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 Žižek’s ‘The
Sublime Object of
Ideology’
 BLOOMSBURY READER’S GUIDES

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 Žižek’s ‘The
Sublime Object of
Ideology’
A Reader’s Guide

Rafael Winkler
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii

1 Context 1
The Habermas-Foucault debate and Althusser 1
Laclau and Mouffe: Antagonism and the Real of the drive 7

2 Overview of themes 15
The critique of ideology 15
Subject-positions and antagonism 18
The reality and pleasure principles and the drive 20

3 Reading the text 25

Section 1 26
What is money? 26
Exchange: Alfred Sohn-Rethel 29
Cynical consciousness: Peter Sloterdijk 30
Belief and ideology 33
Althusser: Interpellation and misrecognition 36
Kant and the Law 42
Disidentification 45

Section 2 48
Retroactivity (Nachträglichkeit) 49
Error as the way to the truth 55
Desire and lack 59
vi Contents

Trauma redux 61
The form of ideology 62

Section 3 66
The constitution of sublime objects 66
The constitution of the subject and enjoyment (jouissance) 78

Section 4 92
Symbolic and physical existence: Symbolic and physical death 92
Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ 101
Power and its representation 108

Section 5 111
‘There is no metalanguage’: Derrida and dissemination 111
Lacan and ‘Lenin in Warsaw’ 116
The Real revisited 117
Freedom and the forced choice: the Real 120
Lack, the subject and the ontological inconsistency of the big
Other 124
The ideological function of objet a 128
The subject presumed to . . . 130

Section 6 132
The indefinite judgement, lack and negation 132
Beauty and the sublime: The pleasure principle and its beyond 138
From Kant to Hegel: Lack and negativity 142
‘Spirit is a bone’ 144
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the heroism of flattery 146
The ‘beautiful soul’ and positing the presuppositions 149

4 Reception and influence 155

Notes 159
Select Bibliography 162
Index 164
 Acknowledgements

T his project began as a reading group in early 2023. We’d meet for two
hours every Friday at 11.00 AM at the IT Corner on the corner of 7th
Street and 3rd Avenue in Melville, Johannesburg, for a period of three months.
Our aim was to understand the intricacies and unravel the complexities of
Žižek’s Lacanian rehabilitation of the Marxist notion of ideology in The Sublime
Object of Ideology. The notes I prepared and distributed weekly constituted the
first draft of what eventually became this Reader’s Guide to Žižek’s text.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the
weekly reading group, including Chad Harris, Asheel Singh, Catherine Otto,
Chantelle Gray, Aragorn Eloff, Yolanda and Yoliswa Mlungwana, Reneilwe
Masuluke and Dominic Griffiths. The better parts of this work is due to
our conversations.
I want to thank the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Johannesburg for allowing me to complete this project in the tranquility of my
home in the last two months of semester 1 of 2023.
Finally, to Salomé and Mira, all I can say is that the world would be a grim
and sad place without the lightness and joy you bring to it.
 Abbreviations

The following include Žižek’s works cited below:

SOI The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso: London, UK and New York,
USA, 2008).
CHU Contingency, Hegemony, University: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left (Verso: London, UK, New York, US, 2000).
NEP For They Know not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(Verso: London, UK, and New York, USA, 2008).
ES Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (Routledge:
New York, London, 1992).
PV The Parallax View (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,
London, England, 2006).
ZR The Žižek Reader, ed. E. Wright and E. Wright (Blackwell Publishing:
MA, USA, Oxford, UK, Victoria, Australia, 2005).
SE Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (Bloomsbury
Academic: London, New York, 2022)
PF The Plague of Fantasies (Verso: London and New York, 2008).
TN Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
(Duke University Press: Durham, 1998)
 1
Context

The Habermas-Foucault debate and Althusser

Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English) appears
in 1989. Four years earlier, Jürgen Habermas publishes The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity in which he defends a version of the Enlightenment
project against such critics of modernity as Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault
(among others) who see in it moral nihilism, decadence and so on, instead
of progress, the acquisition of rights and freedoms, the liberation of mankind
from the oppressive forces of tradition and capitalism and so on. Habermas
is out to defend the value of reason or of a communicative rationality that
underpins modern participatory democratic institutions, against those whom
he perceives to be a threat to the process of democratization on account of
their skepticism of and mistrust in reason. Foucault dies in 1984, the year
before Habermas’ book comes out, and one of the debates raging in academia
at the time – the time being the decade of the 1980s until, at the end of the
1980s and during the 1990s, deconstruction comes to dominate the academic
scene in the English-speaking world – is whether Foucault’s Nietzsche-
inspired genealogical analysis of disciplinary practices or Habermas’ Hegel-
inspired communicative rationality offers a more incisive critique of the power
relations permeating modern society. You’d hear at conferences or read in
papers, edited volumes, journals or books that Foucault offers you insights on
the constitution of the economically useful and politically obedient subject
via the deployment of disciplines in institutions like the school, the hospital,
2 Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’

the prison and so on, but that he robs you of the normative standpoint from
which you can say whether such-or-such institutions, such-or-such actions
are good or bad. As Foucault says somewhere, there is nothing in society that
is good or bad, but everything is dangerous. In contrast, Habermas’ approach
provides you with just such an immanent normative-evaluative standpoint
– immanent, that is, to the failing practice or institution in question – a
standpoint that makes it possible to determine with others and by means
of agreed upon rational principles the merit of the practice or institution in
terms of its proposed goals. But the commentator or speaker would go on,
his model of power is inadequate. Not only does it fail to capture its capillary
structure in modern society. It also relies upon the timeworn top-down model:
there are oppressors and there are the oppressed and the experience of power,
of its force or violence, is like that of the boot of the SS officer squashing its
victim’s jowl. Habermas does not appear to have an inkling of the fact that
power is productive, that it constitutes the subject by attaching bodies to an
identity, type or clinically determined desire and so on (pathological/normal,
perverse/neurotic/psychotic). Žižek opens the Introduction of his book with
this very debate between Habermas and Foucault in order to show that it hides
a neglected alternative: the Lacan-Althusser axis.

