Plays by Susan Glaspell Part 43

FEJEVARY: You don't seem much chastened.

MADELINE: Chastened? Was that the idea? Well, if you think that keeping a person where she doesn't want to be chastens her! I never felt less 'chastened' than when I walked out of that slimy spot and looked across the street at your nice bank. I should think you'd hate to--(_with friendly concern_) Why, Uncle Felix, you look tired out.

FEJEVARY: I am tired out, Madeline. I've had a nerve-racking day.

MADELINE: Isn't that too bad? Those speeches were so boresome, and that old senator person--wasn't he a stuff? But can't you go home now and let auntie give you tea and--

FEJEVARY: (_sharply_) Madeline, have you no intelligence? Hasn't it occurred to you that your performance would worry me a little?

MADELINE: I suppose it was a nuisance. And on such a busy day.

(_changing_) But if you're going to worry, Horace is the one you should worry about. (_answering his look_) Why, he got it all up. He made me ashamed!

FEJEVARY: And you're not at all ashamed of what you have done?

MADELINE: Ashamed? Why--no.

FEJEVARY: Then you'd better be! A girl who rushes in and a.s.saults an officer!

MADELINE: (_earnestly explaining it_) But, Uncle Felix, I had to stop him. No one else did.

FEJEVARY: Madeline, I don't know whether you're trying to be nave--

MADELINE: (_angrily_) Well, I'm _not_. I like that! I think I'll go home.

FEJEVARY: I think you will not! It's stupid of you not to know this is serious. You could be dismissed from school for what you did.

MADELINE: Well, I'm good and ready to be dismissed from any school that would dismiss for that!

FEJEVARY: (_in a new manner--quietly, from feeling_) Madeline, have you no love for this place?

MADELINE: (_doggedly, after thinking_) Yes, I have. (_she sits down_) And I don't know why I have.

FEJEVARY: Certainly it's not strange. If ever a girl had a background, Morton College is Madeline Fejevary Morton's background. (_he too now seated by the table_) Do you remember your Grandfather Morton?

MADELINE: Not very well. (_a quality which seems sullenness_) I couldn't bear to look at him. He shook so.

FEJEVARY: (_turning away, real pain_) Oh--how cruel!

MADELINE: (_surprised, gently_) Cruel? Me--cruel?

FEJEVARY: Not just you. The way it pa.s.ses--(_to himself_) so _fast_ it pa.s.ses.

MADELINE: I'm sorry. (_troubled_) You see, he was too old then--

FEJEVARY: (_his hand up to stop her_) I wish I could bring him back for a moment, so you could see what he was before he (_bitterly_) shook so.

He was a powerful man, who was as real as the earth. He was strangely of the earth, as if something went from it to him. (_looking at her intently_) Queer you should be the one to have no sentiment about him, for you and he--sometimes when I'm with you it's as if--he were near. He had no personal ambition, Madeline. He was ambitious for the earth and its people. I wonder if you can realize what it meant to my father--in a strange land, where he might so easily have been misunderstood, pushed down, to find a friend like that? It wasn't so much the material things--though Uncle Silas was always making them right--and as if--oh, hardly conscious what he was doing--so little it mattered. It was the way he _got_ father, and by that very valuing kept alive what was there to value. Why, he literally laid this country at my father's feet--as if that was what this country was for, as if it made up for the hard early things--for the wrong things.

MADELINE: He must really have been a pretty nice old party. No doubt I would have hit it off with him all right. I don't seem to hit it off with the--speeches about him. Somehow I want to say, 'Oh, give us a rest.'

FEJEVARY: (_offended_) And that, I presume, is what you want to say to me.

MADELINE: No, no, I didn't mean you, Uncle. Though (_hesitatingly_) I was wondering how you could think you were talking on your side.

FEJEVARY: What do you mean--my side?

MADELINE: Oh, I don't--exactly. That's nice about him being--of the earth. Sometimes when I'm out for a tramp--way off by myself--yes, I know. And I wonder if that doesn't explain his feeling about the Indians. Father told me how grandfather took it to heart about the Indians.

FEJEVARY: He felt it as you'd feel it if it were your brother. So he must give his choicest land to the thing we might become. 'Then maybe I can lie under the same sod with the red boys and not be ashamed.'

(MADELINE _nods, appreciatively_.)

MADELINE: Yes, that's really--all right.

FEJEVARY: (_irritated by what seems charily stated approval_) 'All right!' Well, I am not willing to let this man's name pa.s.s from our time. And it seems rather bitter that Silas Morton's granddaughter should be the one to stand in my way.

MADELINE: Why, Uncle Felix, I'm not standing in your way. Of course I wouldn't do that. I--(_rather bashfully_) I love the Hill. I was thinking about it in jail. I got fuddled on direction in there, so I asked the woman who hung around which way was College Hill. 'Right through there', she said. A blank wall. I sat and looked through that wall--long time. (_she looks front, again looking through that blank wall_) It was all--kind of funny. Then later she came and told me you were out there, and I thought it was corking of you to come and tell them they couldn't put that over on College Hill. And I know Bakhshish will appreciate it too. I wonder where he went?

FEJEVARY: Went? I fancy he won't go much of anywhere to-night.

MADELINE: What do you mean?

FEJEVARY: Why, he's held for this hearing, of course.

MADELINE: You mean--you came and got just me--and left him there?

FEJEVARY: Certainly.

MADELINE: (_rising_) Then I'll have to go and get him!

FEJEVARY: Madeline, don't be so absurd. You don't get people out of jail by stopping in and calling for them.

MADELINE: But you got me.

FEJEVARY: Because of years of influence. At that, it wasn't simple.

Things of this nature are pretty serious nowadays. It was only your ignorance got you out.

MADELINE: I do seem ignorant. While you were fixing it up for me, why didn't you arrange for him too?

FEJEVARY: Because I am not in the business of getting foreign revolutionists out of jail.

MADELINE: But he didn't do as much as I did.

FEJEVARY: It isn't what he did. It's what he is. We don't want him here.

MADELINE: Well, I guess I'm not for that!

FEJEVARY: May I ask why you have appointed yourself guardian of these strangers?

MADELINE: Perhaps because they are strangers.