An unemployed gentleman

FERENC MOLNÁR

(The scene is the hall in front of an apartment door. A gentleman is impatiently ringing the door-hell. The careful observer may infer, from this gentleman's slightly grim expresssion, that he has already rung the bell four times. At last, the maid opens the door.)

GENTLEMAN: HOW often does one have to ring your bell before you open it?

THE MAID (placidly): Five times, sir.

(The Gentleman is horrified. Maids, he believes, should never be impertinent, unless so instructed.)

GENTLEMAN: IS your mistress home?

MAID: NO, sir.

GENTLEMAN: That's impossible—she said she would be! Go and see whether she is at home. She may be in another room.

MAID: Thank you. (This refers to the banknote The Gentleman has slipped into her hand.) I'll see.

(From the apartment, the following dialogue is heard. Faintly, to be sure, but heard just the same.)

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE: What does he want?

MAID: He doesn't believe that you are not at home.

LADY: Tell him again, then, tell him quite plainly that I am not at home.

(Hearing this, The Gentleman enters the room without further ado. The Maid disappears. )

LADY: HOW dare you come in like that when I said I was not at home?

GENTLEMAN: I thought you were probably lying. (Pause.)

LADY: DO you wish to hear an interesting paradox? I am not at home.

GENTLEMAN: But—but—one treats a cook like this—or a tailor who comes with a bill — (Pause.) Am I to be thrown out?

LADY: YOU are.

GENTLEMAN: At least, tell me why? Read me my death sentence.

LADY: Very well. There was a dreadful scene between us yesterday. Am I right?

GENTLEMAN: Yes, you are.

LADY: There was a scene because I did

not want to confess that I loved you. We bad been lovers for six months and yesterday you worked yourself into a purple rage because I would not tell you that I loved you. This was only one link in the long chain of your innumerable mistakes—but it was the one which made me decide not to be at home to you today.

GENTLEMAN (slowly) : So that is the reason.

LADY: Yes. (Pause.)

GENTLEMAN: Go on! I can see that you want to say something else, too.

LADY: I knew that I would love you only until the moment when I could be sure I would never deceive you. I no longer love you.

GENTLEMAN: Which means that you are going to deceive me.

LADY: Which means just that. I shall even tell you why. You are much too masculine for me.

GENTLEMAN: I don't understand you.

LADY: There is a certain type of man that I like to call the pure male. He is the absolute man. He is a wonderful person, but—not for a woman like me. The pure male is the joy of faithful wives, he is the happiness of good little girls who marry for security. This is the type of man who will ask a woman six times in the course of a single kiss: "Do you love me? Do you love me? Tell me how much you love me. How do you love me?" He continually asks these questions because he is so masculine that he demands male characteristics even from women. Shall I be more explicit? (She pauses, then continues rapidly.) Well, to confess, to admit, to announce things loudly and thoroughly and completely, is a male characteristic. The genuine woman does not like to confess. The genuine woman loves to deny, even when there is no need for it. Every time I visited you in your rooms, my greatest desire was to say: "I am not in your rooms, I am not with you, I am not yours"—because I, like all other genuine women, need that certain uncertain, incredulous, doubtful look on the man's face which says: "Oh, God—I don't know—does she love me?" We women thrive on that, my dear.

GENTLEMAN: Oh, God! Oh, God!

LADY: Our power over you consists in that we are different from you. And your tragedy is that you always demand things from us that the world usually expects from men only: loyalty, observance of promises, constancy, frankness. These are all male virtues created for the greater comfort of women. Just imagine: you tell me that you are going to visit a sick friend in Buda at five o'clock. I know that you are a man who never lies, who keeps his word, who, in other words, will be in Buda at five in the afternoon, even if it rains cats and dogs. So I can calmly go somewhere else at five o'clock, to a rendez-vous d'amour for which you would kill me, if you knew. You haven't the least idea how reassuring a thing your word of honour is, this merry little nonsense of which you are so proud. I ask my husband: "Are you really going to Vienna?" He says: "Upon my word of honor." And since a word of honor is such a deadly earnest thing with you, I can calmly go, for two days, wherever I want to. Isn't it easy for us to live under such circumstances? You must simply learn eight or ten things about men and then you can do everything you want.

