Nobody’s likely to have this evening’s paper.
CHARLES. Stop, I think I bought a lunch edition
Before I left St. Pancras. If I did, it’s in my overcoat.
I’ll see if it’s there. There might be something in that.
[Exit]
GERALD. Well, I said that Arthur was every bit as likely
To have an accident as John. And it wasn’t John’s fault,
I don’t believe. John is unlucky,
But Arthur is definitely reckless.
VIOLET. I think these racing cars ought to be prohibited.
[Re-enter CHARLES, with a newspaper]
CHARLES. Yes, there is a paragraph … I’m glad to say
It’s not very conspicuous …
GERALD. There’ll have been more in the later editions.
You’d better read it to us.
CHARLES [reads].
‘Peer’s Brother in Motor Smash
The Hon. Arthur Gerald Charles Piper, younger brother of Lord Monchensey, who ran into and demolished a roundsman’s cart in Ebury Street early on the morning of January 1st, was fined £50 and costs to-day, and forbidden to drive a car for the next twelve months.
While trying to extricate his car from the collision, Mr. Piper reversed into a shop-window. When challenged, Mr. Piper said: “I thought it was all open country about here” —’
GERALD. Where?
CHARLES. In Ebury Street. ‘The police stated that at the time of the accident Mr. Piper was being pursued by a patrol, and was travelling at the rate of 66 miles an hour. When asked why he did not stop when signalled by the police car, he said: “I thought you were having a game with me.”’
GERALD. This is what the Communists make capital out of.
CHARLES. There’s a little more. ‘The Piper family …’ no, we needn’t read that.
VIOLET. This is just what I expected. But if Agatha
Is going to moralise about it, I shall scream.
GERALD. It’s going to be awkward, explaining this to Amy.
IVY. Poor Arthur! I’m sure that you’re being much too hard on him.
CHARLES. In my time, these affairs were kept out of the papers;
But nowadays, there’s no such thing as privacy.
CHORUS. In an old house there is always listening, and more is heard than is spoken.
And what is spoken remains in the room, waiting for the future to hear it.
And whatever happens began in the past, and presses hard on the future.
The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying,
Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.
The treble voices on the lawn
The mowing of hay in summer
The dogs and the old pony
The stumble and the wail of little pain
The chopping of wood in autumn
And the singing in the kitchen
And the steps at night in the corridor
The moment of sudden loathing
And the season of stifled sorrow
The whisper, the transparent deception
The keeping up of appearances
The making the best of a bad job
All twined and tangled together, all are recorded.
There is no avoiding these things
And we know nothing of exorcism
And whether in Argos or England
There are certain inflexible laws
Unalterable, in the nature of music.
There is nothing at all to be done about it,
There is nothing to do about anything,
And now it is nearly time for the news
We must listen to the weather report
And the international catastrophes.
[Exeunt CHORUS]
Scene II
HARRY, AGATHA
HARRY. John will recover, be what he always was;
Arthur again be sober, though not for very long;
And everything will go on as before. These mild surprises
Should be in the routine of normal life at Wishwood.
John is the only one of us I can conceive
As settling down to make himself at home at Wishwood,
Make a dull marriage, marry some woman stupider —
Stupider than himself. He can resist the influence
Of Wishwood, being unconscious, living in gentle motion
Of horses, and right visits to the right neighbours
At the right times; and be an excellent landlord.
AGATHA. What is in your mind, Harry?
I can guess about the past and what you mean about the future;
But a present is missing, needed to connect them.
You may be afraid that I would not understand you,
You may also be afraid of being understood,
Try not to regard it as an explanation.
HARRY. I still have to learn exactly what their meaning is.
At the beginning, eight years ago,
I felt, at first, that sense of separation,
Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable —
It’s eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity,
Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.
Then the numbness came to cover it — that is another —
That was the second hell of not being there,
The degradation of being parted from my self,
From the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing.
All this last year, I could not fit myself together:
When I was inside the old dream, I felt all the same emotion
Or lack of emotion, as before: the same loathing
Diffused, I not a person, in a world not of persons
But only of contaminating presences.
And then I had no horror of my action,
I only felt the repetition of it
Over and over. When I was outside,
I could associate nothing of it with myself,
Though nothing else was real. I thought foolishly
That when I got back to Wishwood, as I had left it,
Everything would fall into place. But they prevent it.
