona might have felt had she overheard Othello's outburst. I was so dumfounded that I had not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether she insisted on having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest and solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more fastidiously, by women.
All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population) on the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the subject is considered shameful and sinful we shall have no systematic instruction in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as are given in Germany, France, and even prudish America (where the great Miltonic tradition in this matter still lives) will be considered a corruption of that youthful innocence which now subsists on nasty stories and whispered traditions handed down from generation to generation of school-children: stories and traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society and the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to maintain the White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on the one hand, tolerating the white slave as the necessary breakwater of marriage; and, on the other, trampling on her and degrading her until she has nothing to hope from our Courts; and so, with policemen at every corner, and law triumphant all over Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven from one end of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically investing her trade with every allurement that the art of the novelist, the playwright, the dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight man, and the sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue to be very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the other victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable refrain: "Why did nobody warn me?"
WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?
I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of the reply. One would think, to hear the way in which people sometimes ask the question, that not only does marriage prevent the difficulty from ever arising, but that nothing except divorce can ever raise it. It is true that if you divorce the parents, the children have to be disposed of. But if you hang the parents, or imprison the parents, or take the children out of the custody of the parents because they hold Shelley's opinions, or if the parents die, the same difficulty arises. And as these things have happened again and again, and as we have had plenty of experience of divorce decrees and separation orders, the attempt to use children as an obstacle to divorce is hardly worth arguing with. We shall deal with the children just as we should deal with them if their homes were broken up by any other cause. There is a sense in which children are a real obstacle to divorce: they give parents a common interest which keeps together many a couple who, if childless, would separate. The marriage law is superfluous in such cases. This is shewn by the fact that the proportion of childless divorces is much larger than the proportion of divorces from all causes. But it must not be forgotten that the interest of the children forms one of the most powerful arguments for divorce. An unhappy household is a bad nursery. There is something to be said for the polygynous or polyandrous household as a school for children: children really do suffer from having too few parents: this is why uncles and aunts and tutors and governesses are often so good for children. But it is just the polygamous household which our marriage law allows to be broken up, and which, as we have seen, is not possible as a typical institution in a democratic country where the numbers of the sexes are about equal. Therefore polygyny and polyandry as a means of educating children fall to the ground, and with them, I think, must go the opinion which has been expressed by Gladstone and others, that an extension of divorce, whilst admitting many new grounds for it, might exclude the ground of adultery. There are, however, clearly many things that make some of our domestic interiors little private hells for children (especially when the children are quite content in them) which would justify any intelligent State in breaking up the home and giving the custody of the children either to the parent whose conscience had revolted against the corruption of the children, or to neither.
Which brings me to the point that divorce should no longer be confined to cases in which one of the parties petitions for it. If, for instance, you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a living by infamous means and bringing up their children to their trade, the king's proctor, instead of pursuing his present purely mischievous function of preventing couples from being divorced by proving that they both desire it, might very well intervene and divorce these children from their parents. At present, if the Queen herself were to rescue some unfortunate child from degradation and misery and place her in a respectable home, and some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the child and proved that they were its father and mother, the child would be given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law would calmly send an education officer to take the child out of the parents' hands several hours a day in the still more sacred name of compulsory education. (Of course what would really happen would be that the couple would blackmail the Queen for their consent to the salvation of the child, unless, indeed, a hint from a police inspector convinced them that bad characters cannot always rely on pedantically constitutional treatment when they come into conflict with persons in high station).
The truth is, not only must the bond between man and wife be made subject to a reasonable consideration of the welfare of the parties concerned and of the community, but the whole family bond as well. The theory that the wife is the property of the husband or the husband of the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and mischievous than the theory that the child is the property of the parent. Parental bondage will go the way of conjugal bondage: indeed the order of reform should rather be put the other way about; for the helplessness of children has already compelled the State to intervene between parent and child more than between husband and wife. If you pay less than 40 pounds a year rent, you will sometimes feel tempted to say to the vaccination officer, the school attendance officer, and the sanitary inspector: "Is this child mine or yours?" The answer is that as the child is a vital part of the nation, the nation cannot afford to leave it at the irresponsible disposal of any individual or couple of individuals as a mere small parcel of private property. The only solid ground that the parent can take is that as the State, in spite of its imposing name, can, when all is said, do nothing with the child except place it in the charge of some human being or another, the parent is no worse a custodian than a stranger. And though this proposition may seem highly questionable at first sight to those who imagine that only parents spoil children, yet those who realize that children are as often spoilt by severity and coldness as by indulgence, and that the notion that natural parents are any worse than adopted parents is probably as complete an illusion as the notion that they are any better, see no serious likelihood that State action will detach children from their parents more than it does at present: nay, it is even likely that the present system of taking the children out of the parents' hands and having the parental duty performed by officials, will, as poverty and ignorance become the exception instead of the rule, give way to the system of simply requiring certain results, beginning with the baby's weight and ending perhaps with some sort of practical arts degree, but leaving parents and children to achieve the results as they best may. Such freedom is, of course, impossible in our present poverty-stricken circumstances. As long as the masses of our people are too poor to be good parents or good anything else except beasts of burden, it is no use requiring much more from them but hewing of wood and drawing of water: whatever is to be done must be done FOR them mostly, alas! by people whose superiority is merely technical. Until we abolish poverty it is impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far: the wolf at the door will compel us to live in a state of siege and to do everything by a bureaucratic martial law that would be quite unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a prosperous community. But however we settle the question, we must make the parent justify his custody of the child exactly as we should make a stranger justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is or ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal relations of domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which makes some of our bishops imagine that in the phrase "Whom God hath joined," the word God means the district registrar or the Reverend John Smith or William Jones, must be got rid of. Means of breaking up undesirable families are as necessary to the preservation of the family as means of dissolving undesirable marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our domestic laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious general insurrection against them as they already provoke many private ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.
