The Pamperers

Invisible          Obvious
Picked             People
Houseless        Loony

Porcelain breath — Sevres Bow — Gilded
crimson — Curved Flutings — Brocade —
Tailored muscles — Whipped Cream-Blue
spirals — Salved lips — Salon-Debussy —
Azaleas — Ancestors — Armorial complacencies
— Ooze

TAG ENDS OF OVERHEARD
CONVERSATIONS

The social fabric is a curtain^[2] . . . and
that warm garnet fold-shadow, for
soul’s hide and seek . . .
Decency shudders in the bare moment,
taut between vestibule and auto . . .
. . . my crystalline lorgnette,  . . . trees
. . . at this season are all undressed.
The earth a poignant undertaker . . .
I wish I had a wig darling.
. . . Observe the legs, the agony of the
crucified . . . the tendons . . . delicate as
Dresden china 15th century . . . ah yes!
the troubles of the steam-heating plant
. . . man from Milan ^[3] knows his business . . .
Oh Prince how charming of you . . .
and what is your opinion of the sex
question?
How simple . . . still I can’t quite agree
with you . . . we shall never give up
wearing silk stockings.

SOMEBODY: Ossy you know, has dis-
covered a genius . . .

OSSY: . . . coming from the club . . .
wonderful chap, see his predatory eye
. . . picking up cigar ends . . . the grand
passion . . . pockets full . . .

SOMEBODY: Picasso uses all sorts of
odds and ends.^[4]

OSSY: No critic dare anticipate the
masterpiece this man may stack . . .

SOMEBODY: Mud larks and geniuses!

OSSY: There’s a revival in THE THING
being a patron . . . I’ve got a Medici
Villa somewhere . . . put the fellow in
the stables here . . . heart’s content …
counting fags . . . Wait and see; fond of
my dinner doesn’t prevent me having an
enormous respect for this creative sky-
rocket-in-the-sewer chaps; wait and see
I’ve got flair . . . taken two of you to
have got onto those cigar ends . . . like
that
. . . my God!
I’d forgotten Diana . . . Diana collects
geniuses!

SOMEBODY: She’s got perfect toes . . .
pedicured on a diamond footstool . . .

SOMEBODY ELSE: Bach played for
her bath . . .

SOMEBODY: Isadora Allen^[5] used to dance her awake

S.E.: Bought a museum to wear at a ball

SOMEBODY: Has to have the Daily
Mail transposed into the Arabic for the
autumn, British Journalese has a bite in
it . . . superfluously supplements the
morning frost . . .

S.E.: Steam from hot cocoa is so
suggestive of breathing in the open

SOMEBODY: But she has so many
butterflies in her nightcap . . .

S.E.: Avoiding the vulgarity of looking
expensive she waters the aloe in sack-
cloth. Does nothing to her complexion,
but a penny worth of ice
Has her own bran-mash prepared for
her at the Ritz . . . reads Mahabharata
through cotillions . . .

SOMEBODY: So bored . . . she has the
most perfect yawn in Europe . . . virgin^[6]
eyelashes, and abortive morals . . . why
Di dear, we were just talking about you . . .

(Diana turns off the light, sits on the
pekinese which sinking still deeper into
cushions notices nothing; and meditates in
a fussy silence on the dial of a luminous
watch.)
(Two intimate FRIENDS sidle into the conservatory)

1ST FRIEND: Can I trust you?

2ND FRIEND: Did I trust you?

1ST F: Then I will tell you where I
really was last week … at home with a
black eye.

2ND F: And where . . . ?

1ST F: Oh, he was at home with a
black eye too.

2ND F: How ripping!

1 ST F: Delicious, we wore Longhi masks
and had Watsiswinski play Handel on
the spinet

2ND F: Life can be very beautiful with
a lover

1ST F: The Wedgewood and the Venetian
lustres are in splinters and the
ceiling had to be repainted

2ND F: It is your passion for danger,
serves you your incontestable hold on
our social circle, whose criterion the
intactness of porcelain, the watchword
. . . ‘No china is ever broken here; here
where the virginity of white carpets,
sanctifies the passage of the correct’

1ST F: Profundity of superficies

2ND F: While to Stavinski’s meteors
the animal whines a million moons
behind evening dress

1ST F: Split passion to the forty gold
pieces of a manicure set . . . and there it
still is

2ND F: Strew souls in fractions on
dressing tables

1ST F: Oh keep it up . . . disintegratedly
above those others . . . what do you
suppose they do . . . with insufficient
money to do it with?

2ND F: Nature looks after them . . .

