Reginald's Drama

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

　　

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Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of onewho has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless toconceal the fact."One of these days," he said, "I shall write a really greatdrama. No one will understand the drift of it, but everyonewill go back to their homes with a vague feeling ofdissatisfaction with their lives and surroundings. Then theywill put up new wall-papers and forget.""But how about those that have oak panelling all over thehouse?" said the Other."They can always put down new stair-carpets," pursuedReginald, "and, anyhow, I'm not responsible for the audiencehaving a happy ending. The play would be quite sufficientstrain on one's energies. I should get a bishop to say itwas immoral and beautiful--no dramatist has thought of thatbefore, and everyone would come to condemn the bishop, andthey would stay on out of sheer nervousness. After all, itrequires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a markedmanner in the middle of the second act, when your carriageisn't ordered till twelve. And it would commence with wolvesworrying something on a lonely waste--you wouldn't see them,of course; but you would hear them snarling and scrunching,and I should arrange to have a wolfy fragrance suggestedacross the footlights. It would look so well on theprogrammes, 'Wolves in the first act, by Jamrach.' And oldLady Whortleberry, who never misses a first night, wouldscream. She's always been nervous since she lost her firsthusband. He died quite abruptly while watching a countycricket match; two and a half inches of rain had fallen forseven runs, and it was supposed that the excitement killedhim. Anyhow, it gave her quite a shock; it was the firsthusband she'd lost, you know, and now she always screams ifanything thrilling happens too soon after dinner. And afterthe audience had heard the Whortleberry scream the thingwould be fairly launched.""And the plot?""The plot," said Reginald, "would be one of those littleeveryday tragedies that one sees going on all round one. Inmy mind's eye there is the case of the Mudge-Jervises, whichin an unpretentious way has quite an Enoch Arden intensityunderlying it. They'd only been married some eighteen monthsor so, and circumstances had prevented their seeing much ofeach other. With him there was always a foursome orsomething that had to be played and replayed in differentparts of the country, and she went in for slumming quite asseriously as if it was a sport. With her, I suppose, it was.She belonged to the Guild of the Poor Dear Souls, and theyhold the record for having nearly reformed a washerwoman. Noone has ever really reformed a washerwoman, and that is whythe competition is so keen. You can rescue charwomen byfifties with a little tea and personal magnetism, but withwasherwomen it's different; wages are too high. Thisparticular laundress, who came from Bermondsey or some suchplace, was really rather a hopeful venture, and they thoughtat last that she might be safely put in the window as aspecimen of successful work. So they had her paraded at adrawing-room "At Home" at Agatha Camelford's; it was sheerbad luck that some liqueur chocolates had been turned looseby mistake among the refreshments--really liqueur chocolates,with very little chocolate. And of course the old soul foundthem out, and cornered the entire stock. It was like findinga whelk-stall in a desert, as she afterwards partiallyexpressed herself. When the liqueurs began to take effect,she started to give them imitations of farmyard animals asthey know them in Bermondsey. She began with a dancing bear,and you know Agatha doesn't approve of dancing, except atBuckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she gotup on the piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather shewent in for realism rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment ofthe subject Finally, she fell into the piano and said she wasa parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu performance Ibelieve she was very word--perfect; no one had heard anythinglike it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attendedsittings of the Austrian Reichsrath. Agatha is trying theRest-cure at Buxton.""But the tragedy?""Oh, the Mudge-Jervises. Well, they were getting along quitehappily, and their married life was one continuous exchangeof picture-postcards; and then one day they were throwntogether on some neutral ground where foursomes andwasherwomen overlapped, and discovered that they werehopelessly divided on the Fiscal Question. They have thoughtit best to separate, and she is to have the custody of thePersian kittens for nine months in the year--they go back tohim for the winter, when she is abroad. There you have thematerial for a tragedy drawn straight from life--and thepiece could be called 'The Price They Paid for Empire.' Andof course one would have to work in studies of the struggleof hereditary tendency against environment and all that sortof thing. The woman's father could have been an Envoy tosome of the smaller German Courts; that's where she'd get herpassion for visiting the poor, in spite of the most carefulupbringing. C'est le premier pa qui compte, as the cuckoosaid when it swallowed its foster-parent. That, I think, isquite clever.""And the wolves?""Oh, the wolves would be a sort of elusive undercurrent inthe background that would never be satisfactorily explained.After all, life teems with things that have no earthlyreason. And whenever the characters could think of nothingbrilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they couldopen a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. Butthat would be very seldom."

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