ACT II
The same day. The same room. Late in the afternoon. The spare chair for visitors has been replaced at the table, which is, if possible, more untidy than before. Marchbanks, alone and idle, is trying to find out how the typewriter works. Hearing someone at the door, he steals guiltily away to the window and pretends to be absorbed in the view. Miss Garnett, carrying the notebook in which she takes down Morell’s letters in shorthand from his dictation, sits down at the typewriter and sets to work transcribing them, much too busy to notice Eugene. Unfortunately the first key she strikes sticks.
PROSERPINE. Bother! You’ve been meddling with my typewriter, Mr. Marchbanks; and there’s not the least use in your trying to look as if you hadn’t.
MARCHBANKS (timidly). I’m very sorry, Miss Garnett. I only tried to make it write.
PROSERPINE. Well, you’ve made this key stick.
MARCHBANKS (earnestly). I assure you I didn’t touch the keys. I didn’t, indeed. I only turned a little wheel. (He points irresolutely at the tension wheel.)
PROSERPINE. Oh, now I understand. (She sets the machine to rights, talking volubly all the time.) I suppose you thought it was a sort of barrel-organ. Nothing to do but turn the handle, and it would write a beautiful love letter for you straight off, eh?
MARCHBANKS (seriously). I suppose a machine could be made to write love-letters. They’re all the same, aren’t they!
PROSERPINE (somewhat indignantly: any such discussion, except by way of pleasantry, being outside her code of manners). How do I know? Why do you ask me?
MARCHBANKS. I beg your pardon. I thought clever people — people who can do business and write letters, and that sort of thing — always had love affairs.
PROSERPINE (rising, outraged). Mr. Marchbanks! (She looks severely at him, and marches with much dignity to the bookcase.)
MARCHBANKS (approaching her humbly). I hope I haven’t offended you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have alluded to your love affairs.
PROSERPINE (plucking a blue book from the shelf and turning sharply on him). I haven’t any love affairs. How dare you say such a thing?
MARCHBANKS (simply). Really! Oh, then you are shy, like me. Isn’t that so?
PROSERPINE. Certainly I am not shy. What do you mean?
MARCHBANKS (secretly). You must be: that is the reason there are so few love affairs in the world. We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry Of our hearts; but we dare not utter our longing: we are too shy. (Very earnestly.) Oh, Miss Garnett, what would you not give to be without fear, without shame —
PROSERPINE (scandalized), Well, upon my word!
MARCHBANKS (with petulant impatience). Ah, don’t say those stupid things to me: they don’t deceive me: what use are they? Why are you afraid to be your real self with me? I am just like you.
PROSERPINE. Like me! Pray, are you flattering me or flattering yourself? I don’t feel quite sure which. (She turns to go back to the typewriter.)
MARCHBANKS (stopping her mysteriously). Hush! I go about in search of love; and I find it in unmeasured stores in the bosoms of others. But when I try to ask for it, this horrible shyness strangles me; and I stand dumb, or worse than dumb, saying meaningless things — foolish lies. And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it. (Almost whispering.) It must be asked for: it is like a ghost: it cannot speak unless it is first spoken to. (At his normal pitch, but with deep melancholy.) All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy. That is the world’s tragedy. (With a deep sigh he sits in the spare chair and buries his face in his hands.)
PROSERPINE (amazed, but keeping her wits about her — her point of honor in encounters with strange young men). Wicked people get over that shyness occasionally, don’t they?
MARCHBANKS (scrambling up almost fiercely). Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because they don’t need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give. (He collapses into his seat, and adds, mournfully) But we, who have love, and long to mingle it with the love of others: we cannot utter a word. (Timidly.) You find that, don’t you?
PROSERPINE. Look here: if you don’t stop talking like this, I’ll leave the room, Mr. Marchbanks: I really will. It’s not proper. (She resumes her seat at the typewriter, opening the blue book and preparing to copy a passage from it.)
MARCHBANKS (hopelessly). Nothing that’s worth saying IS proper. (He rises, and wanders about the room in his lost way, saying) I can’t understand you, Miss Garnett. What am I to talk about?
PROSERPINE (snubbing him). Talk about indifferent things, talk about the weather.
MARCHBANKS. Would you stand and talk about indifferent things if a child were by, crying bitterly with hunger?
PROSERPINE. I suppose not.
MARCHBANKS. Well: I can’t talk about indifferent things with my heart crying out bitterly in ITS hunger.
PROSERPINE. Then hold your tongue.
MARCHBANKS. Yes: that is what it always comes to. We hold our tongues. Does that stop the cry of your heart? — for it does cry: doesn’t it? It must, if you have a heart.
PROSERPINE (suddenly rising with her hand pressed on her heart). Oh, it’s no use trying to work while you talk like that. (She leaves her little table and sits on the sofa. Her feelings are evidently strongly worked on.) It’s no business of yours, whether my heart cries or not; but I have a mind to tell you, for all that.
MARCHBANKS. You needn’t. I know already that it must.
PROSERPINE. But mind: if you ever say I said so, I’ll deny it.
MARCHBANKS (compassionately). Yes, I know. And so you haven’t the courage to tell him?
PROSERPINE (bouncing up). HIM! Who?
MARCHBANKS. Whoever he is. The man you love. It might be anybody. The curate, Mr. Mill, perhaps.
PROSERPINE (with disdain). Mr. Mill!!! A fine man to break my heart about, indeed! I’d rather have you than Mr. Mill.
MARCHBANKS (recoiling). No, really — I’m very sorry; but you mustn’t think of that. I —
PROSERPINE. (testily, crossing to the fire and standing at it with her back to him). Oh, don’t be frightened: it’s not you. It’s not any one particular person.
MARCHBANKS. I know. You feel that you could love anybody that offered —
PROSERPINE (exasperated). Anybody that offered! No, I do not. What do you take me for?
MARCHBANKS (discouraged). No use. You won’t make me REAL answers — only those things that everybody says. (He strays to the sofa and sits down disconsolately.)
PROSERPINE (nettled at what she takes to be a disparagement of her manners by an aristocrat). Oh, well, if you want original conversation, you’d better go and talk to yourself.
MARCHBANKS. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it’s horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
PROSERPINE. Wait until Mr. Morell comes. HE’LL talk to you. (Marchbanks shudders.) Oh, you needn’t make wry faces over him: he can talk better than you. (With temper.) He’d talk your little head off. (She is going back angrily to her place, when, suddenly enlightened, he springs up and stops her.)
MARCHBANKS. Ah, I understand now!
PROSERPINE (reddening). What do you understand?
MARCHBANKS.