1ST F: When you consider what our
régime has done to Nature

2ND F: Diversion for our old age, in
patching them up

1ST F: Well, I suppose we’re rotten . . .
thank God, we’re rotting soft

2ND F: Double pile . . . or an intellect
walking about on it . . .

1ST F: Don’t make me think . . . might
drive me to anything

2ND F: Come Di’s lit up again . . .
Ossy’s cocktails Remember. . . no china broken here . . .

SOMEBODY: Diana dear, you might
tell us where you were . . . while we were
so patiently watching you?

(DIANA chameleon rattles her emeralds.)

DIANA: Systematizing Futurist plastic
velocity by the displacement of the
minute-hand . . . Ho capito

SOMEBODY ELSE: Isn’t she wonderful?

A MAN: (Whose monocle has been hypnotized
to idea associations by the luminous dial)
I don’t know anything about Marinetti;
I don’t want to know anything
about Marinetti but I respect him
. . . he has a clean collar I am willing to
accept the creed of any man who wears a clean collar

SOMEBODY: Why the devil shouldn’t
Marinetti wear a clean collar?
I don’t know why Marinetti shouldn’t
wear a clean collar, all I say is . . .
Marinetti wears a clean collar!

OSSY: Di . . . if you half guessed what
I’ve caught in the stables, you’d throw
Futurism to . . .

DIANA: Don’t mean . . . that I’m out of
fashion again

OSSY: Since 1 P.M. . . . dispensing
entirely with the middleman, we now
have the genius served directly to the
consumer

DIANA: Let us consume ^[7]. . .

OSSY: (to the footman.) James! just
fetch whatsisname out of the whatyoumecallems
and don’t let its feet touch the floor.

(The footmen carry in the HOUSELESS LOONY
in his natural condition . . . on a throne
chair with a step to it. The LADY DIANA
has stood herself in front of a large light
that hazes her yellow hair.)

SOMEBODY: Di will be able to put
him at his ease!

(The importation fixes on her his fanatical
eyes, set in the lewdest eyelids, the rest
is stubbly.)

DIANA: There are only two kinds of
people in society . . . geniuses and
women.

LOONY: I hang out with God and the
Devil

DIANA: (continuing impressively.) I am
Woman.

LOONY: May be . . . (sniffing her
approach) . . . but you smell like nothing-at-all;
and all that truck on you,
makes me eye sneeze

DIANA: I know. . . I knew. . . I have
always known . . . you alone can see
beneath the . . . beneath the
. . . beneath the truck! I am the elusion^[9]
that cooed to your adolescent isolation,
crystallized in the experience of your
manhood. . . (Oh do stop blinking at
me, or I can’t go on) . . . I am that
reciprocal quality you searched for
among the moonlit mysteries of
Battersea Bridge.
I come to you with gifts those other
women had not to give
I am measured by the silence of inspiration,
tuned to a laudatory discrimination . . .
made of the instigatory caress . . .
I know the moment to press the
grape to thy lip . . . put ice on your
head; for I am the woman who understands
. . . so do tell me what you are
going to make with those cigar-ends?

LOONY: I am going to make Life^[10] out
of cigar-ends
Life
I must have Life . . . more life . . .
I am Life . . . my hair is full of life . . .
my clothes are alive; but I am not satisfied.
I will have more life . . . I will make
more life . . . Life out of cigar ends
When God made Life . . . he rested and
saw that it was . . . good . . . the devil
interfered, making it dangerous. But
Life is more than this or that. Life is
amusing! And you (to DIANA)—you
make me laugh!

DIANA: I am merriment to float your
leisure . . . And what do you do when
you are not picking them up?

LOONY: Sit in the pub arguing with
my companion

DIANA: You mentioned two . . .

LOONY: One and the same . . . ‘God
gives’ and ‘the Devil to pay!’

(The room fills rapidly with the LOONY’s
curiosity, the ‘taken for granted’ advances
to audience gravenly noticeable.)

Such are the secret dens of the terrorized.
Look here, you woman-as-you-
may-say, strikes me I’ve wasted a lot of
theoretic sympathy on the submerged . . .
you don’t look half sorry for
yourselves. Why I’ve knocked a fellow
down, out there in the Grand ’cause’ he
says ‘they don’t feel’ says he . . . ‘they
can’t have the same feelings as we have.’
And yet, and yet . . . what would
happen if one scraped some of the nap off you?

SOMEBODY ELSE: So you’re stopping
at the Grand?

