The Project Gutenberg EBook of Three Lancashire Plays: The Game; The Northerners; Zack, by Harold Brighouse This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Three Lancashire Plays: The Game; The Northerners; Zack Author: Harold Brighouse Release Date: August 7, 2017 [EBook #55286] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE LANCASHIRE PLAYS *** Produced by David Widger from page images generously provided by the Internet Archive THREE LANCASHIRE PLAYS The Game; The Northerners; Zack By Harold Brighouse London: Samuel French, Ltd. Publishers 1920 0007 CONTENTS PREFACE I Bibliography: THE GAME ACT I ACT II ACT III THE NORTHERNERS ACT I. ACT II ACT III ACT IV ZACK ACT I. ACT II. ACT III PREFACE n another age than ours play-books were a favourite, if not the only, form of light reading, and the novel, now almost universally preferred, is the development of the last century. But a writer of plays should be the last person in the world to resent the novelist's victory, for plays are written to be acted, and reach a full completeness only by means of the collaboration of author with producer, scene-painter, actors and, finally and essentially, audience. The author's script bears to the completed play a relationship similar to that of an architect's plan to a completed building. Architect's plans, however, are not unintelligible to the layman, especially to the layman who is not devoid of imagination, the layman who is ready to spend a trifling mental effort and to become, be it ever so little, expert. And so with printed plays, those ground-plans of the drama. There must have been in the eighteenth century, a larger percentage of the reading public than obtains to-day that was expert in reading plays; plays were thought— you can find ample proof of it in the Diarists—easier reading than the novels of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett. Perhaps the comparative brevity of a play was, even in those unhurried days, a point in its favour; certainly the play-reading habit was strong and one likes to think that it is not lost. To read dully the script of a spectacular play is desolating weariness, but the same script read with sympathetic imagination becomes the key to fairyland, and from an armchair one sees more marvels than ever stagecraft could present. There are abominable limitations on the stage; producers are tedious pedants; but the reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a merely human producer. Play-reading, in fact, obeys the law that as a man sows so shall he reap; a little trouble, rapidly eased by practice, leads one to a great deal of pleasure. It depends, of course, upon the play as well as upon the reader, and though one has rather romantically instanced spectacular plays, their scripts do, as a rule, belong to the class of play which is not worth reading. They are, or are apt to become, the libretto to some specific scenery or stage effect and the imaginative reader, failing to hit upon the particular staging intended, is lost in puzzlement. Nor do plays of action make the best reading. There are no plays but plays of action, but action is of many kinds, and the play whose first concern is situation and rapid physical movement is so specifically a stage- play, so sketchy in its ground-plan until the collaborators work in unison upon it, as to make reading more of a torment than a pleasure. While you must have wordless pantomime at the basis of every play, it is those plays which exhibit in high degree the use of action in the form of dialogue that are the more comfortable reading; and, always postulating that a play is a play—not necessarily a playwright's play, the admiration of his brother craftsmen, but a thing practicable, actable and effective on the stage—the more physical action is subordinated to character, to the exploration of the springs of human motive, the better it is for reading purposes and the better for all purposes. Ibsen led the modern play, where the modern novel followed it, to the investigation of character rather than to the unfolding of a story, and one suggests that readers who find satisfaction in the modern psychological novel should find the reading of modern plays to their taste for the reason that the dramatists, though they haven't in a play the same opportunities for analysis as the novelists find in their more spacious pages, are essentially "out for" the same thing. The type of play one is here writing about is one which has not, in the past, flourished extensively in the popular theatres; it is the type known, rather obscurely, as the "Repertory" play. It was called by that name, probably in derision, and the Repertory play was held to be synonymous with the un-commercial play. Then queer things happened. "Hindle Wakes" broke out of the Repertory palisade, made dramatic history and, what from the amazed commercial manager's standpoint was even more startling, a fortune; "The Younger Generation" followed into the commercial camp; and in the rent profiteer's year of 1919, when managers seemed forced by ruthless circumstance more even than by inclination to play the safest game and to offer the Big Public nothing but repetitions of the tried and true, two plays from the Repertories came to town. "The Lost Leader" filled the Court Theatre