It Might Happen to Anyone

A Comedy Adorned by the Moral, That It Is Best to Let Sleeping Loves Lie

NIB

WE come happily upon Arabella and Julien. It is after tea; they are sitting on a sofa in a country house drawing-room, with a sun room at the extreme end. They are looking at an album of old Kodak snap-shots. Arabella idly turns the leaves,while Julien idly identifies the victims. How gay the two are! Mon dieu, it takes very little to amuse two people who are in love!

ARABELLA: I adore old photographs. They are so cruel. Is that Tom Brown at Oxford? or Cyril Maude just about to be ordained?

JULIEN: That's my father, in his first London clothes. . . . Shows what can be done with a bowler hat. . . . And that's mother's cousin Electra Ponsonby who ran away from her husband with Prince Somebody-or-other to the Steppes. . . . Now she lives in Mamaroneck. . . . And that one there is a brilliant and attractive youth, photographed with his Uncle George.

ARABELLA: Not you? Not really? (Laughs.) Dear me, what a little prig you were. And you've no chin.

JULIEN: I was never allowed a chin, so long as it was thought that my Uncle George would leave me his money. lie didn't have a chin, either, and our supposed resemblance was carefully nurtured. Then he married his nurse— and my features got their chance at last.

ARABELLA: I should think so. You've got a wonderfully strong face, darling. It was just that iron look that—I say (suddenly arrested) what a desperate looking coquette that girl is. Pretty, though. Who is it?

JULIEN (Peering; and frowning in an effort to recall) That? Why that, yes if must be, is a girl I once wanted to marry.

ARABELLA: Oh! (a moment.) Did she look like that?

JULIEN: Yes, I think so. As well as I can remember. She had a beautiful brow. Sterner drew her. But, look here, (gets up) what are we doing indoors? Come, let's walk down to the olive trees. (He holds out his hand.) The shower's over.

ARABELLA (Still riveted by the photograph). A beautiful brow. 1 see.

JULIEN (Glancing out). There's a great sky. Do come!

(But Arabella doesn't stir. Ominousness, greentinged,comes into the air.)

ARABELLA: It seems rather strange, doesn't it?

JULIEN: Strange? What?

ARABELLA: About that girl.

JULIEN: Why? You knew.

ARABELLA: Yes. But 1 didn't know that you were treasuring her picture! Sentimentalizing over it! (Something begins to run off with her.) Adoring it! Worshipping it!

JULIEN (Staring) But my dear I've done nothing of the sort. I haven't seen—

ARABELLA: All the time pretending to care for me! Leading me into the most extreme confessions! Doing everything you could to humiliate me! You can't even—

JULIES: I haven't seen that picture for years.

ARABELLA: You can't even be faithful to the woman you really love.

JULIEN (Confidently) Oh, yes I can. Don't worry about that.

ARABELLA (Now completely carried away): Doubtless you wish to go back to this ravishing creature ... of whom you were so proud. . . Whom every artist was mad to paint! Please do. I shall not detain you. (She jumps up, spilling the album on to the floor, and makes a nervous movement towards the door. Julien laughs indulgently. Taking her gently by the shoulders he forces her to meet his eyes.)

JULIES: Listen, you wicked, lovely vixen: The lady whom you've been so busily reconstructing is, to me, as dead as Queen Victoria. She was an incident in my early education and I've forgotten her as completely as I've forgotten everything else I learned at college. There isn't room in my head, or my heart, for any woman on earth but you. (He emphasizes this attractive if extravagant statement by an affectionate little shake.) What made you all at once blaze like that—about nothing? "You, whom I worshipped so!"

(Under his disarming banter the fire subsides as suddenly as it had flamed.)

ARABELLA (Contritely). I'm sorry. But I don't think you quite realized the way you spoke of her. ... Of her brow . . . of

JULIEN: Oh, hang her brow! Here! (He recovers the album, takes out the fatal picture, and tears it up.) Now, is everything all right:

ARABELLA (Looking up at him): I'm terribly ashamed of myself. What do you think it was that—just like that!—made me feel so queerly and so fiercely unhappy?

JULIEN (With subtlety). I can't imagine. That childish affair was all over, long ago, so what does it matter now. What's done is done, as Lady Macbeth once remarked. A clever woman, Lady Macbeth. Hello, there's Venus in the sky.