LOONY: There is no stopping at the
Grand . . . the Grand is all of ‘Out
There’ . . . I am the grand man let loose
in it. Out there where no knick knacks
nudge you into minding your p’s and q’s
. . . ‘my miraculous ambulance in spa-
tial mystery’; out there where there is
everything to find . . . the grand man is
able to pick up anything he is able to
see.

DIANA: (Sighs) Oh! . . . take me with
you, I am the woman who can see.

LOONY: You know not what you ask
Your aspirations are herculean
No human beings can be so polished, so
sequestered, so hermetically sealed …
but that they may still be able to aspire.
I am the apostle of Fraternity. I find my
brother in the most secluded coward …
But out there . . . they are not all as I am
. . . their sympathies have narrowed
their code. Were I to take you among
them . . . you would suffer … even my
protection would not suffice you.
You would be slighted . . . you would be
criticised . . . considered soft.
You with your different way of sitting
down, an unfamiliar manner of gulping
food. Your most fervid conversation
would lose itself as an impertinent si-
lence among the debonaire rumble of
our caste. You would be witless and a
bore; koh-i-noors for the cultured ear
. . . the crude realism of our Imagists
would call up none of the emotions of
the initiated in you . . .

SOMEBODY: I say Ossy . . . we might
be able to keep peace with ’em there.

LOONY: Not at all, with you the art of
ribaldry relies entirely on technique …
dilettante . . . again the cowardice of the
submerged . . .
Ours has the healthy
spring of creative expression rooted in
action . . . we coin nothing but the
image and superscription of personal
experience . . .
My poor child (catching DIANA’s wrist as
he descends from his throne . . . shuffling
the velvet). Dare you look . . . look . . .
(he looks for something he is surprised not
to be able to find) I was going to try to
make you see the ‘Grand.’

OSSY: Oh Di, he wants a window . . .
James! draw the curtains.

(The curtains are drawn
The gilded shutters thrown back—)

LOONY: (to the grand outdoors.) What
an idea to muffle It up like that
Oh thou from whom all colds are caught
. . . they’re afraid of you catching a cold!
(To Diana) Now my pretty house fly!
Think of that mud . . . that bloody
awful mud . . . in all the beauty of its
bloody awfulness!
A quality that escapes you?
You have never felt it plasterly squelching
between your toes, salving their
parchment creak . . . cake coveringly for
warm-footed nights, or sensuous slop
cheek-spattering as a wench’s spittle . . .
from about the Rolls-Royce passing of
the pitiably immune.

SOMEBODY: He can talk about something!

LOONY: Under the lemon-peel sunslip
Human bracchalian stretches
Cautiously draw near to feverish attain-
able,
The blood-shot calculations of an eye
Approximate spent ends
There are many on ’em
And there may
Be always more
Than man yet dares to wish for
I maintain
Though in those rare full hours of r-r-
round numbers
Perfection looms proportionate
The ever-widening cycles of our Future
Shall shed such transcendental showers
of ideo-fags
Shall muster the rear-forces of mentality
To sublimate
To boons that are
For man to pounce upon.
So in the low-geared meanwhile
The humble fanatic
Collects from where he can
Those battered finger-posts
To his ideal
Ashy iotas in the Balance of
The easier equilibrium of Life,
With patient love
To raise them where they lay
A tear of absolution
For the weak
Sucked to impersonality
By
The Zoroastrian mud.
While every here and there
The glowing ones …
Flare to the common call
Till numerously Enough
For Life
Fourpence for dinner, sixpence for love
My life!

Among the geometric static of your
bric-à-brac
Your idle wills
Exile the unforeseen
The nice initiative of ‘nosing about’
Wilts to the barren orderly
Where bells and butlers
Places to put things in
Rob days of discovery
I ask what have you to find
Where can you pick things up?

(DIANA indicating an ash tray, he rever-
ently pockets half a manilla.)^[11]

There, there! my good people . . . Don’t
ask me to say anything . . . but forgive
me.

(Retiring semi-despondently to his throne.)

The grandest of us
Have phases of diminished elasticity
The most expansive
Periodically contract
Can it be possible I am getting narrow?

(Looking with new interest at DIANA,
who is still more preparedly posing.)

And is it likely that women have other
qualities besides their smell?

I have learnt something to-day
And in exchange
The spiritual explorer’s
Footprints
Humanize
The shameless purity
of that padding on your floor.
Let them remain
For ever
Encouraging
Your tentative toddle towards other
ends . . .

OSSY: O . . . oo . . . oh . . . aah . . . aah!
thanks offly . . . cocktail?

(The LOONY, lifting each cocktail successively
from the gold tray handed to him,
drinks them all off with appreciation.)

