THREE LANCASHIRE PLAYS

In another age than ours play-books were a favourite, if not the only, form of light reading, and the novel, now almost universally preferred, is the development of the last century. But a writer of plays should be the last person in the world to resent the novelist's victory, for plays are written to be acted, and reach a full completeness only by means of the collaboration of author with producer, scene-painter, actors and, finally and essentially, audience. The author's script bears to the completed play a relationship similar to that of an architect's plan to a completed building.

Architect's plans, however, are not unintelligible to the layman, especially to the layman who is not devoid of imagination, the layman who is ready to spend a trifling mental effort and to become, be it ever so little, expert. And so with printed plays, those ground-plans of the drama. There must have been in the eighteenth century, a larger percentage of the reading public than obtains to-day that was expert in reading plays; plays were thought—you can find ample proof of it in the Diarists—easier reading than the novels of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett. Perhaps the comparative brevity of a play was, even in those unhurried days, a point in its favour; certainly the play-reading habit was strong and one likes to think that it is not lost. To read dully the script of a spectacular play is desolating weariness, but the same script read with sympathetic imagination becomes the key to fairyland, and from an armchair one sees more marvels than ever stagecraft could present. There are abominable limitations on the stage; producers are tedious pedants; but the reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a merely human producer. Play-reading, in fact, obeys the law that as a man sows so shall he reap; a little trouble, rapidly eased by practice, leads one to a great deal of pleasure.

It depends, of course, upon the play as well as upon the reader, and though one has rather romantically instanced spectacular plays, their scripts do, as a rule, belong to the class of play which is not worth reading. They are, or are apt to become, the libretto to some specific scenery or stage effect and the imaginative reader, failing to hit upon the particular staging intended, is lost in puzzlement. Nor do plays of action make the best reading. There are no plays but plays of action, but action is of many kinds, and the play whose first concern is situation and rapid physical movement is so specifically a stage-play, so sketchy in its ground-plan until the collaborators work in unison upon it, as to make reading more of a torment than a pleasure. While you must have wordless pantomime at the basis of every play, it is those plays which exhibit in high degree the use of action in the form of dialogue that are the more comfortable reading; and, always postulating that a play is a play—not necessarily a playwright's play, the admiration of his brother craftsmen, but a thing practicable, actable and effective on the stage—the more physical action is subordinated to character, to the exploration of the springs of human motive, the better it is for reading purposes and the better for all purposes.

Ibsen led the modern play, where the modern novel followed it, to the investigation of character rather than to the unfolding of a story, and one suggests that readers who find satisfaction in the modern psychological novel should find the reading of modern plays to their taste for the reason that the dramatists, though they haven't in a play the same opportunities for analysis as the novelists find in their more spacious pages, are essentially "out for" the same thing.

The type of play one is here writing about is one which has not, in the past, flourished extensively in the popular theatres; it is the type known, rather obscurely, as the "Repertory" play. It was called by that name, probably in derision, and the Repertory play was held to be synonymous with the un-commercial play. Then queer things happened. "Hindle Wakes" broke out of the Repertory palisade, made dramatic history and, what from the amazed commercial manager's standpoint was even more startling, a fortune; "The Younger Generation" followed into the commercial camp; and in the rent profiteer's year of 1919, when managers seemed forced by ruthless circumstance more even than by inclination to play the safest game and to offer the Big Public nothing but repetitions of the tried and true, two plays from the Repertories came to town. "The Lost Leader" filled the Court Theatre in a very heat wave, and "Abraham Lincoln" took the King to Hammersmith—with many thousands of his subjects. So that it will not do to speak of plays as commercial on the one hand and Repertory on the other. Repertory has golden possibilities, if you don't expect too much of it. It would be fallacious to expect the same pay-dust from "Abraham Lincoln" as from "Chu Chin Chow." Nor would one expect Joseph Conrad to sell like Nat Gould.

Sincerity is a virtue possessed, as a rule, by the Repertory play, but it will by no means do to claim for this sort of play a monopoly of sincerity. The most popular type of drama (and the most English), melodrama, is rigidly sincere—to the confounding of the Intellectual. There is plenty of dishonest thinking and unscrupulous play-making, but not in popular melodrama. In melodrama which pretends to be something other than what it is, there is immediate and obvious insincerity, but there is no writing with the tongue in the cheek in downright, unabashed melodramas of the old Adelphi, and the present Lyceum type. It will not do to call the "highbrow" plays sincere, with the implication that all other plays are insincere, any more than they can themselves be sweepingly characterized as uncommercial. Sincerity, anyhow, may be beside the point, and the term Repertory play, though unsatisfactory, stands for something perfectly well understood. No definition would be apt to the whole body of Repertory plays, but one would like, diffidently, to suggest that Repertory plays are written by men and women of intellectual honesty who postulate that their audience will be composed of educated people—and that attempt at a definition fails. It has a snobbish ring.

And now, after generalizing about Repertory plays and reading plays, to come down to the particular instance of the Lancashire plays here printed. They are three of seven plays which their author has written about the people of his native county, and reasons for publishing them now are that nobody wanted to publish plays during the war, and that the author is an optimist about the future of Repertory. Which last is only a sort of reason for publishing some of Repertory's step-children—that, at any rate, the new men may know, if they care to know, these workaday examples deriving from the only Repertory Theatre in Great Britain which created a local drama. Though none of these three plays was, in fact, produced by Miss Horniman's Company, they nevertheless belong to the "Manchester School," which was a by-product of her Company.

The "Manchester School" was never conscious of itself, as the Irish School was. The Irishmen had a country, a patriotic sentiment, a national mythology; they had, so soon after the beginning that it seemed they had it from the first, the already classical tradition of Synge; they had in the Deidre legend a subject made to their hands, a subject which it appeared every Irishman must tackle in order to pass with honours as an Irish dramatist; and there was explicit endeavour to create an Irish Drama. In Manchester, so far were we from any explicit ambition to create a Lancashire Drama that we denied the fact of its creation. What reputation it had was not home-made in Manchester and exported, but made in London and America. At Miss Horniman's theatre in Manchester, there were so many bigger things being done than the earlier, technically weak plays of the local authors. And it is worth pointing out that the authors went (it was admirable, it was almost original in them) for their material to what was immediately under their noses; they took as models the Lancashire people of their daily life, and in their plays they did not always flatter their models. The models saw themselves in the theatre rather as they were than as they liked to think they were, and they hadn't the quixotry to praise too highly authors who held up to them a mirror of disconcerting truthfulness. It came upon the authors unexpectedly, as even something a little preposterous, to be taken seriously, to be labelled, heaven knows by whom, the "Manchester School," as if they had a common aim..

That, surely, is the significance of the "Manchester School," that the phenomenon and the hope. Miss Horniman established her Company in Manchester, with Mr. B. Iden Payne, a genius, as her producer of plays. What she gave to Manchester was perhaps more, perhaps not more, than the aftermath of the historic Vedrenne-Barker campaign at the Court Theatre; at any rate, she gave a series of Repertory plays—plays which had no likelihood of being seen in the provinces under the touring system—notably well acted; she demonstrated that drama was a living art, and in the light of that demonstration there outcropped spontaneously, un-self-consciously, the body of local drama now known as the "Manchester School." Whatever the individual merits of the Lancashire plays may be, whatever, even, their collective importance or unimportance, they have this significance of localization. Stimulated by Miss Horniman's catholic repertoire, local authors sought to express in drama local characteristics.

There are no two questions in the writer's mind, nor, he thinks, in anybody's, as to whether local drama is or is not a good thing. It is more than ever good in to-day's special London conditions, but it was always good in and for its own locality, and very good when it broke away from home, travelled to London and introduced to Londoners authentic representations of natives of their country. It brought variety where variety was needed. Not all the plays of the "Manchester School," of course, have travelled. One or two, indeed, hardly travelled across the Gaiety Theatre footlights, and in the case of a few others, mostly one-act plays, there was never the least chance of their emerging from Lancashire owing to the fact that they were written deliberately in dialect. A most racy little piece, "Complaints," by Mr. Ernest Hutchinson, with its scene laid in the office of an Oldham spinning-mill, is a case in point. One doubts, even, if the comparatively urbane Manchester audience grasped the whole of its idiomatic dialogue. But these are the extremes of local drama, and generally, the Lancashire writers have avoided dialect as, in the first place, impracticable, and in the second place, disused, except (to quote Houghton) "amongst the roughest class in the most out-of-the way districts." Accent is not dialect though possibly originates in it. Even when one wishes to use dialect one must not, for stage purposes, write it as it is spoken. The dramatist selects his material from dialect as he selects his larger material from life. Dramatically correct dialect is literally incorrect; it is highly selected dialogue which indicates, but does not obscure, and the true dialect dramatist is not the man who exactly imitates the speech of a district, but he who most skilfully adapts its rhythms and picks out its salient words. Synge invented an Irish dialect which is false in detail and infinitely true in broad effect, and the "Manchester School," faced with the same difficulty, has solved it in the same way, hoping, though without much confidence, that the Lancashire cadences it adopted and used in its very few dialect plays may sound to alien ears as aptly as the language of Synge's Irish sounds to our own. Though you may search in vain the dialogue of Mr. Allan Monkhouse's plays for local characteristics, the "Manchester School" has as a rule indicated by the use, in greater or less degree, of local idioms that the speech of Lancashire has a well-marked individuality; but dialect, as a distinctive variant of the national language, can hardly be said to exist in Lancashire.

One labours the point a little in order to make clear that the "Manchester School" had no accidental advantage, over writers who lived near other provincial Repertory Theatres, in the existence of a language whose dramatic literature they felt urged to create; there was no such language. And its absence makes a curiosity of the fact that from Manchester alone of the Repertory centres has any considerable body of local drama emerged. (Dublin is another matter; one speaks here of Great Britain.) Other Repertory centres, like Birmingham and Bristol, must have local characteristics: Liverpool is, geographically at any rate, in Lancashire; and Glasgow has a language of its own. None of these Repertories was sterile, but even Birmingham, despite Mr. John Drinkwater and "Abraham Lincoln," was economical in creativeness and fathered no local drama. Must the conclusion be that the Manchester atmosphere has, with its soot, a vitalizing dramatic principle?

Possibly; but a less fantastic theory is that Manchester had Miss Horniman, and other Repertories had not. Again one insists that the Lancashire plays were a by-product, and a by-product only, of Miss Horniman's Company. Who in their senses would go to Manchester expecting to evoke a local drama? And if she had gone there with a prejudice in favour of poetic plays, it is more than likely that no local drama would have been evoked. Modern Lancashire is industrial Lancashire—one forgets the large agricultural oases, while nobody but map-makers and administrators remembers that a slice of the Lake District is in Lancashire—and industrialism does not inspire the poetic play. Miss Horniman began, on the contrary, with a season whose best productions, though it included Maeterlinck, were Shaw's "Widower's Houses" and McEvoy's "David Ballard." Those two productions seemed, rightly or wrongly, to fix the type of play preferred by Miss Horniman's Company; it happened—let us call it realistic comedy—to be the type by which the life of Lancashire could be best expressed in drama and the future authors of the "Manchester School," most of them of an impressionable age, some of them already fumbling their way to dramatic expression, seized avidly the type and the opportunity. They were not so provincial as to have to wait for Miss Horniman to come to be introduced to Shaw: but there are worlds of difference between reading Shaw, even between seeing him indifferently produced, and a Shaw play transmuted by the handling of such a producer as Iden Payne. It is putting the case without hyperbole to say that Miss Horniman's Company was an inspiration.

