The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II Read online

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: Too late. Too late. You had no choice in this. You must bow your head.

  THE BOY: I am trembling. My knees are hot with my tears.

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: Since only tears can give sight to the eyes. (She drops the chain about his neck)

  THE BOY: Then am I permitted to know the meaning of these pendants?

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: This is a tongue of fire. It feeds upon the brain. It is a madness that in a better country has a better name.

  THE BOY: These are mysteries. Give them no names.

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: This is a leaf of laurel from a tree not often plucked. You shall know pride and the shining of the eyes—of that I do not speak now.

  THE BOY: And this, lady?

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: That is a staff and signifies the journey that awaits you your life long; for you are homeless.

  THE BOY: And this . . . this is of crystal . . .

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: That is yours alone, and you shall smart for it. It is wonderful and terrible. Others shall know a certain peace, and shall live well enough in the limits of the life they know; but you shall be forever hindered. For you there shall be ever beyond the present a lost meaning and a more meaningful love.

  THE BOY: Take back the chain. Take back your gifts. Take back life. For at its end what can there be that is worth such pain?

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED (Slowly drawing back into the shadow of the wood): Farewell, child of the muses, playfellow in the bird-haunted groves. The life of man awaits you, the light laughter and the misery in the same day, in the selfsame hour the trivial and the divine. You are to give it a voice. Among the bewildered and the stammering thousands you are to give it a voice and to mark its meaning. Farewell, child of the muses, playfellow in the bird-haunted . . .

  (The Woman in the Chlamys returns.)

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS: You must go now. Listen to that wind. It is the great fan of time that whirls on the soul for a season.

  THE BOY: Stay a moment. I am not yet brave.

  (She leads him into a grotto and the young soul and his chain are lost in the profound shade.)

  END OF PLAY

  Proserpina and the Devil

  A PLAY FOR MARIONETTES

  CHARACTERS

  THE MANAGER

  THE FIRST MANIPULATOR

  THE SECOND MANIPULATOR

  THE PUPPETS: Proserpina, Demeter, Hermes and Devil

  SETTING

  A puppet show, Venice, 1640 A.D.

  THE MANAGER (Winningly): Citizens and little citizens! We are going to give you a delicious foretaste of our great performance this afternoon, to which the whole world is coming. This is a pantomime about how a beautiful girl named Proserpina was snatched away by the Devil, and how her mother searched for her over all the hills of the world, and how at last she was able to bring her back to the earth for six months out of every year.

  THE FIRST MANIPULATOR (Behind the scenes): Let go them strings.

  THE MANAGER: At our great performance this afternoon this same play will be given with words; and besides it the story of the brave Melusina and her wanderings when she was driven out of Parma.

  THE SECOND MANIPULATOR (His voice rising in anger): You don’t have to show me!

  THE MANAGER: On with the play! —But don’t forget to bring your rich aunts this afternoon.

  (To the Manipulators) Hurry through with it. I’m off for a cup of wine.

  (The curtain rises with indecent haste and shows the underworld. The rivers Styx and Acheron have been replaced by a circular piece of cloth, sulphur-colored, with waves delicately embroidered about the margin. This is the Lake of Wrath and in it are seen floating arms and legs—all that are left, alas, of great puppets, Abraham, Penelope and Jephtha’s daughter, Midas and Harlequin. Beside the lake Proserpina is straying, robed in bluish black as one anticipating grief. Pluto—now a medieval Satan—is stealthily approaching her. Suddenly Proserpina throws up her arms, runs to him and buries her face in his scarlet bosom. Noah’s Ark—mutely protesting against the part it must play, with all its Christianized animals within it, of Charon’s barge—is lowered from the proscenium and the curtain falls.)

  THE FIRST MANIPULATOR (Sotto voce): Beard of Medusa! You made her run in the wrong direction: The hussy courted death. Didn’t I tell you he was to chase her three times around the lake?

  THE SECOND MANIPULATOR (Sulkily): I don’t care. A person can’t tell which is his right hand and which is his left in this place.

  THE FIRST MANIPULATOR: Here, you let me take her; you take the Devil. —Got the orange?

  (When the puppets are next seen Proserpina is exhibiting grief in pantomime. Her lord with affectionate gestures urges her to eat of a yellow pomegranate. Sadly she puts it to her mouth. With an odd recollection of the Garden of Eden, she tempts him into eating the remaining half. They go out cheerlessly.)