GENTLEMAN: Then why do you reproach me with being too much of a man?

LADY: Because one day I discovered that you expected manly virtues of me, too. Why, just now, when you came, you committed another male stupidity. You told my maid that I had to be home because I had told you that I would be. You may talk like that in the waiting room of a doctor or a bank president, but not in a woman's apartment. True, I said I would be at home, but this did not at all mean that I would be.

GENTLEMAN: Well—

LADY: Well, such things put me in bad humour. The real woman's man, or as the French say it, homme a femmes, doesn't act like that. There is a little femininity in him that forgives us our ways. Only the pure males like you can possibly grow furious at a woman's lie or at her inconsistency. And that is why you are just made to be husbands. It is just this quality that makes you so eminently adapted to do nothing hut to watch your own hearth. Only husbands ask such questions as: "Where were you? When did you go? When did you come home?" And only wives answer these questions. And just as wives, because of their exaggerated femininity, are not really women, so, in my eyes, husbands, because of their accentuated masculinity, are not men. The difference between man and husband is about the same as between butterfly and larva. And the same difference exists between woman and wife. Married couples live together on the basis of a peace treaty; lovers, on the basis of a declaration of war. Now then, if a fool happens to come along who mistakes these two things for each other ... he loses out.

GENTLEMAN: That fool is me.

LADY: NO, you aren't exactly a fool. But you have lost out, because I have a husband to whom I explain everything. I tell him that I love him, I give him my word of honour; for his sake I have masculinized myself — intermittently, of course. But because I have signed peace with him at the altar. And I wanted you to suffer, to live in uncertainty, to be tortured, to stimulate the feminine, the lover's side of me. But since you haven't understood your position, you are—

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GENTLEMAN: discarded.

LADY: Not at all. You are hopeless. The wisest thing for you to do is to go to decent, gentle, well-behaved parties until you meet a well-to-do little girl. Marry her. You will be very happy, because the little girl will give you her word of honour. And after two years, you still say, at your club: "Boys, a man is stupid to look for his happiness in fly-by-night adventures. One can find real happiness only in marriage." You will say this at your club, and just because you will say this at your club, your wife will entertain a man with a saucy little moustache like yours and will tell him "Darling, we are safe now, my husband is at the club." This is how it is, my dear.

GENTLEMAN: But what shall we do then? What shall we do that women should not deceive us?

LADY: There! Another perfect example of male stupidity! Only you males think that one must, or can, defend oneself against feminine deception. But to look for women who do not deceive is not love, it is snobbery, or the collection of rarities. If I were you, I'd rather collect stamps.

GENTLEMAN: TO make a long story short, I am thrown out.

LADY: Definitely.

GENTLEMAN: Good-bye. (Starts toward the door.)

LADY: There! Again you act as a man would. I said: Definitely, and you took that as if a lawyer had said it. You started for the door. The homme a femmes, in a case like this, would embrace the woman and say: "So I am thrown out, am I? Well, just for that, I'll stay here and kiss you."

GENTLEMAN: Well, then—in that case—er—er—I will stay here and kiss you. (Attempts to embrace her.)

MAID (enters) : Baron Shawzi is here to see you.

LADY: Show him in.

GENTLEMAN: I see! So he is the successor! Now I understand everything.

LADY (to Maid) : Show the Baron in. (To Gentleman) : And you may go home. (The Maid exits.)

GENTLEMAN: I am thrown out!

LADY (soothingly) : No, no, my dear. (She shooes him through the service door and closes it behind him. Baron Shawzi enters through the other door.)

BARON SHAWZI: How do you do? Was anybody here?

LADY: Nobody. I was just relaxing. Sit down, darling.

(And here ends the tragedy of the man who is no longer wanted. Or, rather, here it begins.