The Bedroom is blacked out, but music still comes from it—presumably the next track on the album.* Only a minute or two have passed.
BONES appears from the Kitchen entrance. He is pushing a well-laden dinner-trolley in front of him. It has on it a covered casserole dish, a bottle of wine in an ice bucket, two glasses, two plates, two of every-thing… dinner for two in fact, and very elegant.
He is followed by GEORGE holding a couple of lettuce leaves and a carrot, which he nibbles absently.
GEORGE: What do you mean, ‘What does he look like?’ He looks like a rabbit with long legs. (But BONES has stopped, listening to Dotty’s voice, rather as a man might pause in St. Peter’s on hearing choristers….)
BONES: That was it…. That was the one she was singing….
I remember how her voice faltered, I saw the tears spring into her eyes, the sobs shaking her breast… and that awful laughing scream as they brought the curtain down on the first lady of the musical stage—never to rise again! Oh yes, there are many stars in the West End night, but there’s only ever been one Dorothy Moore….
GEORGE: Yes, I must say I envy her that. There have not been so many philosophers, but two of them have been George Moore, and it tends to dissipate the impact of one’s name. But for that, I think my book Conceptual Problems of Knowledge and Mind would have caused quite a stir.
BONES: Any chance of a come-back, sir?
GEORGE: Well, I’m still hoping to find a publisher for it. I have also made a collection of my essays under the title, Language, Truth and God. An American publisher has expressed an interest but he wants to edit it himself and change the title to You Better Believe It…. I suppose it would be no worse than benefitting from my wife’s gramophone records.
BONES: A consummate artist, sir. I felt it deeply when she retired.
GEORGE: Unfortunately she retired from consummation about the same time as she retired from artistry.
BONES: It was a personal loss, really.
GEORGE: Quite. She just went off it. I don’t know why.
BONES (coming round to him at last): You don’t have to explain to me, sir. You can’t keep much from her hard-core fans. Actually, I had a brother who had a nervous breakdown.
It’s a terrible thing. It’s the pressure, you know. The appalling pressure of being a star.
GEORGE: Was your brother a star?
BONES: No, he was an osteopath. Bones the Bones, they called him. Every patient had to make a little joke. It drove him mad, finally.
(They have been approaching the Bedroom door, but BONES
suddenly abandons the trolley and takes GEORGE downstage.)
(Earnestly.) You see, Dorothy is a delicate creature, like a lustrous-eyed little bird you could hold in your hand, feeling its little brittle bones through its velvety skin—vulnerable, you understand; highly strung. No wonder she broke under the strain. And you don’t get over it, just like that. It can go on for years, the effect, afterwards—building up again, underneath, until, one day—Snap!—do something violent perhaps, quite out of character, you know what I mean? It would be like a blackout. She wouldn’t know what she was doing. (He grips GEORGE’s elbow.) And I should think that
any competent or, better still, eminent psychiatric expert witness would be prepared to say so. Of course, he wouldn’t be cheap, but it can be done, do you follow me?
GEORGE (puzzled): I’m not sure that I do.
BONES: Well, your wife says you can explain everything, and you say you are wholly responsible, but——
GEORGE: Are you still going on about that?—for goodness sake,
I just lost my temper for a moment, that’s all, and took matters into my own hands.
BONES: Because of the noise?
GEORGE: Exactly.
BONES: Don’t you think it was a bit extreme?
GEORGE: Yes, yes, I suppose it was a bit.
BONES: Won’t wash, Wilfred. I believe you are trying to shield her.
GEORGE: Shield who?
BONES: It’s quite understandable. Is there a man who could stand aside when this fair creature is in trouble——
GEORGE: Aren’t you getting a little carried away? The point is, surely, that I’m the householder and I must be held responsible for what happens in my house.
BONES: I don’t think the burden of being a householder extends to responsibility for any crime committed on the premises.
GEORGE: Crime? You call that a crime?
BONES (with more heat): Well, what would you call it?
GEORGE: It was just a bit of fun! Where’s your sense of humour, man?
BONES (staggered): I don’t know, you bloody philosophers are all the same, aren’t you? A man is dead and you’re as cool as you like. Your wife begged me with tears in her eyes to go easy on you, and I don’t mind admitting I was deeply moved——
GEORGE: Excuse me——
BONES (angrily): But you’re wasted on her, mate. What on earth made her marry you, I’ll never know, when there are so many better men—decent, strong, protective, understanding, sensitive——
GEORGE: Did you say somebody was dead?
BONES: Stone dead, in the bedroom.
GEORGE: Don’t be ridiculous.
BONES: The body is lying on the floor!
GEORGE (going to Door): You have obviously taken leave of your senses.
BONES: Don’t touch it!—it will have to be examined for finger-prints.
GEORGE: If there is a body on the floor, it will have my footprints on it.
(He opens the Bedroom door. In the Bedroom, no one is in view. The drapes—or screens—are round the bed. The ambiguous machine—the dermatograph—is set up so that it peers with its lens through the drapes. The camera-lights are in position round the bed, shining down over the drapes into the bed. The TV set is connected by a lead to the dermatograph.
GEORGE pauses in the doorway.)
ARCHIE (within):… There…
DOTTY (within):… Yes…
ARCHIE: There… there…
DOTTY: Yes…
ARCHIE:… and there…
DOTTY: Yes… yes.