  All right for that. Now I’ll take the mother and the Devil. You take the other fellow and the daughter.

  (Demeter, a handsome Italian matron in a wide gown of brocade, enters with her arms outstretched. At her elbow Hermes, the Archangel Gabriel, guides her through the Lake of Perdition. Proserpina and her husband return and throw up their hands in amazement. Again the frantic girl runs in the wrong direction and casts herself into the arms of Satan. Demeter tries to draw her away, but a matter of pins and hooks-and-eyes prevents her rescue.)

  Oh, you Gazoon! You lack-eyed Silenus! Your hands are nothing but feet.

  THE SECOND MANIPULATOR: The Devil take your show and you with it.

  (The altercation behind the scenes grows out of bounds and one blow knocks down the stage. The Archangel falls upon the pavement and is cherished by gamins unto the third generation; the Devil rolls into the lake; Proserpina is struck by a falling cloud, and lies motionless on her face; Demeter by reason of the stiffness of her brocade stands upright, viewing with staring eyes the ills of her daughter.)

  END OF PLAY

  Fanny Otcott

  CHARACTERS

  MRS. OTCOTT, an actress

  SAMPSON, a servant

  ATCHESON, an old friend of Mrs. Otcott’s

  SETTING

  Outside Mrs. Otcott’s home.

  Mrs. Otcott, that great actress in the tradition of the Siddons, the Oldfield, Bracegirdle, O ’Neill, is spending a quiet month in Wales. We do not see the cottage, we do not even see the mountains, but there is a stretch of lawn on whose gentle slope there stands an ancient round tower overgrown with ivy. In the shadow of this Arthurian monument, Mrs. Otcott has placed a table whereon she is sorting old engravings, playbills, letters, contracts, ribbons—in short, her past. She is still the handsome, humorous, Irish soul from whom every item out of the old trunks exacts its exclamation, its gesture, its renewed indignation or pleasure. She is attended by a blackamoor boy in livery, half asleep against a flowerpot.

  MRS. OTCOTT: Sampson! Tay!

  SAMPSON (Springing up): Yes, ma’am. Wid or widout a streak o’ cream?

  MRS. OTCOTT: Widout. And Sampson, tell Pence I am not at home. Not even to the one in the yellow curls, or to the good black beard. And if they seem to know that I am at home, tell them . . . that I have gone up the tower, or that I have the vapors.

  SAMPSON: You wants tea widout, and tell Mrs. Pence you don’t want to see none of de gentlemen from de village inn—dat you has de vapors.

  MRS. OTCOTT: There! Do you see that, Sampson? I wore that the night the king dined with me on the stage.

  SAMPSON (His eyes as big as soup plates): King . . . James!

  MRS. OTCOTT (Shuddering): No, stupid—Charles. —Go away! This afternoon I shall devote to another woman, to another and a different woman, and yet to myself, to myself, to myself.

  SAMPSON: I’ll tell Mrs. Pence.

  (He goes out. Mrs. Otcott picks up a packet of letters. One look, tosses them away, then rises muttering; goes and stamps on them and laughs. She returns to pick up a playbill and reads the heading
with glistening eyes: “Fanny Otcott as Faizella in the Princess of Cathay. First time.” She strides about lost in thought. She almost walks into a gentleman who has entered through the hedge. He is wearing a black hat and cape, and has a serious worn face.)

  ATCHESON: Your servant, Mrs. Otcott.

  MRS. OTCOTT (Thunderstruck): Why, no! Yes! By the garter, it is George Atcheson. Oh! Oh! Oh!

  ATCHESON: I do not disturb you, Mrs. Otcott? I . . . I came to discuss a thing that is very serious to me.

  MRS. OTCOTT (Suddenly very pleased): Everything is—sit down, my friend. You always were very serious. That’s why you made such a bad Hamlet. Delay your serious talk, George, and tell me about the women you have loved since you loved me, and confess that I finally made them all unendurable to you.

  ATCHESON: You misunderstand me, Mrs. Otcott . . .

  MRS. OTCOTT (Loudly): Fanny.

  ATCHESON: Ah . . . Fanny?