in a very heat wave, and "Abraham Lincoln" took the King to Hammersmith—with many thousands of his subjects. So that it will not do to speak of plays as commercial on the one hand and Repertory on the other. Repertory has golden possibilities, if you don't expect too much of it. It would be fallacious to expect the same pay-dust from "Abraham Lincoln" as from "Chu Chin Chow." Nor would one expect Joseph Conrad to sell like Nat Gould. Sincerity is a virtue possessed, as a rule, by the Repertory play, but it will by no means do to claim for this sort of play a monopoly of sincerity. The most popular type of drama (and the most English), melodrama, is rigidly sincere—to the confounding of the Intellectual. There is plenty of dishonest thinking and unscrupulous play-making, but not in popular melodrama. In melodrama which pretends to be something other than what it is, there is immediate and obvious insincerity, but there is no writing with the tongue in the cheek in downright, unabashed melodramas of the old Adelphi, and the present Lyceum type. It will not do to call the "highbrow" plays sincere, with the implication that all other plays are insincere, any more than they can themselves be sweepingly characterized as uncommercial. Sincerity, anyhow, may be beside the point, and the term Repertory play, though unsatisfactory, stands for something perfectly well understood. No definition would be apt to the whole body of Repertory plays, but one would like, diffidently, to suggest that Repertory plays are written by men and women of intellectual honesty who postulate that their audience will be composed of educated people—and that attempt at a definition fails. It has a snobbish ring. And now, after generalizing about Repertory plays and reading plays, to come down to the particular instance of the Lancashire plays here printed. They are three of seven plays which their author has written about the people of his native county, and reasons for publishing them now are that nobody wanted to publish plays during the war, and that the author is an optimist about the future of Repertory. Which last is only a sort of reason for publishing some of Repertory's step-children—that, at any rate, the new men may know, if they care to know, these workaday examples deriving from the only Repertory Theatre in Great Britain which created a local drama. Though none of these three plays was, in fact, produced by Miss Horniman's Company, they nevertheless belong to the "Manchester School," which was a by-product of her Company. The "Manchester School" was never conscious of itself, as the Irish School was. The Irishmen had a country, a patriotic sentiment, a national mythology; they had, so soon after the beginning that it seemed they had it from the first, the already classical tradition of Synge; they had in the Deidre legend a subject made to their hands, a subject which it appeared every Irishman must tackle in order to pass with honours as an Irish dramatist; and there was explicit endeavour to create an Irish Drama. In Manchester, so far were we from any explicit ambition to create a Lancashire Drama that we denied the fact of its creation. What reputation it had was not home-made in Manchester and exported, but made in London and America. At Miss Horniman's theatre in Manchester, there were so many bigger things being done than the earlier, technically weak plays of the local authors. And it is worth pointing out that the authors went (it was admirable, it was almost original in them) for their material to what was immediately under their noses; they took as models the Lancashire people of their daily life, and in their plays they did not always flatter their models. The models saw themselves in the theatre rather as they were than as they liked to think they were, and they hadn't the quixotry to praise too highly authors who held up to them a mirror of disconcerting truthfulness. It came upon the authors unexpectedly, as even something a little preposterous, to be taken seriously, to be labelled, heaven knows by whom, the "Manchester School," as if they had a common aim.. That, surely, is the significance of the "Manchester School," that the phenomenon and the hope. Miss Horniman established her Company in Manchester, with Mr. B. Iden Payne, a genius, as her producer of plays. What she gave to Manchester was perhaps more, perhaps not more, than the aftermath of the historic Vedrenne-Barker campaign at the Court Theatre; at any rate, she gave a series of Repertory plays—plays which had no likelihood of being seen in the provinces under the touring system—notably well acted; she demonstrated that drama was a living art, and in the light of that demonstration there outcropped spontaneously, un-self-consciously, the body of local drama now known as the "Manchester School." Whatever the individual merits of the Lancashire plays may be, whatever, even, their collective importance or unimportance, they have this significance of localization. Stimulated by Miss Horniman's catholic repertoire, local authors sought to express in drama local characteristics. There are no two questions in the writer's mind, nor, he thinks, in anybody's, as to whether local drama is or is not a good thing. It is more than ever good in to-day's special London conditions, but