LITMIR.BIZ

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your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer to a woman.

      CANDIDA. [Quite quietly.] And you, Eugene? What do you offer?

      MARCHBANKS. My weakness! my desolation! my heart’s need!

      CANDIDA. [Impressed.] That’s a good bid, Eugene. Now I know how to make my choice. [She pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has changed into heartbreaking dread at Eugene’s bid, loses all power of concealing his anxiety. Eugene, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle.]

      MORELL. [In a suffocated voice—the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish.] Candida!

      MARCHBANKS. [Aside, in a flash of contempt.] Coward!

      CANDIDA. [Significantly.] I give myself to the weaker of the two. [Eugene divines her meaning at once: his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it.]

      MORELL. [Bowing his head with the calm of collapse.] I accept your sentence, Candida.

      CANDIDA. Do you understand, Eugene?

      MARCHBANKS. Oh, I feel I’m lost. He cannot bear the burden.

      MORELL. [Incredulously, raising his bead with prosaic abruptness.] Do you mean, me, Candida?

      CANDIDA. [Smiling a little.] Let us sit and talk comfortably over it like three friends. [To Morell.] Sit down, dear. [Morell takes the chair from the fireside—the children’s chair.] Bring me that chair, Eugene. [She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next Morell, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.] You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters and successful brothers of yours were your mother’s and father’s pets: how miserable you were at Eton: how your father is trying to starve you into returning to Oxford: how you have had to live without comfort or welcome or refuge, always lonely, and nearly always disliked and misunderstood, poor boy!

      MARCHBANKS. [Faithful to the nobility of his lot.] I had my books. I had Nature. And at last I met you.

      CANDIDA. Never mind that just at present. Now I want you to look at this other boy here—my boy—spoiled from his cradle. We go once a fortnight to see his parents. You should come with us, Eugene, and see the pictures of the hero of that household. James as a baby! the most wonderful of all babies. James holding his first school prize, won at the ripe age of eight! James as the captain of his eleven! James in his first frock coat! James under all sorts of glorious circumstances! You know how strong he is. [I hope he didn’t hurt you]—how clever he is—how happy! [With deepening gravity.] Ask James’s mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask ME what it costs to be James’s mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so. [With sweet irony.] And when he thought I might go away with you, his only anxiety was what should become of ME! And to tempt me to stay he offered me. [Leaning forward to stroke his hair caressingly at each phrase] his strength for MY defence, his industry for my livelihood, his position for my dignity, his—[Relenting.] Ah, I am mixing up your beautiful sentences and spoiling them, am I not, darling? [She lays her cheek fondly against his.]

      MORELL. [Quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness.] It’s all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.

      CANDIDA. [In his arms, smiling, to Eugene.] Am I your mother and sisters to you, Eugene?

      MARCHBANKS. [Rising with a fierce gesture of disgust.] Ah, never. Out, then, into the night with me!

      CANDIDA. [Rising quickly and intercepting him.] You are not going like that, Eugene?

      MARCHBANKS. [With the ring of a man’s voice—no longer a boy’s—in the words.] I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done.

      MORELL. [Rising from his knee, alarmed.] Candida: don’t let him do anything rash.

      CANDIDA. [Confident, smiling at Eugene.] Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness.

      MARCHBANKS. I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James: I give you my happiness with both hands: I love you because you have filled the heart of the woman I loved. Good-bye. [He goes towards the door.]

      CANDIDA. One last word. [He stops, but without turning to her.] How old are you, Eugene?

      MARCHBANKS. As old as the world now. This morning I was eighteen.

      CANDIDA. [Going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder.] Eighteen! Will you, for my sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me?

      MARCHBANKS. [Without moving.] Say the sentences.

      CANDIDA. When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.

      MARCHBANKS. [Turning to her.] In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.

      CANDIDA. Good-bye. [She takes his face in her hands; and as he divines her intention and bends his knee, she kisses his forehead. Then he flies out into the night. She turns to Morell, holding out her arms to him.] Ah, James! [They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart.]

      THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

      ACT I

      At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in the year 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is sitting up in the kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of the town of Websterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman. No woman looks her best after sitting up all night; and Mrs. Dudgeon’s face, even at its best, is grimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride. She is an elderly matron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety and respectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and rectitude, that they conceive goodness simply as self-denial. This conception is easily extended to others—denial, and finally generalized as covering anything disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon, being exceedingly disagreeable, is held to be exceedingly good. Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete license except for amiable weaknesses of any sort, and is consequently, without knowing it, the most licentious woman in the parish on the strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed a Sunday at the Presbyterian church.

      The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused of the breaking off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight than their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and self-sacrifice on the altar of the Rights of Man. Into the merits of these idealizations it is not here necessary to inquire: suffice it to say, without prejudice, that they have convinced both Americans and English that the most high minded course for them to pursue is to kill as many of one another as possible, and that military operations to that end are in full

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