Short Plays

Ye leafy breasts and warm protecting wings Of mother trees that hatch our tender souls, And from the well of Nature in our hearts Thaw the intolerable inch of ice That bears the weight of all the stamping world. Hear ye me sing to solitude that I, Lydia Carew, the owner of these lands, Albeit most rich, most learned, and most wise, Am yet most lonely. What are riches worth When wisdom with them comes to show the purse bearer That life remains unpurchasable? Learning Learns but one lesson: doubt! To excel all Is, to be lonely. Oh, ye busy birds, Engrossed with real needs, ye shameless trees With arms outspread in welcome of the sun, Your minds, bent singly to enlarge your lives, Have given you wings and raised your delicate heads High heavens above us crawlers.

A rook sets up a great cawing; and the other birds chatter loudly as a gust of wind sets the branches swaying. She makes as though she would show them her sleeves.

Lo, the leaves That hide my drooping boughs! Mock me⁠—poor maid!⁠— Deride with joyous comfortable chatter These stolen feathers. Laugh at me, the clothed one. Laugh at the mind fed on foul air and books. Books! Art! And Culture! Oh, I shall go mad. Give me a mate that never heard of these, A sylvan god, tree born in heart and sap; Or else, eternal maidhood be my hap.

Another gust of wind and bird-chatter. She sits on the mossy root of an oak and buries her face in her hands. Cashel Byron, in a white singlet and breeches, comes through the trees.

It is eight o’clock in the evening. The curtains are drawn and the lamps lighted in the drawing room of Her flat in Cromwell Road. Her lover, a beautiful youth of eighteen, in evening dress and cape, with a bunch of flowers and an opera hat in his hands, comes in alone. The door is near the corner; and as he appears in the doorway, he has the fireplace on the nearest wall to his right, and the grand piano along the opposite wall to his left. Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it a hand mirror, a fan, a pair of long white gloves, and a little white woollen cloud to wrap a woman’s head in. On the other side of the room, near the piano, is a broad, square, softly upholstered stool. The room is furnished in the most approved South Kensington fashion: that is, it is as like a show room as possible, and is intended to demonstrate the racial position and spending powers of its owners, and not in the least to make them comfortable.

He is, be it repeated, a very beautiful youth, moving as in a dream, walking as on air. He puts his flowers down carefully on the table beside the fan; takes off his cape, and, as there is no room on the table for it, takes it to the piano; puts his hat on the cape; crosses

In a bed-sitting room in a fashionable quarter of London a Lady sits at her dressing table, with her maid combing her hair. It is late; and the electric lamps are glowing. Apparently the room is bedless; but there stands against the opposite wall to that at which the dressing table is placed a piece of furniture that suggests a bookcase without carrying conviction. On the same side is a chest of drawers of that disastrous kind which, recalcitrant to the opener until she is provoked to violence, then suddenly come wholly out and defy all her efforts to fit them in again. Opposite this chest of drawers, on the Lady’s side of the room, is a cupboard. The presence of a row of gentleman’s boots beside the chest of drawers proclaims that the Lady is married. Her own boots are beside the cupboard. The third wall is pierced midway by the door, above which is a cuckoo clock. Near the door a pedestal bears a portrait bust of the Lady in plaster. There is a fan on the dressing table, a hatbox and rug strap on the chest of drawers, an umbrella and a bootjack against the wall near the bed. The general impression is one of brightness, beauty, and social ambition, damped by somewhat inadequate means. A certain air of theatricality is produced by the fact that though the room is rectangular it has only three walls. Not a sound is heard except the overture and the crackling of the Lady’s hair as the maid’s brush draws electric sparks from it in the dry air of the London midsummer.

Mercer, an elderly clerk, seated at work. Enter, to him, through the public door, Horace Brabazon, a smart and beautiful young man of nineteen, dressed in the extremity of fashion, with a walking stick.

Brabazon

I want to see the Lord Chancellor.

Mercer

Have you an appointment?

Brabazon

No.

Mercer

Then you can’t see the Lord Chancellor.

Brabazon

I tell you I must see him.

Mercer

I tell you you cant. Look here: do you think the Lord Chancellor’s a palmist or a hair doctor that people can rush in out of the street and see him whenever they want to?

Brabazon

That speech was meant to insult and humiliate me. I make it a rule to fight people who attempt to insult and humiliate me. Throwing away his stick. Put up your hands. He puts up his own.

Mercer

Here: you let me alone. You leave this office, d’ye hear; or I’ll have the police in on you.

Brabazon

You are face to face with your destiny; and your destiny is to fight me. Be quick: I’m going to begin. Don’t look pale: I scorn to take you by surprise. I shall lead off with my left on your right eye. Put them up.

Mercer

I ain’t going to fight you. Let me alone, will you? I said nothing to you.

Brabazon

Liar and slave. Fight, I tell you: fight.

Mercer

Oh, was there ever the like of this? Don’t make such a noise.

Brabazon

I’m making it on purpose. I want you to fight because it’ll make more noise than anything else. The Lord Chancellor will come to see what the noise is about if only it’s loud enough. Time! He spars.

Fin de siècle 15⁠–⁠1600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven.

A Beefeater on guard. A Cloaked Man approaches.

The Beefeater

Stand. Who goes there? Give the word.

The Man

Marry! I cannot. I have clean forgotten it.

The Beefeater

Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who are you? Are you a true man?

The Man

Far from it, Master Warder. I am not the same man two days together: sometimes Adam, sometimes Benvolio, and anon the Ghost.

The Beefeater

Recoiling. A ghost! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

The Man

Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that down in writing; for I have a very poor and unhappy brain for remembrance. He takes out his tablets and writes. Methinks this is a good scene, with you on your lonely watch, and I approaching like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but mark what I say. I keep tryst here tonight with a dark lady. She promised to bribe the warder. I gave her the wherewithal: four tickets for the Globe Theatre.

The Beefeater

Plague on her! She gave me two only.

The Man