it was always good in and for its own locality, and very good when it broke away from home, travelled to London and introduced to Londoners authentic representations of natives of their country. It brought variety where variety was needed. Not all the plays of the "Manchester School," of course, have travelled. One or two, indeed, hardly travelled across the Gaiety Theatre footlights, and in the case of a few others, mostly one-act plays, there was never the least chance of their emerging from Lancashire owing to the fact that they were written deliberately in dialect. A most racy little piece, "Complaints," by Mr. Ernest Hutchinson, with its scene laid in the office of an Oldham spinning-mill, is a case in point. One doubts, even, if the comparatively urbane Manchester audience grasped the whole of its idiomatic dialogue. But these are the extremes of local drama, and generally, the Lancashire writers have avoided dialect as, in the first place, impracticable, and in the second place, disused, except (to quote Houghton) "amongst the roughest class in the most out-of-the way districts." Accent is not dialect though possibly originates in it. Even when one wishes to use dialect one must not, for stage purposes, write it as it is spoken. The dramatist selects his material from dialect as he selects his larger material from life. Dramatically correct dialect is literally incorrect; it is highly selected dialogue which indicates, but does not obscure, and the true dialect dramatist is not the man who exactly imitates the speech of a district, but he who most skilfully adapts its rhythms and picks out its salient words. Synge invented an Irish dialect which is false in detail and infinitely true in broad effect, and the "Manchester School," faced with the same difficulty, has solved it in the same way, hoping, though without much confidence, that the Lancashire cadences it adopted and used in its very few dialect plays may sound to alien ears as aptly as the language of Synge's Irish sounds to our own. Though you may search in vain the dialogue of Mr. Allan Monkhouse's plays for local characteristics, the "Manchester School" has as a rule indicated by the use, in greater or less degree, of local idioms that the speech of Lancashire has a well-marked individuality; but dialect, as a distinctive variant of the national language, can hardly be said to exist in Lancashire. One labours the point a little in order to make clear that the "Manchester School" had no accidental advantage, over writers who lived near other provincial Repertory Theatres, in the existence of a language whose dramatic literature they felt urged to create; there was no such language. And its absence makes a curiosity of the fact that from Manchester alone of the Repertory centres has any considerable body of local drama emerged. (Dublin is another matter; one speaks here of Great Britain.) Other Repertory centres, like Birmingham and Bristol, must have local characteristics: Liverpool is, geographically at any rate, in Lancashire; and Glasgow has a language of its own. None of these Repertories was sterile, but even Birmingham, despite Mr. John Drinkwater and "Abraham Lincoln," was economical in creativeness and fathered no local drama. Must the conclusion be that the Manchester atmosphere has, with its soot, a vitalizing dramatic principle? Possibly; but a less fantastic theory is that Manchester had Miss Horniman, and other Repertories had not. Again one insists that the Lancashire plays were a by-product, and a by-product only, of Miss Horniman's Company. Who in their senses would go to Manchester expecting to evoke a local drama? And if she had gone there with a prejudice in favour of poetic plays, it is more than likely that no local drama would have been evoked. Modern Lancashire is industrial Lancashire—one forgets the large agricultural oases, while nobody but map-makers and administrators remembers that a slice of the Lake District is in Lancashire—and industrialism does not inspire the poetic play. Miss Horniman began, on the contrary, with a season whose best productions, though it included Maeterlinck, were Shaw's "Widower's Houses" and McEvoy's "David Ballard." Those two productions seemed, rightly or wrongly, to fix the type of play preferred by Miss Horniman's Company; it happened—let us call it realistic comedy—to be the type by which the life of Lancashire could be best expressed in drama and the future authors of the "Manchester School," most of them of an impressionable age, some of them already fumbling their way to dramatic expression, seized avidly the type and the opportunity. They were not so provincial as to have to wait for Miss Horniman to come to be introduced to Shaw: but there are worlds of difference between reading Shaw, even between seeing him indifferently produced, and a Shaw play transmuted by the handling of such a producer as Iden Payne. It is putting the case without hyperbole to say that Miss Horniman's Company was an inspiration. The Repertory whose "note" is the poetic play will probably evoke no local drama, because, until we get the village Repertory, local drama is the drama of the modern town, wherein the stuff of poetry exists, if at all, only as a forced revival of folk-lore. Anything can be great poetry to the