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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> How He Lied to Her Husband
This Etext was produced by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA
HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND
by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
PREFACE
Like many other works of mine, this playlet is a piece
d'occasion. In 1905 it happened that Mr Arnold Daly, who was then
playing the part of Napoleon in The Man of Destiny in New York,
found that whilst the play was too long to take a secondary place
in the evening's performance, it was too short to suffice by
itself. I therefore took advantage of four days continuous rain
during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write How He Lied To
Her Husband for Mr Daly. In his hands, it served its turn very
effectively.
I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the
most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed
touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.
Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband,
wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. I have taken
both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can
if only he will look about him for his material instead of
plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded
on Othello's romantic assumptions and false point of honor.
A further experiment made by Mr Arnold Daly with this play is
worth recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warren's Profession
in New York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that
such persons as Mrs Warren are "ordure," and should not be
mentioned in the presence of decent people. This hideous
repudiation of humanity and social conscience so took possession
of the New York journalists that the few among them who kept
their feet morally and intellectually could do nothing to check
the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving
obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers
abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were
upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each
other with their hysteria until they were for all practical
purposes indecently mad. They finally forced the police to arrest
Mr Daly and his company, and led the magistrate to express his
loathing of the duty thus forced upon him of reading an
unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the convulsion soon
exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat impatient
when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously ethical
play forming part of a book which had been in circulation
unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without
protest by the whole London and New York press, gave the
journalists a piece of his mind as to their moral taste in plays.
By consent, he passed the case on to a higher court, which
declared that the play was not immoral; acquitted Mr Daly; and
made an end of the attempt to use the law to declare living women
to be "ordure," and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching
fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial
purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well. I
hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season
and out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the
public conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a
tariff to keep up the price of every American commodity except
American manhood and womanhood.
Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of
those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater
or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side
by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts
vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the
condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again,
and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and
grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to
approach an American city, including even those cities which had
heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he
produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing
whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays
as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs
Warren's Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it.
What made this harder to bear was that though no fact is better
established in theatrical business than the financial
disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done
all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly,
being exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal
fortunes out of the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked
it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real
life could hardly go further.
One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his
financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he
not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville
theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he
played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the
press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the
audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more,
perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are
fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and
what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to
expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very
unsavory mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and
which was not the less disgusting because we suffered in a good
cause and in the very best company.
Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul
free of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors.
But I have certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like
that word "ordure." Apply it to my work, and I can afford to
smile, since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to
apply it to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one
substance with our own and her body no less holy: to look your
women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang
yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.
POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from
America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the
most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's
Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its
revenue from advertisements of Mrs Warren's houses.
Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators
as aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an
almost horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by
persons and papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on
all other occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits
of Mrs Warren's profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and
Sir George Crofts, but by the landlords of their houses, the
newspapers which advertize them, the restaurants which cater for
them, and, in short, all the trades to which they are good
customers, not to mention the public officials and
representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or
blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female
labor, and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it [you
find such people everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in
the highest places in Church and State], and you get a large and
powerful class with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs
Warren's profession, and a correspondingly strong incentive to
conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world,
the real sources of their gain. These are the people who declare
that it is feminine vice and not poverty that drives women to the
streets, as if vicious women with independent incomes ever went
there. These are the people who, indulgent or indifferent to
aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against
performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses to
the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for
fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the
judicial decision in New York State in favor of the play does not
end the matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality,
finding itself restrained by the courts from preventing the
performance, fell back on a local bye-law against indecency to
evade the Constitution of the United States. They summoned the
actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and
offered her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the
city or being prosecuted under this bye-law.
Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who
suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre
were either Mrs Warren's landlords, or employers of women at
starvation wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper
proprietors, or in some other more or less direct way sharers of
the profits of her trade. No doubt it is equally possible that
they were simply stupid men who thought that indecency consists,
not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however, been myself a
member of a municipal council, and have not found municipal
councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this. At all
events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the
benefit of the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large,
which will finally decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on
gentlemen who will stand anything at the theatre except a
performance of Mrs Warren's Profession, and who assert in the
same breath that [a] the play is too loathsome to be bearable by
civilized people, and [b] that unless its performance is
prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be
merely excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public
that it is equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.
At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which
the play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for
assuming that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists,
and that the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend
for their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on
rents, advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them
in moral sense and public responsibility.
