Act I Scene 1
The scene is triangular, representing a corner of the living-room of No. 137, Burnley Road, Hindle, a house rented for about 7s. 6d. a week. In the left-hand wall, low down, there is a door leading to the scullery. In the same wall, but further away from the spectator, is a window looking on to the backyard. A dresser stands in front of the window. About half-way up the right-hand wall is the door leading to the hall or passage. Nearer, against the same wall, a high cupboard for china and crockery. The fire-place is not visible, being in one of the walls not represented. However, down in the L. corner of the stage is an arm-chair, which stands by the hearth. In the middle of the room is a square table, with chairs on each side. The room is cheerful and comfortable. It is nine o’clock on a warm August evening. Through the window can be seen the darkening sky, as the blind is not drawn. Against the sky an outline of roof tops and mill chimneys. The only light is the dim twilight from the open window. Thunder is in the air. When the curtain rises, Christopher Hawthorn, a decent, white-bearded man of nearly fifty, is sitting in the arm-chair, smoking a pipe. Mrs. Hawthorn, a keen, sharp-faced woman of fifty-five, is standing, gazing out of the window. There is a flash of lightning and a rumble of thunder far away.
Mrs. Hawthorn. It’s passing over. There’ll be no rain.
Christopher. Ay! We could do with some rain.
(There is a flash of lightning.)
Chris. Pull down the blind and light the gas.
Mrs. H. What for?
Chris. It’s more cozy-like with the gas.
Mrs. H. You’re not afraid of the lightning?
Chris. I want to look at that railway guide.
Mrs. H. What’s the good. We’ve looked at it twice already. There’s no train from Blackpool till half-past ten, and it’s only just on nine now.
Chris. Happen we’ve made a mistake.
Mrs. H. Happen we’ve not. Besides, what’s the good of a railway guide? You know trains run as they like on Bank Holiday.
Chris. Ay! Perhaps you’re right. You don’t think she’ll come round by Manchester!
Mrs. H. What would she be doing coming round by Manchester?
Chris. You can get that road from Blackpool.
Mrs. H. Yes. If she’s coming from Blackpool.
Chris. Have you thought she may not come at all?
Mrs. H. (Grimly.) What do you take me for?
Chris. You never hinted.
Mrs. H. No use putting them sort of ideas into your head.
(Another flash and a peal of thunder.)
Chris. Well, well, those are lucky who haven’t to travel at all on Bank Holiday.
Mrs. H. Unless they’ve got a motor car, like Nat Jeffcote’s lad.
Chris. Nay, he’s not got one.
Mrs. H. What? Why I saw him with my own eyes setting out in it last Saturday week after the mill shut.
Chris. Ay! He’s gone off these Wakes with his pal George Ramsbottom. A couple of thick beggars, those two!
Mrs. H. Then what do you mean telling me he’s not got a motor car?
Chris. I said he hadn’t got one of his own. It’s his father’s. You don’t catch Nat Jeffcote parting with owt before his time. That’s how he holds his lad in check, as you might say.
Mrs. H. Alan Jeffcote’s seldom short of cash. He spends plenty.
Chris. Ay! Nat gives him what he asks for, and doesn’t want to know how he spends it either. But he’s got to ask for it first. Nat can stop supplies any time if he’s a mind.
Mrs. H. That’s likely, isn’t it?
Chris. Queerer things have happened. You don’t know Nat like I do. He’s a bad one to get across with.
(Another flash and gentle peal. Mrs. H. gets up.)
Mrs. H. I’ll light the gas.
(She pulls down the blind and lights the gas.)
Chris. When I met Nat this morning he told me that Alan had telegraphed from Llandudno on Saturday asking for twenty pounds.
Mrs. H. From Llandudno?
Chris. Ay! Reckon he’s been stopping there. Run short of brass.
Mrs. H. And did he send it?
Chris. Of course he sent it. Nat doesn’t stint the lad. (He laughs quietly.) Eh, but he can get through it, though!
Mrs. H. Look here. What are you going to say to Fanny when she comes?
Chris. Ask her where she’s been?
Mrs. H. Ask her where she’s been. Of course we’ll do that. But suppose she won’t tell us?
Chris. She’s always been a good girl.
Mrs. H. She’s always gone her own road. Suppose she tells us to mind our own business?
