THE PAINTED SWAN

By the same Author.

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THE
PAINTED SWAN

A Play in Three Acts

BY
ELIZABETH BIBESCO

“People don’t escape from one thing to another thing, but from one thing to the same thing.”

LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO.
Paternoster Row, E.C.4

All Rights Reserved.

Applications regarding performing rights
should be addressed to Mr. J. L. Campbell,
Regency House, Warwick Street.

TO
ANTOINE

The Painted Swan

A Play in Three Acts
by
ELIZABETH BIBESCO
(as produced at the Everyman Theatre, March 16th, 1925).

Characters in order of their appearance:

THE PLAY PRODUCED BY NORMAN MACDERMOTT

ACT I

ACT I

Scene: Ann’s boudoir at Candover. The butler is directing two footmen, who are piling up blankets, garments, etc.

[Enter Lord William and Selina in travelling clothes. Lord William over to fire L.

Selina: How are you, Thompson?

[Moves over to chair D. S. L.

Thompson: Very well, thank you, Miss Selina.

Selina: Has no one else arrived yet?

Thompson: No, miss. Lady Emily and Mr. Carstairs have been here since yesterday. Mrs. Martineau and Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Jordan are coming by the three o’clock train and should be here in a few minutes.

Selina: We would have been down an hour ago if the car hadn’t been suffering from asthma.

Lord William: Who is the Mr. Jordan who is coming, Thompson?

Thompson: I believe him to be in the Cabinet, m’lord.

Selina: Aren’t you sure?

Thompson: Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, Miss Selina.

Selina: Why do you always say you believe when you know, Thompson?

Thompson: My father always said to me, miss, a good servant should never presume to be sure. He should avoid conveying information as if he were instructing his betters.

Lord William: A wise man, your father, Thompson—if only people could get it into their heads that each time they are right somebody loves them less. How is her ladyship?

Thompson: Overworking, m’lord.

Lord William: What at?

[Sits settee L.

Thompson: Other people, m’lord.

Selina: Other people?

[Sits D. S. L.

Thompson: Other people’s happiness, Miss Selina.

Selina: Ah!

Thompson: Her ladyship can’t see that the worthless is the worthless.

Selina: She doesn’t try to improve them, does she, Thompson?

Thompson: No, miss—to make them happy. Pampering the riff-raff that’s what she does. Why, only the other day she was taken in by a swindler, and do you know what she said, m’lord?

Lord William: No.

Thompson: She said, “Well, it’s much better than if he’d been honest and I’d not believed him.”

Selina: Don’t you try and protect her against herself, Thompson?

Thompson: I try, Miss Selina, but then, her ladyship says: “You aren’t kind to me, Thompson,” and I capitulate. Human and mortal, that’s what we all are.

[He goes out.

Selina: (calling to him at the door): Thompson!

Thompson: Miss Selina?

Selina: You haven’t admired my new hat.

Thompson: Very neat, I’m sure——

[Exit Thompson.

Selina: Funny, isn’t it, a saint like Ann coming out of our family.

[Enter Tim.

Lord William: How de do, Tim?

Selina: How’s Ann?

Tim: She’s looking tired.

Selina: Is Ninian here?

Tim: He doesn’t arrive till seven-thirty.

Lord William: The others are coming by the three o’clock train—Molly, Mr. Jordan and Mrs. Martineau.

Tim: Yes.

Selina: I never can think why Ann should see so much of Mabel Martineau.

Tim: They played together in the nursery.

Selina: That’s the only explanation that’s ever brought forward for Mabel.

Lord William: She’s rather an amusing little viper.

Tim: But she stings so continuously that I don’t believe she could stop if she wanted to.

Selina: She certainly is no respecter of persons.

Tim: Some day she will sting Ann.

Selina: She really would be fond of Ann if it weren’t for you.

Tim: Me?

Selina: She’s a little bit in love with you.

Tim: Nonsense.

Lord William: And why not? An attractive, personable young man like you.

Selina: Papa, you’ve made Tim blush.

Lord William: It’s easier nowadays to make a young man blush than a young woman.

Selina: One’s cheeks can’t always respond to one’s feelings.

Lord William: Do you know Jordan, Tim?

Tim: A little.

Selina: What’s he like?

Tim: Heavy and common and on the make.

Selina: Why does Ann like him?

Lord William: One of her endowment schemes, I expect.

Selina: What do you mean, Papa?

Lord William: That Ann goes about endowing people with her own qualities. Very unfair to the poor things, of course, as they have to revert to type sooner or later.

Tim: I don’t know—if she can breathe some of her own spirit into them they must be permanently enriched.