The Repertory whose "note" is the poetic play will probably evoke no local drama, because, until we get the village Repertory, local drama is the drama of the modern town, wherein the stuff of poetry exists, if at all, only as a forced revival of folk-lore. Anything can be great poetry to the great poet; one speaks here of the average playwright, the observer of his fellow man in a provincial town, seeking his medium of expression in drama; and such a man is unlikely to find it in the poetic play or to find encouragement and inspiration from a Repertory where poetic plays are visibly preferred. It is almost to be said that Miss Horniman's Company and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre stand for rival theories of the drama, but not quite; they have too much, including Shakespeare, in common.

Local drama is too important to be left so specially in the hands of Miss Horniman and the "Manchester School." It is important for the localities and important, too, for London; London is quite as ready to be interested in good plays about people in Aberdeen or Halifax as in plays about people in New York, but the New York author lives in a city where plays are produced and the Aberdeen author does not. The stimulation of local drama is possible only where a local producing theatre exists; the education of a dramatist is unfinished until he has heard his lines spoken and watched his puppets move. Drama in the capitals is standardized to some half-dozen patterns which alter slowly and, failing the local producing theatre, what is the provincial author to do but to suppress his originality and to write plays, in hopes of London production, as near as he can make them to one of the approved current designs? It is said that were it not for the continued influx from the provinces, London would die out in three—or is it two?—generations; and if that is true of life, it is true also of drama, and the plain duty of those who control British Drama, the Napoleons of the theatre, is to dig channels whereby healthy provincial blood may flow to London to revitalize its Drama.

This, which means that Sir Alfred Butt ought to seek out a number of intelligent producers and endow them in provincial Repertory theatres to work without interference from above, but always with the vigilant eye for that byproduct of a rightly inspired Repertory, local drama, is a simple matter of commercial self-interest, on a par with the action of the magnates of scientific trade who endow research not out of love of science, but in the expectation that they will be able some day to exploit profitably the resulting discoveries. So might Sir Alfred Butt exploit local authors discovered by the producers of his far-flung Repertories. The theatre is either a business or a gamble, and in the hands of men like Sir Alfred Butt it looks less like a gamble every day. Enlightened business self-interest would look a little to the future, to the fostering of authorship in provincial towns, to the establishment of many Repertories.

To come back to the windfalls of the "Manchester School" printed here. They fell, one of them in the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, at a time when Miss Horniman's Company was on vacation; another at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, which was in origin a secession from Manchester headed by the late Miss Darragh, with the plays produced by Mr. Basil Dean, later the first Liverpool Director; and the third so far away from Manchester as the Empire Theatre, Syracuse, New York State, linked with Manchester, for all that, through being produced by Mr. Iden Payne. In reading them again, one is startled for the thousandth time by the difference between stage and study. The third act of "The Northerners" makes curious reading, because it depends partly upon the juxtaposition of the characters on the stage, partly upon the suggestion "off" of a ruse plagiarized from the Punic Wars, partly upon a spectacular "curtain," but it is—production proved it—in the focus of the theatre. It "came off" on the stage. Laughter in the theatre is, again, a mystery. It is possible that the Lancashire plays in general have the characteristic of acting more amusingly than they read. "Hindle Wakes" reads positively austerely; acted, it is full of humour; and one's recollections of "The Game" on the stage make for the same conclusion. It has, in the theatre, a far more pronounced tendency to set its audience laughing than seems apparent in its text. In the case of "Zack" the funis, one would say, hardly of a subtle kind. Taking the "Manchester School," bye and large, and remembering the charge against it that it was "grey" or "dreary," one is forced to believe either that Lancashire humour is not everybody's humour—Mrs. Metherell in "The Game" might almost be set as a test—or else that the "Manchester School" has been confused with the whole body of Miss Horniman's productions; and, even if so, the charge fails.

There was an Icelandic tragedy produced in the early days of her Company, which depressed the thermometer alarmingly; there was Verhaeren's "The Cloister," a great play performed to empty houses, adding insult to injury by being popularly called "dreary," and the chill resulting from those two productions, one a mistake of management, the other a mistake of the public, lasted for years. The case of the Lancashire Plays is clear; their authors aimed at presenting the human comedy of Lancashire, and if their dramatic purpose was to be achieved by the alternative uses of laughter or of tears, they preferred to achieve it by the ruthless light of laughter. Many of the plays have not been printed and the appended bibliography includes no examples of the comedy of Mr. H. M. Richardson, Dr. F. E. Wynne or Mr. M. A. Arabian. Incomplete record of the Lancashire Plays as it is, it serves to drive home the contention that the "Manchester School" are, in the main, comic writers.

Bibliography:

(1) Stanley Houghton—"The Works of Stanley Houghton," three volumes (Constable & Co.); "Hindle Wakes" (Sidgwick and Jackson); "The Younger Generation," "Five Short Plays," "Independent Means," "The Dear Departed," "Fancy Free" (Samuel French, Ltd.).

(2) Allan Monkhouse—"Mary Broome," "The Education of Mr. Surrage" (Sidgwick & Jackson); "Four Tragedies" (Duckworth & Co); "War Plays" (Constable & Co.).

(3) Harold Brighouse—"Hobson's Choice," "Garside's Career" (Constable & Co.); "Dealing in Futures," "Graft" (Samuel French, Ltd. ); "Lonesome-Like," "The Price of Coal," "Converts," (Gowans & Grey, Ltd).

(4) Judge E. A. Parry;—"The Tallyman and other Plays" (Sherratt & Hughes).

(5) J. Sackville Martin—"Cupid and the Styx" (Samuel French, Ltd.).

THE GAME

A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS

CHARACTERS

AUSTIN Whitworth.

EDMUND Whitworth.

LEO Whitworth.

JACK Metherell.

Hugh Martin.

Dr. Wells.

BARNES.

ELSIE Whitworth.

FLORENCE Whitworth.

MRS. METHERELL.

MRS. WILMOT.

MRS. NORBURY.

ACT I

The Action of the Play takes place in a Lancashire town on the last Saturday in April between the hours of one and five in the afternoon.

Austin Whitworth's house in Blackton was built by his father in 1870 and the library is a stately room. The door is on the right. Centre is a deep bay with a mullioned window and padded window seat. A brisk fire burns in the elaborate fireplace, with its high club fender. Shelves line the walls. All the furniture dates from the original period of the house, and though the chairs may have been upholstered in the meantime, they would repay fresh attention. Solidity is the keynote of the roomy but its light wood and bright rugs save it from heaviness.

The time is one o'clock on the last Saturday in April. A painting of old John Whitworth is over the fireplace.

In the armchair is Edmund Whitworth, a prosperous London solicitor. A bachelor, his habit of dining well has marked his waist-line. Pompous geniality is his manner. In his hand is a sheet of notepaper which, as the curtain rises, he finishes reading. Sitting facing him on the fender is Leo Whitworth, his nephew. Leo is twenty-one and dresses with fastidious taste, beautifully and unobtrusively. He is small. Just now he awaits Edmund's verdict with anxiety. Edmund removes his pince-nez and hands the paper to Leo.

EDMUND. I like it, Leo.

LEO. Really, uncle? I asked you to be candid.

EDMUND. Yes. I do like It. It's immature, but it's the real thing. (Rising and patting his shoulder patronizingly.) There's stuff in you, my boy.

LEO. You're the first Whitworth who's ever praised my work. The usual thing's to laugh at me for trying to be a poet.

EDMUND. A prophet in his own country, eh? Perhaps they don't know very much about poetry, Leo.

LEO. (excitedly, walking about, while Edmund takes his place by the fire). Is that any reason for laughing at me? I don't know anything about hockey, but I don't laugh at Flo and Elsie for playing. As I tell them, mutual tolerance is the only basis for family life. If I were a large-limbed athlete they'd bow down and worship, but as I've got a sense of beauty and no brawn they simply bully the life out of me.

EDMUND. You're sure you do tolerate them?

LEO. Of course I do. I'd rather have a sister who's a football maniac any day than a sister who's a politician. There's some beauty in catching balls, but there's no beauty in catching votes. What I complain of is that there's no seriousness in this house about the things that matter.

EDMUND. Such as—poetry?

LEO. Oh, now you're getting at me. All right. I'm used to it. Being serious about poetry's better than being serious about football, anyhow.

EDMUND. Sonnets have their place in the scheme of things.

LEO. A high place, too.

EDMUND. I agree with you in putting them above football.

LEO. Then you'll find yourself unpopular here,

EDMUND. At the same time, it's possible to overdo the sonnets, Leo.

LEO. Never. Art demands all.

EDMUND. My dear boy, if you're going to talk about art and temperament, and all the other catchwords——

LEO. I'm not. I'm only asking you to tell them you believe in my genius and then they'll drop thinking I'm making an ass of myself.

EDMUND. I see. By the way, what are you making of yourself, Leo?

LEO. A poet, I hope.

EDMUND. I meant for a living.

LEO. I have a weak lung.

EDMUND. Is that your occupation?

LEO. It is my tragedy.

EDMUND. Um.

LEO. You will speak to them for me, uncle? They'll listen to you. At least you come from London, where people are civilized.

EDMUND. Are they? In London I hold a brief for the culture of the provinces.

LEO. You took jolly good care to get away from the provinces, yourself. And you mustn't tell me you think Blackton is cultured.

EDMUND. I heard my first Max Reger sonata in Blackton long before London had found him.

LEO. Music's another matter.

EDMUND. Yes. Your father played it to me.

LEO. Well, there you are again. Music and football are the only things he cares about. That's just what I complain of. I've tried to raise his tastes, but I find generally a lack of seriousness in men of his age. Of course' there are exceptions.

EDMUND. Thank you.

(Enter Florence Whitworth, in golfing tweeds with bag, and without hat, hair tumbled by the wind. She is a largemade girl of eighteen, supremely healthy and athletic.)

FLORENCE. May I hide in here?

LEO. What's there to hide from?

FLORENCE. Eleanor Smith is tackling Elsie in the hall to play hockey for the High School Old Girls this afternoon. When she finds Elsie won't, she'll want to try me, so I'll keep out of the way, please.

EDMUND. And why won't Elsie?

FLORENCE. We never do when the Rovers are playing at home. I wouldn't miss seeing the match this afternoon for the best game of hockey I ever had. (Slinging the golf-bag in a corner.) Topping round on the links, uncle. You ought to have come.

EDMUND. I'm a sedentary animal, Flo.