THE COST OF DIVORCE
But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage can be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The very cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a solicitor for its own sake and that of humanity, costs at least 30 pounds out-of-pocket expenses. To a client on business terms it costs about three times as much. Until divorce is as cheap as marriage, marriage will remain indissoluble for all except the handful of people to whom 100 pounds is a procurable sum. For the enormous majority of us there is no difference in this respect between a hundred and a quadrillion. Divorce is the one thing you may not sue for in forma pauperis.
Let me, then, recommend as follows:
1. Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.
2. Grant divorce at the request of either party, whether the other consents or not; and admit no other ground than the request, which should be made without stating any reasons.
3. Confine the power of dissolving marriage for misconduct to the State acting on the petition of the king's proctor or other suitable functionary, who may, however, be moved by either party to intervene in ordinary request cases, not to prevent the divorce taking place, but to enforce alimony if it be refused and the case is one which needs it.
4. Make it impossible for marriage to be used as a punishment as it is at present. Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but do not send them back to perpetual wedlock.
5. If, on the other hand, you think a couple perfectly innocent and well conducted, do not condemn them also to perpetual wedlock against their wills, thereby making the treatment of what you consider innocence on both sides the same as the treatment of what you consider guilt on both sides.
6. Place the work of a wife and mother on the same footing as other work: that is, on the footing of labor worthy of its hire; and provide for unemployment in it exactly as for unemployment in shipbuilding or an other recognized bread-winning trade.
7. And take and deal with all the consequences of these acts of justice instead of letting yourself be frightened out of reason and good sense by fear of consequences. We must finally adapt our institutions to human nature. In the long run our present plan of trying to force human nature into a mould of existing abuses, superstitions, and corrupt interests, produces the explosive forces that wreck civilization.
8. Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion. If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or bishop. Do NOT ask somebody who does not know what a judge is, or what a bishop is, or what the law is, or what religion is. In other words, do not ask your newspaper. Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
CONCLUSIONS
To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual relations between men and women decent and honorable by making women economically independent of men, and (in the younger son section of the upper classes) men economically independent of women. We also have to bring ourselves into line with the rest of Protestant civilization by providing means for dissolving all unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages. And, as it is our cautious custom to lag behind the rest of the world to see how their experiments in reform turn out before venturing ourselves, and then take advantage of their experience to get ahead of them, we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying grounds for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony, insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children, desertion, public defamation, violent temper, religious heterodoxy, contagious disease, outrages, indignities, personal abuse, "mental anguish," conduct rendering life burdensome and so forth (all these are examples from some code actually in force at present), is a mistake, because the only effect of compelling people to plead and prove misconduct is that cases are manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed in public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made so general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within them by a little special pleading and a little mental reservation on the part of witnesses examined on oath. When it conies to "conduct rendering life burdensome," it is clear that no marriage is any longer indissoluble; and the sensible thing to do then is to grant divorce whenever it is desired, without asking why.
GETTING MARRIED
By Bernard Shaw
1908
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N.B.—There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long period, would be impossible.
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On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and handsome and healthy.
The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or "restored" by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money to spend on it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the paint, the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black beams of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his predecessors to make themselves feel at home and respectable in a Norman fortress. It is a house built to last for ever. The walls and beams are big enough to carry the tower of Babel, as if the builders, anticipating our modern ideas and instinctively defying them, had resolved to show how much material they could lavish on a house built for the glory of God, instead of keeping a competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the lowest tender, and scientifically calculating how little material would be enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own weight.
The kitchen is the Bishop's favorite room. This is not at all because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is one of the finest rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the income nor the appetite to have his cooking done there. The windows, high up in the wall, look north and south. The north window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an open door near the corner to the left. Through this door we have a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine. In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the upper floors of the palace. In the wall to our right is the immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a scullery. Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed back and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick fibre matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude; but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it going. It hangs above the oak chest.
The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop's lady, Mrs Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon. Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.
Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their lower ends. He is an affable man, with those perfect manners which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so unquestionable that they are not anxious about it. He is a reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social distinctions. He is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.
Mrs Bridgenorth reads placidly: Collins counts: a blackbird sings in the garden. Mrs Bridgenorth puts The Times down in her lap and considers Collins for a moment.
