Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (62 page)

DON JUAN Ana.

THE STATUE To be sure: Ana. A goodlooking girl, if I recollect aright. Have you warned Whatshisname—her husband?

DON JUAN My friend Ottavio? No: I have not seen him since Ana arrived.

ANA What does this mean? Ottavio here and your friend! And you, father, have forgotten my name. You are indeed turned to stone.

THE STATUE My dear: I am so much more admired in marble than I ever was in my own person that I have retained the shape the sculptor gave me. He was one of the first men of his day: you must acknowledge that.

ANA Father! Vanity! personal vanity! from you!

THE STATUE Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off [by an accident] in my 64th year, and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child, in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not as a father.

ANA You speak as this villain speaks.

THE STATUE Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound thinker.

ANA [
horror creeping upon her
] I begin to understand. These are devils, mocking me. I had better pray.

THE STATUE [
consoling her
] No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over the gate here are the words “Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.” Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. [DON
JUAN sighs deeply
]
.
You sigh, friend Juan; but if you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages.

DON JUAN You are in good spirits to-day, Commander. You are positively brilliant. What is the matter?

THE STATUE I have come to a momentous decision, my boy. But first, where is our friend the Devil? I must consult him in the matter. And Ana would like to make his acquaintance, no doubt.

ANA You are preparing some torment for me.

DON JUAN All that is superstition, Ana. Reassure yourself. Remember: the devil is not so black as he is painted.

THE STATUE Let us give him a call.

At the wave of THE STATUE's hand the great chords roll out again; but this time Mozart's music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod's.
⁹
A scarlet halo begins to glow; and into it the DEVIL rises, very Mephistophelean, and not at all unlike MENDOZA, though not so interesting. He looks older; is getting prematurely bald; and, in
spite
of an effusion of goodnature and friendliness, is peevish and sensitive when his advances are not reciprocated. He does not inspire much confidence in his powers of hard work or endurance, and is, on the whole, a disagreeably self-indulgent looking person; but he is clever and plausible, though perceptibly less well bred than the two other
men,
and
enormously
less vital than the
woman.

THE DEVIL [
heartily
] Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? [
Coldly
] Dun Juan, your servant. [
Politely
] And a strange lady? My respects, Señora.

ANA Are you—

THE DEVIL [
bowing
] Lucifer, at your service.

ANA I shall go mad.

THE DEVIL [
gallantly
] Ah, Señora, do not be anxious. You come to us from earth, full of the prejudices and terrors of that priest-ridden place. You have heard me ill spoken of; and yet, believe me, I have hosts of friends there.

ANA Yes: you reign in their hearts.

THE DEVIL [shaking his head] You flatter me, Señora; but you are mistaken. It is true that the world cannot get on without me; but it never gives me credit for that: in its heart it mistrusts and hates me. Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation of the body and of the heart. I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love, with happiness, with beauty—
¹⁰

DON JUAN [
nauseated
] Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand this.

THE DEVIL [
angrily
] Yes: I know that you are no friend of mine.

THE STATUE What harm is he doing you, Juan? It seems to me that he was talking excellent sense when you interrupted him.

THE DEVIL [
warmly shaking
THE STATUE's
hand
] Thank you, my friend: thank you. You have always understood me: he has always disparaged and avoided me.

DON JUAN I have treated you with perfect courtesy.

THE DEVIL Courtesy! What is courtesy? I care nothing for mere courtesy. Give me warmth of heart, true sincerity, the bond of sympathy with love and joy—

DON JUAN You are making me ill.

THE DEVIL There! [
Appealing to THE STATUE
] You hear, sir! Oh, by what irony of fate was this cold selfish egotist sent to my kingdom, and you taken to the icy mansions of the sky!

THE STATUE I can't complain. I was a hypocrite; and it served me right to be sent to heaven.

THE DEVIL Why, sir, do you not join us, and leave a sphere for which your temperament is too sympathetic, your heart too warm, your capacity for enjoyment too generous?

