CHAPTER XVI
The blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room—“making two worlds,” Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, “where only one grew before—and one of them a better world,” he added too philosophically, “because unreal.” There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again.
On a narrow bed—on a bier perhaps—the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.
The Husband: Margaret! Margaret!
The Doctor: She is dead.
The Husband: Margaret!
The Doctor: Of septicæmia, I tell you.
The Husband: I wish that I too were dead!
The Doctor: But you won’t to-morrow.
The Husband: To-morrow! But I don’t want to live to see to-morrow.
The Doctor: You will to-morrow.
The Husband: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.
The Doctor: You will not be slow to survive her.
The Husband: Christ have mercy upon us!
The Doctor: You would do better to think of the child.
The Husband (rising and standing menacingly over the cradle): Is that the monster?
The Doctor: No worse than others.
The Husband: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!
The Doctor: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!
The Husband: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!
The Doctor: The child must be fed.
The Husband: Fed? With what?
The Doctor: With milk.
The Husband: Her milk is cold in her breasts.
The Doctor: There are still cows.
The Husband: Tubercular shorthorns. (Calling.) Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!
Voices (off): Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! (Fadingly) Short-i’-the....
The Doctor: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.
The Husband: But none of them belonged to my harem.
The Doctor: Each of them was somebody’s wife.
The Husband: Doubtless. But the people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.
The Doctor: Not in the spectator’s eyes.
The Husband: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret!...
The Doctor: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.
The Husband: The only one!
The Doctor: But here comes the cow.
(Short-i’-the-horn is led in by a Yokel.)
The Husband: Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! (He pats the animal.) She was tested last week, was she not?
The Yokel: Ay, sir.
The Husband: And found tubercular. No?
The Yokel: Even in the udders, may it please you.
The Husband: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.
The Yokel: I will, sir. (He milks the cow.)
The Husband: Her milk—her milk is cold already. All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will make it flow again?
The Yokel: The wash-pot is full, sir.
The Husband: Then take the cow away.
The Yokel: Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, good Short-i’-the-horn. (He goes out with the cow.)
The Husband (pouring the milk into a long-tubed feeding-bottle): Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own health in. (He gives the bottle to the child.)
Curtain.
“A little ponderous, perhaps,” said Gumbril, as the curtain came down.
“But I liked the cow.” Mrs. Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. “I don’t want it in the least,” she said.
“Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,” Gumbril agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since he had been to a Christmas pantomime. Not since Dan Leno’s days. All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them—every year they filled the best part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grown-ups always wanted to go away before the harlequinade. And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out, trampling and stumbling over everybody else’s feet—and every stumble making the need more agonizingly great—in the middle of the transformation scene. And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody else’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.
“I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,” said Mrs. Viveash. “If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.”
“Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,” said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms.
“None of your cracker mottoes, please,” protested Mrs. Viveash. All the same, she reflected, what was she doing now but waiting for the curtain to go up again, waiting, with what unspeakable weariness of spirit, for the curtain that had rung down, ten centuries ago, on those blue eyes, that bright strawy hair and the weathered face?
“Thank God,” she said with an expiring earnestness, “here’s the second scene!”