Collins?
COLLINS. Lord bless you, no, maam. It would be a joke, after
marrying five of your daughters, if I was to get nervous over
marrying the last of them.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. I have always said you were a wonderful man,
Collins.
COLLINS [almost blushing] Oh, maam!
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. I never could arrange anything—a wedding
or even dinner—without some hitch or other.
COLLINS. Why should you give yourself the trouble, maam? Send for
the greengrocer, maam: thats the secret of easy housekeeping.
Bless you, it's his business. It pays him and you, let alone the
pleasure in a house like this [Mrs Bridgenorth bows in
acknowledgment of the compliment]. They joke about the
greengrocer, just as they joke about the mother-in-law. But they
cant get on without both.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. What a bond between us, Collins!
COLLINS. Bless you, maam, theres all sorts of bonds between all
sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, maam, for a
Bishop's lady. I have known Bishop's ladies that would fairly
provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget
himself and his place with you, maam.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins: you are a flatterer. You will
superintend the breakfast yourself as usual, of course, wont you?
COLLINS. Yes, yes, bless you, maam, of course. I always do. Them
fashionable caterers send down such people as I never did set
eyes on. Dukes you would take them for. You see the relatives
shaking hands with them and asking them about the family—
actually ladies saying "Where have we met before?" and all sorts
of confusion. Thats my secret in business, maam. You can always
spot me as the greengrocer. It's a fortune to me in these days,
when you cant hardly tell who any one is or isnt. [He goes out
through the tower, and immediately returns for a moment to
announce] The General, maam.
Mrs Bridgenorth rises to receive her brother-in-law, who enters
resplendent in full-dress uniform, with many medals and orders.
General Bridgenorth is a well set up man of fifty, with large
brave nostrils, an iron mouth, faithful dog's eyes, and much
natural simplicity and dignity of character. He is ignorant,
stupid, and prejudiced, having been carefully trained to be so;
and it is not always possible to be patient with him when his
unquestionably good intentions become actively mischievous; but
one blames society, not himself, for this. He would be no worse a
man than Collins, had he enjoyed Collins's social opportunities.
He comes to the hearth, where Mrs Bridgenorth is standing with
her back to the fireplace.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, Boxer. [They shake hands]. Another
niece to give away. This is the last of them.
THE GENERAL [very gloomy] Yes, Alice. Nothing for the old warrior
uncle to do but give away brides to luckier men than himself.
Has—[he chokes] has your sister come yet?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Why do you always call Lesbia my sister? Dont
you know that it annoys her more than any of the rest of your
tricks?
THE GENERAL. Tricks! Ha! Well, I'll try to break myself of it;
but I think she might bear with me in a little thing like that.
She knows that her name sticks in my throat. Better call her your
sister than try to call her L— [he almost breaks down] L— well,
call her by her name and make a fool of myself by crying. [He
sits down at the near end of the table].
MRS BRIDGENORTH [going to him and rallying him] Oh come, Boxer!
Really, really! We are no longer boys and girls. You cant keep up
a broken heart all your life. It must be nearly twenty years
since she refused you. And you know that it's not because she
dislikes you, but only that she's not a marrying woman.
THE GENERAL. It's no use. I love her still. And I cant help
telling her so whenever we meet, though I know it makes her avoid
me. [He all but weeps].
MRS BRIDGENORTH. What does she say when you tell her?
THE GENERAL. Only that she wonders when I am going to grow out of
it. I know now that I shall never grow out of it.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Perhaps you would if you married her. I
believe youre better as you are, Boxer.
THE GENERAL. I'm a miserable man. I'm really sorry to be a
ridiculous old bore, Alice; but when I come to this house for a
wedding—to these scenes—to—to recollections of the past—
always to give the bride to somebody else, and never to have my
bride given to me—[he rises abruptly] May I go into the garden
and smoke it off?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Boxer.
Collins returns with the wedding cake.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Oh, heres the cake. I believe it's the same one
we had for Florence's wedding.
THE GENERAL. I cant bear it [he hurries out through the garden
door].
COLLINS [putting the cake on the table] Well, look at that,
maam! Aint it odd that after all the weddings he's given away at,
the General cant stand the sight of a wedding cake yet. It always
seems to give him the same shock.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Well, it's his last shock. You have married the
whole family now, Collins. [She takes up The Times again and
resumes her seat].
COLLINS. Except your sister, maam. A fine character of a lady,
maam, is Miss Grantham. I have an ambition to arrange her wedding
breakfast.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. She wont marry, Collins.
COLLINS. Bless you, maam, they all say that. You and me said it,
I'll lay. I did, anyhow.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. No: marriage came natural to me. I should have
thought it did to you too.
COLLINS [pensive] No, maam: it didnt come natural. My wife had to
break me into it. It came natural to her: she's what you might
call a regular old hen. Always wants to have her family within
sight of her. Wouldnt go to bed unless she knew they was all safe
at home and the door locked, and the lights out. Always wants her
luggage in the carriage with her. Always goes and makes the
engine driver promise her to be careful. She's a born wife and
mother, maam. Thats why my children all ran away from home.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Did you ever feel inclined to run away, Collins?