  MRS. OTCOTT: All you need is a little coaxing. Well, George, a woman drove you on to the stage when you were preparing for the church, and a woman drove you off, and it was my greatest service to the stage. Look, George, you remember me as Faizella in the Princess of Cathay. I never did better than that. Great Rufus, you played opposite me in it. Look!

  ATCHESON: Perhaps you remember . . . I lost consciousness . . .

  MRS. OTCOTT: Ah yes! The pale divinity student fainted. Oh! George, you were the first of my lovers. No, it wasn’t love, perhaps, but it was beautiful. It was like hawthorn buds and meadowlarks and Mr. Handel’s Water Music. And since, I have never ceased searching for love. Perhaps love strikes the first time or never at all. Then I was too much in love with my work. And, oh, George, how young we were! But you were very dear to me in the old garret, and I’m sorry to see you’re growing stout, for it’s one more reminder that I shall probably live and die without having known the lightning of love.

  (She sits down with a great flow of silken draperies and shakes her head at him ruefully.)

  ATCHESON: I have come to discuss our . . . our association . . .

  MRS. OTCOTT: Thunder and hell! Don’t you call that an association!

  ATCHESON: . . . but my view of it is very different.

  (Her shoe commences to mark time nervously on the turf.)

  After my retirement from the stage I resumed my theological studies, and I am now Bishop of Westholmstead.

  (The shoe is now motionless.)

  None of my friends know of that . . . that experience in my life, but it has always remained as a bitter . . . as a distressing spot in my conscience.

  MRS. OTCOTT (After a pause, very rapidly): I see, you want to make a clean breast of the perilous stuff. You want to make a public confession, probably. You are married?

  ATCHESON: Yes.

  MRS. OTCOTT: You have several sons probably?

  ATCHESON: Yes.

  MRS. OTCOTT: And you lie awake nights, saying: “Hypocrisy, hypocrisy.”

  (Pause) Well, make your confession. But why consult me?

  ATCHESON: I have followed your course, madam, and seen the growing admiration your art commands in court—I might almost say in the church.

  MRS. OTCOTT: You do not suppose that that revelation would cast any deeper shadow on the good name of Fanny Otcott, such as it is. Remember, George, the months you call sinful. It wasn’t love, perhaps, but it was grace and poetry. The heavens rained odors on us. It was as childlike and harmless as paintings on fans. I was a girl tragedienne reciting verses endlessly before a mirror and you were a young student who for the first time had seen a young girl braid her hair and sing at her work. Since then you have learned long names from books and heard a great many sneers from women as old as myself. You have borrowed your ideas from those who have never begun to live and who dare not.

  ATCHESON (His head in his hands and his elbows on his knees): I do not know what to think. Your reasoning is full of perils.

  MRS. OTCOTT: Go away and tell your congregations what you please. I feel as though you were communicating to my mind some of those pitiable remorses that have weakened you. I have sinned, but I have not that year on my conscience. It is that year and my playing of Faizella that will bring troops of angels to welcome me to Paradise. Go away and tell your congregations what you please.

  ATCHESON: You give me no help in the matter, Mrs. Otcott.

  MRS. OTCOTT: Go away. In the name of Heaven, go!

  (Crooked with doubt and hesitation, the Bishop of Westholmstead goes out through the hedge. For a few moments Mrs. Otcott sits on the table, swinging one foot and muttering savagely in an imaginary conversation.

  Reenter Sampson with a tray.)

  SAMPSON: Three gentlemen waited on you from de village inn, but Mrs. Pence sent dem away. She said you was up de tower, ma’am.

  MRS. OTCOTT (Showily): Go call them back, Sampson. Tell them I have come down from de tower. Bring up the best box of wine—the one with my picture painted on it. I shall be young again.

  END OF PLAY

  Brother Fire

  CHARACTERS

  ANNUNZIATA, a peasant woman

  ISOLA, her daughter, about eight

  BROTHER FRANCIS, their friend

  SETTING

  A hut in the mountains of northern Italy.

  Annunziata is preparing the evening meal over the fire. Isola is playing beside her.

  ANNUNZIATA: Now, now! Not so near. One of these days you’ll be falling into the fire, and there’ll be nothing left to tell us about you but your shoes. Put them on and get out the bowls for supper.

  ISOLA: I like to play with the fire.