[Mrs. Martineau, Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Jordan are shown in. General greetings.

[Mrs. Martineau introduces Jordan to Lord William and Selina.

Lord William: Did you come down by train?

Jordan: Yes.

Mrs. Martineau: There was a most charming man in the carriage—quite drunk. He looked round at us all and said: “I’m glad I’m not here.”

Molyneux: Unfortunately he got out at the next station, which must have taken the edge off his enjoyment.

Mrs. Martineau: Where is Ann?

Lord William: I don’t know.

Molyneux: We should see more of Ann if we could appear to her as a duty. Unfortunately, we are undoubtedly a pleasure.

Selina: You might make a bid as sinners in need of reform.

Tim: But that is just what is so wonderful about Ann. She never wants anyone to be better—only happier.

Lord William: Ann is my niece. She is, of course, a saint, but she is not a fool. No Cathcart is a fool.

Selina: Amen.

Lord William: Don’t interrupt. I was about to say something very good.

Selina: Would you like to “think it out in silence?”

Lord William: What were we talking about?

Mrs. Martineau: There is only one subject in this house.

Selina: We were talking about Ann.

Lord William: Yes—but what were you actually saying?

Selina: Tim said that Ann never tried to make people good, but only happy.

Mrs. Martineau: Only!

Lord William: I remember I was about to say that in practice goodness and happiness are much the same thing.

Selina: Bravo!

Molyneux: My dear Bill, surely that is a platitude?

Lord William: Even a platitude can contain a truth.

Molyneux: But we are few of us brave enough to admit it.

Selina: What do you think, Mr. Jordan?

Jordan: I think that the truth can be found in very unexpected places.

Selina: The obvious, for instance?

Jordan: I wasn’t thinking of that.

Selina: Indeed?

Lord William: Is this your first visit here, Mr. Jordan?

Jordan: No.

Lord William: Then you know Ninian?

Jordan: I have just met Lord Candover.

Molyneux: Then you know Ninian.

[They laugh.

Selina: Ninian is first-hand information.

Mrs. Martineau: What do you mean?

Selina: That you learn all there is to be learnt the first time.

Lord William: No one can tell you anything about him. The whole truth is revealed in five minutes.

Selina: Yes, indeed. It doesn’t take a detective to know what Ninian is like.

Lord William: He is the family masterpiece.

Selina: By marriage.

Molyneux: A very inconvenient institution, marriage. Illogical when you want one thing, to have another.

Selina: You mean when you want one person to have two?

Molyneux: Precisely.

Selina: Ninian would be perfect if we didn’t have so much of him. He never fails one.

Lord William: He combines under the cover of an English gentleman—

Selina: Of a Lord Lieutenant.

Lord William: I accept the amendment, of a Lord Lieutenant; the ridiculous and the sublime.

Selina: And that, mind you, without taking the proverbial step.

Tim: He is our host and Ann’s husband.

Mrs. Martineau: Tim, you are becoming a prig.

Tim: Perhaps, but we must think of Ann.

Mrs. Martineau (acidly): Perhaps, but you think of nothing else.

Molyneux: Thinking about Ann is a delightful occupation. It is like thinking about primroses and spring and lilac bushes and blue-bell woods, all of the things, in fact, that we are too clever or too stupid to think about.

Lord William: You left out skylarks and rippling brooks and blossoming trees.

Mrs. Martineau (acidly): And red flannel blankets.

Molyneux: I should like to have forgotten them.

Lord William: Think of Molly dreaming about primroses and red flannel and you will realize that Ann is something more than a saint.

Selina: A saint who works miracles.

Mrs. Martineau: A siren, in fact.

Lord William: You should always remember, Selina, that virtue has its charms.

Molyneux: Which will be a strain, my poor child, as you will seldom be reminded of it.

Tim: Except when you are staying with Ann.

Selina: I am afraid that, however virtuous I may become, I shall never be as charming as Ann.

Mrs. Martineau (acidly): Not in Tim’s eyes.

Lord William: Let me beg you, my dear, not to regard Tim as representative of his sex. He is a knight errant. He puts women on a pedestal.

Molyneux: A gallant form of shelving.

Mrs. Martineau: He divides the world into saints and cocottes, and, as there are many who fall between the two stools, they are disposed of as “children of nature.”

Tim: Come!

Mrs. Martineau: You would be surprised, Selina, at Tim’s child of nature. She can powder and paint, languish and pounce, but, if she was never a saint and is not yet in the gutter, we are forced to accept her as a pure, wild creature, trapped in our horrible society.

[They laugh.

Molyneux: You are silent, Jordan.