(These sounds are consistent with a proper doctor-patient relationship. If DOTTY has a tendency to gasp slightly it is probably because the stethoscope is cold, ARCHIE on the other hand, might be getting rather overheated under the blaze of the dermatograph lights.)
ARCHIE (within): Excuse me…
(ARCHIE’s coat comes sailing over the drapes. GEORGE retreats, closing the door.)
GEORGE: Well, he’s very much alive now.
BONES: Sir?
GEORGE: My wife’s doctor.
BONES: Really? On the floor?
GEORGE: He’s a psychiatrist, notorious for his methods. And for much else. (On this bitter note, GEORGE goes into the Study, BONES, with
the trolley, cautiously enters the Bedroom. No one is in view.
BONES pauses. One of ARCHIE’s shoes comes over the drapes and falls on the floor. Another pause. The second shoe comes over, falling into BONES’s hands. The absence of a thump brings ARCHIE’s head into view, popping up over the drapes.)
ARCHIE: Ah! Good morning!
(ARCHIE moves to come out from the bed. Meanwhile DOTTY
looks over the top.)
DOTTY: Lunch! And Bonesy!
(ARCHIE picks his coat up and hands it to BONES, and then readies himself to put his arms in the sleeves, as though BONES
were a manservant.)
ARCHIE (slipping on his coat): Thank you so much. Rather warm in there. The lights, you know.
DOTTY: Isn’t he sweet?
ARCHIE: Charming. What happened to Mrs. Whatsername?
DOTTY: No, no, it’s Bonesy!
BONES: Inspector Bones, C.I.D.
DOTTY (disappearing): Excuse me!
ARCHIE: Bones…? I had a patient named Bones. I wonder if he was any relation?—an osteopath.
BONES: My brother!
ARCHIE: Remember the case well. Cognomen Syndrome. My advice to him was to take his wife’s maiden name of Foot and carry on from there.
BONES: He took your advice but unfortunately he got interested in chiropody. He is now in an asylum near Uxbridge.
ARCHIE: Isn’t that interesting? I must write him up. The Cognomen Syndrome is my baby, you know.
BONES: You discovered it?
ARCHIE: I’ve got it. Jumper’s the name—my card.
BONES (reading off card): ‘Sir Archibald Jumper, M.D., D.Phil.,
D.Litt., L.D., D.P.M., D.P.T. (Gym)’…. What’s all that?
ARCHIE: I’m a doctor of medicine, philosophy, literature and law, with diplomas in psychological medicine and P.T. including gym.
BONES (handing back the card): I see that you are the Vice-Chancellor of Professor Moore’s university.
ARCHIE: Not a bad record, is it? And I can still jump over seven feet.
BONES: High jump?
ARCHIE: Long jump. My main interest, however, is the trampoline.
BONES: Mine is show business generally.
ARCHIE: Really? Well, nowadays, of course, I do more theory than practice, but if trampoline acts appeal to you at all, a vacancy has lately occurred in a little team I run, mainly for our own amusement with a few social engagements thrown in——
BONES: Just a minute, just a minute!—what happened to
Professor McFee?
ARCHIE: Exactly. I regret to tell you he is dead.
BONES: I realize he is dead——
ARCHIE: Shocking tragedy. I am entirely to blame.
BONES: You, too, sir?
ARCHIE: Yes, Inspector.
BONES: Very chivalrous, sir, but I’m afraid it won’t wash.
(He addresses the drapes, loudly.) Miss Moore, is there any-thing you wish to say at this stage?
DOTTY (her head appearing): Sorry?
BONES: My dear—we are all sorry——
(DOTTY disappears.)
ARCHIE: Just a moment! I will not have a patient of mine brow-beaten by the police.
BONES (thoughtfully): Patient…
ARCHIE: Yes. As you can see I have been taking a dermatographical reading.
BONES (indicating the dermatograph): This? What does it do?
ARCHIE: It reads the skin, electronically; hence dermatograph.
BONES: Why is it connected to the television set?
ARCHIE: We’ll get the read-back on the screen. All kinds of disturbances under the skin show up on the surface, if we can learn to read it, and we are learning.
BONES: Disturbances? Mental disturbances?
ARCHIE: Among other things.
BONES (a new intimacy): Sir Jim——
ARCHIE: Archie——
BONES: Sir Archie, might I have a word with you, in private?
ARCHIE: Just what I was about to suggest. (He opens the Bedroom door.) Shall we step outside…?
(BONES steps into the Hall.)
DOTTY:… Things don’t seem so bad after all. So to speak.
(ARCHIE follows BONES into the Hall. Fade out on Bedroom,
ARCHIE and BONES move towards Kitchen exit.)
BONES: This is just between you and me, Sigmund. I understand your feelings only too well. What decent man could stand aside while that beautiful, frail creature——(In the Study, GEORGE has resumed…)
GEORGE: The study of moral philosophy is an attempt to determine what we mean when we say that something is good and that something else is bad. Not all value judgements, however, are the proper study of the moral philosopher. Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, ‘This is a good bacon sandwich,’ or, ‘Bedser had a good wicket.’ (The SECRETARY raises her head at ‘Bedser’.) Bedser!—Good God, B-E-D-S… (Fade on Study.
