MARCHBANKS. [Looking round him.] Is it like this for her here always? A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?
MORELL. [Stung.] Marchbanks: you make it hard for me to control myself. My talent is like yours insofar as it has any real worth at all. It is the gift of finding words for divine truth.
MARCHBANKS. [Impetuously.] It’s the gift of the gab, nothing more and nothing less. What has your knack of fine talking to do with the truth, any more than playing the organ has? I’ve never been in your church; but I’ve been to your political meetings; and I’ve seen you do what’s called rousing the meeting to enthusiasm: that is, you excited them until they behaved exactly as if they were drunk. And their wives looked on and saw clearly enough what fools they were. Oh, it’s an old story: you’ll find it in the Bible. I imagine King David, in his fits of enthusiasm, was very like you. [Stabbing him with the words.] “But his wife despised him in her heart.”
MORELL. [Wrathfully.] Leave my house. Do you hear? [He advances on him threateningly.]
MARCHBANKS. [Shrinking back against the couch.] Let me alone. Don’t touch me. [Morell grasps him powerfully by the lappell of his coat: he cowers down on the sofa and screams passionately.] Stop, Morell, if you strike me, I’ll kill myself. I won’t bear it. [Almost in hysterics.] Let me go. Take your hand away.
MORELL. [With slow, emphatic scorn.] You little snivelling, cowardly whelp. [Releasing him.] Go, before you frighten yourself into a fit.
MARCHBANKS. [On the sofa, gasping, but relieved by the withdrawal of Morell’s hand.] I’m not afraid of you: it’s you who are afraid of me.
MORELL. [Quietly, as he stands over him.] It looks like it, doesn’t it?
MARCHBANKS. [With petulant vehemence.] Yes, it does. [Morell turns away contemptuously. Eugene scrambles to his feet and follows him.] You think because I shrink from being brutally handled—because. [With tears in his voice] I can do nothing but cry with rage when I am met with violence—because I can’t lift a heavy trunk down from the top of a cab like you—because I can’t fight you for your wife as a navvy would: all that makes you think that I’m afraid of you. But you’re wrong. If I haven’t got what you call British pluck, I haven’t British cowardice either: I’m not afraid of a clergyman’s ideas. I’ll fight your ideas. I’ll rescue her from her slavery to them: I’ll pit my own ideas against them. You are driving me out of the house because you daren’t let her choose between your ideas and mine. You are afraid to let me see her again. [Morell, angered, turns suddenly on him. He flies to the door in involuntary dread.] Let me alone, I say. I’m going.
MORELL. [With cold scorn.] Wait a moment: I am not going to touch you: don’t be afraid. When my wife comes back she will want to know why you have gone. And when she finds that you are never going to cross our threshold again, she will want to have that explained, too. Now I don’t wish to distress her by telling her that you have behaved like a blackguard.
MARCHBANKS. [Coming back with renewed vehemence.] You shall—you must. If you give any explanation but the true one, you are a liar and a coward. Tell her what I said; and how you were strong and manly, and shook me as a terrier shakes a rat; and how I shrank and was terrified; and how you called me a snivelling little whelp and put me out of the house. If you don’t tell her, I will: I’ll write to her.
MORELL. [Taken aback.] Why do you want her to know this?
MARCHBANKS. [With lyric rapture.] Because she will understand me, and know that I understand her. If you keep back one word of it from her—if you are not ready to lay the truth at her feet as I am—then you will know to the end of your days that she really belongs to me and not to you. Good-bye. [Going.]
MORELL. [Terribly disquieted.] Stop: I will not tell her.
MARCHBANKS. [Turning near the door.] Either the truth or a lie you MUST tell her, if I go.
MORELL. [Temporizing.] Marchbanks: it is sometimes justifiable.
MARCHBANKS. [Cutting him short.] I know—to lie. It will be useless. Good-bye, Mr. Clergyman. [As he turns finally to the door, it opens and Candida enters in housekeeping attire.]
CANDIDA. Are you going, Eugene?[Looking more observantly at him.] Well, dear me, just look at you, going out into the street in that state! You are a poet, certainly. Look at him, James! [She takes him by the coat, and brings him forward to show him to Morell.] Look at his collar! look at his tie! look at his hair! One would think somebody had been throttling you. [The two men guard themselves against betraying their consciousness.] Here! Stand still. [She buttons his collar; ties his neckerchief in a bow; and arranges his hair.] There! Now you look so nice that I think you’d better stay to lunch after all, though I told you you mustn’t. It will be ready in half an hour. [She puts a final touch to the bow. He kisses her hand.] Don’t be silly.
MARCHBANKS. I want to stay, of course—unless the reverend gentleman, your husband, has anything to advance to the contrary.
CANDIDA. Shall he stay, James, if he promises to be a good boy and to help me to lay the table? [Marchbanks turns his head and looks steadfastly at Morell over his shoulder, challenging his answer.]
MORELL. [Shortly.] Oh, yes, certainly: he had better. [He goes to the table and pretends to busy himself with his papers there.]
MARCHBANKS. [Offering his arm to Candida.] Come and lay the table. [She takes it and they go to the door together. As they go out he adds] I am the happiest of men.
MORELL. So was I—an hour ago.
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