COLLINS. Oh yes, maam, yes: very often. But when it came to the
point I couldnt bear to hurt her feelings. Shes a sensitive,
affectionate, anxious soul; and she was never brought up to know
what freedom is to some people. You see, family life is all the
life she knows: she's like a bird born in a cage, that would die
if you let it loose in the woods. When I thought how little it
was to a man of my easy temper to put up with her, and how deep
it would hurt her to think it was because I didnt care for her, I
always put off running away till next time; and so in the end I
never ran away at all. I daresay it was good for me to be took
such care of; but it cut me off from all my old friends something
dreadful, maam: especially the women, maam. She never gave them a
chance: she didnt indeed. She never understood that married
people should take holidays from one another if they are to keep
at all fresh. Not that I ever got tired of her, maam; but my! how
I used to get tired of home life sometimes. I used to catch
myself envying my brother George: I positively did, maam.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. George was a bachelor then, I suppose?
COLLINS. Bless you, no, maam. He married a very fine figure of a
woman; but she was that changeable and what you might call
susceptible, you would not believe. She didnt seem to have any
control over herself when she fell in love. She would mope for a
couple of days, crying about nothing; and then she would up and
say—no matter who was there to hear her—"I must go to him,
George"; and away she would go from her home and her husband
without with-your-leave or by-your-leave.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. But do you mean that she did this more than
once? That she came back?
COLLINS. Bless you, maam, she done it five times to my own
knowledge; and then George gave up telling us about it, he got so
used to it.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. But did he always take her back?
COLLINS. Well, what could he do, maam? Three times out of four
the men would bring her back the same evening and no harm done.
Other times theyd run away from her. What could any man with a
heart do but comfort her when she came back crying at the way
they dodged her when she threw herself at their heads, pretending
they was too noble to accept the sacrifice she was making. George
told her again and again that if she'd only stay at home and hold
off a bit theyd be at her feet all day long. She got sensible at
last and took his advice. George always liked change of company.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. What an odious woman, Collins! Dont you think
so?
COLLINS [judicially] Well, many ladies with a domestic turn
thought so and said so, maam. But I will say for Mrs George that
the variety of experience made her wonderful interesting. Thats
where the flighty ones score off the steady ones, maam. Look at
my old woman! She's never known any man but me; and she cant
properly know me, because she dont know other men to compare me
with. Of course she knows her parents in—well, in the way one
does know one's parents not knowing half their lives as you might
say, or ever thinking that they was ever young; and she knew her
children as children, and never thought of them as independent
human beings till they ran away and nigh broke her heart for a
week or two. But Mrs George she came to know a lot about men of
all sorts and ages; for the older she got the younger she liked
em; and it certainly made her interesting, and gave her a lot of
sense. I have often taken her advice on things when my own poor
old woman wouldnt have been a bit of use to me.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. I hope you dont tell your wife that you go
elsewhere for advice.
COLLINS. Lord bless you, maam, I'm that fond of my old Matilda
that I never tell her anything at all for fear of hurting her
feelings. You see, she's such an out-and-out wife and mother that
she's hardly a responsible human being out of her house, except
when she's marketing.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Does she approve of Mrs George?
COLLINS. Oh, Mrs George gets round her. Mrs George can get round
anybody if she wants to. And then Mrs George is very particular
about religion. And shes a clairvoyant.
MRS BRIDGENORTH [surprised] A clairvoyant!
COLLINS [calm] Oh yes, maam, yes. All you have to do is to
mesmerize her a bit; and off she goes into a trance, and says the
most wonderful things! not things about herself, but as if it was
the whole human race giving you a bit of its mind. Oh, wonderful,
maam, I assure you. You couldnt think of a game that Mrs George
isnt up to.
Lesbia Grantham comes in through the tower. She is a tall,
handsome, slender lady in her prime; that is, between 36 and 55.
She has what is called a well-bred air, dressing very carefully
to produce that effect without the least regard for the latest
fashions, sure of herself, very terrifying to the young and shy,
fastidious to the ends of her long finger-tips, and tolerant and
amused rather than sympathetic.
LESBIA. Good morning, dear big sister.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, dear little sister. [They kiss].
LESBIA. Good morning, Collins. How well you are looking! And how
young! [She turns the middle chair away from the table and sits
down].
COLLINS. Thats only my professional habit at a wedding, Miss. You
should see me at a political dinner. I look nigh seventy.
[Looking at his watch] Time's getting along, maam. May I send up
word from you to Miss Edith to hurry a bit with her dressing?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Collins.
Collins goes out through the tower, taking the cake with him.
LESBIA. Dear old Collins! Has he told you any stories this
morning?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. You were just late for a particularly
thrilling invention of his.
LESBIA. About Mrs George?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. He says she's a clairvoyant.
LESBIA. I wonder whether he really invented George, or stole her
out of some book.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. I wonder!