Mrs. Martineau: Mr. Jordan is making a reputation.

Lord William: Be careful, you will find it impossible to lose.

Molyneux: We are a faithful people. A little late, perhaps, but true to the end. Have you ever known an English audience to recognize a singer till she’s forty, or disown her till she’s dead?

Lord William: Remember, Jordan, one evening may stamp you as a drunkard, one mot advertise you as a wit, one adventure immortalize you as a Don Juan.

Jordan: Will one speech proclaim me an orator?

Lord William: Speeches are swallows that never make a summer.

Selina: Do you take things seriously, Mr. Jordan?

Lord William: Really, Selina, you make me ashamed of your upbringing. You mustn’t ask a rising young statesman a question like that. He might have to say “yes” and then we should think him a fool.

Jordan: Don’t worry, Miss Selina. I am brave enough to admit that I take some things seriously.

Selina: Women?

Mrs. Martineau: Woman!

Jordan: Some women.

Molyneux: The election wasn’t lost on you, Jordan; you learnt to qualify.

Selina: Do please tell us a little more. Are the women you take seriously serious women?

Lord William: Selina, you are my daughter, and in every sense of the word, my creation. I have told you before now that your cousin Ann is the only serious woman in the world. I am for the moment using the term woman as a form of praise. There are, of course, many serious persons of the female sex.

Tim: I don’t call Ann serious. She bubbles over with gaiety.

Mrs. Martineau: But she takes things seriously.

Selina: She is good.

Molyneux: She is unique. A woman we all adore, who can be described as good.

Selina: Do you adore Ann, Mr. Jordan?

Jordan: Yes.

Lord William: Well, I wish she weren’t up to so many good works. As for her virtue it is a “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signal that you can see for miles.

Selina: Papa, I think you’re very vulgar.

Tim: Ann is so radiantly uncensoriously good.

Molyneux: Ann is a damned good-looking woman.

Lord William: But she does lead a silly life. I did think that once the war was over and she had stopped nursing cholera in Siberia we should be all right. But what has peace brought us? Why, the house is positively infested with Mayors and clergymen and cranks and old maids, and when she’s tired of talking to her Socialist friends, she thinks of Ninian, plasters on the family jewels, resumes the rôle of the Lord Lieutenant’s wife and entertains the county. Disgusting, I call it.

Molyneux: William and I have never believed in entertaining the county.

Lord William: I confess I am sometimes entertained by it.

Molyneux: My appetite is too jaded to enjoy the hunting exploits of the squire or the cameos of his lady.

Lord William: And the parson is always collecting for an organ.

Mrs. Martineau: Ann is so strange; she really seems to enjoy it.

Timothy: That is because everything is dramatic to her. She doesn’t know what patronage means, so everyone tells her their secrets.

Mrs. Martineau: They can’t be very interesting secrets.

Timothy: All secrets are interesting.

Molyneux: All secrets are the same.

Lord William: The tiresome thing about a secret is that no one believes you know one till you’ve told it.

Mrs. Martineau: Ann is so patient. She can listen for hours to the laundry-maid.

Timothy: Ann is so interested. She knows that all of the romance in the world is contained in the laundry-maid’s love affair.

Molyneux: All lovers are the same. That is why I gave up being one. I realized that the only new rôle I could assume was that of a husband, and marriage seemed too heavy a price to pay.

Mrs. Martineau: And everyone knows all about husbands.

Molyneux: To tell you the truth, I wanted to keep one illusion. I was afraid that if I married I might discover that wives deceive their lovers with their husbands.

Lord William: Molly and I gave up sentimental adventures when we noticed that we were becoming sentimental. We decided to take to dry wit.

Molyneux: We are universally considered as wits, and as that reputation, so easily gained, is impossible to lose, we are dragooned by public opinion and our own self-respect into living up to it.

Lord William: You see, Jordan, a reputation is a prison.

Mrs. Martineau: And self-respect is the jailor.

Selina: What is self-respect, Tim?

Tim: The thing that makes Mrs. Martineau dress for dinner when she is alone in the country, that prevents Jordan from buying a vote, Lord William from making a bad joke——

Mrs. Martineau: And Ann from having a lover.

Lord William: Lord bless my soul, Ann has not been prevented from having a lover. The possibility never occurred to her.

Mrs. Martineau: If it did she would reject it without a pang. Ann’s moral tidiness is unequalled.

Tim (angrily): Is that your definition of effortless radiant goodness?

Mrs. Martineau: I only meant that Ann is not exactly a Bohemian. All her meals are in the dining-room. There are no trays in her life.

Tim: That is Ninian.

