Status Updates From Arms and the Man

BLUNTSCHLI.
You gave me your hand to kiss, your bed to sleep in, and your roof to shelter me—
RAINA.
(interrupting him). I did not give them to the Emperor of Switzerland!
BLUNTSCHLI.
That’s just what I say. (He catches her hand quickly and looks her straight in the face as he adds, with confident mastery) Now tell us who you did give them to.
RAINA.
(succumbing with a shy smile). To my chocolate cream soldier!

BLUNTSCHLI.
(before he can speak). It’s no use. He never apologizes.
LOUKA.
Not to you, his equal and his enemy. To me, his poor servant, he will not refuse to apologize.
SERGIUS.
(approvingly). You are right. (He bends his knee in his grandest manner.) Forgive me!
LOUKA.
I forgive you. (She timidly gives him her hand, which he kisses.) That touch makes me your affianced wife.

SERGIUS.
(commandingly). It means that you love me, and that I have had you here in my arms, and will perhaps have you there again. Whether that is an insult I neither know nor care: ... If I choose to love you, I dare marry you, in spite of all Bulgaria. If these hands ever touch you again, they shall touch my affianced bride.
LOUKA.
We shall see whether you dare keep your word. But take care. I will not wait long.

SERGIUS.
What would you do, most noble Empress?
LOUKA.
I would marry the man I loved, which no other queen in Europe has the courage to do.

BLUNTSCHLI
(making a wry face). Do you like gratitude? I don’t. If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.
RAINA
Gratitude! (Turning on him.) If you are incapable of gratitude you are incapable of any noble sentiment. Even animals are grateful. Oh, I see now exactly what you think of me! You were not surprised to hear me lie. That is how men think of women. (She walks up the room melodramatically)

RAINA.
(suddenly coming out of her picturesque revery). Really, mother, if you are going to take the jewellery, I don’t see why you should grudge me my Arab.

SERGIUS.
(grimly). Yes: we’ll manage it. He finds out what to do; draws up the orders; and I sign ’em. Division of labour, Major. (Bluntschli passes him a paper.) Another one? Thank you. (He plants the papers squarely before him; sets his chair carefully parallel to them; and signs with the air of a man resolutely performing a difficult and dangerous feat.) This hand is more accustomed to the sword than to the pen.

SERGIUS.
Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals . . . he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse,

(Major Sergius Saranoff, the original of the portrait in Raina’s room, is a tall, romantically handsome man, with the physical hardihood, the high spirit, and the susceptible imagination of an untamed mountaineer chieftain. But his remarkable personal distinction is of a characteristically civilized type.

(Major Petkoff comes from the stable yard, followed by Nicola. He is a cheerful, excitable, insignificant, unpolished man of about 50, naturally unambitious except as to his income and his importance in local society, but just now greatly pleased with the military rank which the war has thrust on him as a man of consequence in his town. The fever of plucky patriotism which the Servian attack roused in all . . . .)

Louka, smoking a cigaret, is standing between the table and the house, turning her back with angry disdain on a man-servant who is lecturing her. He is a middle-aged man of cool temperament and low but clear and keen intelligence, with the complacency of the servant who values himself on his rank in servility, and the imperturbability of the accurate calculator who has no illusions.

RAINA.
Ugh! But I don’t believe the first man is a coward. I believe he is a hero!
MAN.
(goodhumoredly). That’s what you’d have said if you’d seen the first man in the charge to-day.
RAINA.
(breathless). Ah, I knew it! Tell me—tell me about him.
MAN.
He did it like an operatic tenor—a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting a war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills.

RAINA
(eagerly turning to him, as all her enthusiasm and her dream of glory rush back on her) Did you see the great cavalry charge? Oh, tell me about it.
MAN
You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?
RAINA
How could I?
MAN
Ah, perhaps not—of course. Well, it’s a funny sight. It’s like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one comes; then two or three close behind him; and then all the rest in a lump

On the balcony, a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty is a part of it, is on the balcony, gazing at the snowy Balkans. She is covered by a long mantle of furs, worth, on a moderate estimate, about three times the furniture of her room.

Night. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass. It is late in November in the year 1885, and through an open window with a little balcony on the left can be seen a peak of the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in the starlit snow. The interior of the room is not like anything to be seen in the east of Europe. It is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap Viennese.