ARCHIE and BONES re-enter.)
ARCHIE: Please come to the point, Inspector. The plain facts are that while performing some modest acrobatics for the entertainment of Miss Moore’s party-guests, Professor McFee was killed by a bullet fired from the outer darkness. We all saw him shot, but none of us saw who shot him. With the possible exception of McFee’s fellow gymnasts, anybody could have fired the shot, and anybody could have had a reason for doing so, including, incidentally, myself.
BONES: And what might your motive be, sir?
ARCHIE: Who knows? Perhaps McFee, my faithful protégé, had secretly turned against me, gone off the rails and decided that he was St. Paul to Moore’s Messiah.
BONES: Doesn’t seem much of a reason.
ARCHIE: It depends. Moore himself is not important—he is our tame believer, pointed out to visitors in much the same spirit as we point out the magnificent stained glass in what is now the gymnasium. But McFee was the guardian and figurehead of philosophical orthodoxy, and if he threatened to start calling on his masters to return to the true path, then I’m afraid it would certainly have been an ice-pick in the back of the skull.
DOTTY (off): Darling!
ARCHIE: And then again, perhaps it was Dorothy. Or someone.
(Smiles.)
DOTTY (off): Darling!
BONES: My advice to you is, number one, get her lawyer over here——
ARCHIE: That will not be necessary. I am Miss Moore’s legal adviser.
BONES: Number two, completely off the record, get her off on expert evidence—nervous strain, appalling pressure, and one day—snap!—blackout, can’t remember a thing. Put her in the box and you’re half-way there. The other half is, get something on Mad Jock McFee, and if you don’t get a Scottish judge it’ll be three years probation and the sympathy of the court.
ARCHIE: This is most civil of you, Inspector, but a court appearance would be most embarrassing to my client and patient; and three years’ probation is not an insignificant curtailment of a person’s liberty.
BONES: For God’s sake, man, we’re talking about a murder charge.
ARCHIE: You are. What I had in mind is that McFee, suffering from nervous strain brought on by the appalling pressure of overwork—for which I blame myself entirely—left here last night in a mood of deep depression, and wandered into the park, where he crawled into a large plastic bag and shot himself…
(Pause, BONES opens his mouth to speak.)
… leaving this note… (ARCHIE produces it from his pocket.)… which was found in the bag together with his body by some gymnasts on an early morning keep-fit run. (Pause, BONES opens his mouth to speak.)
Here is the coroner’s certificate.
(ARCHIE produces another note, which BONES takes from him. BONES reads it.)
BONES: Is this genuine?
ARCHIE (testily): Of course it’s genuine. I’m a coroner, not a forger.
(BONES hands the certificate back, and almost comes to attention.)
BONES: Sir Archibald Bouncer——
ARCHIE: Jumper.
BONES: Sir Archibald Jumper, I must——
ARCHIE: Now, I judge from your curiously formal and some-what dated attitude, that you are deaf to offers of large sums of money for favours rendered.
BONES: I didn’t hear that.
ARCHIE: Exactly. On the other hand, I think you are a man who feels that his worth has not been recognized. Other men have got on—younger men, flashier men… Superintendants… Commissioners….
BONES: There may be something in that.
ARCHIE: I dare say your ambitions do not stop with the Police
Force, even.
BONES: Oh?
ARCHIE: Inspector, my patronage is not extensive, but it is select.
I can offer prestige, the respect of your peers and almost unlimited credit among the local shopkeepers—in short, the Chair of Divinity is yours for the asking.
BONES: The Chair of Divinity?
ARCHIE: Not perhaps, the Chair which is in the eye of the hurricane nowadays, but a professorship will still be regarded as a distinction come the day—early next week, in all probability—when the Police Force will be thinned out to a ceremonial front for the peace-keeping activities of the Army.
BONES: I see. Well, until that happens, I should still like to know—if McFee shot himself inside a plastic bag, where is the gun?
ARCHIE (awed): Very good thinking indeed! On consideration I can give you the Chair of Logic, but that is my last offer.
BONES: This is a British murder enquiry and some degree of justice must be seen to be more or less done.
ARCHIE: I must say I find your attitude lacking in flexibility.
What makes you so sure that it was Miss Moore who shot McFee?
BONES: I have a nose for these things.
ARCHIE: With the best will in the world I can’t give the Chair of
Logic to a man who relies on nasal intuition.
DOTTY (off): Help!
(BONES reacts, ARCHIE restrains him.)
ARCHIE: It’s all right—just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call ‘a cry for help’.
BONES: But it was a cry for help.
ARCHIE: Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a cry for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.
DOTTY (off): MURDER!
(BONES rushes to the Bedroom, which remains dark, ARCHIE
looks at his watch and leaves towards the Kitchen. In the Study GEORGE resumes.)
GEORGE:… whereas a spell with the heavy roller would improve it from Bradman’s point of view and worsen it from Bedser’s…
Likewise, to say that this is a good bacon sandwich is only to say that by the criteria applied by like-minded lovers of bacon sandwiches, this one is worthy of approbation. The word good is reducible to other properties such as crisp, lean and unadulterated by tomato sauce. You will have seen at once that to a man who likes his bacon sandwiches underdone, fatty and smothered in ketchup, this would be a rather poor bacon sandwich. By subjecting any given example to similar analysis, the modern school, in which this university has played so lamentable a part, has satisfied itself that all statements implying goodness or badness, whether in conduct or in bacon sandwiches, are not statements of fact but merely expressions of feeling, taste or vested interest.