LESBIA. Wheres the Barmecide?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. In the study, working away at his new book. He
thinks no more now of having a daughter married than of having an
egg for breakfast.
The General, soothed by smoking, comes in from the garden.
THE GENERAL [with resolute bonhomie] Ah, Lesbia!
MRS BRIDGENORTH. How do you do? [They shake hands; and he takes
the chair on her right].
Mrs Bridgenorth goes out through the tower.
LESBIA. How are you, Boxer? You look almost as gorgeous as the
wedding cake.
THE GENERAL. I make a point of appearing in uniform whenever I
take part in any ceremony, as a lesson to the subalterns. It is
not the custom in England; but it ought to be.
LESBIA. You look very fine, Boxer. What a frightful lot of
bravery all these medals must represent!
THE GENERAL. No, Lesbia. They represent despair and cowardice. I
won all the early ones by trying to get killed. You know why.
LESBIA. But you had a charmed life?
THE GENERAL. Yes, a charmed life. Bayonets bent on my buckles.
Bullets passed through me and left no trace: thats the worst of
modern bullets: Ive never been hit by a dum-dum. When I was only
a company officer I had at least the right to expose myself to
death in the field. Now I'm a General even that resource is cut
off. [Persuasively drawing his chair nearer to her] Listen to me,
Lesbia. For the tenth and last time—
LESBIA [interrupting] On Florence's wedding morning, two years
ago, you said "For the ninth and last time."
THE GENERAL. We are two years older, Lesbia. I'm fifty: you
are—
LESBIA. Yes, I know. It's no use, Boxer. When will you be old
enough to take no for an answer?
THE GENERAL. Never, Lesbia, never. You have never given me a real
reason for refusing me yet. I once thought it was somebody else.
There were lots of fellows after you; but now theyve all given it
up and married. [Bending still nearer to her] Lesbia: tell me
your secret. Why—
LESBIA [sniffing disgustedly] Oh! Youve been smoking. [She rises
and goes to the chair on the hearth] Keep away, you wretch.
THE GENERAL. But for that pipe, I could not have faced you
without breaking down. It has soothed me and nerved me.
LESBIA [sitting down with The Times in her hand] Well, it has
nerved me to tell you why I'm going to be an old maid.
THE GENERAL [impulsively approaching her] Dont say that, Lesbia.
It's not natural: it's not right: it's—
LESBIA. [fanning him off] No: no closer, Boxer, please. [He
retreats, discouraged]. It may not be natural; but it happens all
the time. Youll find plenty of women like me, if you care to look
for them: women with lots of character and good looks and money
and offers, who wont and dont get married. Cant you guess why?
THE GENERAL. I can understand when there is another.
LESBIA. Yes; but there isnt another. Besides, do you suppose I
think, at my time of life, that the difference between one decent
sort of man and another is worth bothering about?
THE GENERAL. The heart has its preferences, Lesbia. One image,
and one only, gets indelibly—
LESBIA. Yes. Excuse my interrupting you so often; but your
sentiments are so correct that I always know what you are going
to say before you finish. You see, Boxer, everybody is not like
you. You are a sentimental noodle: you dont see women as they
really are. You dont see me as I really am. Now I do see men as
they really are. I see you as you really are.
THE GENERAL [murmuring] No: dont say that, Lesbia.
LESBIA. I'm a regular old maid. I'm very particular about my
belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to
myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and
cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous
for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good
company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one
thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all
over my house and going to sleep in his chair after dinner, and
untidying everything. Ugh!
THE GENERAL. But love—
LESBIA. Ob, love! Have you no imagination? Do you think I have
never been in love with wonderful men? heroes! archangels!
princes! sages! even fascinating rascals! and had the strangest
adventures with them? Do you know what it is to look at a mere
real man after that? a man with his boots in every corner, and
the smell of his tobacco in every curtain?
THE GENERAL [somewhat dazed] Well but—excuse my mentioning
it—dont you want children?
LESBIA. I ought to have children. I should be a good mother to
children. I believe it would pay the country very well to pay me
very well to have children. But the country tells me that I cant
have a child in my house without a man in it too; so I tell the
country that it will have to do without my children. If I am to
be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife
at the same time.
THE GENERAL. My dear Lesbia: you know I dont wish to be
impertinent; but these are not the correct views for an English
lady to express.
LESBIA. That is why I dont express them, except to gentlemen who
wont take any other answer. The difficulty, you see, is that I
really am an English lady, and am particularly proud of being
one.
THE GENERAL. I'm sure of that, Lesbia: quite sure of it. I never
meant—
LESBIA [rising impatiently] Oh, my dear Boxer, do please try to
think of something else than whether you have offended me, and
whether you are doing the correct thing as an English gentleman.
You are faultless, and very dull. [She shakes her shoulders
intolerantly and walks across to the other side of the kitchen].
THE GENERAL [moodily] Ha! thats whats the matter with me. Not
clever. A poor silly soldier man.
LESBIA. The whole matter is very simple. As I say, I am an
English lady, by which I mean that I have been trained to do
without what I cant have on honorable terms, no matter what it
is.