Chris. I reckon it is my business to know what she’s been up to.
Mrs. H. Don’t you forget it. And don’t let her forget it either. If you do, I promise you I won’t.
Chris. All right. Where’s that post-card?
Mrs. H. Little good taking heed of that.
(Christopher rises and gets a picture post-card from the dresser.)
Chris. (Reading.) She’ll be home before late on Monday. Lovely weather. (Looking at the picture.) North Pier, Blackpool. Very like, too.
Mrs. H. (Suddenly.) Let’s have a look. When was it posted?
Chris. It’s dated Sunday.
Mrs. H. That’s nowt to go by. Any one can put the wrong date. What’s the postmark? (She scrutinizes it.) “August 5th, summat P.M.” I can’t make out the time.
Chris. August 5th. That was yesterday all right. There’d only be one post on Sunday.
Mrs. H. Then she was in Blackpool till yesterday, that’s certain.
Chris. Ay!
Mrs. H. Well, it’s a mystery.
Chris. (Shaking his head.) Or summat worse.
Mrs. H. Eh? You don’t think that, eh?
Chris. I don’t know what to think.
Mrs. H. Nor me neither.
(They sit silent for a time. There is a rumble of thunder, far away. After it has died away, a knock is heard at the front door. They turn and look at each other. Mrs. Hawthorn rises and goes out in silence. In a few moments, Fanny Hawthorn comes in, followed by Mrs. Hawthorn.)5
What usually keeps a writer from passing to well characterized dialogue from dialogue merely clear as to essential facts is that he is so bound to his facts that he sees rather than feels the scene. The chief trouble with the dialogue of the John Brown play was an attempt to keep so close to historical accounts of the particular incident that sympathetic imagination was benumbed. One constantly meets this fault in the earlier Miracle Plays before writers had come to understand that audiences care more for the human being in the situation than for the situation itself, and that only by representing a situation not for itself but as felt by the people involved can it be made fully interesting. At the left is a speech of Mary in The Crucifixion of the York Cycle; at the right is her speech in the Hegge or so-called Coventry Plays.
| Mary. Alas! for my sweet son, I say, | Mary, O my son, my son! my darling dear! |
| That dolefully to deed thus is dight, | What have I defended [offended] thee? |
| Alas! for full lovely thou lay | Thou hast spoke to all of those that be here, |
| In my womb, this worthely wight | And not a word thou speakest to me. |
| Alas! that I should see this sight | To the Jews thou art full kind, |
| Of my son so seemly to see, | Thou hast forgiven all here misdeed; |
| Alas! that this blossom so bright | And the thief thou hast in mind, |
| Untruly is tugged to this tree, Alas! | For once asking mercy heaven is his meed. |
| My lord, my life, | Ah! my sovereign lord, why wilt thou not speak |
| With full great grief, | To me that am thy mother in pain for thy wrong? |
| Hanges as a thief, | Ah, heart, heart why wilt thou not break? |
| Alas! he did never trespass. 6 | That I were out of this sorrow so strong! 7 |
The writer of the Hegge speech had discovered long before Ralph Waldo Emerson that the secret of good dialogue is “truth carried alive into the heart by passion.” The second requisite, then, of good dialogue is that it must be kindled by feeling, made alive by the emotion of the speaker. For the would-be dramatist the secret is so to know his characters that facts are not mere facts, but conditions moving him because they move the characters he perfectly understands. As he interprets between character and audience, he must be like Planchette or the clairvoyant, the creature of another’s will, whose ideas and emotions rather than his own he tries with all the power that is in him to convey. In brief, then, though it is absolutely necessary that dialogue give the facts as to what happens, who the people are, their relations to one another, etc., it is better dialogue if, while doing all this, it seems to be busied only with characterization.
Unassigned dialogue usually makes a reader or hearer promptly recognize his preference for characterized rather than uncharacterized speech. When a group, as in many stage mobs, speaks in chorus, or at best in sections, the result is unreality for many hearers and absurdity for the more critical. Every hearer knows that people do not really, when part of a mob, say absolutely the same thing, and rarely speak in perfect unison. Common sense cries out for individualization among the possible speakers. When we read the following extract from Andreiev’s Life of Man, we may agree with what is apparently the author’s idea, that it makes no difference which one of the speakers delivers a particular line or sentence; but the moment the scene is staged everything changes.