But when we say that the Good Samaritan acted well, we are surely expressing more than a circular prejudice about behaviour. We mean he acted kindly—selflessly—well. And what is our approval of kindness based on if not on the intuition that kindness is simply good in itself and cruelty is not. A man who sees that he is about to put his foot down on a beetle in his path, decides to step on it or not to. Why? What process is at work? And what is that quick blind mindless connection suddenly made and lost by the man who didn’t see the beetle but only heard the crunch? (Towards the end of this speech, ARCHIE re-enters and quietly lets himself into the Study.)
It is ironic that the school which denies the claims of the intuition to know good when it sees it, is itself the product of the pioneer work set out in his Principia Ethica by the late G. E. Moore, an intuitionist philosopher whom I respected from afar but who, for reasons which will be found adequate by logical spirits, was never in when I called. Moore did not believe in God, but I do not hold that against him—for of all forms of wishful thinking, humanism demands the greatest sympathy—and at least by insisting that goodness was a fact, and on his right to recognize it when he saw it, Moore avoided the moral limbo devised by his successors, who are in the unhappy position of having to admit that one man’s idea of good is no more meaningful than another man’s whether he be St. Francis or—Vice-Chancellor! (For he has noticed ARCHIE in the mirror, ARCHIE comes forward.)
ARCHIE: An inept comparison, if I may say so. I’m very fond of animals. (He picks up PAT.) What do you call it?
GEORGE: Pat.
ARCHIE: Pat!… what a lovely name.
GEORGE: It’s a good name for a tortoise, being sexually ambiguous. I also have a hare called Thumper, somewhere…. By the way, I wasn’t really comparing you with——
ARCHIE: Quite understand. You were going to say Hitler or
Stalin or Nero… the argument always gets back to some lunatic tyrant, the reductio ad absurdum of the new ethics, and the dog-eared trump card of the intuitionists.
GEORGE (rising to that): Well, why not? When I push my convictions to absurdity, I arrive at God—which is at least as embarrassing nowadays. (Pause.) All I know is that I think that I know that I know that nothing can be created out of nothing, that my moral conscience is different from the rules of my tribe, and that there is more in me than meets the microscope—and because of that I’m lumbered with this incredible, indescribable and definitely shifty God, the trump card of atheism.
ARCHIE: It’s always been a mystery to me why religious faith and atheism should be thought of as opposing attitudes.
GEORGE: Always?
ARCHIE: It just occurred to me.
GEORGE: It occurred to you that belief in God and the conviction that God doesn’t exist amount to much the same thing?
ARCHIE: It gains from careful phrasing. Religious faith and atheism differ mainly about God; about Man they are in accord: Man is the highest form of life, he has duties he has rights, etcetera, and it is usually better to be kind than cruel. Even if there is some inscrutable divinity behind it all, our condition for good or ill is apparently determined by our choice of actions, and choosing seems to be a genuine human possibility. Indeed, it is surely religious zeal rather than atheism which is historically notorious in the fortunes of mankind.
GEORGE: I’m not at all sure that the God of religious observance is the object of my faith. Do you suppose it would be presumptuous to coin a deity?
ARCHIE: I don’t see the point. If he caught on, you’d kill for him, too. (Suddenly remembering.) Ah!—I knew there was something!—McFee’s dead.
GEORGE: What?!!
ARCHIE: Shot himself this morning, in the park, in a plastic bag.
GEORGE: My God! Why?
ARCHIE: It’s hard to say. He was always tidy.
GEORGE: But to shoot himself…
ARCHIE: Oh, he could be very violent, you know… In fact we had a furious row last night—perhaps the Inspector had asked you about that…?
ARCHIE: It was a purely trivial matter. He took offence at my description of Edinburgh as the Reykjavik of the South.
(GEORGE is not listening.)
GEORGE:… Where did he find the despair…? I thought the whole point of denying the Absolute was to reduce the scale, instantly, to the inconsequential behaviour of inconsequential animals; that nothing could ever be that important…
ARCHIE: Including, I suppose, death…. It’s an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of crutch for those who can’t bear the reality of God…
GEORGE (still away): I wonder if McFee was afraid of death?
And if he was, what was it that he would have been afraid of: surely not the chemical change in the material that was his body. I suppose he would have said, as so many do, that it is only the dying he feared, yes, the physical process of giving out. But it’s not the dying with me—one knows about pain. It’s death that I’m afraid of. (Pause.)
ARCHIE: Incidentally, since his paper has of course been circulated to everyone, it must remain the basis of the symposium.
GEORGE: Yes, indeed, I have spent weeks preparing my commentary on it.
ARCHIE: We shall begin with a two-minute silence. That will give me a chance to prepare mine.
GEORGE: You will be replying, Vice-Chancellor?
ARCHIE: At such short notice I don’t see who else could stand in. I’ll relinquish the chair, of course, and we’ll get a new chairman, someone of good standing; he won’t have to know much philosophy. Just enough for a tribute to Duncan.
GEORGE: Poor Duncan… I like to think he’ll be there in spirit.
