Short Plays

I cannot make speeches: I have won no victories: they will not rally to my call. Again he sinks into his chair with his former gesture of discouragement. The Grand Duchess Are you sure they will not rally to mine? Strammfest Oh, if only you were a man and a soldier! The Grand Duchess Suppose I find you a man and a soldier? Strammfest Rising in a fury. Ah! the scoundrel you eloped with! You think you will shove this fellow into an army command, over my head. Never. The Grand Duchess You promised everything. You swore anything. She marches as if in front of a regiment. I know that this man alone can rouse the army to enthusiasm. Strammfest Delusion! Folly! He is some circus acrobat; and you are in love with him. The Grand Duchess I swear I am not in love with him. I swear I will never marry him. Strammfest Then who is he? The Grand Duchess Anybody in the world but you would have guessed long ago. He is under your very eyes. Strammfest Staring past her right and left. Where? The Grand Duchess Look out of the window. He rushes to the window, looking for the officer. The Grand Duchess takes off her cloak and appears in the uniform of the Panderobajensky Hussars. Strammfest Peering through the window. Where is he? I can see no one. The Grand Duchess Here, silly. Strammfest Turning. You! Great Heavens! The Bolshevik Empress!

Endnotes

1. In a treatise on boxing by Captain Edgeworth Johnstone, just published, I read, “In the days of the prize-ring, fights lasted for hours; and the knockout blow was unknown.” This statement is a little too sweeping. The blow was known well enough. A veteran prizefighter once described to me his first experience of its curious effect on the senses. Only, as he had thirty seconds to recover in instead of ten, it did not end the battle. The thirty seconds made the knockout so unlikely that the old pugilists regarded it as a rare accident, not worth trying for. The glove fighter tries for nothing else. Nevertheless knockouts, and very dramatic ones too (Mace by King, for example), did occur in the prize-ring from time to time. Captain Edgeworth Johnstone’s treatise is noteworthy in comparison with the earlier Badminton handbook of sparring by Mr. E. B. Michell (one of the Queensberry champions) as throwing over the old teaching of prize-ring boxing with mufflers, and going in frankly for glove fighting, or, to put it classically, cestus boxing. ↩

Colophon

Short Plays
includes plays published between 1901 and 1927 by
George Bernard Shaw.

This ebook was produced for
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