It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession, Society, and not any
individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow
that the people who take offence at it are all champions of
society. Their credentials cannot be too carefully examined.
HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND
It is eight o'clock in the evening. The curtains are drawn
and the lamps lighted in the drawing room of Her flat in
Cromwell Road. Her lover, a beautiful youth of eighteen, in
evening dress and cape, with a bunch of flowers and an opera hat
in his hands, comes in alone. The door is near the corner; and as
he appears in the doorway, he has the fireplace on the nearest
wall to his right, and the grand piano along the opposite wall to
his left. Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it a
hand mirror, a fan, a pair of long white gloves, and a little
white woollen cloud to wrap a woman's head in. On the other side
of the room, near the piano, is a broad, square, softly up-
holstered stool. The room is furnished in the most approved
South Kensington fashion: that is, it is as like a show room as
possible, and is intended to demonstrate the racial position and
spending powers of its owners, and not in the least to make them
comfortable.
He is, be it repeated, a very beautiful youth, moving as in a
dream, walking as on air. He puts his flowers down carefully on
the table beside the fan; takes off his cape, and, as there is no
room on the table for it, takes it to the piano; puts his hat on
the cape; crosses to the hearth; looks at his watch; puts it up
again; notices the things on the table; lights up as if he saw
heaven opening before him; goes to the table and takes the cloud
in both hands, nestling his nose into its softness and kissing
it; kisses the gloves one after another; kisses the fan: gasps a
long shuddering sigh of ecstasy; sits down on the stool and
presses his hands to his eyes to shut out reality and dream a
little; takes his hands down and shakes his head with a little
smile of rebuke for his folly; catches sight of a speck of dust
on his shoes and hastily and carefully brushes it off with his
handkerchief; rises and takes the hand mirror from the table to
make sure of his tie with the gravest anxiety; and is looking at
his watch again when She comes in, much flustered. As she is
dressed for the theatre; has spoilt, petted ways; and wears many
diamonds, she has an air of being a young and beautiful woman;
but as a matter of hard fact, she is, dress and pretensions
apart, a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37,
hopelessly inferior in physical and spiritual distinction to the
beautiful youth, who hastily puts down the mirror as she enters.
HE [kissing her hand] At last!
SHE. Henry: something dreadful has happened.
HE. What's the matter?
SHE. I have lost your poems.
HE. They were unworthy of you. I will write you some more.
SHE. No, thank you. Never any more poems for me. Oh, how could I
have been so mad! so rash! so imprudent!
HE. Thank Heaven for your madness, your rashness, your
imprudence!
SHE [impatiently] Oh, be sensible, Henry. Can't you see what a
terrible thing this is for me? Suppose anybody finds these poems!
what will they think?
HE. They will think that a man once loved a woman more devotedly
than ever man loved woman before. But they will not know what man
it was.
SHE. What good is that to me if everybody will know what woman it
was?
HE. But how will they know?
SHE. How will they know! Why, my name is all over them: my silly,
unhappy name. Oh, if I had only been christened Mary Jane, or
Gladys Muriel, or Beatrice, or Francesca, or Guinevere, or
something quite common! But Aurora! Aurora! I'm the only Aurora
in London; and everybody knows it. I believe I'm the only Aurora
in the world. And it's so horribly easy to rhyme to it! Oh,
Henry, why didn't you try to restrain your feelings a little in
common consideration for me? Why didn't you write with some
little reserve?
HE. Write poems to you with reserve! You ask me that!
SHE [with perfunctory tenderness] Yes, dear, of course it was
very nice of you; and I know it was my own fault as much as
yours. I ought to have noticed that your verses ought never to
have been addressed to a married woman.
HE. Ah, how I wish they had been addressed to an unmarried woman!
how I wish they had!
SHE. Indeed you have no right to wish anything of the sort. They
are quite unfit for anybody but a married woman. That's just the
difficulty. What will my sisters-in-law think of them?
HE [painfully jarred] Have you got sisters-in-law?
SHE. Yes, of course I have. Do you suppose I am an angel?
HE [biting his lips] I do. Heaven help me, I do--or I did--or [he
almost chokes a sob].
SHE [softening and putting her hand caressingly on his shoulder]
Listen to me, dear. It's very nice of you to live with me in a
dream, and to love me, and so on; but I can't help my husband
having disagreeable relatives, can I?