ARCHIE: If only to make sure the materialistic argument is properly represented.
DOTTY (off): Darling!
(Both men respond automatically, and both halt and look at each other.)
GEORGE: How do I know? You’re the doctor.
ARCHIE: That’s true.
(ARCHIE moves out of the Study, GEORGE with him; into the Hall.)
I naturally try to get her to open up, but one can’t assume she tells me everything, or even that it’s the truth.
GEORGE: Well, I don’t know what’s the matter with her. She’s like a cat on hot bricks, and doesn’t emerge from her room. All she says is, she’s all right in bed.
ARCHIE: Yes, well there’s something in that.
GEORGE (restraining his going; edgily): What exactly do you do in there?
ARCHIE: Therapy takes many forms.
GEORGE: I had no idea you were still practising.
ARCHIE: Oh yes… a bit of law, a bit of philosophy, a bit of medicine, a bit of gym…. A bit of one and then a bit of the other.
GEORGE: You examine her?
ARCHIE: Oh yes, I like to keep my hand in. You must understand, my dear Moore, that when I’m examining Dorothy I’m not a lawyer or a philosopher. Or a gymnast, of course. Oh, I know, my dear fellow—you think that when I’m examining Dorothy I see her eyes as cornflowers, her lips as rubies, her skin as soft and warm as velvet—you think that when I run my hands over her back I am carried away by the delicate contours that flow like a sea-shore from shoulder to heel—oh yes, you think my mind turns to ripe pears as soon as I press——
GEORGE (viciously): No, I don’t!
ARCHIE: But to us medical men, the human body is just an imperfect machine. As it is to most of us philosophers. And to us gymnasts, of course.
DOTTY (off; urgently): Rape! (Pause.) Ra——!
(ARCHIE smiles at GEORGE, and quickly lets himself into the Bedroom, closing the door behind him.
The BEDROOM lights up. The dermatograph and the lights have been put away. The bed is revealed as before, DOTTY is sobbing
across the bed.
BONES standing by as though paralysed. A wild slow smile spreads over his face as he turns to ARCHIE, the smile of a man
pleading, ‘It’s not what you think.’ ARCHIE moves in slowly.)
ARCHIE: Tsk tsk… Inspector, I am shocked… deeply shocked. What a tragic end to an incorruptible career…
BONES:… I never touched her——
ARCHIE: Do not despair. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement….
(GEORGE has returned to the study.)
GEORGE: How the hell does one know what to believe?
(Fade out on Bedroom, to BLACKOUT.
The SECRETARY has taken down the last sentence.)
GEORGE: No, no——(Changes mind.) Well, all right. (Dictating.) How does one know what it is one believes when it’s so difficult to know what it is one knows. I don’t claim to know that God exists, I only claim that he does without my knowing it, and while I claim as much I do not claim to know as much; indeed I cannot know and God knows I cannot. (Pause.) And yet I tell you that, now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of polygons or new-born babes, nor in extremities of pain or joy, but more probably ambushed by some quite trivial moment—say the exchange of signals between two long-distance lorry-drivers in the black sleet of a god-awful night on the old Ai—then, in that dip-flash, dip-flash of headlights in the rain that seems to affirm some common ground that is not animal and not long-distance lorry-driving—then I tell you I know—I sound like a joke vicar, new paragraph.
(The light is fading to a spot on GEORGE, sufficiently to put the Hall and Front door into blackout if they are not black already.) There is in mathematics a concept known as a limiting curve, that is the curve defined as the limit of a polygon with an infinite number of sides. For example, if I had never seen a circle and didn’t know how to draw one, I could nevertheless postulate the existence of circles by thinking of them as regular polygons with numberless edges, so that an old threepennybit would be a bumpy imperfect circle which would approach perfection if I kept doubling the number of its sides: at infinity the result would be the circle which I have never seen and do not know how to draw, and which is logically implied by the existence of polygons. And now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of rainbows or new-born babes, nor in extremities of pain or joy, but more probably in some quite trivial moment, it seems to me that life itself is the mundane figure which argues perfection at its limiting curve. And if I doubt it, the ability to doubt, to question, to think seems to be the curve itself. Cogito ergo deus est. (Pause.) The fact that I cut a ludicrous figure in the academic world is largely due to my aptitude for traducing a complex and logical thesis to a mysticism of staggering banality. McFee never made that mistake, never put himself at risk by finding mystery in the clockwork, never looked for trouble or over his shoulder, and I’m sorry he’s gone but what can be his complaint? McFee jumped, and left nothing behind but a vacancy.
(There is a delicious unraped laugh from DOTTY in the dark.
The Study light comes on again; only the Bedroom is blacked as GEORGE strides out of the Study; then the Bedroom is lit.
ARCHIE and DOTTY are sitting at the trolley eating a very civilized lunch.
BONES has gone.)
DOTTY: I must say, I do find mashed potatoes and gravy very consoling.
(GEORGE enters without knocking.)
GEORGE: I’m sorry to interrupt your inquiries——
(He looks round for the Inspector.
ARCHIE smoothly takes a silver-backed notebook from his pocket, and a silver pencil from another.)
ARCHIE: When did you first become aware of these feelings?
DOTTY (gaily): I don’t know—I’ve always found mashed potatoes and gravy very consoling.
