Бернард Шоу - Mrs. Warren's Profession. The Dark Lady of the Sonnets / Профессия миссис Уоррен. Смуглая леди сонетов

VIVIE. It would not matter if you did: you would not succeed. [Mrs Warren winces, deeply hurt by the implied indifference towards her affectionate intention. Vivie, neither understanding this nor concerning herself about it, goes on calmly] Mother: you don’t at all know the sort of person I am. I don’t object to Crofts more than to any other coarsely built man of his class. To tell you the truth, I rather admire him for being strongminded enough to enjoy himself in his own way and make plenty of money instead of living the usual shooting, hunting, dining-out, tailoring, loafing life of his set merely because all the rest do it. And I’m perfectly aware that if I’d been in the same circumstances as my aunt Liz, I’d have done exactly what she did. I don’t think I’m more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I’m less. I’m certain I’m less sentimental. I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly be without having a word said to me about it. But I don't want to be worthless. I shouldn’t enjoy trotting about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of diamonds.

MRS WARREN [bewildered] But—

VIVIE. Wait a moment: I’ve not done. Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it. Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her. Why don’t you do the same?

MRS WARREN. Oh, it’s all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I’m fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn’t do it somebody else would; so I don’t do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No: it’s no use: I can’t give it up—not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I’ll never mention it. I’ll keep Crofts away. I’ll not trouble you much: you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. You’ll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE. No: I am my mother’s daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my work is not your work, and my way is not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: that’s all.

MRS WARREN [her voice stifled in tears]. Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed.

VIVIE. It’s no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay.

MRS WARREN [wildly] Oh, you call a mother’s tears cheap.

VIVIE. They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together?

MRS WARREN [lapsing recklessly into her dialect] We’re mother and daughter. I want my daughter. I’ve a right to you. Who is to care for me when I’m old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. You’ve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter.

VIVIE [jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother’s voice] My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don’t want a mother; and I don’t want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you?

MRS WARREN [violently] Oh, I know the sort you are: no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I don’t want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there’s a Heaven above us.

VIVIE. Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS WARREN. No: I’d bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me: yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I’d bring you up in my own house, I would.

VIVIE [quietly]. In one of your own houses.

MRS WARREN [screaming]. Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her.

VIVIE. I wish you wouldn’t rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don’t spoil it all now.

MRS WARREN. Yes, Heaven forgive me, it’s true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it! the injustice! the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I were a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I’d talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I’ll prosper on it.

VIVIE. Yes: it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am I not?

MRS WARREN [taken aback]. Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE. No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to. Isn’t that so?

MRS WARREN [sulkily]. Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I’d better go than stay where I’m not wanted. [She turns to the door].

VIVIE [kindly] Won’t you shake hands?

MRS WARREN [after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her]. No, thank you. Goodbye.

VIVIE [matter-of-factly] Goodbye.

[Mrs Warren goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds Frank’s note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it]. And goodbye, Frank. [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in its figures].

THE END

Fin de siécle 500-1600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven. A Beefeater on guard. A Cloaked Man approaches.