She was no longer a human being; she was an Intelligence and an EAR. Not a sound came from without, even the Elevated appeared to be temporarily off duty; but inside the big quiet house that footfall was waxing louder, louder, until iron feet crashed on iron stairs and echo thundered.
She had counted the steps--one--two--three--irritated beyond endurance at the long deliberate pauses between. As they climbed and clanged with slow precision she continued to count, audibly and with equal precision, noting their hollow reverberation. How many steps had the stair? She wished she knew. No need! The colossal trampling announced the lessening distance in an increasing volume of sound not to be misunderstood. It turned the curve; it reached the landing; it advanced--slowly--down the hall; it paused before her door. Then knuckles of iron shook the frail panels. Her nerveless tongue gave no invitation. The knocking became more imperious; the very walls vibrated. The handle turned, swiftly and firmly. With a wild instinctive movement she flung herself into the arms of her husband.
When Mary opened the door and entered the room she found a dead woman lying across a dead man.
IX
A Prologue
(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 ma.s.ses 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 att.i.tude, 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 G.o.d! 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 a.s.sumed 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--
RACHAEL. No one but a girl of sixteen, to whom no one would listen--
MISTRESS FAWCETT. I commanded you to hush.
RACHAEL. Command the hurricane! I will speak!
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Very well, speak. It may be our last hour--who knows?
(She seats herself, sets her lips, and presses her hands hard on the handle of her crutch.)
RACHAEL. Did you think you knew me in the two years that followed, years when I was as speechless as while in bondage to John Lavine, when I crouched in the dark corners, fearing the light, the sound of every man"s voice? Then health again, and normal interests, but not hope--not hope! At nineteen I had lived too long! You are sixty, and you have not the vaguest idea what that means! Then, four weeks ago--
MISTRESS FAWCETT. Ah!
RACHAEL. James Hamilton came. Ah, how unprepared I was! That I--_I_ should ever look upon another man except with loathing! Sixty and twenty--perhaps somewhere between is the age of wisdom! And the law holds me fast to a man who is not fit to live! All nature awoke in me and sang the hour I met Hamilton. For the first time I loved children, and longed for them. For the first time I saw G.o.d in man. For the first time the future seemed vast, interminable, yet all too short. And if I go to this man who has made me feel great and wonderful enough to bear a demi-G.o.d, a wretch can divorce and disgrace me! Oh, these four terrible weeks--ecstasy, despair--ecstasy, despair--and to the world as unblinking as a marble in a museum! Do you wonder that I welcome the hurricane, in which no man dare think of any but his puny self? For the moment I am free, and as alive, as triumphant as that great wind outside--as eager to devastate, to fight, to conquer, to live--to live--to live. What do I care for civilization? If James Hamilton were out there among the flying trees and called to me, I would go. Hark!
Listen! Is it not magnificent?
[The hurricane is nearer and louder. The approaching roar is varied by sudden tremendous gusts, the hissing and splashing of water, the howling of negroes and dogs, the wild pealing of bells. In the room below is heard the noise of many trampling feet, slamming of windows, and smothered exclamations.]
MISTRESS FAWCETT. The negroes have taken refuge in the cellar--every one of them, beyond a doubt, two hundred and more! G.o.d grant they do not die of fright or suffocation. It is useless to attempt to coax them up here.
These only wait until our backs are turned. Look!
[The slaves have crawled to the door on the left. They are livid. Their tongues hang out. Rachael runs forward, seizes them by their long hair, and administers a severe shaking.]