THE GENERAL. I really dont understand you, Lesbia.
LESBIA [turning on him] Then why on earth do you want to marry a
woman you dont understand?
THE GENERAL. I dont know. I suppose I love you.
LESBIA. Well, Boxer, you can love me as much as you like,
provided you look happy about it and dont bore me. But you cant
marry me; and thats all about it.
THE GENERAL. It's so frightfully difficult to argue the matter
fairly with you without wounding your delicacy by overstepping
the bounds of good taste. But surely there are calls of nature—
LESBIA. Dont be ridiculous, Boxer.
THE GENERAL. Well, how am I to express it? Hang it all, Lesbia,
dont you want a husband?
LESBIA. No. I want children; and I want to devote myself entirely
to my children, and not to their father. The law will not allow
me to do that; so I have made up my mind to have neither husband
nor children.
THE GENERAL. But, great Heavens, the natural appetites—
LESBIA. As I said before, an English lady is not the slave of her
appetites. That is what an English gentleman seems incapable of
understanding. [She sits down at the end of the table, near the
study door].
THE GENERAL [huffily] Oh well, if you refuse, you refuse. I shall
not ask you again. I'm sorry I returned to the subject. [He
retires to the hearth and plants himself there, wounded and
lofty].
LESBIA. Dont be cross, Boxer.
THE GENERAL. I'm not cross, only wounded, Lesbia. And when you
talk like that, I dont feel convinced: I only feel utterly at a
loss.
LESBIA. Well, you know our family rule. When at a loss consult
the greengrocer. [Opportunely Collins comes in through the
tower]. Here he is.
COLLINS. Sorry to be so much in and out, Miss. I thought Mrs
Bridgenorth was here. The table is ready now for the breakfast,
if she would like to see it.
LESBIA. If you are satisfied, Collins, I am sure she will be.
THE GENERAL. By the way, Collins: I thought theyd made you an
alderman.
COLLINS. So they have, General.
THE GENERAL. Then wheres your gown?
COLLINS. I dont wear it in private life, General.
THE GENERAL. Why? Are you ashamed of it?
COLLINS. No, General. To tell you the truth, I take a pride in
it. I cant help it.
THE GENERAL. Attention, Collins. Come here. [Collins comes to
him]. Do you see my uniform—all my medals?
COLLINS. Yes, General. They strike the eye, as it were.
THE GENERAL. They are meant to. Very well. Now you know, dont
you, that your services to the community as a greengrocer are as
important and as dignified as mine as a soldier?
COLLINS. I'm sure it's very honorable of you to say so, General.
THE GENERAL [emphatically] You know also, dont you, that any man
who can see anything ridiculous, or unmanly, or unbecoming in
your work or in your civic robes is not a gentleman, but a
jumping, bounding, snorting cad?
COLLINS. Well, strictly between ourselves, that is my opinion,
General.
THE GENERAL. Then why not dignify my niece's wedding by wearing
your robes?
COLLINS. A bargain's a bargain, General. Mrs Bridgenorth sent for
the greengrocer, not for the alderman. It's just as unpleasant to
get more than you bargain for as to get less.
THE GENERAL. I'm sure she will agree with me. I attach importance
to this as an affirmation of solidarity in the service of the
community. The Bishop's apron, my uniform, your robes: the
Church, the Army, and the Municipality.
COLLINS [retiring] Very well, General. [He turns dubiously to
Lesbia on his way to the tower]. I wonder what my wife will say,
Miss?
THE GENERAL. What! Is your, wife ashamed of your robes?
COLLINS. No, sir, not ashamed of them. But she grudged the money
for them; and she will be afraid of my sleeves getting into the
gravy.
Mrs Bridgenorth, her placidity quite upset, comes in with a
letter; hurries past Collins; and comes between Lesbia and the
General.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Lesbia: Boxer: heres a pretty mess!
Collins goes out discreetly.
THE GENERAL. Whats the matter?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Reginald's in London, and wants to come to the
wedding.
THE GENERAL [stupended] Well, dash my buttons!
LESBIA. Oh, all right, let him come.
THE GENERAL. Let him come! Why, the decree has not been made
absolute yet. Is he to walk in here to Edith's wedding, reeking
from the Divorce Court?
MRS BRIDGENORTH [vexedly sitting down in the middle chair] It's
too bad. No: I cant forgive him, Lesbia, really. A man of
Reginald's age, with a young wife—the best of girls, and as
pretty as she can be—to go off with a common woman from the
streets! Ugh!
LESBIA. You must make allowances. What can you expect? Reginald
was always weak. He was brought up to be weak. The family
property was all mortgaged when he inherited it. He had to
struggle along in constant money difficulties, hustled by his
solicitors, morally bullied by the Barmecide, and physically
bullied by Boxer, while they two were fighting their own way and
getting well trained. You know very well he couldnt afford to
marry until the mortgages were cleared and he was over fifty. And
then of course he made a fool of himself marrying a child like
Leo.