GEORGE: Where’s the Inspector?
ARCHIE: The inquiries have been completed. Did you want him?
GEORGE: Well no…. As a matter of fact, I came to ask you… Vice-Chancellor, about the Chair of Logic.
(GEORGE is unsettled by the lunch-party atmosphere. Nothing about ARCHIE or DOTTY suggests that there is anything unusual
about it. They continue to eat and drink.)
ARCHIE: Yes?
GEORGE: You probably have had very little time to think about
McFee’s successor….
ARCHIE: The appointment to the Chair of Logic is of course a matter for the gravest consideration. We’ve always been a happy team and I shall be looking for someone who will fit in, someone with a bit of bounce.
GEORGE: Yes. Well, it just seemed to me that as the senior professor——
ARCHIE: The oldest——
GEORGE: The longest-serving professor——
ARCHIE: Oh yes.
GEORGE: Well, Logic has traditionally been considered the senior Chair….
ARCHIE (pause): Yes, well, there you are; you have made your request. But I’m not too happy about your Ethics.
GEORGE: I’m not seeking any favours——
ARCHIE: No, no, I mean Ethics has always been your department—what will happen to Ethics?
GEORGE: There’s no conflict there. My work on moral philosophy has always been based on logical principles, and it would do no harm at all if the Chair of Logic applied itself occasionally to the activities of the human race.
ARCHIE: Yes… yes…. But you see, the Chair of Logic is considered the leading edge of philosophical inquiry here, and your strong point is, how shall I put it, well, many of the students are under the impression that you are the author of Principia Ethica.
GEORGE: But he’s dead.
ARCHIE: That is why I take a serious view of the mistake.
GEORGE (pause): I see. (Moves towards door.) Incidentally, what do you psychiatrists call this form of therapy?
ARCHIE: Lunch. I don’t wish to make a fetish of denying you chairs, but you will appreciate that I can’t ask you to sit down—a psychiatrist is akin to a priest taking confession.
DOTTY: Well, it wasn’t me.
ARCHIE: Absolute privacy, absolute trust.
DOTTY: I didn’t do it. I thought you did it.
GEORGE: What is she talking about? Where’s the Inspector?
DOTTY: He’s gone. Dishonour is even. (Giggles.)
GEORGE: Without taking his record?
DOTTY: Oh yes, we must send it on. I signed it with a most moving dedication, I thought. I forgot what it was, but it was most moving.
(GEORGE can’t put his finger on it, but something is bothering him. He starts to wander towards the Bathroom.)
GEORGE: I’m surprised he just… went… like that.
(GEORGE enters the Bathroom.)
DOTTY: Oh yes!——‘To Evelyn Bones, the Sweetheart of the Force!’
GEORGE (off; horrified): My God!
(GEORGE enters from the Bathroom, white, shaking with rage.) You murderous bitchl… You might have put some water in the bath!
(He is holding a dead goldfish.)
DOTTY: Oh dear… I am sorry. I forgot about it.
GEORGE: Poor little Arch——(Catches himself.)
(ARCHIE raises his head a fraction.)
GEORGE: Murdered for a charade!
DOTTY (angrily): Murdered? Don’t you dare splash me with your sentimental rhetoric! It’s a bloody goldfish! Do you think every sole meunière comes to you untouched by suffering?
GEORGE: The monk who won’t walk in the garden for fear of treading on an ant does not have to be a vegetarian…. There is an irrational difference which has a rational value.
DOTTY: Brilliant! You must publish your findings in some suitable place like the Good Food Guide.
GEORGE: No doubt your rebuttal would look well in the
Meccano Magazine.
DOTTY: You bloody humbug!—the last of the metaphysical egocentrics! You’re probably still shaking from the four-hundred-year-old news that the sun doesn’t go round you!
GEORGE: We are all still shaking. Copernicus cracked our confidence, and Einstein smashed it: for if one can no longer believe that a twelve-inch ruler is always a foot long, how can one be sure of relatively less certain propositions, such as that God made the Heaven and the Earth….
DOTTY (dry, drained): Well, it’s all over now. Not only are we no longer the still centre of God’s universe, we’re not even uniquely graced by his footprint in man’s image…. Man is on the Moon, his feet on solid ground, and he has seen us whole, all in one go, little—local… and all our absolutes, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots that seemed to be the very condition of our existence, how did they look to two moonmen with a single neck to save between them? Like the local customs of another place. When that thought drips through to the bottom, people won’t just carry on. There is going to be such… breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such covetting of neighbours’ oxen and knowing of neighbours’ wives, such dishonourings of mothers and fathers, and bowings and scrapings to images graven and incarnate, such killing of goldfish and maybe more——(Looks up, tear-stained.) Because the truths that have been taken on trust, they’ve never had edges before, there was no vantage point to stand on and see where they stopped. (And weeps.)
ARCHIE (pause): When did you first become aware of these feelings?
DOTTY: Georgie….
(But GEORGE won’t or can’t….)
GEORGE (facing away, out front, emotionless): Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: ‘Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?’ His friend said, ‘Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth.’ To which the philosopher replied, ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?’
ARCHIE: I really can’t conduct a consultation under these conditions! You might as well join us.
GEORGE (moving): No, thank you.
ARCHIE: Do… This, whatever it is, makes a very good casserole.