FLORENCE. Yes. And you're putting on weight. It's six years since you were here, and I'll bet you've gone up a stone a year.

EDMUND. In my profession a portly figure is an asset. If you have a lean and hungry look, clients think it's because you sit up late running up bills of costs. If you look comfortable, they imagine you're too busy dining to think of the six and eightpences.

FLORENCE. Yes. I never met a slacker yet who wasn't full of excellent excuses. Leo calls his poetry. You call yours business. Wait till you'll retire. You'll find it out then if you haven't a decent hobby.

EDMUND. But I have.

FLORENCE. It's invisible to the naked eye. You don't golf, and you don't play tennis or cricket or——

EDMUND. I collect postage stamps.

FLORENCE. No wonder you're in bad condition with a secret vice like that. (Goes to open window.)

LEO (sharply). Don't do that.

FLORENCE. It's blazing hot. I can't imagine what you want a fire for.

LEO. Uncle felt chilly.

FLORENCE. Sorry I spoke. No, I'm not. It serves him right for taking no exercise.

(Enter Elsie Whitworth, who, like Florence, is tall and muscular, but with a slim beauty which, contrasted with Florence's loose limbs and occasional gawkishness, is, at twenty-two, comparatively mature. Her indoor dress, to honour the visiting uncle, is elaborate and bright.)

ELSIE. Flo, Eleanor Smith wants you.

FLORENCE. I know she does. That's why I'm hiding in here.

ELSIE. They're a man short on the team, and——

FLORENCE. Didn't you tell her I can't play to-day? Elsie. She thinks she can persuade you.

FLORENCE. She can't.

ELSIE. You'd better go and tell her so.

FLORENCE (gathering up her golf-bag). Blow Eleanor Smith! She thinks hockey's everything. I hate fanatics. Elsie. She's waiting for you.

FLORENCE. All right. I'll go. (Exit Florence.)

ELSIE. Heard the news, Leo?

LEO. Not particularly.

ELSIE (excitedly). Jack Metherell's coming in to see father before the match. Father told me.

LEO. Oh? My pulse remains normal.

ELSIE. You've no more blood in you than a cauliflower. I'm tingling all over at the thought of being under the same roof with Metherell.

EDMUND. May I enquire who Mr. Metherell is?

ELSIE. Do you mean to say you've never heard of Metherell?

EDMUND. I apologise for being a Londoner.

ELSIE. That's no excuse. They can raise a decent crowd at Chelsea nowadays.

EDMUND. Indeed? I live at Sevenoaks.

ELSIE. You must have heard of Metherell.

EDMUND. No. Who is he?

LEO. Metherell is a professional footballer, uncle.

EDMUND. Oh!

ELSIE (indignantly). A professional footballer! He's the finest centre forward in England.

EDMUND (politely). Really? Quite a great man.

LEO. Quite. He's the idol of my sisters and the Black-ton roughs. For two hours every Saturday and Bank Holiday through eight months of the year forty thousand pairs of eyes are glued on Metherell and the newspapers of Saturday night, Sunday and Monday chronicle his exploits in about two columns; but if you don't know what "agitating the spheroid towards the sticks" means, you'd better not try to read them.

(Elsie approaches him threateningly.)

He is also good looking and a decent fellow.

ELSIE. You'd better add that.

LEO. I will add more. He spends the rest of his time training for those two hours, and when he's thirty he'll retire and keep a pub; and in three years eighteen stone of solid flesh will bury the glory that was Metherell.

ELSIE (threatening him). You viperous little skunk.

LEO. I appeal to you, uncle. Can a skunk possess the attributes of a viper?

ELSIE. If you say another word against Jack Metherell, I'll knock you into the middle of next week. You're frightened of the sight of a football yourself and you dare to libel a man who——

LEO. The greater the truth the greater the libel. You're a solicitor, uncle. Isn't that so?

EDMUND. Do you want my professional opinion?

LEO (dodging round the table from Elsie). I want your personal protection.

ELSIE (giving Leo up). Uncle, Jack Metherell's the truest sportsman who ever stepped on to a football field. He's the straightest shooter and the trickiest dribbler in the game. I'd walk barefooted over thorns to watch him play, and for Leo to say he'll retire at thirty and grow fat is nothing but a spiteful idiotic lie.

EDMUND (making peace) Well, suppose we say he'll retire at thirty-five and just put on a little flesh and live to a ripe old age, fighting his battles over again.

LEO. Over a gallon of beer in the saloon bar.

ELSIE. If your head wasn't too full of poetry for anything important, you'd know Jack's a teetotaller. He's never entered a public house and he never will.

EDMUND. If I were you, Leo, I wouldn't quarrel. I should make a poem about it.

ELSIE. It's all he's fit for. Lampooning a great man. I tell you, uncle, Jack Metherell can do what he likes in Blackton. If he cared to put up for Parliament, no other man would make a show.

LEO. Oh, the fellow's popular. They all love Jack.

ELSIE. Popular. There isn't a woman in the town but would sell her soul to marry him.

EDMUND. This seems to be the old Pagan worship of the body.

LEO. The mob must have a hero. Prize-fighting's illegal and cricket's slow, so it's the footballer's turn to-day to be an idol.

ELSIE. Look here, you can judge for yourself this afternoon.

LEO. Are you coming to the match, uncle?

EDMUND. Yes. I'm curious to see it. I suppose you're not going?

LEO. Oh, I shall go.

EDMUND. Really? I had gathered that you don't like football.

LEO. I don't like funerals or weddings either, but they're all the sort of family function one goes to as a duty.

ELSIE. A duty. Will you believe me, he never misses a match, uncle?

LEO. If you want to know, I go for professional reasons.

EDMUND. Professional?

LEO. I am training myself to be a close observer of my fellow men, and in a football crowd I can study human passions in the raw. To the earnest student of psychology the interest is enormous.

ELSIE. Yes. You wait for his psychological shout when Blackton score a goal. You'll know then if his lungs are weak. We go because we like it and so does he, only we're not ashamed of our tastes and he is. Wait till Jack Metherel comes on the field this afternoon in the old red and gold of the Blackton Rovers and——

(Austin Whitworth enters while she speaks and interrupts her. Without being grossly fat, Austin is better covered than Edmund, whose elder brother he is. Without exaggeration, his lounge suit suggests sporting tendencies. His manner is less confident than that of Edmund, the successful carver-out of a career, and at times curiously deferential to his brother. Obviously a nice fellow and, not so obviously, in some difficulty. With his children he is on friendly chaffing terms, so habitually getting the worst of the chaff that he is in danger of becoming a nonentity in his own house. He wears a moustache, which, like his remaining hair, is grey. Florence follows him.).

AUSTIN. But Metherell won't.

ELSIE. What. Has Jack hurt himself at practice? Austin. No.

LEO. What's up with him?

AUSTIN. Nothing.

ELSIE. Then why isn't he playing?

AUSTIN. He is playing.

ELSIE. You just said——

AUSTIN. He won't wear the Blackton colours. He's playing for Birchester. He's transferred.

ELSIE. You've transferred Jack Metherell! Father, you're joking.

AUSTIN. No.

ELSIE (tensely). I'll never forgive you. He's the only man on the team who's Blackton born and bred. The rest are all foreigners.

FLORENCE. Who've you got to put in his place? There isn't another centre forward amongst them.

AUSTIN. There's Angus.

FLORENCE. Angus! He can't sprint for toffee, and his shooting's the limit.

AUSTIN. Well, you've to make the best you can of Angus. Metherell belongs to Birchester now.

ELSIE. I don't know what you're thinking about, father. Are you mad? What did you do it for?

AUSTIN. Money, my dear, which the Club needs badly.

ELSIE. It'll need it worse if we lose to-day and drop to the second division.

AUSTIN. We must not lose to-day.

FLORENCE. You're asking for it. Transferring Metherell. The rest are a pack of rotters.

AUSTIN. They've got to fight for their lives to-day. Birchester offered a record fee on condition I fixed at once. I was there last night with Metherell and he signed on for them.

FLORENCE. It's a howling shame.

LEO. And over Blackton Rovers was written Ichabod, their glory is departed.

ELSIE. Father, do you mind if I go? I might say some of the things I'm thinking if I stayed.

FLORENCE. I'll come too. I wish to goodness I was playing hockey. It won't be fun to see Jack Metherell play against us.

(Florence at door,)

AUSTIN. It wasn't for fun that I transferred him.

ELSIE. No. Worse. For money. You've told us that and—oh, I'd better go.

(Exeunt Flo and Elsie.)

AUSTIN. Go with them, Leo.

LEO. Shall I?

AUSTIN. Please.

(Exit Leo.)

Well, Edmund?

EDMUND (puzzled). Well, Austin?

AUSTIN. Now you can judge exactly how pressing my necessities are. You've heard it all.

EDMUND. Really? You've only talked football.

AUSTIN. Football is all. I'm sorry I got in last night too late to have a chat with you, but (shuddering) what I was doing yesterday is public property this morning.

EDMUND. You mean about the man Metherell?

AUSTIN. Yes.

EDMUND. I understand some other club has bought him from you. Are footballers for sale?

AUSTIN. Er—in a sense.

EDMUND. And why have you sold him if he's a valuable man?

AUSTIN. He's invaluable. If ever there was a one-man team, that team is ours. I've seen the others stand around and watch Metherell win matches by himself. But to-day money is more essential than the man.

EDMUND. I'm still puzzled. Is football a business then?

AUSTIN. Of course. That's the worst of burying yourself in London. You never know anything. Football clubs to-day are limited companies.

EDMUND. I fancy I had heard that.

AUSTIN. Well, broadly speaking, and not so broadly either, I am the limited company that runs Blackton Rovers. You never cared for sport. I was always keen. In the old amateur days, I played for Blackton while you went country walks and studied law. Football's always meant a lot to me. It means life or death to-day.

EDMUND. That's a strong way of talking about a game, Austin.

AUSTIN. Life or death, Edmund. Blackton's been my passion. It's not a town that's full of rich men, and the others buttoned up their pockets. Employers of labour too, who know as well as I do that football is an antidote to strikes, besides keeping the men in better condition by giving them somewhere to go instead of pubs. I've poured money out like water, but the spring's run dry and other Clubs are richer. They can buy better players. They bought them from me.

EDMUND. Have the men no choice?

AUSTIN. Up to a point. But footballers aren't sentimentalists and rats desert a sinking ship. The one man who stuck to me was Metherell. He's a Blackton lad, and he liked to play for his native town. To-day, he's gone. I made him go for the money I needed. The Club's been losing matches. We were knocked out of the Cup Tie in the first round. Lose to-day and Blackton Rovers go down to the second division. My Club in the second division!

EDMUND. Does that matter so much—apart from sentimental reasons?

AUSTIN. It matters this much. That there'll never be another dividend. The gate money for the second division game's no use to me.

EDMUND. But surely, if your public's got the football habit they'll go on coming.

AUSTIN. Not to a second division team. They'll drink a pint or two less during the week and travel on Saturdays to the nearest first division match.