HE [brightening up] Ah, of course they are your husband's
relatives: I forgot that. Forgive me, Aurora. [He takes her hand
from his shoulder and kisses it. She sits down on the stool. He
remains near the table, with his back to it, smiling fatuously
down at her].
SHE. The fact is, Teddy's got nothing but relatives. He has eight
sisters and six half-sisters, and ever so many brothers--but I
don't mind his brothers. Now if you only knew the least little
thing about the world, Henry, you'd know that in a large family,
though the sisters quarrel with one another like mad all the
time, yet let one of the brothers marry, and they all turn on
their unfortunate sister-in-law and devote the rest of their
lives with perfect unanimity to persuading him that his wife is
unworthy of him. They can do it to her very face without her
knowing it, because there are always a lot of stupid low family
jokes that nobody understands but themselves. Half the time you
can't tell what they're talking about: it just drives you wild.
There ought to be a law against a man's sister ever entering his
house after he's married. I'm as certain as that I'm sitting here
that Georgina stole those poems out of my workbox.
HE. She will not understand them, I think.
SHE. Oh, won't she! She'll understand them only too well. She'll
understand more harm than ever was in them: nasty vulgar-minded
cat!
HE [going to her] Oh don't, don't think of people in that way.
Don't think of her at all. [He takes her hand and sits down on
the carpet at her feet]. Aurora: do you remember the evening when
I sat here at your feet and read you those poems for the first
time?
SHE. I shouldn't have let you: I see that now. When I think of
Georgina sitting there at Teddy's feet and reading them to him
for the first time, I feel I shall just go distracted.
HE. Yes, you are right. It will be a profanation.
SHE. Oh, I don't care about the profanation; but what will Teddy
think? what will he do? [Suddenly throwing his head away from her
knee]. You don't seem to think a bit about Teddy. [She jumps up,
more and more agitated].
HE [supine on the floor; for she has thrown him off his balance]
To me Teddy is nothing, and Georgina less than nothing.
SHE. You'll soon find out how much less than nothing she is. If
you think a woman can't do any harm because she's only a
scandalmongering dowdy ragbag, you're greatly mistaken. [She
flounces about the room. He gets up slowly and dusts his hands.
Suddenly she runs to him and throws herself into his arms].
Henry: help me. Find a way out of this for me; and I'll bless you
as long as you live. Oh, how wretched I am! [She sobs on his
breast].
HE. And oh! how happy I am!
SHE [whisking herself abruptly away] Don't be selfish.
HE [humbly] Yes: I deserve that. I think if I were going to the
stake with you, I should still be so happy with you that I could
hardly feel your danger more than my own.
SHE [relenting and patting his hand fondly] Oh, you are a dear
darling boy, Henry; but [throwing his hand away fretfully] you're
no use. I want somebody to tell me what to do.
HE [with quiet conviction] Your heart will tell you at the right
time. I have thought deeply over this; and I know what we two
must do, sooner or later.
SHE. No, Henry. I will do nothing improper, nothing dishonorable.
[She sits down plump on the stool and looks inflexible].
HE. If you did, you would no longer be Aurora. Our course is
perfectly simple, perfectly straightforward, perfectly stainless
and true. We love one another. I am not ashamed of that: I am
ready to go out and proclaim it to all London as simply as I will
declare it to your husband when you see--as you soon will see--
that this is the only way honorable enough for your feet to
tread. Let us go out together to our own house, this evening,
without concealment and without shame. Remember! we owe something
to your husband. We are his guests here: he is an honorable man:
he has been kind to us: he has perhaps loved you as well as his
prosaic nature and his sordid commercial environment permitted.
We owe it to him in all honor not to let him learn the truth from
the lips of a scandalmonger. Let us go to him now quietly, hand
in hand; bid him farewell; and walk out of the house without
concealment and subterfuge, freely and honestly, in full honor
and self-respect.
SHE [staring at him] And where shall we go to?
HE. We shall not depart by a hair's breadth from the ordinary
natural current of our lives. We were going to the theatre when
the loss of the poems compelled us to take action at once. We
shall go to the theatre still; but we shall leave your diamonds
here; for we cannot afford diamonds, and do not need them.
SHE [fretfully] I have told you already that I hate diamonds;
only Teddy insists on hanging me all over with them. You need not
preach simplicity to me.