There is something enigmatic in the sudden eclipse of the Althusserian

school: it cannot be explained away in terms of a theoretical defeat. It is
more as if there were, in Althusser’s theory, a traumatic kernel which had
to be quickly forgotten, ‘repressed’; it is an effective case of theoretical
amnesia. (SOI xxiii-xxiv)

Althusser’s theory calls into question an assumption shared by both Foucault

and Habermas. This is that there are strategies the subject can use to neutralize
certain effects of power, that the subject can be rescued from the ideological
grid, or, what amounts to the same thing, that an ideologically neutral subject
is, politically speaking, not impossible. Of course, such a shared assumption
should be infinitely qualified and refined. It goes without saying that the ideal
subject for Habermas and Foucault isn’t the same – though, and this is the
point, they do have an ideal, one that has liberated itself from oppressive forms
of power or from immobilized, fixed power relations. Habermas’ ideal subject
 Context 3

is the self-transparent intersubjective community that has achieved consensus

on matters of justice, right and law, whereas according to Žižek, Foucault’s is
the subject that fashions herself in the way an author fashions her characters in
a novel. She is someone who creates herself, her sexual or gender identity, who
gives shape to her vices and virtues, who gives her character style and so on by
using the resources and techniques available in the social field. Žižek detects
in Foucault’s ideal, beyond Nietzsche’s ‘sovereign individual’, the humanist
Renaissance agent who masters his passions and shapes his existence as if it
were a work of art.1 One way of putting this is to say that there is still hope in
Habermas and Foucault (obviously more so in Habermas than in Foucault) and
it is this hope tied to the belief in the ideologically emancipated subject that is
belied by Althusser’s theory of interpellation. For, according to the latter, there
is no way out of ideology or, more precisely, ideology doesn’t consist simply
in the reification of the social relation (i.e. labour), it doesn’t consist merely in
making you see your labour power as just another commodity on the market
to be sold for a price. Ideology for Althusser is a mechanism of subjectivation,
it constitutes the subject. An ‘ideologically-neutral subject’ is on this view a
contradiction in terms. Or better yet, if you were to shed your ‘ideological
glasses’, you’d find yourself stripped of the big Other, that is, of the symbolic
order that sustains your position as a subject for the world.
Ideology for Žižek is ubiquitous. It coincides with the symbolic order. It
exists not simply out there in the world in structural inequalities whose
injustice tends to be masked and rendered innocuous. It prevails as well in your
deepest, most private thoughts and fantasies. I am reminded of an episode in
Don DeLillo’s White Noise where one of Jack Gladney’s daughters says out loud
in her sleep at night in bed, Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida, as if
the market had colonized her unconscious. Nothing limits ideology-cum-the
symbolic order save the Real of the drive. That is why the radical act for Žižek
is the act of ‘subjective destitution’. The critique of ideology demands nothing
less than that I sacrifice my position as subject – that is, my attachment to the
symbolic order. It demands an act of symbolic suicide, an ethical gesture. It is
not simply a question of dis-identifying with the desire of the Other in order
to forge my own desire (separation). It is a matter of suspending the belief that
the big Other – society, the symbolic order – exists. The supposition that it
4 Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’

exists makes my experiences consistent and meaningful. By neutralizing it, I

embrace my experiences in their contingency and meaninglessness, and I am
led to affirm the stupidity of the drive (the Real) that they ceaselessly border
on, confront and occlude.

[I]t is clear that the whole of [Althusser’s] work embodies a certain radical
ethical attitude which we might call the heroism of alienation or of subjective
destitution. (SOI xxv; word added by me)

In Žižek’s eyes, the end of the critique of ideology coincides with the end of
the psychoanalytic cure and, thus, not with ‘science’ as traditionally conceived
in classical Marxism and Althusser. We will see in Section 1 why Žižek thinks
that one gets out of ideology not by means of the knowledge that exposes
its illusions but thanks to an ethical gesture, or, indeed, therapeutically. This
ethical dimension gives Žižek’s critique of ideology an existential dimension.
It is enough here to recall the fact that the locus of ideology, the site where it
operates, is, according to Althusser, not so much the market as the subject.
The principal effect of ideology is subjectivation, the transformation of
what Althusser calls the ‘individual’, which is something indeterminate like
Aristotle’s prima materia, into a subject, that is, someone with a determinate
social identity who thinks of herself as an agent.
The point I have been insisting on is that according to Žižek, the differences
between Habermas and Foucault are secondary if we look at them from the
point of view of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. The latter questions their
shared assumption. The ‘real break is represented by Althusser, by his insistence
on the fact that a certain cleft, a certain fissure, misrecognition, characterizes
the human condition as such: by the thesis that the idea of the possible end
of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence’ (SOI xxiv). What is there
a misrecognition of? It can be glossed, in the first instance, as the error of
naturalizing a social relation. The State or one of its apparatuses, for example,
the school I was sent to as a child, addresses me as male, white, Jewish and so
on, and I take these inherently social mandates as natural, inborn, God-given
and so on, as if I had always been that. The ‘process of ideological interpellation
through which the subject “recognizes” itself as the addressee in the calling up
of the ideological cause implies necessarily a certain short circuit, an illusion
 Context 5

of the type “I was already there”’ (SOI xxv). Naturally I might question these
qualities attributed to me. I might refuse to be labeled as such (‘No, I don’t
consider myself Jewish anymore’) or I might contest the current interpretation
of these labels (‘No, to be Jewish doesn’t mean that you de facto support the
actions of the Israeli government,’ etc.). Still, it is insofar as this misrecognition
has taken place that I can take a reflexive attitude towards the signifiers with
which I identify: misrecognition is unavoidable.
At a formal level, there is a misrecognition of what I take myself to be when
I identify as subject: I take myself to be an agent – the agent of my thoughts
and actions, of history or of destiny and so on. The truth is that the subject is
an effect of interpellation, and it is as unavoidable that I misrecognize myself
as an agent as that I misrecognize myself in terms of such concrete social
roles. As we will see, this is the central aspect of imaginary identification. To
be an agent, an autonomous, autarchic being, is my Ideal Ego. It is what, in
the final analysis, I want to be for the big Other, that is, in order to be likeable
to it.

