(TO AN UNWRITTEN PLAY)
Characters: James Hamilton, Mary Fawcett, Rachael Lavine, two slaves.
Place: Nevis, British West Indies. Time: The month of April, 1756.
[A large room, with open windows, to which are attached heavy inside
wooden shutters furnished with iron bars. Beyond the windows are seen
masses of tropical trees and foliage, green and more brilliantly hued,
filled with screaming birds and monkeys. In the court is a fountain. The
house is half-way up the mountain, and between the trees is a glint of
the sea. The room is severely simple. There are no curtains, carpets,
nor upholstered furniture; but there are two handsome pieces of
mahogany, a bookcase full of books bound in old calf, a table on which
are tropical fruits and cooling drinks in earthen jugs, one or two
palm-trees, and Caribbean pottery on shelves. In one corner is a harp.
In the distance is heard a loud menacing roar. The sky is covered with
racing clouds. Suffusing everything is a livid light.
Mistress Fawcett is leaning on her crutch, looking through one of the
windows. Two slaves are crouching on the floor. All are in an intense
attitude, listening. Suddenly there is heard the quick loud firing of
cannon, four guns in rapid succession. The negroes shriek and crouch
lower as if they would insinuate their trembling bodies through the
floor. Mistress Fawcett hastily closes the window by which she is
standing, swings to and bars its shutters. Immediately after may be
heard the sound, gradually diminishing in the distance, of a long line
of windows slammed and barred. Mistress Fawcett attempts to move the
shutters of the other window, but the hinges are rusty and defy her
feeble strength.]
MISTRESS FAWCETT (to the slaves). Come here. Close this window. Did you
not hear the guns? A hurricane is upon us.
THE SLAVES (crouching lower and wailing almost unintelligibly). Oh,
mistress, save us! Send for oby doctor!
MISTRESS FAWCETT. To strangle you with a horse-hair pie! Your obeah
charlatans are grovelling in their cellars. Only our courage and our
two hands can save us to-day. Come! (Beating the floor with her crutch.)
A hundred man slaves on the estate, and not one to help us save the
house! Are my daughter and I to do it all? Get up! (She menaces them
with her crutch.)
THE SLAVES (not moving). Oh, mistress!
[Enter RACHAEL. She walks to the open window and looks out.]
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Close the windows, Rachael. I cannot. And those
creatures are empty skulls.
RACHAEL. In a moment.
MISTRESS FAWCETT. In a moment? Open your ears. Do you want to see the
roof racing with the wind?'
RACHAEL. The hurricane is still miles away.
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Great God! How can you stand there and wait for a
hurricane? Do you realize that an hour, if this old house be not strong
enough, may see us struggling out in those roaring waters? These
desolate afflicted Caribbees! They have tested my courage many times,
and I can go through this without flinching; but I cannot stand that
unnatural calm of yours.
RACHAEL. Do I seem calm? (She closes and bars the window.) It is a fine
sight. We may never have such another.
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Nor live to know.
RACHAEL (her back is still turned, as she shakes and tests the window).
Well, what of that? Are you so in love with life?
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Even at sixty I am in no haste to be blown out of it.
And if I were twenty--
RACHAEL (turning suddenly, and facing her mother). At twenty, with forty
years of nothingness before you, cut off from all the joy of life, on an
island in the Caribbean Sea, what then? (She snaps her fingers.) That
for the worst a hurricane can do!
MISTRESS FAWCETT (uneasily). Do not let us talk of personal things
to-day.
RACHAEL. I never felt more personal.
MISTRESS FAWCETT (looking at her keenly). I believe you are excited.
RACHAEL (she clinches her hands and brings them up sharply to her
breast). Excited! Call it that if you like. All my life I have longed
for the hurricane, and now I feel as if it were coming to me alone.
MISTRESS FAWCETT (evasively). I do not always understand you, Rachel.
You are a strange girl.
RACHAEL (bursting through her assumed composure). Strange? Because I
long to feel the mountain shaken, as I have been shaken through four
terrible weeks? Because I long to hear the wind roar and shriek its
derision of man, make his quaking soul forget every law he ever knew,
stamp upon him, grind him to pulp--
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Hush! What are you saying? I do not know you--"the
ice-plant of the tropics," indeed! The electricity of this hurricane has
bewitched you.
RACHAEL. That I will not deny. (She laughs.) But I do deny that I am not
myself, whether you recognize me or not. Which self that you have seen
do you think my real one? First, the dreaming girl, in love with books,
the sun, the sea, and a future that no man has written in books; then,
while my scalp is still aching from my newly turned hair, I am thrust
through the church doors into the arms of a brute. A year of dumb
horror, and I run from his house in the night, to my one friend, the
mother who--
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Not another word! I believed in him! There wasn't a
mother on St. Kitts who did not envy me. No one could have imagined--