great poet; one speaks here of the average playwright, the observer of his fellow man in a provincial town, seeking his medium of expression in drama; and such a man is unlikely to find it in the poetic play or to find encouragement and inspiration from a Repertory where poetic plays are visibly preferred. It is almost to be said that Miss Horniman's Company and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre stand for rival theories of the drama, but not quite; they have too much, including Shakespeare, in common. Local drama is too important to be left so specially in the hands of Miss Horniman and the "Manchester School." It is important for the localities and important, too, for London; London is quite as ready to be interested in good plays about people in Aberdeen or Halifax as in plays about people in New York, but the New York author lives in a city where plays are produced and the Aberdeen author does not. The stimulation of local drama is possible only where a local producing theatre exists; the education of a dramatist is unfinished until he has heard his lines spoken and watched his puppets move. Drama in the capitals is standardized to some half-dozen patterns which alter slowly and, failing the local producing theatre, what is the provincial author to do but to suppress his originality and to write plays, in hopes of London production, as near as he can make them to one of the approved current designs? It is said that were it not for the continued influx from the provinces, London would die out in three—or is it two?—generations; and if that is true of life, it is true also of drama, and the plain duty of those who control British Drama, the Napoleons of the theatre, is to dig channels whereby healthy provincial blood may flow to London to revitalize its Drama. This, which means that Sir Alfred Butt ought to seek out a number of intelligent producers and endow them in provincial Repertory theatres to work without interference from above, but always with the vigilant eye for that byproduct of a rightly inspired Repertory, local drama, is a simple matter of commercial self-interest, on a par with the action of the magnates of scientific trade who endow research not out of love of science, but in the expectation that they will be able some day to exploit profitably the resulting discoveries. So might Sir Alfred Butt exploit local authors discovered by the producers of his far-flung Repertories. The theatre is either a business or a gamble, and in the hands of men like Sir Alfred Butt it looks less like a gamble every day. Enlightened business self- interest would look a little to the future, to the fostering of authorship in provincial towns, to the establishment of many Repertories. To come back to the windfalls of the "Manchester School" printed here. They fell, one of them in the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, at a time when Miss Horniman's Company was on vacation; another at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, which was in origin a secession from Manchester headed by the late Miss Darragh, with the plays produced by Mr. Basil Dean, later the first Liverpool Director; and the third so far away from Manchester as the Empire Theatre, Syracuse, New York State, linked with Manchester, for all that, through being produced by Mr. Iden Payne. In reading them again, one is startled for the thousandth time by the difference between stage and study. The third act of "The Northerners" makes curious reading, because it depends partly upon the juxtaposition of the characters on the stage, partly upon the suggestion "off" of a ruse plagiarized from the Punic Wars, partly upon a spectacular "curtain," but it is—production proved it—in the focus of the theatre. It "came off" on the stage. Laughter in the theatre is, again, a mystery. It is possible that the Lancashire plays in general have the characteristic of acting more amusingly than they read. "Hindle Wakes" reads positively austerely; acted, it is full of humour; and one's recollections of "The Game" on the stage make for the same conclusion. It has, in the theatre, a far more pronounced tendency to set its audience laughing than seems apparent in its text. In the case of "Zack" the funis, one would say, hardly of a subtle kind. Taking the "Manchester School," bye and large, and remembering the charge against it that it was "grey" or "dreary," one is forced to believe either that Lancashire humour is not everybody's humour—Mrs. Metherell in "The Game" might almost be set as a test—or else that the "Manchester School" has been confused with the whole body of Miss Horniman's productions; and, even if so, the charge fails. There was an Icelandic tragedy produced in the early days of her Company, which depressed the thermometer alarmingly; there was Verhaeren's "The Cloister," a great play performed to empty houses, adding insult to injury by being popularly called "dreary," and the chill resulting from those two productions, one a mistake of management, the other a mistake of the public, lasted for years. The case of the Lancashire Plays is clear; their authors aimed at presenting the human comedy of Lancashire, and if their dramatic purpose was to be achieved by the alternative uses of laughter or of tears, they preferred to