  ANNUNZIATA: What a thing to say!

  ISOLA: I’d like to let my hair into it, gently, gently, gently, gently.

  ANNUNZIATA: Don’t you hear me tell you it’s a wicked thing?

  ISOLA: Brother Francis says it’s our brother, and one of the best things in the world.

  ANNUNZIATA: Tchk, Tchk! —What makes the starling sing in his cage all of a sudden?

  ISOLA: It’s Brother Francis himself looking at us.

  ANNUNZIATA: Tell him to come in and have some supper.

  ISOLA: Come in, my mother says, and have some supper.

  (Brother Francis appears at the door. He blesses the house.)

  BROTHER FRANCIS: I can very well go on to my own supper and need not lighten your kettle.

  ANNUNZIATA: Come in, Brother Francis. What you take will not even make a new ring around the kettle. Besides, I see you have been up to the top of the mountain again. You are cold and wet. Come and sit by the fire.

  BROTHER FRANCIS: Yes, I have been up to the very top since yesterday, among the rocks and the birds in the rocks. Brother Wind was there and Sister Rain was there, but Brother Fire was not.

  ANNUNZIATA: Now you sit by him, Isola, while I get some more wood; but don’t ask him any questions. Now, Brother, put this fur skin across your knees.

  (She goes out.)

  ISOLA: What did you do, Brother Francis?

  BROTHER FRANCIS: I watched and waited to see what they would let me see. For a long while there was nothing; then they nodded to one another, meaning that it was permitted to me. I watched seven stars closely. Suddenly they turned and fled inwards, and I saw the Queen of Heaven leading forth her company before all the shipwrecked seamen of this world. —However, do not tell thy mother, for she believes in no one’s miracles but her own.

  ISOLA: My mother says the fire is a wicked thing.

  BROTHER FRANCIS (Turning): What, Sister Annunziata, how can you say that? —Why, what would cook your broth, what would keep you warm? And when you return from the mountaintops, what else shines out from all the friendly windows of the world? Look at its flames, how they lean towards us!

  ISOLA: It says: Give me something to eat. Give me something to eat.

  BROTHER FRANCIS (Excitedly): Yes, yes. Its warmth is a kind of hunger. I have a love for all things in fur, feathers and scales, but I have not less a love for the fire that warms us.
r />   (He edges the cloak into the fire) Look how it reaches for it. Wicked? Wicked? Never.

  ISOLA: But, Brother Francis, it will . . . it will . . .

  (The flames suddenly seize the cloak. Francis rises, wrapped in fire.)

  Brother Francis, you are on fire! Mother, Mother!

  (She rushes from the hut and returns with her mother. Annunziata snatches the fur from Brother Francis and throws it into the hearth.)

  BROTHER FRANCIS (Still standing ecstatically with lifted hands): Eat, Brother Fire. I knew you wanted this. I knew that you loved me too.

  (He looks about him; then ruefully to Annunziata) Sister, you have spoiled his supper.

  ANNUNZIATA (With somber and averted face): I do not know what you mean. Here is your bowl of broth. Sit down and eat it.

  BROTHER FRANCIS: Sister, do not be angry with me.

  ANNUNZIATA (Breaking out): Come now, should we kill everything, the animals for their furs, yes, and one another, to feed them to the fire? Is it not enough that it takes our good pine tree by our road? There, that is logic, Brother Francis.

  BROTHER FRANCIS: Bring me not logic, sister. She is the least of the handmaids of Love. I am often troubled when she speaks.

  ANNUNZIATA: Must we give what makes us often warm for that which makes us warm only for a moment?

  BROTHER FRANCIS (Waving his wooden spoon about humorously): My mind is strangely light tonight, like the flames that play about the relics of Saint James. I could wander again through the whole night.

  ANNUNZIATA: Where is your mother that she should watch over you? Had I not these other duties I should leave everything and watch over you myself.

  BROTHER FRANCIS: She is in Paradise with a golden crook, leading the flames that died of hunger in this wicked world. She leads them to pasture on drifts of dried leaves. Look, Isola, I know that there is flame to burn all evil in the Lake of the Damned. I do not speak of that now, but I know also that fire is at all times useful to the great Blessed. It surrounds them and they dwell in it. And even now . . .

  (And so on.)

  END OF PLAY