HE. I never thought of doing so, dearest: I know that these
trivialities are nothing to you. What was I saying--oh yes.
Instead of coming back here from the theatre, you will come with
me to my home--now and henceforth our home--and in due course of
time, when you are divorced, we shall go through whatever idle
legal ceremony you may desire. I attach no importance to the
law: my love was not created in me by the law, nor can it be
bound or loosed by it. That is simple enough, and sweet enough,
is it not? [He takes the flower from the table]. Here are flowers
for you: I have the tickets: we will ask your husband to lend us
the carriage to show that there is no malice, no grudge, between
us. Come!
SHE [spiritlessly, taking the flowers without looking at them,
and temporizing] Teddy isn't in yet.
HE. Well, let us take that calmly. Let us go to the theatre as if
nothing had happened. and tell him when we come back. Now or
three hours hence: to-day or to-morrow: what does it matter,
provided all is done in honor, without shame or fear?
SHE. What did you get tickets for? Lohengrin?
HE. I tried; but Lohengrin was sold out for to-night. [He takes
out two Court Theatre tickets].
SHE. Then what did you get?
HE. Can you ask me? What is there besides Lohengrin that we two
could endure, except Candida?
SHE [springing up] Candida! No, I won't go to it again, Henry
[tossing the flower on the piano]. It is that play that has done
all the mischief. I'm very sorry I ever saw it: it ought to be
stopped.
HE [amazed] Aurora!
SHE. Yes: I mean it.
HE. That divinest love poem! the poem that gave us courage to
speak to one another! that revealed to us what we really felt for
one another! That--
SHE. Just so. It put a lot of stuff into my head that I should
never have dreamt of for myself. I imagined myself just like
Candida.
HE [catching her hands and looking earnestly at her] You were
right. You are like Candida.
SHE [snatching her hands away] Oh, stuff! And I thought you were
just like Eugene. [Looking critically at him] Now that I come to
look at you, you are rather like him, too. [She throws herself
discontentedly into the nearest seat, which happens to be the
bench at the piano. He goes to her].
HE [very earnestly] Aurora: if Candida had loved Eugene she would
have gone out into the night with him without a moment's
hesitation.
SHE [with equal earnestness] Henry: do you know what's wanting in
that play?
HE. There is nothing wanting in it.
SHE. Yes there is. There's a Georgina wanting in it. If Georgina
had been there to make trouble, that play would have been a
true-to-life tragedy. Now I'll tell you something about it that I
have never told you before.
HE. What is that?
SHE. I took Teddy to it. I thought it would do him good; and so
it would if I could only have kept him awake. Georgina came too;
and you should have heard the way she went on about it. She said
it was downright immoral, and that she knew the sort of woman
that encourages boys to sit on the hearthrug and make love to
her. She was just preparing Teddy's mind to poison it about me.
HE. Let us be just to Georgina, dearest
SHE. Let her deserve it first. Just to Georgina, indeed!
HE. She really sees the world in that way. That is her
punishment.
SHE. How can it be her punishment when she likes it? It'll be my
punishment when she brings that budget of poems to Teddy. I wish
you'd have some sense, and sympathize with my position a little.
HE. [going away from the piano and beginning to walk about rather
testily] My dear: I really don't care about Georgina or about
Teddy. All these squabbles belong to a plane on which I am, as
you say, no use. I have counted the cost; and I do not fear the
consequences. After all, what is there to fear? Where is the
difficulty? What can Georgina do? What can your husband do? What
can anybody do?
SHE. Do you mean to say that you propose that we should walk
right bang up to Teddy and tell him we're going away together?
HE. Yes. What can be simpler?
SHE. And do you think for a moment he'd stand it, like that
half-baked clergyman in the play? He'd just kill you.
HE [coming to a sudden stop and speaking with considerable
confidence] You don't understand these things, my darling,
how could you? In one respect I am unlike the poet in the play. I
have followed the Greek ideal and not neglected the culture of my
body. Your husband would make a tolerable second-rate heavy
weight if he were in training and ten years younger. As it is, he
could, if strung up to a great effort by a burst of passion, give
a good account of himself for perhaps fifteen seconds. But I am
active enough to keep out of his reach for fifteen seconds; and
after that I should be simply all over him.
SHE [rising and coming to him in consternation] What do you mean
by all over him?
HE [gently] Don't ask me, dearest. At all events, I swear to you
that you need not be anxious about me.