achieve it by the ruthless light of laughter. Many of the plays have not been printed and the appended bibliography includes no examples of the comedy of Mr. H. M. Richardson, Dr. F. E. Wynne or Mr. M. A. Arabian. Incomplete record of the Lancashire Plays as it is, it serves to drive home the contention that the "Manchester School" are, in the main, comic writers. Bibliography: (1) Stanley Houghton—"The Works of Stanley Houghton," three volumes (Constable & Co.); "Hindle Wakes" (Sidgwick and Jackson); "The Younger Generation," "Five Short Plays," "Independent Means," "The Dear Departed," "Fancy Free" (Samuel French, Ltd.). (2) Allan Monkhouse—"Mary Broome," "The Education of Mr. Surrage" (Sidgwick & Jackson); "Four Tragedies" (Duckworth & Co); "War Plays" (Constable & Co.). (3) Harold Brighouse—"Hobson's Choice," "Garside's Career" (Constable & Co.); "Dealing in Futures," "Graft" (Samuel French, Ltd. ); "Lonesome-Like," "The Price of Coal," "Converts," (Gowans & Grey, Ltd). (4) Judge E. A. Parry;—"The Tallyman and other Plays" (Sherratt & Hughes). (5) J. Sackville Martin—"Cupid and the Styx" (Samuel French, Ltd.). THE GAME A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS CHARACTERS AUSTIN Whitworth. EDMUND Whitworth. LEO Whitworth. JACK Metherell. Hugh Martin. Dr. Wells. BARNES. ELSIE Whitworth. FLORENCE Whitworth. MRS. METHERELL. MRS. WILMOT. MRS. NORBURY. ACT I The Action of the Play takes place in a Lancashire town on the last Saturday in April between the hours of one and five in the afternoon. Austin Whitworth's house in Blackton was built by his father in 1870 and the library is a stately room. The door is on the right. Centre is a deep bay with a mullioned window and padded window seat. A brisk fire burns in the elaborate fireplace, with its high club fender. Shelves line the walls. All the furniture dates from the original period of the house, and though the chairs may have been upholstered in the meantime, they would repay fresh attention. Solidity is the keynote of the roomy but its light wood and bright rugs save it from heaviness. The time is one o'clock on the last Saturday in April. A painting of old John Whitworth is over the fireplace. In the armchair is Edmund Whitworth, a prosperous London solicitor. A bachelor, his habit of dining well has marked his waist-line. Pompous geniality is his manner. In his hand is a sheet of notepaper which, as the curtain rises, he finishes reading. Sitting facing him on the fender is Leo Whitworth, his nephew. Leo is twenty-one and dresses with fastidious taste, beautifully and unobtrusively. He is small. Just now he awaits Edmund's verdict with anxiety. Edmund removes his pince-nez and hands the paper to Leo. EDMUND. I like it, Leo. LEO. Really, uncle? I asked you to be candid. EDMUND. Yes. I do like It. It's immature, but it's the real thing. (Rising and patting his shoulder patronizingly.) There's stuff in you, my boy. LEO. You're the first Whitworth who's ever praised my work. The usual thing's to laugh at me for trying to be a poet. EDMUND. A prophet in his own country, eh? Perhaps they don't know very much about poetry, Leo. LEO. (excitedly, walking about, while Edmund takes his place by the fire). Is that any reason for laughing at me? I don't know anything about hockey, but I don't laugh at Flo and Elsie for playing. As I tell them, mutual tolerance is the only basis for family life. If I were a large-limbed athlete they'd bow down and worship, but as I've got a sense of beauty and no brawn they simply bully the life out of me. EDMUND. You're sure you do tolerate them? LEO. Of course I do. I'd rather have a sister who's a football maniac any day than a sister who's a politician. There's some beauty in catching balls, but there's no beauty in catching votes. What I complain of is that there's no seriousness in this house about the things that matter. EDMUND. Such as—poetry? LEO. Oh, now you're getting at me. All right. I'm used to it. Being serious about poetry's better than being serious about football, anyhow. EDMUND. Sonnets have their place in the scheme of things. LEO. A high place, too. EDMUND. I agree with you in putting them above football. LEO. Then you'll find yourself unpopular here, EDMUND. At the same time, it's possible to overdo the sonnets, Leo. LEO. Never. Art demands all. EDMUND. My dear boy, if you're going to talk about art and temperament, and all the other catchwords—— LEO. I'm not. I'm only asking you to tell them you believe in my genius and then they'll drop thinking I'm making an ass of myself. EDMUND. I see. By the way, what are you making of yourself, Leo? LEO. A poet, I hope. EDMUND. I meant for a living. LEO. I have a weak lung. EDMUND. Is that your occupation? LEO. It is my tragedy. EDMUND. Um. LEO. You will speak to them for me, uncle? They'll listen to you. At least you come from London, where people are civilized. EDMUND. Are they? In London I hold a brief for the culture of the provinces. LEO. You took jolly good care to get away from the provinces, yourself. And you mustn't tell me you think Blackton is cultured. EDMUND. I heard my first Max Reger sonata in Blackton long before London had found him. LEO. Music's another matter. EDMUND. Yes. Your father played it to me. LEO. Well, there you are again. Music and football are the