I suppose it has an artistic decoration on it. CALLER Yes, I think so. POET Then I decline to look at it or to go near it. I know these decorations in cast iron. I once saw a pot-bellied Egyptian god, named Bes, and he was _meant_ to be ugly, but he wasn't as ugly as these decorations that the twentieth century can make with machinery. What has a plumber got to do with art that he should dare to attempt decoration? CALLER Then you won't help me. POET I won't look at ugly things and I won't listen to ugly noises, but if you can think of any reasonable plan I don't mind helping you. CALLER I can think of nothing else. You don't look like a plumber or a clock-winder. I can think of nothing more. I have had a terrible ordeal and I am not in the condition to think calmly. POET Then you will have to leave your hat to its altered destiny. CALLER Why can't you think of a plan? If you're a poet, thinking's rather in your line. POET If I could bring my thoughts to contemplate so absurd a thing as a hat for any length of time no doubt I could think of a plan, but the very triviality of the theme seems to scare them away. CALLER (_rising_) Then I must get it myself. POET For Heaven's sake, don't do that! Think what it means! CALLER I know it will seem absurd, but not so absurd as walking through London without it. POET I don't mean that. But you will make it up. You will forgive each other, and you will marry her and have a family of noisy, pimply children like everyone else, and Romance will be dead. No, don't ring that bell. Go and buy a bayonet, or whatever one does buy, and join the Bosnians. CALLER I tell you I can't without a hat. POET What is a hat! Will you sacrifice for it a beautiful doom? Think of your bones, neglected and forgotten, lying forlornly because of hopeless love on endless golden sands. "Lying forlorn!" as Keats said. What a word! Forlorn in Africa. The careless Bedouins going past by day, at night the lion's roar, the grievous voice of the desert. CALLER As a matter of fact, I don't think you're right in speaking of it as desert. The Bosnians, I believe, are only taking it because it is supposed to be the most fertile land in the world. POET What of that? You will not be remembered by geography and statistics, but by golden-mouthed Romance. And that is how Romance sees Africa. CALLER Well, I'm going to get my hat. POET Think! Think! If you enter by that door you will never fall among the foremost Bosnians. You will never die in a far-off, lonely land to lie by immense Sahara. And she will never weep for your beautiful doom and call herself cruel in vain. CALLER Hark! She is playing the piano. It seems to me that she might be unhappy about it for years. I don't see much good in that. POET No. _I_ will comfort her. CALLER I'm damned if you do! Look here! I don't mind saying, I'm damned if you do. POET Calm yourself. Calm yourself. I do not mean in that way. CALLER