The point is not just that we must unmask the structural mechanism which
is producing the effect of subject as ideological misrecognition, but that we
must at the same time fully acknowledge this misrecognition as unavoidable
– that is, we must accept a certain delusion as a condition of our historical
activity, of assuming the role as agent of the historical process. (SOI xxv)

Misrecognition is unavoidable. It is where the human being begins. It begins

alienated in the symbolic order. Alienated? Yes, but not in the classical
Marxist sense according to which I am alienated from my essence on entering
a commodity-producing society, that is, capitalism, or in the sense that the
market suppresses and hides my freedom or species-being. Alienation in
Lacan’s sense has nothing to do with the notion that my essence is occluded by
the established order. It is similar to the concept of thrownness in Heidegger’s
Being and Time. Before I can even say ‘I am so-and-so’ to the person hailing
me in the street, I find myself in a world – a language, culture, tradition,
political regime and so on – I have not created and that is not mine and that
is accordingly other and alien. I am hailed by all of these things – language,
culture, tradition and so on – through the other person that embodies for me
6 Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’

the big Other. The big Other for Lacan is the symbolic order. It is not identical
to ‘the world’ in the phenomenological sense: the horizon of meaning and
focal point for the projection of my existence. It is a system of signifiers
lacking substantiality and life. It is a ‘dead letter’, a machine that generates
sense, a formal, timeless structure that renders transparent the contingent
and imaginary contents of culture, language and so on. More on this later. For
now, let me just say that in talking about ‘where the human being begins’, I do
not mean its natural beginning at birth or during conception. The subject’s
symbolic identity is determined prior to birth or conception. It is determined
by the name (the signifier) that anticipates its physical existence, the name the
infant will inherit and bear, the father’s name and, thus, the Name-of-the-
Father in societies where patrilineal descent is the norm. This is just another
way of saying that ideology – the symbolic order – is almost all-enveloping.
I say ‘almost’ because, as I have begun to suggest and will explain at greater
length later on, its limit is the Real of the drive, not some fact in the empirical
world but, instead, the unsymbolized and unsymbolizable, the trauma that
recurs precisely to the extent that it refuses to be symbolically digested
and integrated.
One more word on interpellation. How does it work? Althusser’s model
is the following. A person in authority says ‘Hey you!’ Is he calling someone
in particular? It doesn’t matter. The point is that the person who turns round
identifies with the call and is interpellated under that name. The signifier
sticks to him because he accepts it. He identifies with it. What needs to be
noted is that the signifier wouldn’t stick unless the caller were someone who
embodies the authority of the symbolic order. Anyone can tell me who I am,
those I consider my equals and those whom I see as authority figures. The
signifier that determines my being issues from an authority figure, my parents
or caregivers, as well as my teachers, state functionaries or representatives of
an institution, a club, race, ethnicity, religion and so on. The power he has over
me is unique: he tells me (of course, obliquely, indirectly!) who I need to be in
order to belong and be worthy of his love or respect. (We will see later on that
this is the central feature of symbolic identification: I want to be worthy of his
love and to that end, I become the representative of this order, cast, ethnicity,
club, etc.)
 Context 7

Laclau and Mouffe: Antagonism and the Real of

the drive

In the next two pages of the Introduction (SOI xxvi-xxvii), Žižek begins to
introduce one of the core arguments of The Sublime Object of Ideology. He
positions himself against the foundationalism of classical Marxism and the
post-structuralism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by arguing that the
traumatic Real is what all antagonisms in society are of. Žižek spells out his
argument in ‘Beyond Discourse-Analysis’.
Let me clarify the sense in which Marxism is a foundationalist doctrine. Let’s
start with the uncontroversial observation that we find in society a multiplicity of
conflicts. The feminist fights for the rights of women, the ecologist fights against
the exploitation of nature, the worker’s party fights for the rights of workers,
‘democrats for political and social freedoms’ and so on. The classical Marxist
insists that there is one conflict that is fundamental and the basis of all the
others. This is the class conflict, that between labour and capital, the proletarians
and the owners of the means of production. The claim is that by resolving the
class conflict, all the others will also be resolved. There will be equal pay in the
workplace, the exploitation of nature will be over and so on, once the class conflict
is resolved. The latter is the ground of the others. As long as it persists, they too
persist. This is why Marx takes the class conflict to be the basis of history. What
causes history to move is the contradiction between social classes. By the same
token, history comes to an end with the resolution of the class conflict. That is
in fact the goal of history. History aims at the institution of a rationally governed
society, a society that is at one with itself, notably, communism.
Laclau and Mouffe break with this view of history as well as with the idea
that the economy is the explanatory basis of surface phenomena like politics,
religion, literature and the like. In their eyes, politics is war by other means.
Conflict is irreducible and the idea of a closed, harmonious society that is
transparent to itself is the very substance of ideology.
For Laclau and Mouffe, it’s a question of politicizing one’s struggle. As
Žižek puts it, ‘almost any of the antagonisms which, in light of Marxism,
8 Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’

appear to be secondary can take over this essential role of mediator for all
the others’. (SOI xxvii) You have to stake your particular struggle – whether
for workers’ rights, women’s equal pay, the environment and so on – as one
that is of universal interest. You make a part stand for the whole, that is, you
‘hegemonize’ your struggle. Politics involves putting forth your struggle as
one whose resolution will bring about the public good, that is, a harmonious
society, against other agents who see the resolution of their struggle as the
way to bring about the public good. This contestation between social agents
is what radical democracy looks like. Doing anything else, like lobbying the
State for advancing the private interests of groups and corporations as in the
United States and countries where the liberal tradition is strong, is inherently
depoliticizing. In a situation where politics is alive in the sense described, we
have a democratic contestation between a plurality of social actors whose view
of society – of the common good, the res publica – is incommensurable. There
is no common ground between the views of society on the Left and Right.
The position of each excludes the position of the others. This is one reason
why society as a perfectly harmonious, all-inclusive totality is impossible.
It remains a representation – a chain of signifiers – rather than something
realized in fact (or outside of language).
In Žižek’s eyes, Laclau and Mouffe fall short in their leaning
toward ‘post-structuralism’.

Lacanian psychoanalysis goes a decisive step further than the usual ‘post-
Marxist’ anti-essentialism affirming the irreducible plurality of particular
struggles – in other words, demonstrating how their articulation into a
series of equivalences depends always on the radical contingency of the
social-historical process: it enables us to grasp this plurality as a multitude
of responses to the same impossible-real kernel. (SOI xxvii)

What Žižek objects to is best explained in reference to Laclau’s short 1983

essay ‘The Impossibility of Society’ which contains the principal argument of
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. It will
assist us in understanding the alternative Žižek proposes, notably, that social
conflicts do in fact have a quasi-foundation. It is not, to be sure, the economy,
but the limit of the symbolic order, the Real of the drive.
 Context 9