EDMUND. So much for their loyalty.

AUSTIN. They don't want loyalty. They want first class football, and if I can't give it them, they'll go where they can get it. As it is, the Club's on the brink of bankruptcy, and I'm the Club.

EDMUND. Then your men had better win to-day.

AUSTIN. They must.

EDMUND. And if—supposing they don't?

AUSTIN. That's why I brought you here. To look into things. I can't face ruin myself.

EDMUND. Ruin? It's as bad as that?

AUSTIN. Oh, I daresay you're thinking me a fool.

EDMUND. I think your sense of proportion went astray.

AUSTIN. All my money's in it. I don't care for myself. I had value for it all the day four years ago when Blackton won the Cup at the Crystal Palace, but it's been a steady decline ever since. What troubles me is, it's so rough on the children.

EDMUND. Have you told them?

AUSTIN. What's the use? Leo's got no head for business and the girls are—girls.

EDMUND. Yes. Tell me, what are you doing with Leo?

AUSTIN. Doing? Well, Leo's is a decorative personality, and he has a lung, poor lad. Leo's not made for wear.

EDMUND. Rubbish! If he's made you feel that, he's a clever scamp, with a taste for laziness and a gift for deception.

AUSTIN. Well, I do feel about Leo like a barndoor fowl that has hatched out a peacock.

EDMUND. Peacock! Yes, for vanity. A little work would do the feathers no harm.

AUSTIN. I can't be hard on a boy with his trouble.

EDMUND. I foresee a full week-end, Austin. And I thought I was coming down for a quiet time in the bosom of my family.

AUSTIN. Yes, we've been great family men, Edmund, you and I.

EDMUND (hastily). Well, we won't go into that again.

AUSTIN. Yes, we will. We quarrelled over Debussy. Come into the music-room and I'll play the thing over to you now. If you don't admit it's great, I'll——

EDMUND. We've other matters to discuss, Austin. This isn't the time for music.

AUSTIN. Yes, it is. Music makes me forget. Some men take to drink. I go to the piano.

(Enter Florence and Elsie.)

ELSIE. Father, do you want any lunch?

AUSTIN (looking at watch). By Jove, yes. Time's getting on. I'll play that Debussy thing afterwards, Edmund. Coming, girls?

ELSIE. No, thank you, father. Neither Flo nor I feel we can sit down to table with you just yet. We've had ours.

AUSTIN. You've been quick about it. Where's Leo?

FLORENCE. Stuffing himself with cold beef. Men have no feelings.

EDMUND. Surely Leo must have a feeling of hunger.

ELSIE. It's indecent to be hungry after hearing of father's treachery to Blackton.

AUSTIN. Treachery!

FLORENCE. Some of my tears fell in the salad bowl, and I hope they'll poison you.

EDMUND. Be careful what you're saying, Florence. Is that the way to talk to your father?

FLORENCE. No. That's nothing to the way I ought to talk to him.

EDMUND. Well, I know if I'd addressed my father like that——

FLORENCE. It's a long time since you had a father to address, Uncle Edmund. We bring our fathers up differently to-day.

EDMUND. If you only knew what your father——

AUSTIN (taking his arm). It doesn't matter, Edmund. Come to lunch.

(Exeunt Edmund and Austin.)

FLORENCE. Yes, it doesn't matter if the Rovers are defeated, but there's beef and beer in the next room and the heavens would fall if food were neglected.

ELSIE. Oh, I don't care if they are beaten. The Rovers don't interest me without Metherell.

FLORENCE. I don't believe they ever did. You're no true sportswoman, Elsie. You always thought more about the man than the game. You might be in love with Metherell.

ELSIE. Yes, I might.

FLORENCE. Perhaps you are.

ELSIE. Is there a woman in Blackton who doesn't admire him?

FLORENCE. Oh, I admire him. But that's not loving.

ELSIE. No. That isn't loving.

FLORENCE. You sound jolly serious about it.

ELSIE. Do you realize that now he's transferred he'll have to live in Birchester—two hundred miles away?

FLORENCE. Yes, I suppose so.

ELSIE. What are our chances of seeing him?

FLORENCE. Once a year or so when Birchester play here, instead of about every alternate Saturday.

ELSIE. I've been seeing him oftener than that.

FLORENCE. Do you mean you've been meeting him?

ELSIE (breaking down on Flo's shoulder, to her great embarrassment). Flo, I do love him and I don't care who knows it, and now he'll have to leave Blackton, and I——

FLORENCE. Steady, old girl. I'm a bit out of my depth myself, but I'll do my best for you with father.

ELSIE (braced up). Father wouldn't stop me.

FLORENCE. He might try. Jack isn't quite our class, in a general way of speaking, is he?

ELSIE. Class! What is our class? We're nobodies.

FLORENCE. Still, as things go in Blackton we're rather upper crust, wouldn't you say?

ELSIE. Grandfather began life as a mechanic's labourer.

FLORENCE. Did he? I've never worried about our pedigree, but you wouldn't think it to look at him. (Looking at his portrait.)

ELSIE. Oh, he made money. One of the good old grinding, saving sort. But he began a good deal lower down than Jack. Jack's father was an undertaker.

FLORENCE. An undertaker!

ELSIE (hotly). Well, I suppose undertakers can have children like other people.

FLORENCE. Oh, I've no objections

ELSIE. I've no objections either.

FLORENCE. I daresay not—to the father. He's dead. But the mother isn't.

ELSIE. What's the matter with his mother?

FLORENCE. Haven't you seen her?

ELSIE. Jack's shirked introducing me, if you want to know.

FLORENCE. Well, I have seen her, and——

ELSIE. Well?

FLORENCE. She's a hard nut to crack.

ELSIE. I'll crack her if she needs it. If I want to marry a man, I marry him. I don't mind telling parents about it, but I don't ask their permission. That sort of thing went out about the time motor cars came in.

FLORENCE. Then why haven't you told father before this?

ELSIE. Because Jack's old-fashioned and thinks he ought to speak to father first. He's got a perfectly ridiculous respect for father.

FLORENCE. Father's his employer. We don't think much of father, but I expect there are people who regard him as quite a big man.

ELSIE. That needn't have made Jack a coward. As father's ceased to employ him perhaps he'll get his out-of-date interview over now. (She runs suddenly to window.)

FLORENCE. What's the matter?

ELSIE. I'm sure I heard a ring.

FLORENCE. You've got sharp ears. Do you mean to tell me that in this room you can hear a bell in the kitchen?

ELSIE (opening window). It might be Jack.

FLORENCE (following her). Don't you know whether it is?

ELSIE. I can't see any one.

FLORENCE. But I thought people in your case didn't need to see. Don't you feel his unseen presence in your bones like you feel a thunderstorm?

(They are both in the window bay. Barnes, the butler, shows in Jack Metherell. Jack is dark and handsome with traces of coarseness, tall and of strong appearance, clean-shaven, dressed rather cheaply hut not vulgarly. A modest fellow, unspoiled by popular acclaim and simple-minded though successful. He remains near the door, not seeing the girls. Florence restrains Elsie.)

BARNES. I will let Mr. Whitworth know you are here. Jack. Thank you.

(Barnes half closes door, then returns.)

BARNES. Mr. Metherell, I was thinking of having a little money on the team this afternoon. Can I take it from you that it's safe?

JACK. It depends which team you put it on.

BARNES. Why, the Rovers, of course.

JACK. Do you want to win your bet?

BARNES. I do that.

JACK. Then put it on Birchester.

BARNES. Really, Mr. Metherell?

JACK. Really.

(Barnes pauses, then.)

BARNES. I will inform Mr. Whitworth that you are here.

(Exit Barnes. Jack watches him close door, then goes to bookcase, examines books, takes one out and begins to read studiously. Florence motions Elsie to remain and comes forward.)

FLORENCE. Good-morning, Mr. Metherell.

JACK (closing book quietly). Good morning, Miss Florence. Florence. Are you much of a reader?

JACK. I'm striving to improve my mind.

FLORENCE (taking the book). Good gracious, you've got hold of Plato.

JACK. Yes. I have read him in the Everyman Edition, but I see this is a different translation by a Mr. Jowett.

FLORENCE. How learned you must be.

JACK. Not I, more's the pity. We've two members in the Mutual Improvement League at our Sunday School who can read Plato in the original. I wish I could.

FLORENCE. Do you? I'll put it back (replacing book). You'll have no use for Plato in a minute.

JACK. Why not, Miss Florence?

(Florence laughs and exit, leaving him looking after her. Elsie comes forward and puls her hands over his eyes.)

JACK. It's Elsie.

ELSIE. Yes. It's Elsie. (Facing him.) Aren't you going to kiss me, Jack?

JACK. In your father's house?

ELSIE. It's as good as any other place.

JACK. No, it isn't. Not till I have asked his leave.

ELSIE. You've kissed me in the fields.

JACK. I know. I've compromised with my conscience.

ELSIE. Jack, if the rest of you was as antiquated as your conscience, you'd be a doddering octogenarian instead of the liveliest player in the League. Have you come now to ask father's leave?

JACK. I've come because he told me to last night. I might ask his leave though, now. But I think I ought to ask my mother first.

ELSIE. They'd better both be told at once. If you're going to Birchester, I'm coming with you.

JACK. You've heard that then?

ELSIE. Yes. Did you hear what I said?

JACK. About coming with me?

ELSIE. Yes.

JACK. I'm willing if they are.

ELSIE. Who are "they"?

JACK. Your father, and my mother. Suppose the banns go up next Sunday, we could get married in a month and make one bite of the wedding and the testimonial do they'll want to give me.

ELSIE. I couldn't be ready in a month, Jack.

JACK. Well, I'm ready any time.

(She kisses him.)

Oh, now Elsie, that's a foul. You know——

ELSIE. You didn't kiss me. I kissed you. I do what I like in this house.

JACK. It's a big house, lass. You'll find less breathing space in my seven-and-six a week house in a row, with my mother in it, and all.

ELSIE (pulling him to the arm-chair and sitting herself on its arm). I've thought it all out, Jack. It won't be a house in a row. There are moors round Birchester, and we're going to live outside the town in a dinky little cottage where the air will always keep you at the top of your form, and I shall have a garden to look after and be handy for the links. I'm going to teach you golf. I shall drop hockey when I'm married. Married life demands sacrifices.

JACK. Yes. You're going to sacrifice a lot.

ELSIE. You're not going to begin all that over again, are you? Do you want to marry me?

JACK. Like nothing on earth.

ELSIE. Then I get you and nothing that I lose counts against that gain.

JACK. You've a fine sweet way of putting things. I just go funny-like all over and the words won't come. But I love you, lass, I love you. I'll be a good husband to you.

ELSIE. It's heaven to hear you say you love me. I want no sweeter words to come than those, I don't deserve it, Jack. Who am I? Elsie Whitworth. Nothing. And you're the grandest, strongest player of your time.

JACK (rising). You think too much of football, Elsie.

ELSIE. That's impossible.

