Read-Aloud Plays Part 32

JEAN

I'm not leaving here. I'm staying on.

VERA

Oh. But I thought that now ... you were talking about being free for your own work at last....

JEAN

If I have any work to do, I can do it here. You don't understand, quite.

All these years I have been living from whirlpool to whirlpool, never settled, always _deracine_--the thought of getting accustomed to another place makes me shudder.

VERA

I can imagine, now, how it has been, Jean. But can you find any peace here? With all these things about? You are so sensitive--lamps, and pictures, and rugs--these aren't just _furniture_ to you, they are images of the past. Won't they be, too--real? Too personal? Won't you feel more at liberty with yourself if you create your own atmosphere?

JEAN

Ah, they are real enough! That table is a winter in Munich; the samovar is Warsaw one night in May; the lucerna is Rome ... and all that those places mean to me. I never realized how _things_ could be _alive_--be personal--until I was left all alone in the midst of these.

VERA

There, don't you see? They're so _dominating_. I knew you before all this.... I wish you would get away--be _yourself_.

JEAN

No. I shall stay here. As close as possible.

VERA

But really, Jean! I'm thinking of your work. Perhaps you don't appreciate what an insidious drug memory can be. Especially the memory of unhappiness. Let's be frank, Jean, for the sake of your future. You _have_ been unhappy.

JEAN

Unhappy? Yes, I have been outrageously unhappy! Years of it! Sharp arrows and poisoned wine. I wanted to die....

VERA

_Jean!_

JEAN

You read a play by Strindberg, and you say it's very strong, very artistic, but all the while you believe it is only the nightmare of a diseased mind. It's just a _play_--you shut the book and return to "real"

life, thankfully. Well, the Strindberg play has been my real life, and real life my play, my impossible dream. You can't imagine how terrifying it is to feel the situation develop around you. Two bodies caught naked in an endless wilderness of thorns. Every movement one makes to free the other only wounds him the more. Two souls, each innocent and aspiring, bound together by serpents, like the Laoc.o.o.n.... It is one of those things that are absolutely impossible ... and yet _true_.

VERA

I'll help you pack. Now. You _must_!

JEAN

We had the deepest respect and admiration for one another, but somehow we never walked in step. His emotion repressed mine, my emotion repressed his. Sometimes one was the slave, sometimes the other. We couldn't both be free at the same time. There was always something to hide, to be afraid of.... Not words nor acts, but moods. It pa.s.sed over from one soul to the other like invisible rays. And we couldn't separate. That was part of it.

We just went on and on....

VERA

People wondered. The first time I met Paul--

JEAN

What do you feel?

VERA

I wondered, afterward, what it really was. He seemed to impress me like a powerful motor car stalled in a muddy road.

JEAN

Ah. I know!

VERA

Poor child.

JEAN

No. You don't understand, I _was_ unhappy, in the ordinary sense, unbelievably so. But that wasn't all. I was alive! I lived as the man lives who faints in the dark mine underground, and I lived as the aviator lives, thrilling against the sun, and as the believer in a world of infidels. That was what _he_ did for me. And slowly, as I learned how deeply the very pain was making me live, I put my unhappiness by. It was there, but it no longer seemed important. It was the lingering complaint of my old commonplace soul standing fearfully on the brink of greater things and hating the situation that led it there.

VERA

You are a big woman, Jean.

JEAN

No, I am a small woman in front of a big thing. One of the biggest, genius. And the force of it, relentless as nature, made me what I am.

_Paul._ Oh, Vera, when I think of his music, tempestuous as the sea, healing as spring.... And now where is it? He had what all the world wants most, _flight_, and the world stalled him in its own mud. You saw it....

That's why I shall stay here. It's the only place with _his_ atmosphere.

All these things are _he_. I face them here in silence, and I bare my breast to the arrow. Here I am, the only one who knows Paul's music in its possibility. To the rest, it is a heap of stones by the roadside. The architect is dead.

VERA

But didn't he ever ... why didn't he...?

JEAN

You ask it, of course. You have the right. Sometimes I ask it, too, why Paul never _succeeded_. While we were struggling along, the things that held him back seemed only details. Only now do I see them as a whole.

In the first place, Paul never aimed directly at success. He was all-round. If it had been merely a question of exploiting his talent, sticking to the one idea day in, day out, never letting an opportunity slip by of meeting the right people and getting to the right places ...