only things he cares about. That's just what I complain of. I've tried to raise his tastes, but I find generally a lack of seriousness in men of his age. Of course' there are exceptions. EDMUND. Thank you. (Enter Florence Whitworth, in golfing tweeds with bag, and without hat, hair tumbled by the wind. She is a largemade girl of eighteen, supremely healthy and athletic.) FLORENCE. May I hide in here? LEO. What's there to hide from? FLORENCE. Eleanor Smith is tackling Elsie in the hall to play hockey for the High School Old Girls this afternoon. When she finds Elsie won't, she'll want to try me, so I'll keep out of the way, please. EDMUND. And why won't Elsie? FLORENCE. We never do when the Rovers are playing at home. I wouldn't miss seeing the match this afternoon for the best game of hockey I ever had. (Slinging the golf-bag in a corner.) Topping round on the links, uncle. You ought to have come. EDMUND. I'm a sedentary animal, Flo. FLORENCE. Yes. And you're putting on weight. It's six years since you were here, and I'll bet you've gone up a stone a year. EDMUND. In my profession a portly figure is an asset. If you have a lean and hungry look, clients think it's because you sit up late running up bills of costs. If you look comfortable, they imagine you're too busy dining to think of the six and eightpences. FLORENCE. Yes. I never met a slacker yet who wasn't full of excellent excuses. Leo calls his poetry. You call yours business. Wait till you'll retire. You'll find it out then if you haven't a decent hobby. EDMUND. But I have. FLORENCE. It's invisible to the naked eye. You don't golf, and you don't play tennis or cricket or—— EDMUND. I collect postage stamps. FLORENCE. No wonder you're in bad condition with a secret vice like that. (Goes to open window.) LEO (sharply). Don't do that. FLORENCE. It's blazing hot. I can't imagine what you want a fire for. LEO. Uncle felt chilly. FLORENCE. Sorry I spoke. No, I'm not. It serves him right for taking no exercise. (Enter Elsie Whitworth, who, like Florence, is tall and muscular, but with a slim beauty which, contrasted with Florence's loose limbs and occasional gawkishness, is, at twenty-two, comparatively mature. Her indoor dress, to honour the visiting uncle, is elaborate and bright.) ELSIE. Flo, Eleanor Smith wants you. FLORENCE. I know she does. That's why I'm hiding in here. ELSIE. They're a man short on the team, and—— FLORENCE. Didn't you tell her I can't play to-day? Elsie. She thinks she can persuade you. FLORENCE. She can't. ELSIE. You'd better go and tell her so. FLORENCE (gathering up her golf-bag). Blow Eleanor Smith! She thinks hockey's everything. I hate fanatics. Elsie. She's waiting for you. FLORENCE. All right. I'll go. (Exit Florence.) ELSIE. Heard the news, Leo? LEO. Not particularly. ELSIE (excitedly). Jack Metherell's coming in to see father before the match. Father told me. LEO. Oh? My pulse remains normal. ELSIE. You've no more blood in you than a cauliflower. I'm tingling all over at the thought of being under the same roof with Metherell. EDMUND. May I enquire who Mr. Metherell is? ELSIE. Do you mean to say you've never heard of Metherell? EDMUND. I apologise for being a Londoner. ELSIE. That's no excuse. They can raise a decent crowd at Chelsea nowadays. EDMUND. Indeed? I live at Sevenoaks. ELSIE. You must have heard of Metherell. EDMUND. No. Who is he? LEO. Metherell is a professional footballer, uncle. EDMUND. Oh! ELSIE (indignantly). A professional footballer! He's the finest centre forward in England. EDMUND (politely). Really? Quite a great man. LEO. Quite. He's the idol of my sisters and the Black-ton roughs. For two hours every Saturday and Bank Holiday through eight months of the year forty thousand pairs of eyes are glued on Metherell and the newspapers of Saturday night, Sunday and Monday chronicle his exploits in about two columns; but if you don't know what "agitating the spheroid towards the sticks" means, you'd better not try to read them. (Elsie approaches him threateningly.) He is also good looking and a decent fellow. ELSIE. You'd better add that. LEO. I will add more. He spends the rest of his time training for those two hours, and when he's thirty he'll retire and keep a pub; and in three years eighteen stone of solid flesh will bury the glory that was Metherell. ELSIE (threatening him). You viperous little skunk. LEO. I appeal to you, uncle. Can a skunk possess the attributes of a viper? ELSIE. If you say another word against Jack Metherell, I'll knock you into the middle of next week. You're frightened of the sight of a football yourself and you dare to libel a man who—— LEO. The greater the truth the greater the libel. You're a solicitor, uncle. Isn't that so? EDMUND. Do you want my professional opinion? LEO (dodging round the table from Elsie). I want your personal protection. ELSIE (giving Leo up). Uncle, Jack Metherell's the truest sportsman who ever stepped on to a football field. He's the straightest shooter and the trickiest dribbler in the game. I'd walk barefooted over thorns to watch him play, and for Leo to say he'll retire at thirty and grow fat is nothing but a spiteful idiotic lie. EDMUND (making peace) Well, suppose we say he'll retire at thirty-five and just put on a little flesh and live to a ripe old age, fighting