JACK. You do. Football's as good a way as another of earning a week's wages, but that's all it is.

ELSIE. It's the thing you do supremely well.

JACK. Yes. Now and for a few more years maybe, but I'll be an old man for football soon.

ELSIE. That's why I mean to teach you golf. Don't I tell you I have thought about it, Jack? You're going to be as brilliant at golf as now you are at football. I'll never lose my pride in you, your huge, hard muscles and your clean fit body.

JACK. It's a great thing to be strong and master of your strength.

ELSIE. Your splendid strength! Your swiftness and your grace.

JACK. But it's a greater to be clever, and I'd give up all my strength if I could write a poem like the one your brother wrote in the Blackton Evening Times.

ELSIE (contemptuously). Leo! That weakling.

JACK. He may be, but he's got a brain.

ELSIE. You're twenty times the cleverer.

JACK. Then I'm good for something better than football. I'm up in football now as high as I can get. I used to dream of being called the finest player in the League. They've called me that these last two seasons and my dream's grown bigger. I'm honoured for my play. I'd like to gain some honour now for work.

ELSIE. You've just told me football is work.

JACK. I mean brain work. A footballer's a labouring man. And I want you, Elsie. I look to you to lead me to the higher path.

ELSIE (dejectedly). You think I can!

JACK. I know you can. You've got a fancy now for football, but it's not your real self. You're a cultured woman.

ELSIE (interrupting). Culture doesn't count.

JACK (proceeding). You've gone beyond the things that puzzle me. You're at the other side. Why, Elsie, there are things in Browning that I can't make out, and Walter Pater has me beat to atoms.

ELSIE. Those aren't the real things, Jack.

JACK. They're real enough to be the things that made me want you. I could pick and choose from lots of women fit to talk of football to me, but I'm tired of football. You're the only woman who can talk to me of other things—and you won't.

ELSIE. You're tired of football!

JACK. Not of the game. Sick of the eternal jaw about it.

ELSIE. Well, I'm sick of books.

JACK. You can't be that. Books last.

ELSIE. Your fame will last. Books aren't the real thing.

JACK. Then what is real?

ELSIE. Blood. Flesh and blood. I'd burn every book in this room for the glory of another rush like yours when you scored your second goal last Saturday. It may have lasted thirty seconds, but it was worth a wilderness of books.

JACK. It was worth just half a column in the Athletic News.

ELSIE. It's worth my love for you. It's not your brain I'm wanting, Jack. It's you. You're splendid as you are. Don't try to hide behind a dreary cloud of culture. It's better fun to be alive all over than to crawl through life with a half-dead body and a half-baked mind.

JACK. Life's not all fun.

ELSIE. It isn't, but it ought to be, and for you and me it's going to be, and if you don't stop looking serious, I'll upset you by kissing you again.

JACK. Don't do that, Elsie. It isn't right yet.

ELSIE. Jack, you've a bilious conscience. It's the only part of you that isn't gloriously fit.

JACK. Give me till I've seen your father and then perhaps you'll tire of being kissed a long while sooner than I tire of kissing you.

ELSIE It's so stupid to ask father about a thing like that. It's not his lips you're going to kiss. It's mine.

JACK. I've to satisfy my conscience, Elsie.

ELSIE. The poor thing needs a lot of nourishment.

(Enter Austin and Edmund.)

Don't stint it.

AUSTIN. Good morning, Metherell. Elsie, we've to talk business.

ELSIE. Mayn't I stay? Men are so funny when they're serious.

AUSTIN (holding door). You would find no entertainment this time.

ELSIE (passing him). That's all you know about it.

(Exit Elsie.)

AUSTIN. Sit down, Metherell. Oh, this is my brother, Mr. Edmund Whitworth.

EDMUND (shaking). I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Metherell.

(They sit down, Austin commanding, the room from the club-fender.)

AUSTIN. Very busy that train we came home by last night, Metherell.

JACK. Yes, very full.

AUSTIN. I couldn't get a chance of talking to you. Now, it's about this match to-day.

JACK. Yes?

AUSTIN. You know how tremendously important it is for Blackton.

JACK. Blackton 'ull be a second division team next season.

AUSTIN. I hope not, Metherell.

JACK (without arrogance). With me playing against them?

AUSTIN. I still hope not. Blackton must not lose today.

JACK. I don't see how they can help it.

EDMUND. You've a good opinion of yourself, I notice, Mr. Metherell.

JACK. Blackton Rovers without me aren't a team at all. They're certain to be beaten.

AUSTIN. You say that as if you don't mind if they are.

JACK. I belong to Birchester now, Mr. Whitworth.

AUSTIN. Come, Metherell, you've belonged to Birchester for half a day. You belonged to Blackton for five years. This match can make no difference to Birchester. They're half way up the list. It's critical for Blackton. You've played all these years for Blackton and you've thought Blackton all your life. You can't change your allegiance all in a moment. You can't pretend you'd like to see Blackton go down.

JACK. Oh, I've a fondness for Blackton. I don't deny it.

AUSTIN. Metherell, Blackton must win to-day.

JACK. They might have done if you hadn't transferred me.

AUSTIN. My hand was forced.

JACK. So you told me.

AUSTIN. At heart you're still a Blackton man, Metherell.

JACK. Maybe. But at Football I've signed on to play with Birchester. I may be just as sorry as yourself to see Blackton go down to-day, but as centre forward of Birchester United it's my bounden duty to do my best to send the Rovers down.

AUSTIN. Look here, Metherell, you see the hole I'm in. What am I to do?

JACK. I've no suggestions.

AUSTIN. What about the referee?

JACK. Eh?

AUSTIN. Anything to be done there?

JACK. I don't understand.

AUSTIN. Could I square him?

JACK. Not unless you want to see him lynched.

AUSTIN. Then you're the only hope.

JACK. It's a poor hope if you're looking for anything of that from me.

AUSTIN. I'm asking you to be loyal to Blackton for another day.

JACK. Were you loyal when you transferred me?

AUSTIN. Yes: loyal to Blackton's very existence. Don't play your best this afternoon. That's all I ask.

JACK. I always play my best.

EDMUND. Are you never out of form, Mr. Metherell?

JACK. I play at the top of whatever form I'm in.

EDMUND. Couldn't you make it convenient to be in particularly bad form to-day? After your long journey to and from Birchester yesterday, a tired feeling's only natural.

JACK. I'm feeling very fit. Do you know you're asking me to sell a match?

AUSTIN (firmly). Yes.

JACK. I couldn't square it with my conscience. I really couldn't, Mr. Whitworth. I know it means a lot to you, but I'm not that sort, and you ought to know it.

AUSTIN. Your conscience might be—salved.

JACK. Salved?

EDMUND. Yes. Just let us know how much you consider will cover all moral and intellectual damages, will you?

JACK (to Austin). I'm glad it wasn't you who spoke that word.

AUSTIN. I endorse it, Metherell. I told you last night how I stood. The loss of to-day's match may involve my ruin.

JACK. As bad as that? I'm sorry.

AUSTIN. Man, can't you see I'm not romancing? Do you think I'd come to you with this if I wasn't desperate?

JACK. It's a pretty desperate thing to do. Suppose I blabbed?

AUSTIN. Yes. There's that. It ought to show you just how desperate I am. You know, and no one better, how this Club's been run. You know there's blackguardism in the game, but Blackton hasn't stooped. Whatever other clubs have done, Blackton has stood for sport, the straight, the honest game. The Blackton Club's my life's work, Metherell. I might have done a nobler thing, but there it is. I chose the Club. I gave it life and kept it living, and the time's come now when I can't keep it living any more. Twice top of the League and once winners of the Cup. It's had a great past, Metherell, an honourable past. It's earned the right to live, and now it's in your hands to kill the Blackton Club and end the thing I've fostered till it's seemed I only lived for that one thing. It isn't much to ask. A little compromise to save the Club you've played for all these years, to save the club and me.

JACK. I cannot do it, Mr. Whitworth.

(Austin sinks hopelessly into armchair.)

EDMUND (briskly). Now you referred to your conscience, Mr. Metherell. My experience is that when a man does that he's open to negotiation.

JACK. Money won't buy my conscience, sir.

EDMUND (half mockingly). Well, are you open to barter?

JACK. No. The thing I want from you is no more to be bought than my conscience is.

AUSTIN (without hope). You do want something from me, then?

JACK. I want to marry Elsie.

EDMUND (shocked). My God!

AUSTIN. Does she know? (Rising.)

JACK. Does she know? She says we're to be married and that's all about it, but I'm old-fashioned and I want your leave.

EDMUND. My niece and a professional footballer!

AUSTIN. Steady, Edmund. Now, Metherell, just let us see where we stand. You propose to help Birchester to beat Blackton.

JACK. I'll do my best.

AUSTIN. And you think I'll let you ruin me first and marry my daughter afterwards?

JACK. I won't buy Elsie from you at the price of my professional honour.

AUSTIN. Professional fiddlesticks! The thing's done every day.

JACK. Not by a Blackton lad. I've learnt the game you taught me, Mr. Whitworth, the straight, clean Blackton game. I'll not forget my school even at the bidding of the head. I'm not anxious to be suspended for dishonest play.

AUSTIN. Only incompetents get suspended. You needn't fear. You're skilful.

JACK. Not at roguery.

EDMUND. You're talking straight, Mr. Metherell.

JACK. Yes. It's you that's talking crooked.

(Enter Elsie.)

ELSIE. May I come in now?

AUSTIN. No. We're busy.

ELSIE. Thank you. (Closing door.) You don't get rid of me twice with that dear old business bogey. I expect Jack's made an awful mess of it. Has he told you about us, father?

AUSTIN. No. Yes. Go away. We're talking seriously.

ELSIE. Yes. You all look very foolish. Is it settled, Jack?

JACK. No.

ELSIE. What's the trouble? Is father being ridiculous?

EDMUND. Upon my word, Elsie——

ELSIE. Oh, that's all right, uncle Ed. It does father no end of good to be talked to like that. Jack, I find I can be ready in a month after all, so that's all right.

EDMUND. Ready for what, girl?

ELSIE. My wedding, uncle. You'd better start thinking about your present.

AUSTIN. But——

ELSIE. Hasn't Jack told you we're to be married?

AUSTIN. He's told me he wants to marry you, but——

ELSIE. Then what is there to argue about? Men do love making a fuss about nothing and fancying themselves important. Come along, Jack. You're going to take me down to the ground.

EDMUND. Well, I'm——

ELSIE. Oh, dear no, Uncle. You're not.

(Elsie goes off with Jack. They reach door.)

CURTAIN.

ACT II

The office of Blackton Football Club is situated under a stand, the slope of which forms its roof, down to some eight feet from its floor. In the perpendicular side are the windows, overlooking the ground. Used as much for the entertainment of visitors as for office work, the room contains only a desk with revolving chair, and a sofa to indicate its titular purpose, and for the rest is a comfortably appointed club-room. On the walls are sporting prints and, by the desk, a file of posters, the uppermost advertising the day's match. A door gives access, and a second door leads to the ambulance-room.