THE GENERAL. But to hit her! Absolutely to hit her! He knocked
her down—knocked her flat down on a flowerbed in the presence of
his gardener. He! the head of the family! the man that stands
before the Barmecide and myself as Bridgenorth of Bridgenorth! to
beat his wife and go off with a low woman and be divorced for it
in the face of all England! in the face of my uniform and
Alfred's apron! I can never forget what I felt: it was only the
King's personal request—virtually a command—that stopped me
from resigning my commission. I'd cut Reginald dead if I met him
in the street.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Besides, Leo's coming. Theyd meet. It's
impossible, Lesbia.
LESBIA. Oh, I forgot that. That settles it. He mustnt come.
THE GENERAL. Of course he mustnt. You tell him that if he enters
this house, I'll leave it; and so will every decent man and woman
in it.
COLLINS [returning for a moment to announce] Mr Reginald, maam.
[He withdraws when Reginald enters].
THE GENERAL [beside himself] Well, dash my buttons!!
Reginald is just the man Lesbia has described. He is hardened and
tough physically, and hasty and boyish in his manner and speech,
belonging as he does to the large class of English gentlemen of
property (solicitor-managed) who have never developed
intellectually since their schooldays. He is a muddled,
rebellious, hasty, untidy, forgetful, always late sort of man,
who very evidently needs the care of a capable woman, and has
never been lucky or attractive enough to get it. All the same, a
likeable man, from whom nobody apprehends any malice nor expects
any achievement. In everything but years he is younger than his
brother the General.
REGINALD [coming forward between the General and Mrs Bridgenorth]
Alice: it's no use. I cant stay away from Edith's wedding. Good
morning, Lesbia. How are you, Boxer? [He offers the General his
hand].
THE GENERAL [with crushing stiffness] I was just telling Alice,
sir, that if you entered this house, I should leave it.
REGINALD. Well, dont let me detain you, old chap. When you start
calling people Sir, youre not particularly good company.
LESBIA. Dont you begin to quarrel. That wont improve the
situation.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. I think you might have waited until you got my
answer, Rejjy.
REGINALD. It's so jolly easy to say No in a letter. Wont you let
me stay?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. How can I? Leo's coming.
REGINALD. Well, she wont mind.
THE GENERAL. Wont mind!!!!
LESBIA. Dont talk nonsense, Rejjy; and be off with you.
THE GENERAL [with biting sarcasm] At school you lead a theory
that women liked being knocked down, I remember.
REGINALD. Youre a nice, chivalrous, brotherly sort of swine, you
are.
THE GENERAL. Mr Bridgenorth: are you going to leave this house or
am I?
REGINALD. You are, I hope. [He emphasizes his intention to stay
by sitting down].
THE GENERAL. Alice: will you allow me to be driven from Edith's
wedding by this—
LESBIA [warningly] Boxer!
THE GENERAL. —by this Respondent? Is Edith to be given away by
him?
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Certainly not. Reginald: you were not asked to
come; and I have asked you to go. You know how fond I am of Leo;
and you know what she would feel if she came in and found you
here.
COLLINS [again appearing in the tower] Mrs Reginald, maam.
LESBIA {No, no. Ask her to— } [All three
MRS BRIDGENORTH {Oh, how unfortunate! } clamoring
THE GENERAL {Well, dash my buttons! } together].
It is too late: Leo is already in the kitchen. Collins goes out,
mutely abandoning a situation which he deplores but has been
unable to save.
Leo is very pretty, very youthful, very restless, and
consequently very charming to people who are touched by youth and
beauty, as well as to those who regard young women as more or
less appetizing lollipops, and dont regard old women at all.
Coldly studied, Leo's restlessness is much less lovable than the
kittenishness which comes from a rich and fresh vitality. She is
a born fusser about herself and everybody else for whom she feels
responsible; and her vanity causes her to exaggerate her
responsibilities officiously. All her fussing is about little
things; but she often calls them by big names, such as Art, the
Divine Spark, the world, motherhood, good breeding, the Universe,
the Creator, or anything else that happens to strike her
imagination as sounding intellectually important. She has more
than common imagination and no more than common conception and
penetration; so that she is always on the high horse about words
and always in the perambulator about things. Considering herself
clever, thoughtful, and superior to ordinary weaknesses and
prejudices, she recklessly attaches herself to clever men on that
understanding, with the result that they are first delighted,
then exasperated, and finally bored. When marrying Reginald she
told her friends that there was a great deal in him which needed
bringing out. If she were a middle-aged man she would be the
terror of his club. Being a pretty young woman, she is forgiven
everything, proving that "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner"
is an error, the fact being that the secret of forgiving
everything is to understand nothing.
She runs in fussily, full of her own importance, and swoops on
Lesbia, who is much less disposed to spoil her than Mrs
Bridgenorth is. But Leo affects a special intimacy with Lesbia,
as of two thinkers among the Philistines.
LEO [to Lesbia, kissing her] Good morning. [Coming to Mrs
Bridgenorth] How do, Alice? [Passing on towards the hearth] Why
so gloomy, General? [Reginald rises between her and the General]
Oh, Rejjy! What will the King's Proctor say?