his battles over again. LEO. Over a gallon of beer in the saloon bar. ELSIE. If your head wasn't too full of poetry for anything important, you'd know Jack's a teetotaller. He's never entered a public house and he never will. EDMUND. If I were you, Leo, I wouldn't quarrel. I should make a poem about it. ELSIE. It's all he's fit for. Lampooning a great man. I tell you, uncle, Jack Metherell can do what he likes in Blackton. If he cared to put up for Parliament, no other man would make a show. LEO. Oh, the fellow's popular. They all love Jack. ELSIE. Popular. There isn't a woman in the town but would sell her soul to marry him. EDMUND. This seems to be the old Pagan worship of the body. LEO. The mob must have a hero. Prize-fighting's illegal and cricket's slow, so it's the footballer's turn to-day to be an idol. ELSIE. Look here, you can judge for yourself this afternoon. LEO. Are you coming to the match, uncle? EDMUND. Yes. I'm curious to see it. I suppose you're not going? LEO. Oh, I shall go. EDMUND. Really? I had gathered that you don't like football. LEO. I don't like funerals or weddings either, but they're all the sort of family function one goes to as a duty. ELSIE. A duty. Will you believe me, he never misses a match, uncle? LEO. If you want to know, I go for professional reasons. EDMUND. Professional? LEO. I am training myself to be a close observer of my fellow men, and in a football crowd I can study human passions in the raw. To the earnest student of psychology the interest is enormous. ELSIE. Yes. You wait for his psychological shout when Blackton score a goal. You'll know then if his lungs are weak. We go because we like it and so does he, only we're not ashamed of our tastes and he is. Wait till Jack Metherel comes on the field this afternoon in the old red and gold of the Blackton Rovers and—— (Austin Whitworth enters while she speaks and interrupts her. Without being grossly fat, Austin is better covered than Edmund, whose elder brother he is. Without exaggeration, his lounge suit suggests sporting tendencies. His manner is less confident than that of Edmund, the successful carver-out of a career, and at times curiously deferential to his brother. Obviously a nice fellow and, not so obviously, in some difficulty. With his children he is on friendly chaffing terms, so habitually getting the worst of the chaff that he is in danger of becoming a nonentity in his own house. He wears a moustache, which, like his remaining hair, is grey. Florence follows him.). AUSTIN. But Metherell won't. ELSIE. What. Has Jack hurt himself at practice? Austin. No. LEO. What's up with him? AUSTIN. Nothing. ELSIE. Then why isn't he playing? AUSTIN. He is playing. ELSIE. You just said—— AUSTIN. He won't wear the Blackton colours. He's playing for Birchester. He's transferred. ELSIE. You've transferred Jack Metherell! Father, you're joking. AUSTIN. No. ELSIE (tensely). I'll never forgive you. He's the only man on the team who's Blackton born and bred. The rest are all foreigners. FLORENCE. Who've you got to put in his place? There isn't another centre forward amongst them. AUSTIN. There's Angus. FLORENCE. Angus! He can't sprint for toffee, and his shooting's the limit. AUSTIN. Well, you've to make the best you can of Angus. Metherell belongs to Birchester now. ELSIE. I don't know what you're thinking about, father. Are you mad? What did you do it for? AUSTIN. Money, my dear, which the Club needs badly. ELSIE. It'll need it worse if we lose to-day and drop to the second division. AUSTIN. We must not lose to-day. FLORENCE. You're asking for it. Transferring Metherell. The rest are a pack of rotters. AUSTIN. They've got to fight for their lives to-day. Birchester offered a record fee on condition I fixed at once. I was there last night with Metherell and he signed on for them. FLORENCE. It's a howling shame. LEO. And over Blackton Rovers was written Ichabod, their glory is departed. ELSIE. Father, do you mind if I go? I might say some of the things I'm thinking if I stayed. FLORENCE. I'll come too. I wish to goodness I was playing hockey. It won't be fun to see Jack Metherell play against us. (Florence at door,) AUSTIN. It wasn't for fun that I transferred him. ELSIE. No. Worse. For money. You've told us that and—oh, I'd better go. (Exeunt Flo and Elsie.) AUSTIN. Go with them, Leo. LEO. Shall I? AUSTIN. Please. (Exit Leo.) Well, Edmund? EDMUND (puzzled). Well, Austin? AUSTIN. Now you can judge exactly how pressing my necessities are. You've heard it all. EDMUND. Really? You've only talked football. AUSTIN. Football is all. I'm sorry I got in last night too late to have a chat with you, but (shuddering) what I was doing yesterday is public property this morning. EDMUND. You mean about the man Metherell? AUSTIN. Yes. EDMUND. I understand some other club has bought him from you. Are footballers for sale? AUSTIN. Er—in a sense. EDMUND. And why have you sold him if he's a valuable man? AUSTIN. He's invaluable. If ever there was a one-man team, that team is ours. I've seen the others stand around and watch Metherell win matches by himself. But to-day money is more essential than the man. EDMUND. I'm still puzzled. Is football a business then? AUSTIN. Of course. That's the worst of burying yourself in London. You never know anything. Football