I still have to find out what their meaning is.
Here I have been finding
A misery long forgotten, and a new torture,
The shadow of something behind our meagre childhood,
Some origin of wretchedness. Is that what they would show me?
And now I want you to tell me about my father.
AGATHA. What do you want to know about your father?
HARRY. If I knew, then I should not have to ask.
You know what I want to know, and that is enough:
Warburton told me that, though he did not mean to.
What I want to know is something I need to know,
And only you can tell me. I know that much.
AGATHA. I had to fight for many years to win my dispossession,
And many years to keep it. What people know me as,
The efficient principal of a women’s college —
That is the surface. There is a deeper
Organisation, which your question disturbs.
HARRY. When I know, I know that in some way I shall find
That I have always known it. And that will be better.
AGATHA. I will try to tell you. I hope I have the strength.
HARRY. I have thought of you as the completely strong,
The liberated from the human wheel.
So I looked to you for strength. Now I think it is
A common pursuit of liberation.
AGATHA. Your father might have lived — or so I see him —
An exceptionally cultivated country squire,
Reading, sketching, playing on the flute,
Something of an oddity to his county neighbours,
But not neglecting public duties.
He hid his strength benea
th unusual weakness,
The diffidence of a solitary man:
Where he was weak he recognised your mother’s power,
And yielded to it.
HARRY. There was no ecstasy.
Tell me now, who were my parents?
AGATHA. Your father and your mother.
HARRY. You tell me nothing.
AGATHA. The dead man whom you have assumed to be your father,
And my sister whom you acknowledge as your mother:
There is no mystery here.
HARRY. What then?
AGATHA. You see your mother as identified with this house —
It was not always so. There were many years
Before she succeeded in making terms with Wishwood,
Until she took your father’s place, and reached the point where
Wishwood supported her, and she supported Wishwood.
At first it was a vacancy. A man and a woman
Married, alone in a lonely country house together,
For three years childless, learning the meaning
Of loneliness. Your mother wanted a sister here
Always. I was the youngest: I was then
An undergraduate at Oxford. I came
Once for a long vacation. I remember
A summer day of unusual heat
For this cold country.
HARRY. And then?
AGATHA. There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,
Only a present moment of pointed light
When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand
To the flames. They only come once,
Thank God, that kind. Perhaps there is another kind,
I believe, across a whole Thibet of broken stones
That lie, fang up, a lifetime’s march. I have believed this.
HARRY. I have known neither.
AGATHA. The autumn came too soon, not soon enough.
The rain and wind had not shaken your father
Awake yet. I found him thinking
How to get rid of your mother. What simple plots!
He was not suited to the role of murderer.
HARRY. In what way did he wish to murder her?
AGATHA. Oh, a dozen foolish ways, each one abandoned
For something more ingenious. You were due in three months’ time;
You would not have been born in that event: I stopped him.
I can take no credit for a little common sense,
He would have bungled it.
I did not want to kill you!
You to be killed! What were you then? only a thing called ‘life’ —
Something that should have been mine, as I felt then.
Most people would not have felt that compunction
If they felt no other. But I wanted you!
If that had happened, I knew I should have carried
Death in life, death through lifetime, death in my womb.
I felt that you were in some way mine!
And that in any case I should have no other child.
HARRY. And have me. That is the way things happen.
Everything is true in a different sense,
A sense that would have seemed meaningless before.
Everything tends towards reconciliation
As the stone falls, as the tree falls. And in the end
That is the completion which at the beginning
Would have seemed the ruin.
Perhaps my life has only been a dream
Dreamt through me by the minds of others. Perhaps
I only dreamt I pushed her.
AGATHA. So I had supposed. What of it?
What we have written is not a story of detection,
Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation.
It is possible that you have not known what sin
You shall expiate, or whose, or why. It is certain
That the knowledge of it must precede the expiation.
It is possible that sin may strain and struggle
In its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness
And so find expurgation. It is possible
You are the consciousness of your unhappy family,
Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.
Indeed it is possible. You may learn hereafter,
Moving alone through flames of ice, chosen
To resolve the enchantment under which we suffer.
HARRY. Look, I do not know why,
I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home.