REGINALD. Damn the King's Proctor!
LEO. Naughty. Well, I suppose I must kiss you; but dont any of
you tell. [She kisses him. They can hardly believe their eyes].
Have you kept all your promises?
REGINALD. Oh, dont begin bothering about those—
LEO [insisting] Have? You? Kept? Your? Promises? Have you rubbed
your head with the lotion every night?
REGINALD. Yes, yes. Nearly every night.
LEO. Nearly! I know what that means. Have you worn your liver
pad?
THE GENERAL [solemnly] Leo: forgiveness is one of the most
beautiful traits in a woman's nature; but there are things that
should not be forgiven to a man. When a man knocks a woman down
[Leo gives a little shriek of laughter and collapses on a chair
next Mrs Bridgenorth, on her left]
REGINALD [sardonically] The man that would raise his hand to a
woman, save in the way of a kindness, is unworthy the name of
Bridgenorth. [He sits down at the end of the table nearest the
hearth].
THE GENERAL [much huffed] Oh, well, if Leo does not mind, of
course I have no more to say. But I think you might, out of
consideration for the family, beat your wife in private and not
in the presence of the gardener.
REGINALD [out of patience] Whats the good of beating your wife
unless theres a witness to prove it afterwards? You dont suppose
a man beats his wife for the fun of it, do you? How could she
have got her divorce if I hadnt beaten her? Nice state of things,
that!
THE GENERAL [gasping] Do you mean to tell me that you did it in
cold blood? simply to get rid of your wife?
REGINALD. No, I didn't: I did it to get her rid of me. What would
you do if you were fool enough to marry a woman thirty years
younger than yourself, and then found that she didnt care for
you, and was in love with a young fellow with a face like a
mushroom.
LEO. He has not. [Bursting into tears] And you are most unkind to
say I didnt care for you. Nobody could have been fonder of you.
REGINALD. A nice way of shewing your fondness! I had to go out
and dig that flower bed all over with my own hands to soften it.
I had to pick all the stones out of it. And then she complained
that I hadnt done it properly, because she got a worm down her
neck. I had to go to Brighton with a poor creature who took a
fancy to me on the way down, and got conscientious scruples about
committing perjury after dinner. I had to put her down in the
hotel book as Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth: Leo's name! Do you know
what that feels like to a decent man? Do you know what a decent
man feels about his wife's name? How would you like to go into a
hotel before all the waiters and people with—with that on your
arm? Not that it was the poor girl's fault, of course; only she
started crying because I couldnt stand her touching me; and now
she keeps writing to me. And then I'm held up in the public court
for cruelty and adultery, and turned away from Edith's wedding by
Alice, and lectured by you! a bachelor, and a precious green one
at that. What do you know about it?
THE GENERAL. Am I to understand that the whole case was one of
collusion?
REGINALD. Of course it was. Half the cases are collusions: what
are people to do? [The General, passing his hand dazedly over his
bewildered brow, sinks into the railed chair]. And what do you
take me for, that you should have the cheek to pretend to believe
all that rot about my knocking Leo about and leaving her for—for
a—a— Ugh! you should have seen her.
THE GENERAL. This is perfectly astonishing to me. Why did you do
it? Why did Leo allow it?
REGINALD. Youd better ask her.
LEO [still in tears] I'm sure I never thought it would be so
horrid for Rejjy. I offered honorably to do it myself, and let
him divorce me; but he wouldnt. And he said himself that it was
the only way to do it—that it was the law that he should do it
that way. I never saw that hateful creature until that day in
Court. If he had only shewn her to me before, I should never have
allowed it.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. You did all this for Leo's sake, Rejjy?
REGINALD [with an unbearable sense of injury] I shouldnt mind a
bit if it were for Leo's sake. But to have to do it to make room
for that mushroom-faced serpent—!
THE GENERAL [jumping up] What right had he to be made room for?
Are you in your senses? What right?
REGINALD. The right of being a young man, suitable to a young
woman. I had no right at my age to marry Leo: she knew no more
about life than a child.
LEO. I knew a great deal more about it than a great baby like
you. I'm sure I dont know how youll get on with no one to take
care of you: I often lie awake at night thinking about it. And
now youve made me thoroughly miserable.
REGINALD. Serve you right! [She weeps]. There: dont get into a
tantrum, Leo.
LESBIA. May one ask who is the mushroom-faced serpent?
LEO. He isnt.
REGINALD. Sinjon Hotchkiss, of course.
MRS BRIDGENORTH. Sinjon Hotchkiss! Why, he's coming to the
wedding!
REGINALD. What! In that case I'm off [he makes for the tower].
LEO } { [seizing him] No you shant.
You promised to be nice to
(all four him.
THE GENERAL } rushing { No, dont go, old chap. Not
after him from Edith's wedding.
and capturing
him on the
MRS. BRIDGE- threshold)
NORTH } { Oh, do stay, Benjjy. I shall
really be hurt if you desert
us.
LESBIA } { Better stay, Reginald. You must
meet him sooner or later.