(Hugh Martin, the Club Secretary, sits at the open desk. Austin enters.)

AUSTIN. Well, Martin.

MARTIN. Good afternoon, Mr. Whitworth.

AUSTIN. What do you estimate the gate at? Five hundred pounds?

MARTIN (rising). The returns are not in yet, but hardly that much.

AUSTIN (looking out of window). I should call it a twenty thousand crowd by the looks of it.

MARTIN (not looking out). Not far short. But (awkwardly) there's been a little accident, sir.

AUSTIN. Accident?

MARTIN. Oh, it's happened before. They rushed the turnstiles on the shilling side.

AUSTIN. I say, Martin, that's too bad. Just when we need every penny we can screw.

MARTIN. About three thousand got in free before the police could master the rush.

AUSTIN. That Chief Constable's an incompetent ass. He never sends us enough men.

MARTIN. Fewer than usual to-day. There's a socialist demonstration on the recreation ground, and that's taken away a lot of police.

AUSTIN. Idiot! Does he think Blackton people will go to a political meeting when there's a football match?

MARTIN. As you say, sir, he's a fool.

AUSTIN (sitting at desk). No use claiming for the loss either. Pass me the cheque-book, Martin. Those people with the mortgage on the stands threaten to foreclose unless we pay on Monday. I'd a letter this morning.

MARTIN (opening safe and passing cheque-book from it). Can we meet it, sir?

AUSTIN. Yes. Metherell's transfer fee is in the Bank.

MARTIN. That brightens our sky.

AUSTIN. Think so, Martin?

(Martin replaces Austin at desk, signs cheque, tears it out and then puts book back in safe.)

MARTIN. I never thought we should live through the season. And here we are at the end of it still alive and kicking.

AUSTIN. They'd better kick to some purpose to-day, Martin, or——-

MARTIN. It'll be all right, sir.

AUSTIN. You're a sanguine fellow. Suppose we lose. Second Division. No dividends. No dividends, no Club. No Club, no Secretary, Martin.

MARTIN. Don't talk about it, sir. It's not losing my job. That doesn't matter. But the thought of Blackton going down is more than I can bear.

AUSTIN. Yes. It's ugly. You're a good fellow, Martin.

MARTIN. Don't mention it, sir. I love the game.

AUSTIN. The game! Yes. Always the game.

MARTIN. I often wish this side didn't exist, though it is my bread and butter.... That's the whistle. They're playing.

AUSTIN. Yes. Didn't you know? They'd begun before I came in here.

MARTIN (reproachfully). Oh, sir!

AUSTIN. Don't let me keep you from your place.

MARTIN. Aren't you coming?

AUSTIN. No. I shan't see much of this match, Martin.

MARTIN. When so much depends upon it!

AUSTIN. Yes. That's why.

MARTIN (consolingly). But you forget things when you watch the game.

AUSTIN (kindly). Go and forget them, Martin.

(Enter Florence, in outdoor spring costume, excitedly.)

FLORENCE. Father, aren't you coming? You've missed it all. We've scored a goal in the first five minutes.

AUSTIN. Scored already! Thank God.

FLORENCE. The most glorious goal you ever saw. Black-ton are playing up like little heroes. It's the match of the season.

(Martin slips out.)

Angus is in terrific form. I take back what I said about him. Metherell himself couldn't do better. He had the Birchester goalee beat to smithereens. I tell you it's tremendous.

AUSTIN. How's Metherell playing?

FLORENCE. Against us.

AUSTIN (impatiently). Yes. But how?

FLORENCE. How does he generally play?

AUSTIN. Like that? He's in form?

FLORENCE. It's worth a guinea a minute to watch him. And you're missing it.

AUSTIN. I'll go on missing it, Flo.

FLORENCE (looking through window). Well, I won't.

(Exit Florence. Austin sits down in desk-chair, staring at the wall, blankly.)

AUSTIN. Metherell!

(Enter from the ambulance-room Dr. Wells, a young sporting doctor, nice-looking, with dark hair and moustache. He is passing through to the outer door. Austin starts.)

Oh, it's you, Doctor. You startled me.

WELLS. I beg your pardon, Mr. Whitworth.

AUSTIN. My fault for day-dreaming. (Rising.) Ready for contingencies in your torture chamber?

WELLS. All clear. You look rather like a contingency yourself.

AUSTIN. I'm—I'm nervous.

WELLS (sympathetically). It's a trying occasion. Don't you keep a bottle of whisky in that desk?

AUSTIN (smiling). Don't you know I do?

WELLS (grinning). I have some recollection of it. Take my strictly unprofessional advice and have a good strong nip.

AUSTIN (at desk cupboard). Have one yourself?

WELLS. No, thanks. I'm going to look out for accidents.

AUSTIN. Ghoul!

WELLS. Every man to his trade.

(Exit Wells. Austin mixes drink. Enter Edmund.)

EDMUND. Hullo! That's bad, Austin.

AUSTIN. Doctor's orders, Edmund. Will you?

EDMUND. No, thanks.

AUSTIN. How's the game?

EDMUND. Rowdy. You're not watching it?

AUSTIN. No. I'm praying for it.

EDMUND. So far the gods have heard your prayer.

AUSTIN. Metherell hasn't. I hear he's playing his best game against us.

EDMUND. I'm no judge.

AUSTIN. Are you tired of it already?

EDMUND. I find it just a trifle wearing. Perhaps I'm tod old to appreciate a new sensation. The excitement's too concentrated. And the noise! I'm deafened.

AUSTIN. It's quiet enough in here. Those windows are double.

EDMUND. They need to be. Austin, about Elsie.

AUSTIN. Yes?

EDMUND. And this footballer. You'll have to put your foot down.

AUSTIN. I don't flatter myself I shall have much to say in the matter.

EDMUND. Hang it, you're her father.

AUSTIN. You heard what she said.

EDMUND. To my blank astonishment, I did.

AUSTIN. Oh, I'm used to it.

EDMUND. Pull yourself together, Austin. You've drifted till your authority's flouted by your own children.

AUSTIN. You know, Edmund, that sort of talk was all right in our day, but my children belong to the new generation, and the new generation regards parental authority as a played-out superstition.

EDMUND. Nonsense. Be supine and they'll tread on you. You've only your own slackness to blame for it if you're flouted.

AUSTIN. That, again, is the view of our time. We're old codgers to-day, Edmund, you and I.

EDMUND. Confound it, Austin, you're not going to take this lying down!

AUSTIN. No. I shall fight the fight of my generation against the next. I shall lose, of course.

EDMUND. You mustn't lose.

AUSTIN. Why should I be an exception to a natural law?

EDMUND. Natural law! Natural laziness, you mean. You've simply let your children get out of hand through sheer weakness, and if you don't care to exert yourself to save Elsie from a gross mésalliance, I will.

AUSTIN. Why's it a mésalliance?

EDMUND. Good heavens, man—a footballer!

AUSTIN. There spoke the acclimatized Londoner. Black-ton won't be scandalized like Sevenoaks.

EDMUND. Oh, hang your smug imitation democracy! You don't believe that, Austin.

AUSTIN. I always believe in the inevitable.

EDMUND. It's not inevitable, It's incredible. Now, I'll tell you what I'll do, Austin. I'll take Elsie back with me to London and cure her of this infatuation with a jolly good round of the theatres and the shops.

AUSTIN. My dear fellow! The theatres where she'll see nothing but romantic love stories and the shops where she'll go under your nose to buy her trousseau. Try it, Edmund. You'll be astonished at the result.

EDMUND. It seems my métier to be astonished to-day. First I assist at an attempted bribery, and now it seems I'm to see my niece marry the incorruptible footballer.

AUSTIN. You're a bachelor. The modern child surprises you. As a father, I have ceased to be surprised.

EDMUND. As a father your idea of your duty is to stand idle while your daughter makes a sentimental mess of her life. I begin to thank my stars I'm a bachelor. At least I'm not henpecked by a rebellious family.

AUSTIN. There's no rebellion about it, Edmund. I date from the sixties, they from the nineties, and we rub along quite peacefully in mutual toleration of the different attitudes.

EDMUND. Tolerating the difference means that you give in to them every time.

AUSTIN. Not quite.

EDMUND. Then you won't give in to Elsie?

AUSTIN. I shall be loyal to my generation, Edmund. She will be loyal to hers,—and youth will fight for her.

EDMUND. That means you'll put up a protest for form's sake and give in gracefully when you think you've said enough to save your face.

AUSTIN. No. Not if I can help it.

EDMUND. Austin, you must help it. The thing's unthinkable. I'll help you to help it.

AUSTIN. I shall be glad of any assistance you can give me.

(Austin turns a little wistfully to window.)

EDMUND. You think I can't give much.

AUSTIN. Hullo! The game's stopped. I hadn't heard the whistle go.

EDMUND. I fancy I did a minute ago, without knowing its significance. What does it mean?

AUSTIN. Probably an accident. Heaven help us if it's one of our men!

(Enter Wells and Jack, who is in green-and-white football costume, soiled on the left side, with his left arm in an emergency sling. Elsie follows.)

ELSIE (anxiously). Father, Jack's broken his arm. Wells. Nothing very serious, Mr. Whitworth. I think it's only a simple fracture.

ELSIE. Only!

WELLS (taking Jack across). Come along in here, Metherell. I'll have it set before you know where you are.

AUSTIN (impulsively). Metherell.

JACK (as Wells opens door). Accidents will happen, Mr. Whitworth.

(Exit Wells with him, closing door.)

ELSIE. Doctors are callous beasts. (She opens door rand goes out with determination after them.)

AUSTIN (scoffing). Accident!

EDMUND. Why not? Don't they happen?

AUSTIN. After my proposition?

EDMUND. He scorned it.

AUSTIN. Second thoughts. I asked for bad play, but he's thinking of his reputation and he's broken his arm.

EDMUND. Deliberately?

AUSTIN. Yes.

EDMUND. Heroic measures, Austin.

AUSTIN. It's the last match of the season. He's all the summer months to get right in.

(Elsie returns.)

ELSIE. That doctor's turned me out.

AUSTIN. Of course. You've no right in there.

ELSIE. I've every right to be where Jack is suffering.

AUSTIN. He can suffer very well without your assistance.

ELSIE. You needn't be brutal about it, father.

AUSTIN. I'm not being brutal. The man's a professional footballer. He accepts the risk of a broken limb as a part of his occupation. Metherell's not a wounded hero.

EDMUND. No. He's simply a workman who'll doubtless receive proper compensation from his employers.

ELSIE. And from me.

AUSTIN. You!

ELSIE. This will hurry on our marriage, father. Jack needs attention now.

AUSTIN. Hasn't he got a mother?

ELSIE. No mother could love him as I do. No one can nurse him as tenderly as I shall.

AUSTIN. Nurse! A broken arm doesn't make an invalid of any one, especially a man in first-class physical condition.

ELSIE. I think it's very cruel of you to belittle Jack's injuries.