clubs to-day are limited companies. EDMUND. I fancy I had heard that. AUSTIN. Well, broadly speaking, and not so broadly either, I am the limited company that runs Blackton Rovers. You never cared for sport. I was always keen. In the old amateur days, I played for Blackton while you went country walks and studied law. Football's always meant a lot to me. It means life or death to-day. EDMUND. That's a strong way of talking about a game, Austin. AUSTIN. Life or death, Edmund. Blackton's been my passion. It's not a town that's full of rich men, and the others buttoned up their pockets. Employers of labour too, who know as well as I do that football is an antidote to strikes, besides keeping the men in better condition by giving them somewhere to go instead of pubs. I've poured money out like water, but the spring's run dry and other Clubs are richer. They can buy better players. They bought them from me. EDMUND. Have the men no choice? AUSTIN. Up to a point. But footballers aren't sentimentalists and rats desert a sinking ship. The one man who stuck to me was Metherell. He's a Blackton lad, and he liked to play for his native town. To-day, he's gone. I made him go for the money I needed. The Club's been losing matches. We were knocked out of the Cup Tie in the first round. Lose to-day and Blackton Rovers go down to the second division. My Club in the second division! EDMUND. Does that matter so much—apart from sentimental reasons? AUSTIN. It matters this much. That there'll never be another dividend. The gate money for the second division game's no use to me. EDMUND. But surely, if your public's got the football habit they'll go on coming. AUSTIN. Not to a second division team. They'll drink a pint or two less during the week and travel on Saturdays to the nearest first division match. EDMUND. So much for their loyalty. AUSTIN. They don't want loyalty. They want first class football, and if I can't give it them, they'll go where they can get it. As it is, the Club's on the brink of bankruptcy, and I'm the Club. EDMUND. Then your men had better win to-day. AUSTIN. They must. EDMUND. And if—supposing they don't? AUSTIN. That's why I brought you here. To look into things. I can't face ruin myself. EDMUND. Ruin? It's as bad as that? AUSTIN. Oh, I daresay you're thinking me a fool. EDMUND. I think your sense of proportion went astray. AUSTIN. All my money's in it. I don't care for myself. I had value for it all the day four years ago when Blackton won the Cup at the Crystal Palace, but it's been a steady decline ever since. What troubles me is, it's so rough on the children. EDMUND. Have you told them? AUSTIN. What's the use? Leo's got no head for business and the girls are—girls. EDMUND. Yes. Tell me, what are you doing with Leo? AUSTIN. Doing? Well, Leo's is a decorative personality, and he has a lung, poor lad. Leo's not made for wear. EDMUND. Rubbish! If he's made you feel that, he's a clever scamp, with a taste for laziness and a gift for deception. AUSTIN. Well, I do feel about Leo like a barndoor fowl that has hatched out a peacock. EDMUND. Peacock! Yes, for vanity. A little work would do the feathers no harm. AUSTIN. I can't be hard on a boy with his trouble. EDMUND. I foresee a full week-end, Austin. And I thought I was coming down for a quiet time in the bosom of my family. AUSTIN. Yes, we've been great family men, Edmund, you and I. EDMUND (hastily). Well, we won't go into that again. AUSTIN. Yes, we will. We quarrelled over Debussy. Come into the music-room and I'll play the thing over to you now. If you don't admit it's great, I'll—— EDMUND. We've other matters to discuss, Austin. This isn't the time for music. AUSTIN. Yes, it is. Music makes me forget. Some men take to drink. I go to the piano. (Enter Florence and Elsie.) ELSIE. Father, do you want any lunch? AUSTIN (looking at watch). By Jove, yes. Time's getting on. I'll play that Debussy thing afterwards, Edmund. Coming, girls? ELSIE. No, thank you, father. Neither Flo nor I feel we can sit down to table with you just yet. We've had ours. AUSTIN. You've been quick about it. Where's Leo? FLORENCE. Stuffing himself with cold beef. Men have no feelings. EDMUND. Surely Leo must have a feeling of hunger. ELSIE. It's indecent to be hungry after hearing of father's treachery to Blackton. AUSTIN. Treachery! FLORENCE. Some of my tears fell in the salad bowl, and I hope they'll poison you. EDMUND. Be careful what you're saying, Florence. Is that the way to talk to your father? FLORENCE. No. That's nothing to the way I ought to talk to him. EDMUND. Well, I know if I'd addressed my father like that—— FLORENCE. It's a long time since you had a father to address, Uncle Edmund. We bring our fathers up differently to-day. EDMUND. If you only knew what your father—— AUSTIN (taking his arm). It doesn't matter, Edmund. Come to lunch. (Exeunt Edmund and Austin.) FLORENCE. Yes, it doesn't matter if the Rovers are defeated, but there's beef and beer in the next room and the heavens would fall if food were neglected. ELSIE. Oh, I don't care if they are beaten. The Rovers don't interest me without Metherell. FLORENCE. I don't believe they ever did. You're no true sportswoman, Elsie. You always thought more about the man than the game. You might be in love with Metherell. ELSIE. Yes, I might.