Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (18 page)

VIVIE It is my month.'s allowance. They sent it to me as usual the other day. I simply sent it back to be placed to your credit, and asked them to send you the lodgment receipt. In future I shall support myself.

MRS. WARREN
[not daring to understand]
Wasn't it enough? Why didn't you tell me? [
With a cunning gleam in her eye.]
I'll double it: I was intending to double it. Only let me know how much you want.

VIVIE You know very well that that has nothing to do with it. From this time I go my own way in my own business and among my own friends. And you will go yours.
[She rises
.] Good-bye.

MRS. WARREN [
appalled
] Good-bye?

VIVIE Yes: good-bye. Come: don't let us make a useless scene: you understand perfectly well. Sir George Crofts has told me the whole business.

MRS. WARREN [
angrily
] Silly old—
[She swallows an epithet, and turns white at the narrowness of her escape from uttering it.]
He ought to have his tongue cut out. But I explained it all to you; and you said you didn't mind.

VIVIE [
steadfastly
] Excuse me: Idomind. You explained how it came about. That does not alter it. [
MRS
. WARREN,
silenced for a moment, looks forlornly at VIVIE, who waits like a statue, secretly hoping that the combat is over. But the cunning expression comes back into MRS. WARREN's face
;
and she bends across the table, sly and urgent, half whispering. ]

MRS. WARREN Vivie: do you know how rich I am?

VIVIE I have no doubt you are very rich.

MRS. WARREN But you don't know all that that means: you're too young. It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of servants ; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means everything you like, everything you want, everything you can think of. And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year. Think over it. [
Soothingly
.] You're shocked, I know. I can enter into your feelings; and I think they do you credit; but trust me, nobody will blame you: you may take my word for that. I know what young girls are; and I know you'll think better of it when you've turned it over in your mind.

VIVIE So that's how it's done, is it? You must have said all that to many a woman, mother, to have it so pat.

MRS. WARREN [
passionately
] What harm am I asking you to do? [
VIVIE
turns
away contemptuously. MRS. WARREN follows her desperately
.] Vivie: listen to me: you don't understand: you've been taught wrong on purpose: you don't know what the world is really like.

VIVIE [
arrested
] Taught wrong on purpose! What do you mean?

MRS. WARREN I mean that you're throwing away all your chances for nothing. You think that people are what they pretend to be—that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly, slavish, common run of people quiet. Do you want to find that out, like other women, at forty, when you've thrown yourself away and lost your chances; or won't you take it in good time now from your own mother, that loves you and swears to you that it's truth—gospel truth? [
Urgently
.] Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what I think. I know plenty of them. I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to make friends of for you. I don't mean anything wrong: that's what you don't understand: your head is full of ignorant ideas about me. What do the people that taught you know about life or about people like me? When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or let anyone tell them about me?—the fools! Would they ever have done anything for you if I hadn't paid them? Haven't I told you that I want you to be respectable? Haven't I brought you up to be respectable? And how can you keep it up without my money and my influence and Lizzie's friends? Can't you see that you're cutting your own throat as well as breaking my heart in turning your back on me?

VIVIE I recognise the Crofts philosophy of life, mother. I heard it all from him that day at the Gardners'.

MRS. WARREN You think I want to force that played-out old sot on you! I don‘t, Vivie: on my oath I don't.

VIVIE It would not matter if you did: you would not succeed. [
MRS
.
WARREN winces, deeply hurt by the implied indifference towards
her
affectionate intention. VIVIE, neither understanding this nor concerning herself about it, goes on calmly]
Mother: you don't at all know the sort of person I am. I don't object to Crofts more than to any other coarsely built man of his class. To tell you the truth, I rather admire him for being strong-minded enough to enjoy himself in his own way and make plenty of money instead of living the usual shooting, hunting, dining-out, tailoring, loafing life of his set merely because all the rest do it. And I'm perfectly aware that if I'd been in the same circumstances as my aunt Liz, I'd have done exactly what she did. I don't think I'm more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I'm less. I'm certain I'm less sentimental. I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence: and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly want to be without having a word said to me about it. But I don't want to be worthless. I shouldn't enjoy trotting about the park to advertise my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to show off a shop windowful of diamonds.