Mrs. Martineau: Well, she is responsible for him, isn’t she? Husbands aren’t gifts from God like one’s relations.

Molyneux: A husband is every woman’s first big mistake.

Mrs. Martineau: Which is the next?

Molyneux: Her second lover.

Mrs. Martineau: How subtle you are.

Lord William: A woman’s first lover is usually a slight caricature of her husband. People don’t escape from one thing to another, but from one thing to the same thing.

Molyneux: There you are again, Bill, always dragging in your confounded philosophy.

Mrs. Martineau: What is your philosophy?

Molyneux: It isn’t really philosophy at all—Bill maintains that life is a merry-go-round always coming back to the same point.

Lord William: And we poor fools think that we are steering our painted swans when we can turn them neither to right nor to left. Why, we can’t even make them go faster or slower.

Jordan: You don’t believe in free will, Lord William?

Lord William: I believe that one can fall off.

Selina: Mr. Jordan, do you think that this is the right atmosphere in which to bring up a young girl?

Mrs. Martineau: We shall drive you to romance.

Selina: And then what will become of me?

Lord William: You will return to us, my dear.

Selina: I can’t think why Ann has you in the house.

Lord William: I am her uncle. She believes that Molly has a heart of gold. Mrs. Martineau played with her in the nursery. Tim is a saint, and Jordan, as he told you, takes some women and some things seriously. Ann is the woman and she selects the things.

[Enter Lady Emily Cathcart.

Lady Emily: Where is Ann?

Mrs. Martineau: Still at her Red Cross meeting.

Lord William: Emily, as a maiden lady of immaculate reputation——

Molyneux: Remember you are speaking of your sister, Bill.

Lady Emily: Molly, you are taking away my character.

Molyneux (gallantly): I am too modest to hope to succeed where so many have failed.

Lord William: I was about to ask my sister, before Molly interrupted with the rather half-hearted propositions we have just been listening to—I was about to ask my sister whether she does not consider that Ann is becoming almost too much of a good thing.

Lady Emily: Too good, you mean?

Mrs. Martineau: For this world.

Lady Emily: For our world.

Tim: Ann couldn’t live in your world. It is too small. She would die for lack of exercise.

Mrs. Martineau: She will die of exhaustion if she tries to combine Whitechapel and the County.

Molyneux: I regard Ninian as the most fatiguing item in the account. He has only two topics of conversation—his responsibilities and his improvements.

Lord William: And if you boil them down, they become the same thing—his pigstys.

Molyneux: You’re a nice unselfish boy, Tim: couldn’t you kill Ninian?

Lord William: Wait a moment, Tim. This requires serious consideration. Wouldn’t Ninian’s death leave Ann even busier than she is?

Lady Emily: And she might marry someone she loved, which would be very inconvenient for you all.

Molyneux: I don’t see that we profit much by the present state of affairs.

Tim: Ann’s in touch with so many kinds of life.

Mrs. Martineau: Ann is a woman of the world.

Tim: But not of this age.

Molyneux: Ann is the only spot of repose in the twentieth century. When she sits in a chair she doesn’t fidget; when she talks to you her attention doesn’t wander to someone else. When she wants to be listened to, she lowers her voice a little. I am sure that when she goes to bed she sleeps, and that when she wakes up she is refreshed.

Selina: Mr. Molyneux, you’re quite romantic.

Lady Emily: You talk very little for a politician, Mr. Jordan.

Jordan: You all talk so well, it is a pleasure to listen.

Lady Emily: What you mean is, that we are difficult to interrupt. It is quite true. But once you cease to be discouraged by finding that what you hoped was going to be a solo is either a duet or a chorus, you will soon begin to rush in on all occasions, and ultimately you will learn to force a hearing for yourself.

[Enter Ann.

[They all get up and help her off with her things, finally pushing her on to a sofa.

Ann: How spoilt I am.

Lady Emily: How tired you are.

Ann: But being with you all will soon put that right.

Lord William: You have missed a lot, Ann. Molly and I were at our best.

Ann: I hate to have missed a moment of it, but you are both always at your best.

Selina: We were all very characteristic. Aunt Emily flirted with Mr. Molyneux, and Mrs. Martineau tried to flirt with Tim; Papa balanced precariously on a tight-rope of wit over an abyss of vulgarity, and Mr. Jordan was silent.

Ann: And what did you do?

Selina: I helped them to their remarks by asking questions.

Mrs. Martineau: Selina treats everyone as if they were performing animals. Except animals.

Selina: I love animals.

Ann: It all sounds delightful. What did you talk about?

Tim: About you, of course.

Lord William: We tried to talk about other things, but you have a way of making conversation into a boomerang.