Laclau begins his essay by reporting two claims from orthodox Marxism.
The first is that ideology exists at a certain (superstructural) level of society,
the second is that ideology signifies false consciousness. The first notion was
undermined when the assumption on which it was based was called into
question by structuralism and, to a greater extent, by Derrida: that society is an
intelligible totality whose parts and relations, whose levels, can be identified;
the second was likewise undermined when the idea of human agency was called
into question, that is, that freedom is the essence of the human being. Laclau
writes that ‘the two approaches were grounded in an essentialist conception of
both society and social agency’.2
As concerns the first, the conception of society as a totality operates in
science ‘as an underlying principle of intelligibility of the social order’. The
totality is the essence of society that has to be recognized behind the empirical
variation at the surface of social life. As opposed to this notion, Laclau follows
the Derridean view in affirming ‘the infinitude of the social’. Society is equated
with discourse and discourse, in turn, cannot be limited by something non-
discursive, yet if not by something non-discursive then it cannot be limited
at all. It is always bleeding meaning. It is impossible to contain or limit the
movement of signification. A signifier signifies other signifiers. Any ‘structural
system’ is ‘always surrounded by an “excess of meaning” which it is unable to
master’ and, consequently, ‘“society” as a unitary and intelligible object which
grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility’. For structuralism, social
identity is relational. It has no positive content of its own. It is determined
by neighboring identities. This is the great step taken by structuralism. The
second step is taken by deconstruction. If identity has a relational character
and it cannot be fixed once and for all, ‘then the social must be identified with
the infinite play of differences, that is, with what in the strictest sense of the
term we can call discourse – on the condition, of course, that we liberate the
concept of discourse from its restrictive meaning as speech and writing’. Laclau
reinvests the meaning of society beyond its classical conception in Marxism.
Society = Discourse = Open-Ended Chain of Differential Elements (signifiers).
Of course, a discourse where meaning cannot be fixed is psychotic and
unintelligible. That is why Laclau continues by insisting that politics (or the
‘social’, as he calls it in the essay) is the attempt to arrest the movement of
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 For some time after her uncle’s departure Marjorie sat motionless
in the same position, her body bent forward, her face in her hands.
She kept on repeating the words, “Never again,” and the sound of
them filled her with despair and made her cry. They seemed to open
up such a dreary grey infinite vista—“never again.” They were as a
spell evoking tears.
She got up at last and began walking aimlessly about the room.
She paused in front of a little old black-framed mirror that hung near
the window and looked at her reflection in the glass. She had
expected somehow to look different, to have changed. She was
surprised to find her face entirely unaltered: grave, melancholy
perhaps, but still the same face she had looked at when she was
doing her hair this morning. A curious idea entered her head; she
wondered whether she would be able to smile now, at this dreadful
moment. She moved the muscles of her face and was overwhelmed
with shame at the sight of the mirthless grin that mocked her from
the glass. What a beast she was! She burst into tears and threw
herself again on the sofa, burying her face in a cushion. The door
opened, and by the noise of shuffling and tapping Marjorie
recognized the approach of George White on his crutches. She did
not look up. At the sight of the abject figure on the sofa, George
halted, uncertain what he should do. Should he quietly go away
again, or should he stay and try to say something comforting? The
sight of her lying there gave him almost physical pain. He decided to
stay.
He approached the sofa and stood over her, suspended on his
crutches. Still she did not lift her head, but pressed her face deeper
into the smothering blindness of the cushion, as though to shut out
from her consciousness all the external world. George looked down
at her in silence. The little delicate tendrils of hair on the nape of her
neck were exquisitely beautiful.
“I was told about it,” he said at last, “just now, as I came in. It’s
too awful. I think I cared for Guy more than for almost anyone in the
world. We both did, didn’t we?”
She began sobbing again. George was overcome with remorse,
feeling that he had somehow hurt her, somehow added to her pain
by what he had said. “Poor child, poor child,” he said, almost aloud.
She was a year older than he, but she seemed so helplessly and
pathetically young now that she was crying.
Standing up for long tired him, and he lowered himself, slowly
and painfully, into the sofa beside her. She looked up at last and
began drying her eyes.
“I’m so wretched, George, so specially wretched because I feel I
didn’t act rightly towards darling Guy. There were times, you know,
when I wondered whether it wasn’t all a great mistake, our being
engaged. Sometimes I felt I almost hated him. I’d been feeling so
odious about him these last weeks. And now comes this, and it
makes me realize how awful I’ve been towards him.” She found it a
relief to confide and confess; George was so sympathetic, he would
understand. “I’ve been a beast.”
Her voice broke, and it was as though something had broken in
George’s head. He was overwhelmed with pity; he couldn’t bear it
that she should suffer.
“You mustn’t distress yourself unnecessarily, Marjorie dear,” he
begged her, stroking the back of her hand with his large hard palm.
“Don’t.”
Marjorie went on remorselessly. “When Uncle Roger told me just
now, do you know what I did? I said to myself, Do I really care? I
couldn’t make out. I looked in the glass to see if I could tell from my
face. Then I suddenly thought I’d see whether I could laugh, and I
did. And that made me feel how detestable I was, and I started
crying again. Oh, I have been a beast, George, haven’t I?”
She burst into a passion of tears and hid her face once more in
the friendly cushion. George couldn’t bear it at all. He laid his hand
on her shoulder and bent forward, close to her, till his face almost
touched her hair. “Don’t,” he cried. “Don’t, Marjorie. You mustn’t
torment yourself like this. I know you loved Guy; we both loved him.
He would have wanted us to be happy and brave and to go on with
life—not make his death a source of hopeless despair.” There was a
silence, broken only by the agonizing sound of sobbing. “Marjorie,
darling, you mustn’t cry.”
“There, I’m not,” said Marjorie through her tears. “I’ll try to stop.
Guy wouldn’t have wanted us to cry for him. You’re right; he would
have wanted us to live for him—worthily, in his splendid way.”
“We who knew him and loved him must make our lives a
memorial of him.” In ordinary circumstances George would have died
rather than make a remark like that. But in speaking of the dead,
people forget themselves and conform to the peculiar obituary
convention of thought and language. Spontaneously, unconsciously,
George had conformed.
Marjorie wiped her eyes. “Thank you, George. You know so well
what darling Guy would have liked. You’ve made me feel stronger to
bear it. But, all the same, I do feel odious for what I thought about
him sometimes. I didn’t love him enough. And now it’s too late. I
shall never see him again.” The spell of that “never” worked again:
Marjorie sobbed despairingly.
George’s distress knew no bounds. He put his arm round
Marjorie’s shoulders and kissed her hair. “Don’t cry, Marjorie.
Everybody feels like that sometimes, even towards the people they
love most. You really mustn’t make yourself miserable.”
Once more she lifted her face and looked at him with a heart-
breaking, tearful smile. “You have been too sweet to me, George. I
don’t know what I should have done without you.”
“Poor darling!” said George. “I can’t bear to see you unhappy.”
Their faces were close to one another, and it seemed natural that at
this point their lips should meet in a long kiss. “We’ll remember only
the splendid, glorious things about Guy,” he went on—“what a
wonderful person he was, and how much we loved him.” He kissed
her again.
“Perhaps our darling Guy is with us here even now,” said Marjorie,
with a look of ecstasy on her face.
“Perhaps he is,” George echoed.
It was at this point that a heavy footstep was heard and a hand
rattled at the door. Marjorie and George moved a little farther apart.
The intruder was Roger, who bustled in, rubbing his hands with an
air of conscious heartiness, studiously pretending that nothing
untoward had occurred. It is our English tradition that we should
conceal our emotions. “Well, well,” he said. “I think we had better be
going in to luncheon. The bell has gone.”
EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS
“I HAVE made a discovery,” said Emberlin as I entered his room.
“What about?” I asked.
“A discovery,” he replied, “about Discoveries.” He radiated an
unconcealed satisfaction; the conversation had evidently gone
exactly as he had intended it to go. He had made his phrase, and,
repeating it lovingly—“A discovery about Discoveries”—he smiled
benignly at me, enjoying my look of mystification—an expression
which, I confess, I had purposely exaggerated in order to give him
pleasure. For Emberlin, in many ways so childish, took an especial
delight in puzzling and nonplussing his acquaintances; and these
small triumphs, these little “scores” off people afforded him some of
his keenest pleasures. I always indulged his weakness when I could,
for it was worth while being on Emberlin’s good books. To be
allowed to listen to his post-prandial conversation was a privilege
indeed. Not only was he himself a consummately good talker, but he
had also the power of stimulating others to talk well. He was like
some subtle wine, intoxicating just to the Meredithian level of
tipsiness. In his company you would find yourself lifted to the sphere
of nimble and mercurial conceptions; you would suddenly realize
that some miracle had occurred, that you were living no longer in a
dull world of jumbled things but somewhere above the hotch-potch
in a glassily perfect universe of ideas, where all was informed,
consistent, symmetrical. And it was Emberlin who, godlike, had the
power of creating this new and real world. He built it out of words,
this crystal Eden, where no belly-going snake, devourer of quotidian
dirt, might ever enter and disturb its harmonies. Since I first knew
Emberlin I have come to have a greatly enhanced respect for magic
and all the formules of its liturgy. If by words Emberlin can create a
new world for me, can make my spirit slough off completely the
domination of the old, why should not he or I or anyone, having
found the suitable phrases, exert by means of them an influence
more vulgarly miraculous upon the world of mere things? Indeed,
when I compare Emberlin and the common or garden black
magician of commerce, it seems to me that Emberlin is the greater
thaumaturge. But let that pass; I am straying from my purpose,
which was to give some description of the man who so confidentially
whispered to me that he had made a discovery about Discoveries.
In the best sense of the word, then, Emberlin was academic. For
us who knew him his rooms were an oasis of aloofness planted
secretly in the heart of the desert of London. He exhaled an
atmosphere that combined the fantastic speculativeness of the
undergraduate with the more mellowed oddity of incredibly wise and
antique dons. He was immensely erudite, but in a wholly
unencyclopædic way—a mine of irrelevant information, as his
enemies said of him. He wrote a certain amount, but, like Mallarmé,
avoided publication, deeming it akin to “the offence of
exhibitionism.” Once, however, in the folly of youth, some dozen
years ago, he had published a volume of verses. He spent a good
deal of time now in assiduously collecting copies of his book and
burning them. There can be but very few left in the world now. My
friend Cope had the fortune to pick one up the other day—a little
blue book, which he showed me very secretly. I am at a loss to
understand why Emberlin wishes to stamp out all trace of it. There is
nothing to be ashamed of in the book; some of the verses, indeed,
are, in their young ecstatic fashion, good. But they are certainly
conceived in a style that is unlike that of his present poems. Perhaps
it is that which makes him so implacable against them. What he
writes now for very private manuscript circulation is curious stuff. I
confess I prefer the earlier work; I do not like the stony, hard-edged
quality of this sort of thing—the only one I can remember of his later
productions. It is a sonnet on a porcelain figure of a woman, dug up
at Cnossus:

“Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze

All imperturbable do not
Even make pretences to regard
The jutting absence of her stays
Where many a Syrian gallipot
Excites desire with spilth of nard.
The bistred rims above the fard
Of cheeks as red as bergamot
Attest that no shamefaced delays
Will clog fulfilment nor retard
Full payment of the Cyprian’s praise
Down to the last remorseful jot.
Hail priestess of we know not what
Strange cult of Mycenean days!”

Regrettably, I cannot remember any of Emberlin’s French poems. His

peculiar muse expresses herself better, I think, in that language than
in her native tongue.
Such is Emberlin; such, I should rather say, was he, for, as I
propose to show, he is not now the man that he was when he
whispered so confidentially to me, as I entered the room, that he
had made a discovery about Discoveries.
I waited patiently till he had finished his little game of
mystification and, when the moment seemed ripe, I asked him to
explain himself. Emberlin was ready to open out.
“Well,” he began, “these are the facts—a tedious introduction, I
fear, but necessary. Years ago, when I was first reading Ben Jonson’s
Discoveries, that queer jotting of his, ‘Eupompus gave splendour to
Art by Numbers,’ tickled my curiosity. You yourself must have been
struck by the phrase, everybody must have noticed it; and
everybody must have noticed too that no commentator has a word
to say on the subject. That is the way of commentators—the obvious
points fulsomely explained and discussed, the hard passages, about
which one might want to know something passed over in the silence
of sheer ignorance. ‘Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers’—
the absurd phrase stuck in my head. At one time it positively
haunted me. I used to chant it in my bath, set to music as an
anthem. It went like this, so far as I remember”—and he burst into
song: “‘Eupompus, Eu-u-pompus gave sple-e-e-endour . . .’” and so
on, through all the repetitions, the dragged-out rises and falls of a
parodied anthem.
“I sing you this,” he said when he had finished, “just to show you
what a hold that dreadful sentence took upon my mind. For eight
years, off and on, its senselessness has besieged me. I have looked
up Eupompus in all the obvious books of reference, of course. He is
there all right—Alexandrian artist, eternized by some wretched little
author in some even wretcheder little anecdote, which at the
moment I entirely forget; it had nothing, at any rate, to do with the
embellishment of art by numbers. Long ago I gave up the search as
hopeless; Eupompus remained for me a shadowy figure of mystery,
author of some nameless outrage, bestower of some forgotten
benefit upon the art that he practised. His history seemed wrapt in
an impenetrable darkness. And then yesterday I discovered all about
him and his art and his numbers. A chance discovery, than which
few things have given me a greater pleasure.
“I happened upon it, as I say, yesterday when I was glancing
through a volume of Zuylerius. Not, of course, the Zuylerius one
knows,” he added quickly, “otherwise one would have had the heart
out of Eupompus’ secret years ago.”
“Of course,” I repeated, “not the familiar Zuylerius.”
“Exactly,” said Emberlin, taking seriously my flippancy, “not the
familiar John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder Henricus Zuylerius, a
much less—though perhaps undeservedly so—renowned figure than
his son. But this is not the time to discuss their respective merits. At
any rate, I discovered in a volume of critical dialogues by the elder
Zuylerius, the reference, to which, without doubt, Jonson was
referring in his note. (It was of course a mere jotting, never meant
to be printed, but which Jonson’s literary executors pitched into the
book with all the rest of the available posthumous materials.)
‘Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers’—Zuylerius gives a
very circumstantial account of the process. He must, I suppose, have
found the sources for it in some writer now lost to us.”
Emberlin paused a moment to muse. The loss of the work of any
ancient writer gave him the keenest sorrow. I rather believe he had
written a version of the unrecovered books of Petronius. Some day I
hope I shall be permitted to see what conception Emberlin has of
the Satyricon as a whole. He would, I am sure, do Petronius justice
—almost too much, perhaps.
“What was the story of Eupompus?” I asked. “I am all curiosity to
know.”
Emberlin heaved a sigh and went on.
“Zuylerius’ narrative,” he said, “is very bald, but on the whole
lucid; and I think it gives one the main points of the story. I will give
it you in my own words; that is preferable to reading his Dutch Latin.
Eupompus, then, was one of the most fashionable portrait-painters
of Alexandria. His clientele was large, his business immensely
profitable. For a half-length in oils the great courtesans would pay
him a month’s earnings. He would paint likenesses of the merchant
princes in exchange for the costliest of their outlandish treasures.
Coal-black potentates would come a thousand miles out of Ethiopia
to have a miniature limned on some specially choice panel of ivory;
and for payment there would be camel-loads of gold and spices.
Fame, riches, and honour came to him while he was yet young; an
unparalleled career seemed to lie before him. And then, quite
suddenly, he gave it all up—refused to paint another portrait. The
doors of his studio were closed. It was in vain that clients, however
rich, however distinguished, demanded admission; the slaves had
their order; Eupompus would see no one but his own intimates.”
 Emberlin made a pause in his narrative.
“What was Eupompus doing?” I asked.
“He was, of course,” said Emberlin, “occupied in giving splendour
to Art by Numbers. And this, as far as I can gather from Zuylerius, is
how it all happened. He just suddenly fell in love with numbers—
head over ears, amorous of pure counting. Number seemed to him
to be the sole reality, the only thing about which the mind of man
could be certain. To count was the one thing worth doing, because it
was the one thing you could be sure of doing right. Thus, art, that it
may have any value at all, must ally itself with reality—must, that is,
possess a numerical foundation. He carried the idea into practice by
painting the first picture in his new style. It was a gigantic canvas,
covering several hundred square feet—I have no doubt that
Eupompus could have told you the exact area to an inch—and upon
it was represented an illimitable ocean covered, as far as the eye
could reach in every direction, with a multitude of black swans.
There were thirty-three thousand of these black swans, each, even
though it might be but a speck on the horizon, distinctly limned. In
the middle of the ocean was an island, upon which stood a more or
less human figure having three eyes, three arms and legs, three
breasts and three navels. In the leaden sky three suns were dimly
expiring. There was nothing more in the picture; Zuylerius describes
it exactly. Eupompus spent nine months of hard work in painting it.
The privileged few who were allowed to see it pronounced it,
finished, a masterpiece. They gathered round Eupompus in a little
school, calling themselves the Philarithmics. They would sit for hours
in front of his great work, contemplating the swans and counting
them; according to the Philarithmics, to count and to contemplate
were the same thing.
“Eupompus’ next picture, representing an orchard of identical
trees set in quincunxes, was regarded with less favour by the
connoisseurs. His studies of crowds were, however, more highly
esteemed; in these were portrayed masses of people arranged in
groups that exactly imitated the number and position of the stars
making up various of the more famous constellations. And then
there was his famous picture of the amphitheatre, which created a
furore among the Philarithmics. Zuylerius again gives us a detailed
description. Tier upon tier of seats are seen, all occupied by strange
Cyclopean figures. Each tier accommodates more people than the
tier below, and the number rises in a complicated but regular
progression. All the figures seated in the amphitheatre possess but a
single eye, enormous and luminous, planted in the middle of the
forehead: and all these thousands of single eyes are fixed, in a
terrible and menacing scrutiny, upon a dwarf-like creature cowering
pitiably in the arena. . . . He alone of the multitude possesses two
eyes.
“I would give anything to see that picture,” Emberlin added, after
a pause. “The colouring, you know; Zuylerius gives no hint, but I
feel somehow certain that the dominant tone must have been a
fierce brick-red—a red granite amphitheatre filled with a red-robed
assembly, sharply defined against an implacable blue sky.”
“Their eyes would be green,” I suggested.
Emberlin closed his eyes to visualize the scene and then nodded a
slow and rather dubious assent.
“Up to this point,” Emberlin resumed at length, “Zuylerius’ account
is very clear. But his descriptions of the later philarithmic art become
extremely obscure; I doubt whether he understood in the least what
it was all about. I will give you such meaning as I manage to extract
from his chaos. Eupompus seems to have grown tired of painting
merely numbers of objects. He wanted now to represent Number
itself. And then he conceived the plan of rendering visible the
fundamental ideas of life through the medium of those purely
numerical terms into which, according to him, they must ultimately
resolve themselves. Zuylerius speaks vaguely of a picture of Eros,
which seems to have consisted of a series of interlacing planes.
Eupompus’ fancy seems next to have been taken by various of the
Socratic dialogues upon the nature of general ideas, and he made a
series of illustrations for them in the same arithmo-geometric style.
Finally there is Zuylerius’ wild description of the last picture that
Eupompus ever painted. I can make very little of it. The subject of
the work, at least, is clearly stated; it was a representation of Pure
Number, or God and the Universe, or whatever you like to call that
pleasingly inane conception of totality. It was a picture of the
cosmos seen, I take it, through a rather Neoplatonic camera obscura
—very clear and in small. Zuylerius suggests a design of planes
radiating out from a single point of light. I dare say something of the
kind came in. Actually, I have no doubt, the work was a very
adequate rendering in visible form of the conception of the one and
the many, with all the intermediate stages of enlightenment between
matter and the Fons Deitatis. However, it’s no use speculating what
the picture may have been going to look like. Poor old Eupompus
went mad before he had completely finished it and, after he had
dispatched two of the admiring Philarithmics with a hammer, he
flung himself out of the window and broke his neck. That was the
end of him, and that was how he gave splendour, regrettably
transient, to Art by Numbers.”
Emberlin stopped. We brooded over our pipes in silence; poor old
Eupompus!

That was four months ago, and to-day Emberlin is a confirmed

and apparently irreclaimable Philarithmic, a quite whole-hearted
Eupompian.
It was always Emberlin’s way to take up the ideas that he finds in
books and to put them into practice. He was once, for example, a
working alchemist, and attained to considerable proficiency in the
Great Art. He studied mnemonics under Bruno and Raymond Lully,
and constructed for himself a model of the latter’s syllogizing
machine, in hopes of gaining that universal knowledge which the
Enlightened Doctor guaranteed to its user. This time it is
Eupompianism, and the thing has taken hold of him. I have held up
to him all the hideous warnings that I can find in history. But it is no
use.
There is the pitiable spectacle of Dr. Johnson under the tyranny of
an Eupompian ritual, counting the posts and the paving-stones of
Fleet Street. He himself knew best how nearly a madman he was.
And then I count as Eupompians all gamblers, all calculating boys,
all interpreters of the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse; then
too the Elberfeld horses, most complete of all Eupompians.
And here was Emberlin joining himself to this sect, degrading
himself to the level of counting beasts and irrational children and
men, more or less insane. Dr. Johnson was at least born with a
strain of the Eupompian aberration in him; Emberlin is busily and
consciously acquiring it. My expostulations, the expostulations of all
his friends, are as yet unavailing. It is in vain that I tell Emberlin that
counting is the easiest thing in the world to do, that when I am
utterly exhausted, my brain, for lack of ability to perform any other
work, just counts and reckons, like a machine, like an Elberfeld
horse. It all falls on deaf ears; Emberlin merely smiles and shows me
some new numerical joke that he has discovered. Emberlin can
never enter a tiled bathroom now without counting how many
courses of tiles there are from floor to ceiling. He regards it as an
interesting fact that there are twenty-six rows of tiles in his
bathroom and thirty-two in mine, while all the public lavatories in
Holborn have the same number. He knows now how many paces it is
from any one point in London to any other. I have given up going for
walks with him. I am always made so distressingly conscious by his
preoccupied look, that he is counting his steps.
His evenings, too, have become profoundly melancholy; the
conversation, however well it may begin, always comes round to the
same nauseating subject. We can never escape numbers; Eupompus
haunts us. It is not as if we were mathematicians and could discuss
problems of any interest or value. No, none of us are
mathematicians, least of all Emberlin. Emberlin likes talking about
such points as the numerical significance of the Trinity, the immense
importance of its being three in one, not forgetting the even greater
importance of its being one in three. He likes giving us statistics
about the speed of light or the rate of growth in fingernails. He loves
to speculate on the nature of odd and even numbers. And he seems
to be unconscious how much he has changed for the worse. He is
happy in an exclusively absorbing interest. It is as though some
mental leprosy had fallen upon his intelligence.
In another year or so, I tell Emberlin, he may almost be able to
compete with the calculating horses on their own ground. He will
have lost all traces of his reason, but he will be able to extract cube
roots in his head. It occurs to me that the reason why Eupompus
killed himself was not that he was mad; on the contrary, it was
because he was, temporarily, sane. He had been mad for years, and
then suddenly the idiot’s self-complacency was lit up by a flash of
sanity. By its momentary light he saw into what gulfs of imbecility he
had plunged. He saw and understood, and the full horror, the
lamentable absurdity of the situation made him desperate. He
vindicated Eupompus against Eupompianism, humanity against the
Philarithmics. It gives me the greatest pleasure to think that he
disposed of two of that hideous crew before he died himself.
 HAPPY FAMILIES
THE scene is a conservatory. Luxuriant tropical plants are seen
looming through a greenish aquarium twilight, punctuated here and
there by the surprising pink of several Chinese lanterns hanging from
the roof or on the branches of trees, while a warm yellow radiance
streams out from the ball-room by a door on the left of the scene.
Through the glass of the conservatory, at the back of the stage, one
perceives a black-and-white landscape under the moon—expanses of
snow, lined and dotted with coal-black hedges and trees. Outside is
frost and death: but within the conservatory all is palpitating and
steaming with tropical life and heat. Enormous fantastic plants
encumber it; trees, creepers that writhe with serpentine life, orchids
of every kind. Everywhere dense vegetation; horrible flowers that
look like bottled spiders, like suppurating wounds; flowers with eyes
and tongues, with moving, sensitive tentacles, with breasts and
teeth and spotted skins.
The strains of a waltz float in through the ball-room door, and to
that slow, soft music there enter, in parallel processions, the two
families which are respectively Mr. Aston J. Tyrrell and Miss Topsy
Garrick.
The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a young and perhaps too
cultured literary man with rather long, dark brown hair, a face well
cut and sensitive, if a trifle weak about the lower jaw, and a voice
whose exquisite modulations could only be the product of education
at one of the two Great Universities. We will call him plain Aston.
Miss Topsy, the head of the Garrick family, is a young woman of not
quite twenty, with sleek, yellow hair hanging, like a page’s, short and
thick about her ears; boyish, too, in her slenderness and length of
leg—boyish, but feminine and attractive to the last degree. Miss
Topsy paints charmingly, sings in a small, pure voice that twists the
heart and makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of it, is well
educated, and has read, or at least heard of, most of the best books
in three languages, knows something, too, of economics and the
doctrines of Freud.
They enter arm in arm, fresh from the dance, trailing behind them
with their disengaged hands two absurd ventriloquist’s dummies of
themselves. They sit down on a bench placed in the middle of the
stage under a kind of arbour festooned with fabulous flowers. The
other members of the two families lurk in the tropical twilight of the
background.
Aston advances his dummy and makes it speak, moving its mouth
and limbs appropriately by means of the secret levers which his
hand controls.

ASTON’S DUMMY.
What a perfect floor it is to-night!

TOPSY’S DUMMY.
Yes, it’s like ice, isn’t it? And such a good band.

ASTON’S DUMMY.
Oh yes, a very good band.

TOPSY’S DUMMY.
They play at dinner-time at the Necropole, you know.

ASTON’S DUMMY.
Really! (A long, uncomfortable silence.)
(From under a lofty twangum tree emerges the figure of CAIN
WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON’S negro brother—for the
TYRRELLS, I regret to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in
them and CAIN is a Mendelian throwback to the pure
 Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his black face shines
with grease. The whites of his eyes are like enamel, his
smile is chryselephantine. He is dressed in faultless
evening dress and a ribbon of seals tinkles on his
stomach. He walks with legs wide apart, the upper part
of his body thrown back and his belly projecting, as
though he were supporting the weight of an Aristophanic
actor’s costume. He struts up and down in front of the
couple on the seat, grinning and slapping himself on the
waistcoat.)