DOTTY (dry-eyed revenge): It’s not casseroled. It’s jugged.
(GEORGE freezes. Pause.
Doorbell.)
GEORGE: Dorothy….
DOTTY: Somebody at the door.
(It’s CROUCH, who rings the bell out of formality and let’s himself in with his master key, pausing in the door so as not to intrude on anything, announcing himself: ‘Crouch!’)
GEORGE: Dorothy You didn’t…?
CROUCH: Hello!
(He closes the Front Door behind him.
GEORGE turns abruptly and walks swiftly out, to his Study. In the Hall he passes by CROUCH.)
CROUCH: Excuse me, sir….
GEORGE (shouts viciously): You seem to be taking out the rubbish at any time that suits you!!
(CROUCH is dumbfounded.
GEORGE walks into the Study, leaving the door open, and slumps into his chair.
The SECRETARY is patient and discreet.
CROUCH timidly enters the Study.)
CROUCH: I haven’t come for the rubbish, sir.
GEORGE: I’m sorry, Mr. Crouch… I’m very sorry. I was upset.
It’s just been the most awful day. (He comforts himself with the tortoise.)
CROUCH: I quite understand, sir. I’m upset myself. I just came up to see if there was anything I could do, I knew you’d be upset….
(GEORGE looks at him.)
I got to know him quite well, you know… made quite a friend of him.
GEORGE: You knew about it?
CROUCH: I was there, sir. Doing the drinks. It shocked me, I can tell you.
GEORGE: Who killed him?
CROUCH: Well, I wouldn’t like to say for certain… I mean, I heard a bang, and when I looked, there he was crawling on the floor…
(GEORGE winces.)… and there was Miss Moore… well——
GEORGE: Do you realize she’s in there now, eating him?
CROUCH (pause): You mean—raw?
GEORGE (crossly): No, of course not!—cooked— with gravy and mashed potatoes.
CROUCH (pause): I thought she was on the mend, sir.
GEORGE: Do you think I’m being too sentimental about the whole thing?
CROUCH (firmly): I do not, sir. I think it’s a police matter.
GEORGE: They’d laugh at me…. There was a policeman here, but he’s gone.
CROUCH: Yes, sir, I saw him leave. I thought that would be him.
You were wondering, sir, who brought them round.
GEORGE: No. I telephoned them myself.
CROUCH: You’re an honest man, sir. In the circumstances I don’t mind telling you I also phoned them myself, anonymous.
GEORGE: Did you?… Well, it’s all right now, he’s gone.
Lot of fuss about nothing. I know things got a bit out of hand but… I’m surprised at your puritanism, Mr. Crouch…. A little wine, women and song….
CROUCH: Yes, sir. Of course, it was the murder of Professor
McFee that was the main thing. (Long pause, GEORGE sits perfectly still, and continues to do so, sightless, deaf, while CROUCH speaks.)
By the way, sir…. (Picking up the tortoise.) I hope you don’t mind my taking the opportunity, but as you know, no pets allowed in the flats—I don’t mind turning a blind eye to this little fellow, but I’ve seen a rabbit around the place of a morning, and it’s as much as my job’s worth—I hope you don’t mind, sir…. (Pause.) Will Miss Moore be… leaving, sir?
GEORGE (blinking awake): She’s in bed with the doctor. Not literally, of course.
(Small pause. He jumps up and strides into the Bedroom.
ARCHIE and DOTTY are calmly watching the TV. The big screen shows us what they see—the read-back of DOTTY’s naked body.)
GEORGE: Crouch says—(he is momentarily taken aback by the fact that they are watching TV)—Crouch says——
(ARCHIE and DOTTY go ‘Sssssh!’ and continue to watch the screen.)
GEORGE (advancing): Crouch says——
(Then GEORGE sees the TV and the naked body on it. He
pauses: the body is familiar to him, perhaps.) What’s going on?
ARCHIE: The dermatograph, you know. All kinds of disturbances under the skin show up on the surface, if we can learn to read it, and we——
GEORGE (abruptly turning off the set, so that the Big Screen goes blank): You must think I’m a bloody fool!
ARCHIE: What do you mean?
GEORGE: Well, everything you do makes it look as if you’re…
(Pause.)
ARCHIE: Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if I were making a dermatographical examination?
DOTTY: What’s the matter, Georgie?
GEORGE: Dotty…
DOTTY: Don’t take any notice of Archie—him and his ripe pears!
GEORGE: Crouch says McFee was shot!—here—last night—
He thinks Dorothy did it——
DOTTY: I thought Archie did it. You didn’t do it, did you, Georgie? (Disappears into Bathroom.)
GEORGE: Crouch says—You can’t hide!—Dorothy—it’s not a game! Crouch says he saw—For God’s sake—I don’t know what to do——
ARCHIE: Crouch says he saw what, George?
GEORGE: Well, he didn’t actually see…
ARCHIE: Quite. We just don’t know.
GEORGE: There are many things I know which are not verifiable but nobody can tell me I don’t know them, and I think that I know that something happened to poor Dotty and she somehow killed McFee, as sure as she killed my poor Thumper.
(GEORGE leaves the Bedroom and ARCHIE follows him out. The Bedroom blacks out. They both walk into the Study where CROUCH is seated at GEORGE’s desk, reading the typescript and
chuckling!)