EDMUND. I wish you would stop calling him Jack.

ELSIE. It's his name. He wasn't christened John.

EDMUND. I refer to the impropriety of a young lady calling a workman by his Christian name.

ELSIE. As the young lady is going to be married to the workman in the shortest possible time, I fail to see where the impropriety comes in.

EDMUND. That is where we differ, my dear.

ELSIE. About impropriety?

EDMUND. No. About marriage.

ELSIE. Would you rather I lived with him without being married?

AUSTIN. Elsie!

ELSIE (coolly). Oh, it's all right, father. Uncle deserves a good shock. He's hopelessly suburban.

EDMUND (pompously). Elsie, I am older than you and——

ELSIE (pertly). Yes. That's your misfortune.

EDMUND (angrily). Will you allow me to speak without interrupting?

(Austin sits in the armchair.)

ELSIE. Yes, if you'll speak sensibly and won't put on side because your mind's grown old and pompous as well as your body.

AUSTIN. Elsie, I won't have this rudeness to your uncle.

ELSIE. My dear father, uncle is being stupid. The only way to combat stupidity is rudeness. Therefore, I am rude.

EDMUND (humouring her). I propose to speak sensibly according to my lights.

ELSIE (under her breath). Ancient lights.

EDMUND (reasoning). Now, suppose we do permit you to marry this——

ELSIE (reproducing his reasonable tone). Be careful, uncle. Talking of permission is on the border line.

EDMUND (avoiding irritability). Suppose you marry him, what interests can you have in common? I grant you he's a handsome specimen of manhood to-day, but retired athletes always run to seed.

AUSTIN (self-consciously). Hem!

EDMUND. And apart from the attraction of the flesh, what's left?

ELSIE (cordially). Oh, you are talking sense this time. It's difficult, but I shall manage him.

EDMUND. Shall you?

ELSIE (confidently). Oh yes. I couldn't do it if he were as old as you, because at your age a man's in a groove and sticks in it till he dies. Jack's not a modern, but he's young enough to learn. It's hardly credible, but at present he believes in Ruskin and Carlyle and reads Browning. Well, you know, I can't have a husband with a taste for Victorianism.

AUSTIN. Then why have him at all?

ELSIE. It's a curable disease.

EDMUND. He reads Browning!

ELSIE. Yes, but you needn't worry about that. I shall make a modern of him all right.

EDMUND. Do you mean to tell me a footballer reads Browning?

ELSIE. He can't always be at football. Oh yes. And Plato, only not in the original.

EDMUND. Why, the man's a scholar.

ELSIE. Did you think he was illiterate?

EDMUND. I'm afraid I have underrated him. Still, that only proves him an estimable member of his class. It doesn't alter the fact that his class isn't yours.

ELSIE (hotly). Class! What do I care for class? Elemental passions sweep away class distinctions.

EDMUND. That's a high falutin' name for a flirtation with a footballer.

ELSIE. It's a name I thought you'd understand. Personally I'd say I've got the sex clutch on and other things don't matter. Any more shots, uncle?

EDMUND. You needn't flatter yourself you've talked me into consenting to this marriage.

ELSIE. Nobody asked you, sir, she said.

EDMUND (angrily). Nobody——

ELSIE (easily conversational). Wouldn't it interest you to see how the game's going, uncle?

EDMUND (relieved). I think it would. But don't you think you've heard the last of me.

ELSIE (sympathetically). No, but you want time to think out a few more objections.

EDMUND. I am going purely out of desire to witness the match.

(Exit Edmund.)

ELSIE (looking after him). Poor dear. He tried his best.

AUSTIN (half rising). And I am going to try now.

ELSIE (pushing him gently hack into chair and sitting on its arm). Oh, I don't mind you. He tried like an outraged relation. You'll try like a pal.

AUSTIN. No. I'm going to be firm.

ELSIE. What a bore.

AUSTIN (seriously). You didn't expect me to be pleased about this, did you?

ELSIE (pouting). Why not, if I'm pleased? Jack isn't marrying you.

AUSTIN. Nor you, if I can help it.

ELSIE. But you can't help it, you know.

AUSTIN. Oh, I'm quite aware the stern parent isn't my game. But as pals, Elsie——

ELSIE (nestling up to him). Yes, father, as pals.

AUSTIN. As goose to goose, it's not the thing. Now, frankly, is Jack Metherell up to our weight?

ELSIE. He's above it.

AUSTIN. Above it?

ELSIE. Certainly. The condescension's his. He's a better footballer than ever you were, and you were no fool at football.

AUSTIN. Football isn't everything, Elsie!

ELSIE. Well, you play a decent hand at Bridge, but that's not much. Your golf's rotten. What else do you do well?

AUSTIN (pushing her aside, and rising). Really, Elsie!

ELSIE (still on the arm). Don't say "really." Tell me.

AUSTIN. I hope I'm fairly good at being a gentleman.

ELSIE. Doing, I said, not being.

AUSTIN (humbly). I—er—play the piano, you know.

ELSIE. Yes, but you're not a musician within the meaning of the Act. You play the piano like a third-rate professional, too good for a public-house and not good enough for the concert platform, whereas Jack's football makes him a certainty for the England team in any international match. You may have more money than he has——

AUSTIN (glancing at window). I'm not even sure of that.

ELSIE (triumphantly). Then you've absolutely nothing on your side except a stupid and obsolete class prejudice.

AUSTIN. Upon my word, Elsie——

ELSIE (coming to him, gently). Yes, I know I'm crushing, dear.

AUSTIN. You're pitiless. Youth always is.

ELSIE. Not always, father, but you shouldn't try to argue about love.

AUSTIN. I was arguing about marriage.

ELSIE (away from him). I suppose at your age it's natural to be cynical about marriage and pretend it's nothing to do with love. And then of course when you were young it used to be the fashion to mock at marriage. We take our duties to society seriously to-day.

AUSTIN. Are you proposing to marry Jack from a sense of duty?

ELSIE (wistfully). You'll be awfully proud of your grandchildren, father. They'll be most beautiful babies.

AUSTIN. You look ahead, young woman.

ELSIE. It's just as well I do. You're still worrying about a thing I settled weeks ago.

AUSTIN. Then why didn't you tell me weeks ago?

ELSIE. I hadn't told Jack then.

(Wells opens door, and enters with Jack, whose arm is in a splint and sling.)

WELLS (entering). You'd better go straight home now. Never mind about the match. I want you to avoid excitement for a awhile.

JACK. The match doesn't excite me.

WELLS. Then you can leave it without regret.

JACK (indicating his costume). In these?

WELLS. I'll go round to the dressing-room and bring your clothes here if you'll trust me not to pick your pockets.

JACK. There's nothing to pick. I've more sense than to take money into a dressing-tent.

AUSTIN. Can't you trust the others, Metherell?

JACK (drily). Yes, so long as they're not tempted.

WELLS. I won't be long. (Exit.)

ELSIE (watching Wells resentfully till he goes). Did he hurt you much, Jack?

JACK. Not to speak of.

(Austin watches her scornfully.)

ELSIE. Oh, you're brave. But you shall come to no more harm. I'll see you home safely.

AUSTIN (sarcastically, indicating door of the ambulance-room). You'll find cotton wool in there.

ELSIE. What for?

AUSTIN. To wrap him up in.

ELSIE. Don't be spiteful, father.

AUSTIN. Good heavens, girl, a broken arm is nothing.

(Jack sits wearily.)

ELSIE. Except that the arm happens to be Jack's.

AUSTIN. The civilized world will gasp at the great event.

ELSIE. The athletic world certainly will. It's all very well for you to joke. Your arm's not hurt. It's all a gain to you. If Blackton don't win with only ten men against them, they deserve shooting. This accident means a lot.

AUSTIN. I know what it means—better than you do. (Looking at Jack.)

JACK (jerking his head up). What's that?

AUSTIN. As you tactfully remarked, Metherell, accidents will happen.

JACK (rising). Don't you believe it was an accident?

ELSIE. What else could it be? Do you think he broke his arm for fun?

JACK (straight at Austin). It was an accident.

AUSTIN. No, my lad. It was a bargain.

JACK. I made no bargain.

AUSTIN (sneering). But you broke your arm.

JACK. By accident.

AUSTIN. A singularly opportune coincidence.

ELSIE. Father, what do you mean?

AUSTIN. You'd better ask Metherell that.

ELSIE (in puzzled appeal). Jack!

JACK. I'll say nothing.

ELSIE. Then what am I to think?

JACK. Think what you like.

ELSIE. I think you're a sportsman, Jack, and——

AUSTIN. I've known a sportsman do a bigger thing than break his arm for a woman.

ELSIE (suspiciously). A woman! What woman?

AUSTIN. You, my dear. And, as you said, Blackton are safe to win now.

(Wells, entering with Jack's clothes and boots, overhears Austin.)

WELLS. I'm not so sure of that, Mr. Whitworth. It's anybody's game. The score's one all.

AUSTIN (startled). Birchester have scored!

WELLS. Yes. Didn't you know? I'll look after Metherell. You're missing a good game.

ELSIE. Then you'd better go and watch it, Dr. Wells.

WELLS (slightly surprised). I will when I've helped Metherell to change.

JACK. I'm in no hurry. Don't put yourself about for me. Half time 'ull do.

WELLS. Well, it can't be far off that now. (Putting Jack's clothes over chair.) I should like to see something of this match. Is the arm painful?

JACK. It's sharpish.

WELLS (by desk). Pull yourself together with a dose of this. (Lifting whisky bottle.)

JACK. No, thanks. I'm a teetotaller.

(Austin is lighting a cigar.)

WELLS (authoritatively). And I'm a doctor, man.

JACK. That doesn't help my principles.

WELLS. Oh, all right. If you like to be stubborn. Are you coming, Mr. Whitworth? (Crossing to door.)

ELSIE. Yes. Do go, father. They'll be expecting to see you outside.

AUSTIN (grim). Yes—I'm going—to show them I can smile. Come along, Doctor.

(Exeunt Wells and Austin.)

ELSIE. Now, Jack. What's this all about?

JACK. Your father's making a mistake.

ELSIE. About what?

JACK (exasperated). It's a confidential matter, Elsie.

ELSIE. That means there's something you're afraid to tell me.

JACK. I'm not afraid. He spoke to me in private, and it's giving him away.

ELSIE. You can't give him away to me. I've lived at home too long for that.

JACK. I can't abuse his confidence.

ELSIE. Are you going to talk about your conscience again? Father said you broke your arm for my sake and I want to know what it means.

JACK. But I didn't, Elsie. It was an accident.

ELSIE. He thought not.

JACK. Yes. He's wrong.

ELSIE. Why should he think you did it intentionally? Jack (sullenly). Ask him.

ELSIE. He's just told me to ask you. Now stop being absurd, Jack, and tell me all about it.

JACK (reluctantly). I told him we wanted to be married—

(Elsie nods, smiling approval.)

—and he offered to strike a bargain. He wants Blackton to win, so I was to play a rotten game for Birchester.