(They have walked to the window and are standing there, arm-in-arm, looking out at the deepening sky.)

ARABELLA (pensively): I only wish, though, that she—not Venus, the other one—hadn't had the—the first flower of your youth and soul. It's so 'depoetizing', if you know what I mean.

JULIEN (Amused). Ah, but that's life. It's May, and we're twenty-one, and some one comes along and writes her—or his—name in the guest book of our hearts, and then, presto! we find that that person isn't the one we wanted to stop there at all.

ARABELLA: Yes, of course.

(A moment. Out of the blue a spirit of perverse mischief descends upon Julien. He regards Arabella narrowly.)

JULIEN: Speaking of spring idylls, you never told me about that little affair of yours. Your great romance, I mean. When was it? Wasn't it, let me see, the time you went to the Adirondacks with your father and met that very agreeable young man: The dark-eyed young chap with the pretty name. (He looks at Arabella, tentatively) I never felt that 1 could refer to the occasion before, since you didn't, but now (smiling) tit for tat.

(He is unprepared for the effect produced by his raillery. The girl looks at him with startled eyes, flushes,then speaks with constrained effort.)

ARABELLA: I hadn't thought that I could ever talk about that—to anyone.

JULIEN: I sec. Put away in lavender. Never mind, then, of course.

ARABELLA (Hastily). No, no. I've just behaved very foolishly about something in your life, after you had been quite frank. It's perfectly fair that—(she leaves the sentence unfinished and, rather desperately, begins another.) The only thing is that my idyll, as you call it, never came to anything that could be put into words. It has been, curiously, just my own secret. One of the memories a woman will carry in her heart always.

JULIEN (With a sigh). That's what I feared.

ARABELLA: I don't think I could have helped caring, then. The.woods were wonderful that autumn. He had the most extraordinary charm. I was very young, and we were a good deal alone. There was a 'hunter's moon'. (Dreamily.)

JULIEN (Triumphantly). There, you sec, a hunter's moon.

ARABELLA: But, as I said nothing came of it. Opposing points of view, on one side and another, saw to that. Still, there, had been that glow. And, for a long time (with a faint smile)I was very unhappy. "Nothing," I told myself, "nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, or glory in the flower."

(Julien, who has been listening deferentially, now bursts out laughing—and takes her in his arms.)

JULIEN: Splendid, darling. I never knew you were such an actress. You were ready for me, weren't you?

ARABELLA (Drawing away and looking at him in astonishment). Ready for you? What do you mean?

JULIEN: Why, playing up to me as you did. I was only joking, of course. Couldn't you tell? I didn't know anything about it, the glow, the cruel parent and the melancholy maiden. Not a thing. (His gaiety increases.)

I was just teasing you a bit to pay you back, see?

I suddenly remembered that you had gone to the mountains once, and knowing what a lovely bit of provocation you arc, I just chanced the whole story. And what a sport you were to play up to me, and carry out the joke.

(He laughs again. But he finds himself enjoying the joke alone. Arabella looks at him incredulously, with strangely darkening eyes.)

ARABELLA: You chanced it? You tricked me into revealing the most secret, the most sacred, the most utterly beautiful thing in my whole lifer The one thing that was mine . . . that belonged to me alone . . . to which you had no right? You made me remember what I have tried to forget? . . . What I thought I had forgotten? Oh, how could you! (She flings out her arms with a gesture of despair.) Never speak to me again!

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JULIEN (ruefully): But I tell you it was all a joke. I didn't have a thing to go on. I—I made the man up, out of whole cloth.

ARABELLA: NO . . . you only brought him back.

(She flings this last sentence over her shoulder as she rushes from the room. Julien, after a moment's daze, gives determined chase. . . .)

JULIEN: Brought him back? Well, he shan't stay, you know. I'll deport him. There is a bourne from whence such blighters ne'er return. (He disappears after her into the sun-room; There's the sound of a mild scuffle, involving an overturned flower-pot, followed by a long, mysterious moment. There! . . . you outrageous woman. (With magnanimity.) But I shall try to forgive you. (There's a murmured protest.) It may take a long time, though, with my nature.

(They start into the garden together, and take the path into the woods. A girl's laugh is heard—His voice floats back, uttering the graceful nonsense invented to cloak life's bare and awkward moments as

THE CURTAIN FALLS