THE STATUE I have this day resolved to do so. In future, excellent Son of the Morning, I am yours. I have left Heaven for ever.

THE DEVIL [
again grasping his hand
] Ah, what an honor for me! What a triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend—I may call you so at last—could you not persuade him to take the place you have left vacant above?

THE STATUE [
shaking his head
] I cannot conscientiously recommend anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself dull and uncomfortable.

THE DEVIL Of course not; but are you sure h e would be uncomfortable ? Of course you know best: you brought him here originally; and we had the greatest hopes of him. His sentiments were in the best taste of our best people. You remember how he sang? [
He begins to sing in a nasal operatic baritone, tremulous from an eternity of misuse in the French manner
]

THE STATUE [
taking up the tune an octave higher in his counter tenor
]

THE DEVIL Precisely. Well, he never sings for us now.

DON JUAN Do you complain of that? Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?

THE DEVIL You dare blaspheme against the sublimest of the arts!

DON JUAN [with cold disgust] You talk like a hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler.

THE DEVIL I am not angry. I merely pity you. You have no soul; and you are unconscious of all that you lose. Now you, Señor Commander, are a born musician. How well you sing! Mozart would be delighted if he were still here; but he moped and went to heaven. Curious how these clever men, whom you would have supposed born to be popular here, have turned out social failures, like Don Juan!

DON JUAN I am really very sorry to be a social failure.

THE DEVIL Not that we don't admire your intellect, you know. We do. But I look at the matter from your own point of view. You don't get on with us. The place doesn't suit you. The truth is, you have—I won't say no heart; for we know that beneath all your affected cynicism you have a warm one—

DON JUAN [
shrinking
] Don‘t, please don't.

THE DEVIL [
nettled
] Well, you've no capacity for enjoyment. Will that satisfy you?

DON JUAN It is a somewhat less insufferable form of cant than the other. But if you'll allow me, I'll take refuge, as usual, in solitude.

THE DEVIL Why not take refuge in Heaven? That's the proper place for you. [
To ANA
] Come, Señora! could you not persuade him for his own good to try change of air?

ANA But can he go to Heaven if he wants to?

THE DEVIL What's to prevent him?

ANA Can anybody—can I go to Heaven if I want to?

THE DEVIL
[rather
[
contemptuously
] Certainly, if your taste lies that way.

ANA But why doesn't everybody go to Heaven, then?

THE STATUE [
chuckling
] I can tell you that, my dear. It's because heaven is the most angelically dull place in creation: that's why.

THE DEVIL His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness; but the strain of living in Heaven is intolerable. There is a notion that I was turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place.

THE STATUE I don't wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of heaven.

THE DEVIL Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is a question of temperament. I don't admire the heavenly temperament: I don't understand it: I don't know that I particularly want to understand it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe. There is no accounting for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don Juan would like it.

DON JUAN But—pardon my frankness—could you really go back there if you desired to; or are the grapes sour?

THE DEVIL Back there! I often go back there. Have you never read the book of Job? Have you any canonical authority for assuming that there is any barrier between our circle and the other one?

ANA But surely there is a great gulf fixed.

THE DEVIL Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that. Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest following—England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency's friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do. And the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge it for them (the earth is full of Devil's Bridges); but the gulf of dislike is impassable and eternal. And that is the only gulf that separates my friends here from those who are invidiously called the blest.

ANA I shall go to heaven at once.

THE STATUE My child: one word of warning first. Let me complete my friend Lucifer's similitude of the classical concert. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English.

THE DEVIL Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

THE STATUE In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there.

ANA And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe it to myself to leave this place at once.

THE DEVIL [
offended
] As you please, Señora. I should have expected better taste from you.

ANA Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here. What will people say?

THE STATUE People! Why, the best people are here—princes of the church and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blest, once called a heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists, the outsiders of to-day.

THE DEVIL It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office.

DON JUAN I think, Ana, you had better stay here.

ANA [
jealously
] You do not want me to go with you.

DON JUAN Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a reprobate like me.

ANA All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not?

DON JUAN My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.

ANA Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth.