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قراءة كتاب Clair de Lune A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes
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Clair de Lune A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes
class="center">3d Courtier
I repeat, you are difficult and poetry is impossible to follow. However, poetry is no longer the fashion.
[Takes a pinch of snuff, and looks with agreeable enmity at 2d Courtier.]
Phedro [deprecatingly]
I merely try to match my words against your silks and laces, my lord. But—her Majesty is approaching.
[Enter the Queen, a sharp-featured, neurotic-looking woman. One of her Cabinet is speaking earnestly to her and she is paying him scant attention.]
Minister
It is vitally necessary that we should discover upon what terms they would capitulate.
Queen
Yes, and they must be heavily taxed for holding out so long. Imagine other people presuming to be patriotic. It simply draws everything out to such an absurd length. Ah, how irritable it makes me to think. Phedro, where is the Prince, where is Prince Charles?
[During the last of her speech she withdraws her arm from the Minister's, who, seeing there is no further hope of holding her attention, withdraws respectfully and quite unobserved.]
Phedro
Attending impatiently the arrival of your Majesty upon the other side of the copse. I go to make him aware of your presence.
[He bows himself out, and the Queen looking anxiously in the direction of the vanishing Phedro espies Prince Charles and the Duchess upon a lawn.]
Queen [adjusting her lorgnette]
How silly people look playing croquet. The Duchess appears to me exactly like a bent hairpin.
2d Courtier
[Looking also in the direction of the Duchess and half admiringly.]
Indeed, Madame, her Grace is too tall to look well bending down.
Queen [turning upon him]
I hope you are not hiding a mud-sling in your silk swallow-tail. Perhaps you forget a courtier's principal duty should be the culture of tact, and tact is nothing whatever but helping me exaggerate my humours until I tire of them.
2d Courtier
Indeed, indeed, Madame, your Majesty's brilliance blinds my eyes with humility.
[Enter Prince Charles, a slender, exotic-looking gentleman.]
Prince
Dear Cousin, how delicious you are looking—so royal and alert. [He bends over her hand.] Ah! [His vitality seems suddenly to leave him at the thought.] I have just been trying to lessen Josephine's habitual ennui by making her my victim at croquet.
Queen
[With a slight lounge into sentimentality.]
I am sure she, like many others, is easily your victim—at croquet. But come, let us be alone, let us dismiss this chain of faces, they confine my thoughts. I would like to talk well, I would like to talk fantastically, that is, I wish you would think of something original for tonight's entertainment.
[She signals to the courtiers that they may leave.]
After all it is the prelude to