Arcadia by Tom Stoppard Page A

room.) lady croom: (Annoyed) Oh!—Mr Noakes’s engine!
    (She goes to the garden door and steps outside.
    CHLOfi re-enters.) CHLOfi: Damn.
    lady croom: (Calls out) Mr Noakes! Valentine: He was
there not long ago ... lady croom: Halloo!
    CHLOfi: Well, he has to be in the photograph—is he dressed? Hannah:
Is Bernard back? CHLOfi: No-he’s late!
    (The piano is heard again, under the noise of the steam engine.
    lady croom steps back into the room.
    CHLOfi steps outside the garden door. Shouts.) Gus!
lady croom: I wonder you can teach against such a disturbance and I am sorry
for it, Mr Hodge.
    (CHLOfi comes back inside.) Valentine: (Getting
up) Stop ordering everybody about. lady croom: It is an unendurable noise. Valentine:
The photographer will wait.
    (But, grumbling, he follows CHLOfi out of the door
she came in by, and closes the door behind them, Hannah remains
absorbed.
    In the silence, the rhythmic thump can be heard again.) lady
croom: The ceaseless dull overbearing monotony of it! It will drive me
distracted. I may have to return to town to escape it. Septimus: Your ladyship
could remain in the country and let
    Count Zelinsky return to town where you would not hear him.
lady croom: I mean Mr Noakes’s engine! (Semi-aside to
    Septimus.) Would you sulk? I will not have my daughter study
sulking. Thomasina: (Not listening) What, mama?
    (Thomasina remains lost in her book, lady croom returns
to close the garden door and the noise of the steam engine subsides.
    Hannah closes one of the ‘garden books’, and opens the
next. She is making occasional notes.
    The piano ceases.) lady croom: (To Thomasina)
What are we learning today?
    (Pause.) Well, not manners. Septimus: We are drawing
today.
    (lady croom negligently examines what Thomasina had
started to draw.) lady croom: Geometry. I approve of geometry. Septimus:
Your ladyship’s approval is my constant object. lady croom: Well, do not
despair of it. (Returning to the window impatiently.) Where is ‘Culpability’
Noakes? (She looks out and is annoyed.) Oh!—he has gone for his hat so
that he may remove it.
    (She returns to the table and touches the bowl of
dahlias.
    Hannah sits back in her chair, caught by what she is reading.) For the widow’s dowry of dahlias I can almost forgive my brother’s
marriage. We must be thankful the monkey bit the husband. If it had bit the
wife the monkey would be dead and we would not be first in the kingdom to show
a dahlia. (Hannah, still reading the garden book, stands up.) I sent one
potted to Chatsworth. The Duchess was most satisfactorily put out by it when I
called at Devonshire House. Your friend was there lording it as a poet.
    (Hannah leaves through the door, following Valentine and CHLOE.)
    Meanwhile, Thomasina thumps the book down on the
table.) Thomasina: Well! Just as I said! Newton’s machine which would knock
our atoms from cradle to grave by the laws of motion is incomplete! Determinism
leaves the road at every corner, as I knew all along, and the cause is very
likely hidden in this gentleman’s observation. lady croom: Of what? Thomasina:
The action of bodies in heat. lady croom: Is this geometry? Thomasina: This?
No, I despise geometry!
    (Touching the dahlias she adds, almost to herself.) The
    Chater would overthrow the Newtonian system in a weekend.
Septimus: Geometry, Hobbes assures us in the Leviathan, is the only
science God has been pleased to bestow on mankind. lady croom: And what does he
mean by it? Septimus: Mr Hobbes or God?
    lady croom: I am sure I do not know what either means by it.
Thomasina: Oh, pooh to Hobbes! Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not
cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only geometry.
There is another geometry which I am engaged in discovering by trial and error,
am I not, Septimus? Septimus: Trial and error perfectly describes your
enthusiasm, my lady. lady croom: How old are you today? Thomasina: Sixteen
years and eleven months, mama, and three