CAIN.
What hair, nyum nyum! and the nape of her neck; and her body—
how slender! and what lovely movements, nyum nyum!
(Approaching ASTON and speaking into his ear.) Eh? eh? eh?

ASTON.
Go away, you pig. Go away. (He holds up his dummy as a shield:
CAIN retires discomfited.)

ASTON’S DUMMY.
Have you read any amusing novels lately?

TOPSY.
(Speaking over the head of her dummy.) No; I never read novels.
They are mostly so frightful, aren’t they?

ASTON.
(Enthusiastically.) How splendid! Neither do I. I only write them
sometimes, that’s all. (They abandon their dummies, which fall
limply into one another’s arms and collapse on to the floor with an
expiring sigh.)

TOPSY.
You write them? I didn’t know. . . .
 ASTON.
Oh, I’d very much rather you didn’t know. I shouldn’t like you
ever to read one of them. They’re all awful: still, they keep the pot
boiling, you know. But tell me, what do you read?

TOPSY.
Mostly history, and philosophy, and a little criticism and
psychology, and lots of poetry.

ASTON.
My dear young lady! how wonderful, how altogether unexpectedly
splendid. (CAIN emerges with the third brother, SIR JASPER, who is a
paler, thinner, more sinister and aristocratic ASTON.)

CAIN.
Nyum nyum nyum. . . .

SIR JASPER.
What a perfect sentence that was of yours, Aston: quite Henry
Jamesian! “My dear young lady”—as though you were forty years
her senior; and the rare old-worldliness of that “altogether
unexpectedly splendid”! Admirable. I don’t remember your ever
employing quite exactly this opening gambit before: but of course
there were things very like it. (To CAIN.) What a nasty spectacle you
are, Cain, gnashing your teeth like that!

CAIN.
Nyum nyum nyum.
(ASTON and TOPSY are enthusiastically talking about books:
the two brothers, finding themselves quite unnoticed,
retire into the shade of their twangum tree. BELLE
GARRICK has been hovering behind TOPSY for some time
past. She is more obviously pretty than her sister, full-
bosomed and with a loose, red, laughing mouth. Unable
to attract TOPSY’S attention, she turns round and calls,
 “HENRIKA.” A pale face with wide, surprised eyes peeps
round the trunk, hairy like a mammoth’s leg, of a
kadapoo tree with magenta leaves and flame-coloured
blossoms. This is HENRIKA, TOPSY’S youngest sister. She is
dressed in a little white muslin frock set off with blue
ribbons.)

HENRIKA.
(Tiptoes forward.) Here I am; what is it? I was rather frightened
of that man. But he really seems quite nice and tame, doesn’t he?

BELLE.
Of course he is! What a goose you are to hide like that!

HENRIKA.
He seems a nice, quiet, gentle man; and so clever.

BELLE.
What good hands he has, hasn’t he? (Approaching TOPSY and
whispering in her ear.) Your hair’s going into your eyes, my dear.
Toss it back in that pretty way you have. (TOPSY tosses her head; the
soft, golden bell of hair quivers elastically about her ears.) That’s
right!

CAIN.
(Bounding into the air and landing with feet apart, knees bent,
and a hand on either knee.) Oh, nyum nyum!

ASTON.
Oh, the beauty of that movement! It simply makes one catch
one’s breath with surprised pleasure, as the gesture of a perfect
dancer might.
 SIR JASPER.
Beautiful, wasn’t it?—a pleasure purely æsthetic and æsthetically
pure. Listen to Cain.

ASTON.
(To TOPSY.) And do you ever try writing yourself? I’m sure you
ought to.

SIR JASPER.
Yes, yes, we’re sure you ought to. Eh, Cain?

TOPSY.
Well, I have written a little poetry—or rather a few bad verses—at
one time or another.

ASTON.
Really now! What about, may I ask?

TOPSY.
Well . . . (hesitating) about different things, you know. (She fans
herself rather nervously.)

BELLE.
(Leaning over TOPSY’S shoulder and addressing ASTON directly.)
Mostly about Love. (She dwells long and voluptuously on the last
word, pronouncing it “lovv” rather than “luvv.”)

CAIN.
Oh, dat’s good, dat’s good; dat’s dam good. (In moments of
emotion CAIN’S manners and language savour more obviously than
usual of the Old Plantation.) Did yoh see her face den?

BELLE.
(Repeats, slowly and solemnly.) Mostly about Love.
 HENRIKA.
Oh, oh. (She covers her face with her hands.) How could you? It
makes me tingle all over. (She runs behind the kadapoo tree again.)

ASTON.
(Very seriously and intelligently.) Really. That’s very interesting. I
wish you’d let me see what you’ve done some time.

SIR JASPER.
We always like to see these things, don’t we, Aston? Do you
remember Mrs. Towler? How pretty she was! And the way we
criticized her literary productions. . . .

ASTON.
Mrs. Towler. . . . (He shudders as though he had touched
something soft and filthy.) Oh, don’t, Jasper, don’t!

SIR JASPER.
Dear Mrs. Towler! We were very nice about her poems, weren’t
we? Do you remember the one that began:

“My Love is like a silvern flower-de-luce

Within some wondrous dream-garden pent:
God made my lovely lily not for use,
But for an ornament.”

Even Cain, I believe, saw the joke of that.

ASTON.
Mrs. Towler—oh, my God! But this is quite different: this girl really
interests me.

SIR JASPER.
Oh yes, I know, I know. She interests you too, Cain, doesn’t she?
 CAIN.
(Prances two or three steps of a cake-walk and sings.) Oh, ma
honey, oh, ma honey.

ASTON.
But, I tell you, this is quite different.

SIR JASPER.
Of course it is. Any fool could see that it was. I’ve admitted it
already.

ASTON.
(To TOPSY.) You will show them me, won’t you? I should so much
like to see them.

TOPSY.
(Covered with confusion.) No, I really couldn’t. You’re a
professional, you see.

HENRIKA.
(From behind the kadapoo tree.) No, you mustn’t show them to
him. They’re really mine, you know, a great many of them.

BELLE.
Nonsense! (She stoops down and moves TOPSY’S foot in such a
way that a very well-shaped, white-stockinged leg is visible some
way up the calf. Then, to TOPSY.) Pull your skirt down, my dear.
You’re quite indecent.

CAIN.
(Putting up his monocle.) Oh, nyum nyum, ma honey! Come wid
me to Dixie Land. . . .

SIR JASPER.
H’m, a little conscious, don’t you think?
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