Plays by Susan Glaspell Part 33

FELIX: You haven't read Darwin, have you, Uncle Silas?

SILAS: Who?

FELIX: Darwin, the great new man--and his theory of the survival of the fittest?

SILAS: No. No, I don't know things like that, Felix.

FELIX: I think he might make you feel better about the Indians. In the struggle for existence many must go down. The fittest survive. This--had to be.

SILAS: Us and the Indians? Guess I don't know what you mean--fittest.

FELIX: He calls it that. Best fitted to the place in which one finds one's self, having the qualities that can best cope with conditions--do things. From the beginning of life it's been like that. He shows the growth of life from forms that were hardly alive, the lowest animal forms--jellyfish--up to man.

SILAS: Oh, yes, that's the thing the churches are so upset about--that we come from monkeys.

FELIX: Yes. One family of ape is the direct ancestor of man.

GRANDMOTHER: You'd better read your Bible, Felix.

SILAS: Do people believe this?

FELIX: The whole intellectual world is at war about it. The best scientists accept it. Teachers are losing their positions for believing it. Of course, ministers can't believe it.

GRANDMOTHER: I should think not. Anyway, what's the use believing a thing that's so discouraging?

FEJEVARY: (_gently_) But is it that? It almost seems to me we have to accept it because it is so encouraging. (_holding out his hand_) Why have we hands?

GRANDMOTHER: Cause G.o.d gave them to us, I s'pose.

FEJEVARY: But that's rather general, and there isn't much in it to give us self-confidence. But when you think we have hands because ages back--before life had taken form as man, there was an impulse to do what had never been done--when you think that we have hands today because from the first of life there have been adventurers--those of best brain and courage who wanted to be more than life had been, and that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to do--it gives our hand a history which should make us want to use it well.

SILAS: (_breathed from deep_) Well, by G.o.d! And you've known this all this while! Dog-gone you--why didn't you tell me?

FEJEVARY: I've been thinking about it. I haven't known what to believe.

This hurts--beliefs of earlier years.

FELIX: The things it hurts will have to go.

FEJEVARY: I don't know about that, Felix. Perhaps in time we'll find truth in them.

FELIX: Oh, if you feel that way, father.

FEJEVARY: Don't be kind to me, my boy, I'm not that old.

SILAS: But think what it is you've said! If it's true that we made ourselves--made ourselves out of the wanting to be more--created ourselves you might say, by our own courage--our--what is it?--aspiration. Why, I can't take it in. I haven't got the mind to take it in. And what mind I have got says no. It's too--

FEJEVARY: It fights with what's there.

SILAS: (_nodding_) But it's like I got this (_very slowly_) other way around. From underneath. As if I'd known it all along--but have just found out I know it! Yes. The earth told me. The beasts told me.

GRANDMOTHER: Fine place to learn things from.

SILAS: Anyhow, haven't I seen it? (_to_ FEJEVARY) In your face haven't I seen thinking make a finer face? How long has this taken, Felix, to--well, you might say, bring us where we are now?

FELIX: Oh, we don't know how many millions of years since earth first stirred.

SILAS: Then we are what we are because through all that time there've been them that wanted to be more than life had been.

FELIX: That's it, Uncle Silas.

SILAS: But--why, then we aren't _finished_ yet!

FEJEVARY: No. We take it on from here.

SILAS: (_slowly_) Then if we don't be--the most we can be, if we don't be more than life has been, we go back on all that life behind us; go back on--the--

(_Unable to formulate it, he looks to_ FEJEVARY.)

FEJEVARY: Go back on the dreaming and the daring of a million years.

(_After a moment's pause_ SILAS _gets up, opens the closet door_.)

GRANDMOTHER: Silas, what you doing?

SILAS: (_who has taken out a box_) I'm lookin' for the deed to the hill.

GRANDMOTHER: What you going to do with it?

SILAS: I'm going to get it out of my hands.

GRANDMOTHER: Get it out of your hands? (_he has it now_) Deed your father got from the government the very year the government got it from the Indians?

(_rising_) Give me that! (_she turns to_ FEJEVARY) Tell him he's crazy.

We got the best land 'cause we was first here. We got a right to keep it.

FEJEVARY: (_going soothingly to her_) It's true, Silas, it is a serious thing to give away one's land.

SILAS: You ought to know. You did it. Are you sorry you did it?

FEJEVARY: No. But wasn't that different?

SILAS: How was it different? Yours was a fight to make life more, wasn't it? Well, let this be our way.

GRANDMOTHER: What's all that got to do with giving up the land that should provide for our own children?

SILAS: Isn't it providing for them to give them a better world to live in? Felix--you're young, I ask you, ain't it providing for them to give them a chance to be more than we are?

FELIX: I think you're entirely right, Uncle Silas. But it's the practical question that--