THEATER CHRONICLE
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the audience might have missed the significance; the analogy is, of
course, the behavior of God toward wayward man. God never gives
up either, so long as the patient is alive. The idea of the Hound of
. Heaven, hunting down a soul like a retriever, is present, not only in the
figure of the psychiatrist ("Our Father, methadrine, hallowed by thy
name," says the newspapennan in a blasphemy that is really an in–
verted prayer), but in the actual dog, who is heard howling offstage in
the potting shed, on the scent of the buried miracle. The rationalist
mother hates dogs and will not have one in the house ; this means that
she hates God and will not have Him in the house either.
If
God, like
the mythical 'IGeorge Spelvin," the actor who doubles in a cast, appears
as a psychiatrist and a dog (the leash is symbolic too), He is also, I
think, present in the young girl who, by playing detective, clears up
the mystery at the center of the play. This mystery seems to be original
sin, as well, which is located in the potting shed, i.e., the matrix of
creation. The dismissed gardener is called Potter, and perhaps he is
God too, sent away by the rationalists; the allusion seems to be both
to the Garden of Eden and to the Potter's hand. In the final lines of
the play, the young girl announces that she has had a dream in which
she meets a lion on the path to the potting shed who licks her hand
when she shows no fear of him-the Lion, presumably, would be Truth,
and the young girl, then, the dauntless Sherlock, might be not God,
but the Church, God's private eye, like the private agents of
The
Cocktail Party.
The audience, naturally, does not catch all these holy references
on the fly-how many people have heard of the Hound of Heaven?
But it is aware of a charge of meaning, something portentous in the
atmosphere, something sly and suggestive. Religion, hinted at in this
manner, becomes a form of obscenity; the same effect is achieved in
The Heart of the Matter,
where a broken rosary in Major Scobie's
desk drawer drops into the story, lightly, like contraband, before the
reader has been told that the police officer is, in fact, a Catholic. That
praying for others can be a rather dangerous activity is intimated in
The Heart of the Matter
also. "Father," prays Major Scobie, injudi–
ciously, at the bed of a sick child, "give her peace. Take my peace for–
ever but give her peace." God answers Scobie in the manner of a
malicious fairy, granting the wish of a mortal; He promptly takes the
child's life (is this not giving her peace?), and contrives things so that
Scobie will be driven to suicide. This God is a very doubtful customer
to deal with; in
The End of the Affair,
another rash prayer is answered,
to everyone's discomfiture, and God slides into the scene as the sup-
