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anything to match the courage, the comradeship, the warmth, the cold, the mud, the stench – fear – folly – Christ Jesu!, but for this blessed leg! – I never thought to be picked out, plucked out, blessed by the blood of a blighty wound – oh
heaven!
– released into folds of snow-white feather beds, pacific civilian heaven!, the mystical swissticality of it, the entente cordiality of it!, the Jesus Christ I’m out of it! – into the valley of the invalided – Carr of the Consulate!
(
Lights to normal
.)
    And what brings
you
here, my dear Tristan?
    TZARA : Oh, pleasure, pleasure … What else should bring anyone anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Henry?
    CARR : I believe it is customary in good society to take a cucumber sandwich at five o’clock. Where have you been since last Thursday?
    TZARA : In the Public Library.
    CARR : What on earth were you doing there?
    TZARA : That’s just what I kept asking myself.
    CARR : And what was the reply?
    TZARA: ‘Ssssh!’ Cecily does not approve of garrulity in the Reference Section.
    CARR : Who is Cecily? And is she as pretty and well-bred as she sounds? Cecily is a name well thought of at fashionable christenings.
    TZARA : Cecily is a librarianness. I say, do you know someone called Joyce?
    CARR :
Joyce
is a name which could only expose a child to comment around the font.
    TZARA : No, no, Mr Joyce, Irish writer, mainly of limericks, christened James Augustine, though registered, due to a clerical error, as James Augusta, a little known fact.
    CARR : Certainly I did not know it. But then I have never taken an interest in Irish affairs. In fashionable society it would be considered a sign of incipient vulgarity with radical undertones.
    TZARA : The war caught Joyce and his wife in Trieste in Austro-Hungary. They got into Switzerland and settled in Zurich. He lives in Universitatsstrasse, and is often seen round about, in the library, in the cafés, wearing, for example, a black pinstripe jacket with grey herringbone trousers, or brown Donegal jacket with black pinstripe trousers, or grey herringbone jacket with brown Donegal trousers, all being the mismatched halves of sundry sundered Sunday suits: sorts language into hands of contract bridge. His limericks are said to be more interesting, though hardly likely to start a revolution – I say, do you know someone called Ulyanov?
    CARR : I’m finding this conversation extremely hard to follow.
    And you still have not told me what you were doing in the public library. I had no idea that poets nowadays were interested in literature. Or is it that your interest is in Cecily?
    TZARA : Good heavens, no. Cecily is rather pretty, and wellbred, as you surmised, but her views on poetry are very old-fashioned and her knowledge of the poets, as indeed of everything else, is eccentric, being based on alphabetical precedence. She is working her way along the shelves. She has read Allingham, Anon, Arnold, Belloc, Blake, both Brownings, Byron, and so on up to, I believe, G.
    CARR : Who is Allingham?
    TZARA : ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men …’ Cecily would regard any poem that came out of a hat with the gravest suspicion. Hello – why the extra cup? – why cucumber sandwiches? Who’s coming to tea?
    CARR : It is merely set for Gwendolen – she usually returns at about this hour.
    TZARA : How perfectly delightful, and to be honest not unexpected. I am in love with Gwendolen and have come expressly to propose to her.
    CARR : Well, that is a surprise.
    TZARA : Surely not, Henry; I have made my feelings for Gwendolen quite plain.
    CARR : Of course you have, my dear fellow. But my surprise stems from the fact that you must surely have met Gwendolen at the Public Library, for she has left here every morning this week saying that that is where she is going, and Gwendolen is a scrupulously truthful girl.