A profound darkness within which nothing moves. Then there can be dimly perceived the outlines of a large, high room and the grey silhouettes of Old Women in strange garments who resemble a troop of grey, hiding mice. In low voices and with laughter to and fro the Old Women converse.
When they sent him to the drug store for some medicine he rode up and down past the store for two hours and could not remember what he wanted. So he came back.
(Subdued laughter. The crying again becomes louder and then dies away. Silence.)
What has happened to her? Perhaps she is already dead.
No, in that case we should hear weeping. The doctor would run out and begin to talk nonsense, and they would bring out her husband unconscious, and we should have our hands full. No, she is not dead.
Then why are we sitting here?
Ask Him. How should we know?
He won’t tell.
He won’t tell. He tells nothing.
He drives us here and there. He rouses us from our beds and makes us watch, and then it turns out that there was no need of our coming.
We came of our own accord. Didn’t we come of our own accord? You must be fair to Him. There, she is crying again. Aren’t you satisfied?
Are you?
I am saying nothing. I am saying nothing and waiting.
How kind-hearted you are!
(Laughter. The cries become louder.)8
Of course every rule has its exception, and it may be urged that the final lines of David Pinski’s The Treasure need no assigning to special speakers. This, if true, results from the fact that Mr. Pinski, as the last touch in his study of the universal perversion of man through lust for money, wishes to represent even all the dead as sharing in this greed. Even here, however, Mr. Pinski is careful, by his headings “Many” and “The Pious Rabbi,” to distinguish among speeches to be given by one person, the chorus, and a figure he wishes specially to individualize, the Rabbi.
The Dead
(In shrouds and praying shawls appear singly and in groups amid the graves. They whisper and breathe their words.) Swiftly into the synagogue!... Hasten!... The hour of midnight is long past.... Hasten....
(They hasten to the gate. One sees only their silhouettes in the dim light of the veiled moon.)
I thought we would not come out today at all.
The dead fear the breath of the living.
We fear them more than they do us. There is no peace betwixt life and death....
No peace... no peace....
Indeed life vexed me grievously today.
Vexed is not the word. I lived in their life so really that I shuddered and feared.
Shuddered with fear or with longing? Did you feel a yearning for your money?
(Ghostly laughter shakes the rows of the dead.)
The distinguished and the wealthy must surely have had a bad day.
It fairly smelled of money and they had to lie with the worms.
It almost threw them out of their graves.
Many
Money... money... money.... (Ghostly laughter.)
But you poor devils hadn’t a much better time either. It smelled of money and you couldn’t even beg. (Laughter.)
It is high time for all of you to be forgetting life.... Come quickly into the synagogue....
(Many of the dead vanish.)
It gave me really an exalted feeling to see how little fear of us they felt.
Don’t flatter yourself. We would have been no better. We were no better either.
Many
(At the same time.) Money... Money... Money....
Others
And that is life... that is life... that is life....
It exalted me in my grave too. So many women walked about here today. Young ones and pretty ones, I wager....
(Laughter.)
Who speaks thus? Who opens his mouth to speak such ugly words?
It’s the petty field surgeon who lies buried by the wall.
The Pious Rabbi
(In passing. His praying shawl hangs but loosely over his left shoulder.) They have dug up my whole grave.... They have dug away my right arm. Woe, how shall I now put on my praying shawl? How shall I appear before God? (To a group.) Will not some one help me to put on my praying shawl?
(They surround and help him. They show signs of deep feeling at the sight of the missing arm. Murmurs of astonishment and compassion.)
Many
Woe... woe... woe....
Others
Money... money... money....
The Rabbi
Now will I go and appear before God.... Now I will ask him.... (He vanishes through the gate.)
Many
He will get no answer... he will get no answer.
One of the Dead
(With feeling.) They who are in life still stand at the same point. Generation dies after generation and all remains as it has been. As it was aforetime, so it was in my time and so it is today.
Many
Money... money... money....
And yet it must lead to something. Surely there must be a goal.
Only God knows that....
And man must learn what it is.
That will be his greatest victory.
Man’s greatest victory.
Several
Man’s....
Others
The living one’s.... And we?
(A ghostly breathing of laughter and sighing.)
The First
Man’s greatest victory...