CROUCH: Saint Sebastian died of fright!—very good! (To SECRETARY; surprisingly.) Of course, the flaw in the argument is that even if the first term of his infinitely regressing series is zero rather than infinitesimal, the original problem remains in identifying the second term of the series, which however small must be greater than zero—you take my point? I grant you he’s answered Russell’s first point, I grant you that—the smallest proper fraction is zero—but——
(GEORGE snatches the paper from behind CROUCH and studies it minutely, already talking.)
GEORGE: Yes, but you entirely miss my point, which is that having established that the first term—that is God—corresponds to zero, there’s no need to worry about the second term—it is enough that it is the second——Surely you can see that?
CROUCH (humbly): I expect you’re right, sir. I mean, it’s only a hobby with me.
ARCHIE (coming forward): Mr. Crouch!
CROUCH: Oh, good morning, Vice-Chancellor, sir…
(The situation: CROUCH and ARCHIE conversing out of the
Study into the Hall. GEORGE worrying his script. The
SECRETARY still the observer with pencil and pad ready. Once in the Hall, ARCHIE shuts the Study door.)
ARCHIE: I see you’re something of a philosopher, Mr. Crouch.
CROUCH: Oh, I wouldn’t call it that, sir—I just picked up a bit
… a bit of reading, a bit of chatting, you know.
ARCHIE: Isn’t that the academic life? Whom would you describe as your mentor?
CROUCH: It was the late Professor McFee.
ARCHIE: Really?
CROUCH: Yes, sir, it was a terrible thing, his death. Of course, his whole life was going through a crisis, as he no doubt told you.
ARCHIE: Yes…?
CROUCH: It was the astronauts fighting on the Moon that finally turned him, sir. Henry, he said to me, Henry, I am giving philosophical respectability to a new pragmatism in public life, of which there have been many disturbing examples both here and on the moon. Duncan, I said, Duncan, don’t let it get you down, have another can of beer. But he kept harking back to the first Captain Oates, out there in the Antarctic wastes, sacrificing his life to give his companions a slim chance of survival…. Henry, he said, what made him do it?—out of the tent and into the jaws of the blizzard. If altruism is a possibility, he said, my argument is up a gum-tree…. Duncan, I said, Duncan, don’t you worry your head about all that. That astronaut yobbo is good for twenty years hard. Yes, he said, yes maybe, but when he comes out, he’s going to find he was only twenty years ahead of his time. I have seen the future, Henry, he said; and it’s yellow.
ARCHIE (pause): You must have been a close friend of his.
(From now on, for the following speeches, the SECRETARY is the only person moving on stage. She gets up. She is going to go for lunch. Perhaps a clock has struck. She comes down stage to make use of the imaginary mirror… a grim, tense, unsmiling young woman, staring at the audience.)
CROUCH: Ah, well, he’d come by to pick up his girl.
ARCHIE: His girl?
CROUCH: And he was always a bit early and as often as not
Professor Moore kept her working a bit late.
ARCHIE: Professor Moore?
CROUCH: So he’d pass the time with me… I shall miss our little talks. And of course it’s tragic for her. I see she’s carrying on, losing herself in her work; it’s the only way… but after three years of secret betrothal, it takes a certain kind of girl.
ARCHIE: Yes. Why secret?
CROUCH: He made her keep it secret because of his wife.
ARCHIE: Ah. His wife didn’t know, of course.
CROUCH: His wife knew about her, but she didn’t know about his wife. He was terrified to tell her, poor Duncan. Well, he won’t be coming round here any more. Not that he would have done anyway, of course.
ARCHIE: Why’s that?
CROUCH: Well obviously, he had to make a clean breast and tell her it was all off—I mean with him going into the monastery.
ARCHIE: Quite.
CROUCH: And now he’s dead.
(SECRETARY snaps her handbag shut with a sharp sound and takes her coat out of the cupboard.)
ARCHIE: A severe blow to Logic, Mr. Crouch.
CROUCH (nodding): It makes no sense to me at all. What do you make of it, sir?
ARCHIE: The truth to us philosophers, Mr. Crouch, is always an interim judgment. We will never even know for certain who did shoot McFee. Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?
(ARCHIE and CROUCH move out through the Front Door. The
SECRETARY is also leaving, now wearing her (white) coat—which has a bright splash of blood on its back.
GEORGE sees the blood as she leaves the Study, and the flat.
In the unseen Bedroom, DOTTY’s record of ‘Forget Yesterday’ starts to play.
GEORGE realizes that the blood must have come from the top of the cupboard, i.e. wardrobe. He needs to stand on his desk or chair. He puts Pat, whom he had been holding, down now and climbs up to look into the top of the cupboard; and withdraws from the unseen depths his mis-fired arrow, on which is impaled Thumper. The music still continues. Holding Thumper up by the arrow, GEORGE puts his face against the fur. A single sob. He steps backwards, down… CRRRRRUNCH!!!
He has stepped, fatally, on Pat. With one foot on the desk and one foot on Pat, GEORGE looks down, and then puts up his head and cries out, ‘Dotty! Help! Murder!’
GEORGE falls to the floor. The song continues. The process which originally brought the set into view now goes into reverse. His last sobs are amplified and repeated right into the beginning of the Coda.)
END OF ACT TWO