SOMEBODY: Di dear! as you’re still
looking intense would you mind very
much if we left him to you?

DIANA: I have never met a genius I
couldn’t manage yet.

SOMEBODY: You sure you’re not getting
let down on this one? The fellow
uses the oldest-hat blank verse!

DIANA: The cosmic form of the idea
behind it!

SOMEBODY: Well if you think a drop
or two of sulphuric would help you at
all . . . send to the chemist.

PICKED PEOPLE evaporate.

(The LOONY has laid himself sublimely on
a brocaded chaise-longue.

DIANA rather at a loss, as she remarks his
drowsiness, plays a precocious trump taking
off one shoe and stocking.)

LOONY: (snoozily as he blinks at the
little white thing blazing under the elec-
tric light.)
This little pig . . .
This little pig . . .
(But falls asleep.)

(DIANA entirely at a loss, replaces the
stocking and shoe . . . and calls— James!)

DIANA: Tell the men there is one
thousand pounds for any one who will
take that to a bathroom . . . and entirely
clean it up . . . not boil it you know . . .
but any other possible means . . .
and oh yes, dress it . . . the Duke’s will
be about the right size . . . and then
determinedly . . . you can bring it back
to me.

AFTER THE IMMERSION

(DIANA minus one shoe and stocking. The
LOONY minus one shoe and stocking. They
sit on the edge of the chaise-longue wriggling
toes thoughtfully up and down . . .)

DIANA: You see after all they’re very
much alike.

LOONY: (anxiously.) I am losing my
self respect.

DIANA: Oh not all I assure you…
you’ll feel all right . . . it’s only the first
five minutes.

LOONY: Look here my dear . . .
(resolutely drawing on foot gear) . . . if
you’ve mistaken me for a blooming
canary bird . . .
Well . . . I didn’t size you up at first . . .
For you’re a woman you are— white . . .
pulpy . . . wheedle-em-round your fin-
ger would you . . . ?
not me . . . !
You’d like to sap my brain to make a
face crease of . . . tack a string to my jaw
and pull it . . . “pretty, pretty” . . . say
Grand louder for his precious!
You’ve made a boss shot . . . a holy error
. . . thought I depended entirely on me
protective cake of mud . . .
nothing inside but slosh . . . active
because itchy . .. think you can drain
off the creative impulse through a bath
tube . . . just because you depend
entirely on your tags and tatters (tearing
savagely at the Mechlin on her shoulders
through which a miraculous white gleam
bursts upon him . . .)
Ah . . . (clenching his fist . . . to a
superhuman brake . .. he sits down on the
chair opposite her … smoothing his hair
from his brow in sudden weariness)
Ah! you thought you’d got me that
time?

DIANA: I maintain any time will do.

SILENCE

DIANA: Stand up—Sir—and dress your
soul for dinner. Throw out your chest
and don’t walk heels first . . . remember
It takes a genius five minutes to acquire
what it takes five centuries to breed into
us . . .
Those tirades about the Grand
are the thing . . . dock them a bit
. . . muddle people up more . . . But
when you’re not holding forth you must
be like us . . . you (hypnotically) are like
us . . .
No use picking up cigar ends—
Here . . . are the whole cigars . . .
(handing him the box … the genius picks
out a cigar entirely at his ease). Here.
The Grand is the infinitesimal . . . nothing
so vulgar as the obvious.
When you talk to a Duchess treat her as
if she were a prostitute at the same time
hold fast to the ethics of property.
Shown a picture . . . look at the left-hand
corner . . .
A book? Pass an innocuous finger-nail
down the back of the binding.
Turn everything upside down and inside
out . . . and you’ll get on . . . you’ve got
to get on . . . I have just telephoned you
to every daily paper in the kingdom and
now . . . look at me with those indomitable eyes . . .
(turning to a step) . . .
Dear Duke . . .I must present Houston
Loon to you . . .
The great Vitalist
. . . Europe raves about him . . . tomorrow . . .

DUKE: A pleasure . . . ah I see . . .
you’ve got a cigar . . .
I’d just like to have your opinion on this
Benozzo Gozzoli.

LOONY: (holding his nose carefully to
the left-hand corner.) Are you sure it’s a
Benozzo Gozzoli? . . . By the direction
of the scratches . . . you can’t scratch a
Benozzo Gozzoli from right to left . . .
from the way he put the paint on . . .
More probably a Genozzo Bozzolini.

My dear . . . (breathes DIANA devoutly)
. . . you’ll DO.

THE END

OF THEM ALL