It is quite irrational, but now
I feel quite happy, as if happiness
Did not consist in getting what one wanted
Or in getting rid of what can’t be got rid of
But in a different vision. This is like an end.
AGATHA. And a beginning. Harry, my dear,
I feel very tired, as only the old feel.
The young feel tired at the end of an action —
The old, at the beginning. It is as if
I had been living all these years upon my capital,
Instead of earning my spiritual income daily:
And I am old, to start again to make my living.
HARRY. But you are not unhappy, just now?
AGATHA. What does the word mean?
There’s relief from a burden that I carried,
And exhaustion at the moment of relief.
The burden’s yours now, yours
The burden of all the family. And I am a little frightened.
HARRY. You, frightened! I can hardly imagine it.
I wish I had known — but that was impossible.
I only now begin to have some understanding
Of you, and of all of us. Family affection
Was a kind of formal obligation, a duty
Only noticed by its neglect. One had that part to play.
After such training, I could endure, these ten years,
Playing a part that had been imposed upon me;
And I returned to find another one made ready —
The book laid out, lines underscored, and the costume
Ready to be put on. But it is very odd:
When other people seemed so strong, their apparent strength
Stifled my decision. Now I see
I might even become fonder of my mother —
More compassionate at least — by understanding.
But she would not like that. Now I see
I have been wounded in a war of phantoms,
The things I thought were real are shadows, and the real
Are what I thought were private shadows. O that awful privacy
Of the insane mind! Now I can live in public.
Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.
AGATHA. I only looked through the little door
When the sun was shining on the rose-garden:
And heard in the distance tiny voices
And then a black raven flew over.
And then I was only my own feet walking
Away, down a concrete corridor
In a dead air. Only feet walking
And sharp heels scraping. Over and under
Echo and noise of feet.
I was only the feet, and the eye
Seeing the feet: the unwinking eye
Fixing the movement. Over and under.
HARRY. In and out, in an endless drift
Of shrieking forms in a circular desert
Weaving with contagion of putrescent embraces
On dissolving bone. In and out, the movement
Until the chain broke, and I was left
Under the single eye above the desert.
AGATHA. Up and down, through the stone passages
Of an immense and empty hospital
Pervaded by a smell of disinfectant,
Looking straight ahead, passing barred windows.
Up and down. Until the chain breaks.
HARRY. To and fro, dragging my feet
Among inner shadows in the smoky wilderness,
Trying to avoid the clasping branches
And the giant lizard. To and fro.
Until the chain breaks.
The chain breaks,
The wheel stops, and the noise of machinery,
And the desert is cleared, under the judicial sun
Of the final eye, and the awful evacuation
Cleanses.
I was not there, you were not there, only our phantasms
And what did not happen is as true as what did happen
O my dear, and you walked through the little door
And I ran to meet you in the rose-garden.
AGATHA. This is the next moment. This is the beginning.
We do not pass twice through the same door
Or return to the door through which we did not pass.
I have seen the first stage: relief from what happened
Is also relief from that unfulfilled craving
Flattered in sleep, and deceived in waking.
You have a long journey.
HARRY. Not yet! not yet! this is the first time that I have been free
From the ring of ghosts with joined hands, from the pursuers,
And come into a quiet place.
Why is it so quiet?
Do you feel a kind of stirring underneath the air?
Do you? don’t you? a communication, a scent
Direct to the brain … but not just as before,
Not quite like, not the same …
[The EUMENIDES appear]
and this time
You cannot think that I am surprised to see you.
And you shall not think that I am afraid to see you.
This time, you are real, this time, you are outside me,
And just endurable. I know that you are ready,
Ready to leave Wishwood, and I am going with you.
You followed me here, where I thought I should escape you —
No! you were already here before I arrived.
Now I see at last that I am following you,
And I know that there can be only one itinerary
And one destination. Let us lose no time. I will follow.
[The curtains close. AGATHA goes to the window, in a somnambular fashion, and opens the curtains, disclosing the empty embrasure. She steps into the place which the EUMENIDES had occupied.]
AGATHA. A curse comes to being
As a child is formed.
In both, the incredible
Becomes the actual
Without our intention
Knowing what is intended.
A curse is like a child, formed
In a moment of unconsciousness
In an accidental bed