MRS. WARREN
[bewildered]
But—

VIVIE Wait a moment: I've not done. Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it. Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her. Why don't you do the same?

MRS. WARREN Oh, it's all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn't do it somebody else would; so I don't do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No: it's no use: I can't give it up—not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I'll never mention it. I'll keep Crofts away. I'll not trouble you much: you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. You'll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE No: I am my mother's daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my work is not your work, and my way not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us; instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: that's all.

MRS. WARREN
[her voice stifled in tears
] Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed.

VIVIE It's no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I dare say.

MRS. WARREN [
wildly
] Oh, you call a mother's tears cheap.

VIVIE They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together?

MRS. WARREN [
lapsing recklessly into her dialect]
We're mother and daughter. I want my daughter. I've a right to you. Who is to care for me when I'm old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. You've no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter.

VIVIE
[jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother's
voice] My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don't want a mother; and I don't want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you?

MRS. WARREN
[violently]
Oh, I know the sort you are—no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself:
I
don't want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again—aye, as sure as there's a Heaven above us?

VIVIE Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS. WARREN No: I'd bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me—yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I'd bring you up in my own house, so I would.

VIVIE [
quietly
] In one of your own houses.

MRS. WARREN
[screaming]
Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother's grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother's curse on her.

VIVIE I wish you wouldn't rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don't spoil it all now.

MRS. WARREN Yes. Heaven forgive me, it's true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it, the injustice, the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I was a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I'd talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I'll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I'll prosper on it.

VIVIE Yes: it's better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you good-bye now. I am right, am I not?

MRS. WARREN [
taken aback
] Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to? Isn't that so?

MRS. WARREN [
sulkily
] Oh, well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I'd better go than stay where I'm not wanted. [
She turns to the door.]

VIVIE [
kindly
] Won't you shake hands?

MRS. WARREN [
after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her]
No, thank you. Good-bye.

VIVIE [
matter-of factly
] Good-bye.
[MRS. WARREN goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on VIVIE's face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing-table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds FRANK's note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it.
] And
goodbye, Frank. [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in her figures.
]
¹⁰

CANDIDA

PREFACE

READERS OF THE DISCOURSE with which the preceding volume is prefaced will remember that I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk about “the New Drama,” and the actual establishment of a “New Theatre” (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that “the New Drama,” in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence.

Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the “New” movement did not stop. In 1894, some public spirited person,
^y
then as now unknown to me, declared that the London theatres were intolerable, and financed a season of plays of the “new” order at the Avenue Theatre. There were, as available new dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion); and Mr. John Todhunter, who had indeed been discovered before, but whose Black Cat had been one of the Independent's successes. Mr. Todhunter supplied A
Comedy of Sighs.
I, having nothing but “unpleasant” plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it
Arms and the Man.
It passed for a success: that is, the first night was as brilliant as could be desired ; and it ran from the 2 1st April to the 7th July. To witness it the public paid precisely
£
1777:5:6, an average of £ 23:2:5 per representation (including nine matinees), the average cost of each representation being about £80. A publisher receiving £1700 for a book would have made a satisfactory profit on it: the loss to the Avenue management was not far from £5000. This, however, need not altogether discourage speculators in the “new” drama. If the people who were willing to pay £1700 to see the play had all come within a fortnight instead of straggling in during twelve weeks—and such people can easily be trained to understand this necessity—the result would have been financially satisfactory to the management and at least flattering to the author. In America, where the play, after a fortnight in New York, took its place simply as an item in the repertory of Mr. Richard Mansfield, it has kept alive to this day. What the feelings of the unknown benefactor of the drama were on realizing that the net cost of running an “artistically successful” theatre on the ordinary London system was from £400 to £500 a week, I do not know. As for me, I opened a very modest banking account, and became comparatively Conservative in my political opinions.