ELSIE. And you couldn't do it.

JACK. No.

ELSIE (enthusiastically). No. You couldn't play badly if you tried, and so you broke your arm instead, for me. Jack, if I was proud of you before, I could worship you now. (Patting the sling.) Your arm, your poor, hurt arm, mangled for me. My hero, my lover and my king.

JACK (disgustedly). You think that too!

ELSIE. Think it! I know it. Don't pretend. It's too late now for modesty.

JACK. Modesty! Don't you see if I'd done that, forgotten my sportsmanship and sold a match for my private gain, I'd deserve to be kicked round the county?

ELSIE. No. I don't see it. You've hurt yourself for my sake, and that's enough to make of me the proudest woman in the land.

JACK. It's enough to prove me dishonest if it were true. Elsie (touching the arm). Isn't that true?

JACK. Don't I tell you that's an accident?

ELSIE. You've never had an accident before.

JACK. Not a serious one.

ELSIE. No. You're too great a master of the game. Accidents happen to the careless and incompetent.

JACK. Then I must be both. I fell and my arm twisted under me.

ELSIE. And you really didn't do it on purpose?

JACK (hurt). Elsie, don't you believe me?

ELSIE. It's so beastly to have to. I thought you were a perfect player, and you have an accident; and I thought you were a perfect lover, and you've been afraid to prove your love.

JACK (stirred up). Elsie, there are twenty thousand folk about this ground to-day and some of them have come to see the match, but more to see me play an honest game. They're just a football crowd, but there isn't a man upon this ground to-day but knows Jack Metherell is straight. It's left for you to say I ought to be a crook. You're great at golf and hockey. Is that the way you play the game?

ELSIE. Forgive me, Jack. I did want things to be right for us.

JACK. At any price?

ELSIE. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking of the game. I only thought of you.

JACK. I know. But I want things to be right and rightly right.

ELSIE (smiling). And now they are.

JACK (puzzled). Your father——

ELSIE. We've only to let him go on thinking you did it on purpose.

JACK. But I didn't.

ELSIE (soothingly). I know. I know it was pure accident. But he doesn't.

JACK. He must be told.

ELSIE. I thought you wanted his consent to our marriage

JACK. I do.

ELSIE. Then let him think you've kept the bargain he proposed.

JACK. Let him think I'm dishonest?

ELSIE. What was he? What does it matter what he thinks if I know the truth?

JACK. He's got to know the truth. If he'd have me as a scoundrel for your husband, he should be glad to have me as an honest man. (Smiling sourly.) My arm's broke either way.

ELSIE. I don't care tuppence for his consent.

JACK. It's not the square thing to get married without.

ELSIE. Oh, leave him to me.

JACK. You bustle him so. It's not respectful, Elsie.

ELSIE. Well, you needn't take him under your wing as well. It's not the custom in this family to split hairs about filial piety. I'll make it all right, Jack.

JACK. It's my job, Elsie.

ELSIE. It's our job, and you've had your innings. Now it's mine. But I'm going to take you home first to your mother.

JACK. But my mother doesn't know about you, yet.

ELSIE (drily). It's time I made her acquaintance.

JACK (doubtfully). I don't know what she'll say.

ELSIE. We'll find out when she says it. You think a great deal of your mother, Jack.

JACK. My father's dead. She's both to me. That's why I'm anxious.

ELSIE. Anxious! But your mother wouldn't stop us, Jack.

JACK (doubtfully). You will be careful with her, Elsie.

ELSIE. Careful?

JACK. Yes. Not like you go on with your father. She's used to my way.

(She has his unhurt arm, urging him to door, when it opens and Austin, Florence and Leo enter.)

AUSTIN. Still here, Metherell!

ELSIE. I'm just going to take him home.

AUSTIN (to Jack). Wasn't the doctor going to help you into your clothes? (To Leo and Florence.) Where is Wells? Have either of you seen him?

LEO. Last seen disappearing in the direction of the bar with an eminent London solicitor.

ELSIE. Oh, never mind him. Jack's clothes can follow. We'll take a taxi.

AUSTIN. But——

ELSIE. Come along, Jack.

(Exeunt Elsie and Jack.)

LEO. I say, father, it's a jolly rough game. This must be one of the referee's slack days or he'd pull Angus up sharp.

AUSTIN (genially). The score's two—one for Blackton, my boy.

FLORENCE. Blackton play against the wind next half.

AUSTIN (confidently). The match is all right. I've something else to talk about to you two. You saw Metherell and Elsie?

LEO (grinning). Yes. It's a case.

AUSTIN. What?

LEO (the grin fading). Well, isn't it?

AUSTIN. So you know.

LEO. I've got eyes.

AUSTIN. You take it philosophically.

LEO. I don't see that it matters how I take it.

AUSTIN. To my mind it matters considerably. He'll be your brother-in-law if he marries her.

LEO. That had occurred to me.

AUSTIN. Don't you mind?

LEO. I don't mind. Metherell's a stupendous nut at football.

AUSTIN. I understood football didn't interest you.

LEO. Merely academically.

AUSTIN. It's really far more your concern than mine, you know, Leo. In the natural course of things Elsie's husband will be your brother-in-law for a longer period than he'll be my son-in-law. Yours too, Flo.

FLORENCE. Yes. (Pause.)

AUSTIN (exasperated). Well? Have neither of you anything to say?

FLORENCE (rather bored). Not much in my line, dad.

LEO. Nor in mine. As I'm her brother I can't cut the other fellow out and marry her myself. I'm rather thankful, too. Elsie takes a lot of stopping when she's got the bit between her teeth.

AUSTIN. I don't get much help from you.

FLORENCE. Why should you?

LEO. It's no use jibbing, father. Much easier to give them your blessing and a cheque.

AUSTIN. It is always easiest to give way, Leo.

LEO. Yes. Isn't it?

AUSTIN (wildly). Good heavens, do you young people care about nothing?

LEO. We're tremendously in earnest about a lot of things, only they're not the things you're in earnest about. There are fashions in shibboleths just as much as in socks, and you're a little out of date in both.

AUSTIN. Possibly. But blood is still thicker than water, Leo. Metherell is a man of the people and——

LEO. Oh, my dear father, don't talk about the people as if they inhabited an inferior universe. The class bogey is one of the ghosts we've laid to-day.

AUSTIN. Indeed. I'd an idea it was rather rampant.

LEO. I believe it used to be. As a matter of fact, I do object to Metherell.

AUSTIN. Oh! You have some sense left.

FLORENCE. I don't. I only wish I was in Elsie's shoes.

LEO. Was I speaking, Flo, or were you?

FLORENCE. You were, too much.

LEO. I object theoretically on aesthetic grounds because of the destined fatness of the retired footballer. But I have Elsie's assurance that Metherell's a teetotaller and I trust her to give him a lively enough time to keep him decently thin, so that practically my objection falls to pieces.

AUSTIN. Leo, I didn't expect much help from you, but upon my word your cynicism is disgusting.

LEO. I expect, you know, that's pretty much what grandfather thought of you.

(Enter Elsie and Jack.)

Hullo! are there no taxis?

ELSIE (angry). I think every taxi in the town is outside the ground, but the men are too keen on getting a free sight of the game from the roofs of their cabs to take a fare.

FLORENCE. It's a sporting town, Blackton.

LEO. I should have thought they'd take it as an honour to drive Metherell home.

JACK (bitterly). Not in the Birchester colours.

LEO (sarcastically). Sporting town, Blackton,

ELSIE (at white heat). They're beasts. Beasts. They jeered. They're glad he's hurt.

JACK. That's what you've done for me, Mr. Whitworth. I'm laughed at in Blackton. Last Saturday I was their idol, and now——

AUSTIN. You've done it for yourself, my boy.

JACK (hotly). You transferred me.

AUSTIN. I meant the broken arm, not the broken idol. Jack (scornfully). Do you still think I did it purposely? Austin. I don't think, Metherell. I know. And I'm very much obliged to you. The chances are it's won the match.

JACK (sulkily). It was an accident.

AUSTIN (playing his last card). Oh, you needn't keep that up before the family. That reminds me. (Turning to them.) Leo, Florence, this is your future brother-in-law, Jack Metherell, the sporting footballer, who's sold a match to buy my consent to his marrying Elsie.

(He watches Leo and Florence for the effect. Jack steps forward, but Elsie stops him.)

ELSIE. Hush, Jack.

FLORENCE (coldly). I don't believe it, father. That consenting business went out with the flood.

LEO (to Jack). Did you ask my father's consent?

JACK. Yes.

LEO. It's just credible, Flo.

FLORENCE. In England? In the twentieth century? Leo. These quaint old customs linger. Half the world doesn't know how the other half thinks.

AUSTIN (who has been looking on amazed). But aren't you horrified?

LEO. At his asking? No. Merely interested in the survival of an archaism.

AUSTIN. At his selling a match, man!

LEO. A man who would ask papa is capable of anything.

ELSIE. He's not capable of dishonesty.

AUSTIN. Oh, you're blind with love.

ELSIE. I have his word.

AUSTIN (scoffing). His word!

ELSIE. Yes. Jack Metherell's word. The word of the man I'm going to marry.

AUSTIN (indicating Jack's arm). Deeds speak louder than words.

JACK (with resolution). Yes, Mr. Whitworth, they do. You think you've won this match. We'll see.

ELSIE (frightened). Jack, what are you going to do?

JACK. Play. Play for Birchester as I've never played for Blackton. I'll show him if I sold the match.

LEO. No. I say. You mustn't do that with a broken arm.

JACK. Yes. Broken arm and all.

LEO. It's madness. Look here, I believe you. So does Elsie.

FLORENCE. And I.

LEO. We all do, except father, and I assure you he's subject to hallucinations. Thinks he can play the piano. Thinks my poetry's bad. Thinks you're a rotter. All sorts of delusions.

JACK (stubbornly). Birchester must win. I'm going on that field to show them all what football is.

(As he speaks Wells and Edmund enter.)

WELLS (with calm authority). I think not, Metherell.

JACK. Out of my way, Doctor.

WELLS. I forbid it.

JACK. Much I care for your forbidding.

WELLS. One moment, Metherell. The play is extraordinarily rough. It's Blackton's game to lame their opponents.

EDMUND. More like a shambles than a game.

WELLS (to Austin). The referee is strangely kind to Blackton, Mr. Whitworth.

AUSTIN. Oh?

JACK (suspiciously). What? What's that you said?

WELLS. I say if I were referee I'd have ordered off half the Blackton team for rough play. This is no match for a damaged man, Metherell.

JACK. So you did try the referee, Mr. Whitworth.

AUSTIN. I don't understand you.

JACK. Don't you? Well, rough or smooth, I'm going through it now. (To Wells.) Thanks for your warning. (To Austin.) And I warn you that referee had best be careful now, or I'll report him.

ELSIE (holding him). For my sake, Jack.

JACK (gently shaking her off). It is for your sake, Elsie, not for his. His consent's nothing to me after this. My record's going to be clean.