Malta packet sailing out of Falmouth! His head is full of Lisbon and Lesbos, and his portmanteau' of pistols, and I have told him it is not to be thought of. The whole of Europe is in a Napoleonic fit,2 all the best ruins will be closed, the roads entirely occupied with the movement of armies, the lodgings turned to billets3 and the fashion for godless republicanism not yet arrived at its natural reversion. He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps. I charge you to take command of his pistols, Mr Hodge! He is not safe with them. His lameness, he confessed to me, is entirely the result of his habit from boyhood of shooting himself in the foot.4 What is that noise} [The noise is a badly played piano in the next room. It has been going on for some time since THOMASINA left.] SEPTIMUS The new Broadwood pianoforte,5 madam. Our music lessons are at an early stage. LADY CROOM Well, restrict your lessons to the piano side of the instrument and let her loose on the forte when she has learned something. [LADY CROOM, holding the book, sails out back into the garden.] BRICE Now! If that was not God speaking through Lady Croom, he never spoke through anyone! CHATER [Awed.] Take command of Lord Byron's pistols! BRICE You hear Mr Chater, sir?how will you answer him? [SEPTIMUS has been watching LADY CROOM'S progress up the garden. He turns back.]
8. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), English poet; Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Irish poet, friend and biographer of Byron; William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet. 9. Lord Byron. 1. Suitcase. 'Packet': mail boat, which also carried passengers. 'Lesbos': Greek island. 2. France, under Napoleon, was fighting the Peninsula War (1804?14) against Great Britain, Portugal, and Spanish guerrillas in the Iberian Peninsula.
3. Accommodation for troops. 4. Byron was born with a clubfoot. 5. An early form of the piano, its name combining the Italian words for soft and loud, respectively.
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2782 / TOM STOPPARD
SEPTIMUS By killing him. I am tired of him. CHATER [Startled.] Eh? BRICE [Pleased.] Ah! SEPTIMUS Oh, damn your soul, Chater! Ovid6 would have stayed a lawyer and
Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos7 to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs!8 I am at your service with a half- ounce ball9 in your brain. May it satisfy you?behind the boat-house at daybreak?shall we say five o'clock? My compliments to Mrs Chater?have no fear for her, she will not want for protection while Captain Brice has a guinea1 in his pocket, he told her so himself.
BRICE Yo u lie, sir!
SEPTIMUS No, sir. Mrs Chater, perhaps. BRICE You lie, or you will answer to me! SEPTIMUS [Wearily.] Oh, very well?I can fit you in at five minutes after five.
And then it's off to the Malta packet out of Falmouth. You two will be dead, my penurious2 schoolfriend will remain to tutor Lady Thomasina, and I trust everybody including Lady Croom will be satisfied!
[SEPTIMUS slams the door behind him.]
BRICE He is all bluster and bladder. Rest assured, Chater, I will let the air out of him.
[BRICE leaves by the other door, CHATER S assurance lasts only a moment. When he spots the flaw . . . 3]
CHATER Oh! Rut. . .
[He hurries out after BRICE.]
SCENE FOUR
HANNAH and VALENTINE. She is reading aloud. He is listening. Lightning, the tortoise, is on the table and is not readily distinguishable from Plautus. In front of VALENTINE is Septimus's portfolio, recognizably so but naturally somewhat faded. It is open. Principally associated with the portfolio (although it may contain sheets of blank paper also) are three items: a slim maths primer; a sheet of drawing paper on which there is a scrawled diagram and some mathematical notations, arrow marks, etc.; and Thomasina's mathematics lesson book, i.e. the one she writes in, which VALENTINE is leafing through as he listens to HANNAH reading from the primer.
HANNAH 'I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone. This margin being too mean for my purpose, the reader must look elsewhere for the New Geometry of Irregular Forms discovered by Thomasina Coverly.'
[Pause. She hands VALENTINE the text book, VALENTINE looks at what she has been reading. From the next room, a piano is heard, beginning to play quietly, unintrusively, improvisationally. ]
Does it mean anything?
6. Roman poet (43 B.C.E.?1 7? c.E.) 1. British gold coin with a value (in the nineteenth 7. Rhetorical descent from the exalted to the com-century) of twenty-one shillings. monplace. 2. Penniless. 8. Your lustful men and foolish young women. 3. Brice, as Chater's 'second,' could duel with 9. Bullet. Septimus only if Chater were dead or wounded.
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ARCADIA II.5 / 2783
VALENTINE I don't know. I don't know what it means, except mathematically. HANNAH I meant mathematically. VALENTINE [Now with the lesson hook again.] It's an iterated algorithm.4 HANNAH What's that? VALENTINE Well, it's . . . Jesus . . . it's an algorithm that's been . . . iterated.
How'm I supposed to .. . ? [He makes an effort.] The left-hand pages are graphs of what the numbers are doing on the right-hand pages. But all on different scales. Each graph is a small section of the previous one, blown up. Like you'd blow up a detail of a photograph, and then a detail of the detail, and so on, forever. Or in her case, till she ran out of pages.
HANNAH Is it difficult?
VALENTINE The maths isn't difficult. It's what you did at school. You have some %-and-y equation. Any value for x gives you a value for y. So you put a dot where it's right for both x and y. Then you take the next value for x which gives you another value for y, and when you've done that a few times you join up the dots and that's your graph of whatever the equation is.
HANNAH And is that what she's doing?
