Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 269
“You was friends oncet, Hiram,” sobs Martha again, “years ago before he went to the city you was friends.”
“Friends!” raves the farmer, “a fine friend, drawing me on with his schemes of money and profit. ‘To make my fortune,’ he said — a fine fortune — ruin, ruin it meant — till I had signed this and signed that, till it was all mortgaged away and till he held me, as he thought, in the hollow of his hand. Martha, if that man stood before me now, by the God that lives, I could choke him with these hands.”
Hiram makes a gesture so terrible and yet so passionate that the one hope of the audience in the top gallery is that Lawyer Ellwood will happen along right now and get choked.
Martha tries to dry her eyes.
“Nay, Hiram, you mustn’t talk like that. Those are evil thoughts. It is God’s will, Hiram, and it must be right. But we can’t never pay.”
“Not pay,” shouts Hiram, “who says I can’t pay? I can pay and when that man comes to-morrow I can throw the money in his face. Look, Martha, there it is!”
Hiram Haycroft draws a great wallet from his pocket and slaps it down on the palm of his hand.
“Two thousand dollars, every cent of his accursed debt. Martha, it will mean poverty and hard times for us where all was plenty, but, thank God! it can be paid.”
“Why, Hiram!”
“I’ve raised it, Martha. I’ve sold the stock, I’ve parted with this and I’ve pledged that — everything but the roof above our heads is sold or pledged. But this accursed mortgage can be paid.”
“Oh, Hiram!”
“It will mean hard times again, hard and bitter times—”
“I don’t mind that, Hiram” — and Martha puts her hands up to her husband’s neck— “we’ve borne it together before and we can bear it together again — But oh, Hiram, if only our boy Jack had been spared to us, I could have borne it so easily then.”
Martha begins to cry.
“There, there, Martha,” says the farmer, “you mustn’t lay it so to heart. The sea has taken him, Mother, as it has taken many a brave lad before him—”
“The sea, the sea—” groans Martha, “I see it there so bright and calm in the sunlight. But will it give me back my boy? Three years this day, Hiram since he left us. I can feel his good-bye kiss still on my cheek. And since then no word, never a word.”
Hiram draws his wife to him to comfort her.
“Come, Mother, come into the house; we mustn’t show sad faces for Hope’s home coming — come—”
They go in through the wooden porch under the flowers on the right, leaving the audience sad and disturbed. That infernal lawyer! But they were all alike in 1880. Show them a sun-lit farm and a happy family and they clap a mortgage on it at sight. And to think that farmer Haycroft and his wife had lost their only son at sea — that calm blue sea in the back curtain with the sunlight on it.
In fact the play is getting too sad; so it has to be relieved and Rube and Phœbe are brought on to the stage again and go through one of those rural love scenes that were used to ease the strain of the melodrama. Rube shambles over to her in a sheepish way, evidently proposing to kiss her, and says:
“Ain’t you got nothing for me this morning, Phœbe?”
And Phœbe says:
“Go along, you big thing, I’ve got that for you,” and swats him over the face with a thistle. The audience roar with laughter, the strain is removed and they’re ready to get on with the play when Phœbe disappears with Rube in pursuit.
“Why, Mother,” — it is Hope calling— “where are you, Mother?”
“I’m here, daughter,” says Martha, reappearing out of the porch.
“I was looking for you all over, Mother,” says Hope, coming over to her coyly. “I have been wanting so much to talk to you all by ourselves.”
“Ah! And I think I can guess something of what that’s about.” Martha has taken Hope’s hand in hers and is patting it and Hope is looking at the ground and swinging herself about on one heel in a way that in a New England play always symbolized the approach of love.
“ — and now Hope tell me all about it,” says the farmer’s wife.
“You remember, Mother, that I wrote and told you that I had a secret—”
“Yes, dearie, a great secret, you said—”
“ — a secret that I didn’t want to put on paper and didn’t want to tell to anybody till I could tell it to you first, Mother dear.”
Hope has snuggled up close to her mother, who is patting her on the shoulder and repeating. “Ay, lass a great secret, and I’ll be bound I can guess a little of what it is — I suppose it means that there is someone — that my little girl—”
She whispers into Hope’s ear.
“Oh, Mother,” Hope goes on, “it’s even greater than that. Look, Mother, see what’s on my hand.”
Hope holds out her hand, her face downcast and not only her mother but even the girls in the gallery can see the plain gold ring that’s on her finger. The men in the audience don’t get it, but the girls and women explain to them what it is.
“Why Hope, darling,” says Martha, all in a tremble, “what does it mean?”
“Why, Mother, it means — it means,” Hope takes a flying leap into her mother’s arms— “it means, Mother, that I’m married.”
“Married!”
“Yes, married, Mother, last Saturday in Boston at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“Married, my little girl married!”
Martha has to be terribly astonished so as to keep the audience in the same frame of mind: not at Hope being married the very day she left her finishing school. That was nothing. — That was a favourite way of getting married in 1880 — but at the fact that she hadn’t told her mother about it. So Martha keeps repeating —
“Married! My little girl married!”
“It was all in such a hurry, Mother — I couldn’t tell you. It all came so sudden—”
Hope is half crying, half smiling.
“But I shouldn’t cry, Mother, because really I’m so happy—”
“That’s right, darling, and now tell me all about it.”
“We were married in Boston last Saturday, Mother. And, oh, I did so want you to be there, only it couldn’t be. It was all in such a hurry — because Ned was offered a new ship — just think, Mother, captain of a ship at twenty-one.”
“Not a sailor, dearie,” says Martha Haycroft in evident agitation, “don’t tell me that your man is a sailor.”
“Why, yes, Mother, Ned’s been at sea ever since he was fifteen.”
“The sea, the sea,” groans the farmer’s wife. “I see it flying there in the sunlight. I hear it roaring in the winter wind. When will it give me back my boy?”
“Mother, you mustn’t cry. It was years ago and it was God’s will, and Mother, Ned will only be at sea a little while longer now — just this one voyage in his new ship, and listen, Mother, Ned’s new ship (it’s a schooner, Mother, and it’s Ned’s father who owns it and it’s called the Good Hope, after me) — will be off the coast here this evening, and if Ned can manage it he’ll come ashore and see us all, and his father — though I’ve never seen him — will be with Ned. And Ned is to settle down and be a farmer, Mother, on a farm beside the sea. His father is a rich lawyer in Boston, Mother, and Ned says that his father has a mortgage on a farm right on the seashore just like this, and after this one voyage—”
“A lawyer, a rich lawyer!”
“Yes, Mother, a rich lawyer in Boston, but he once lived in the country, near here I think, years ago.”
“His name? What name?”
“Ellwood, Mother, Lawyer Ephraim Ellwood.”
Martha breaks from her daughter in alarm.
“No, no, not that, don’t say it’s that name — Hope, it couldn’t be, it can’t be.”
And at that moment the farmer, Hiram Haycroft, steps on to the stage.
“Why, Mother! Why, Hope! What’s — what’s all this?”
Hope (tearfully)— “I don’t know, Father; I only began to tell Mother a secret—”
“Yes, daughter!”
“That I — that we — that I am married, Father.”
“Married, my little girl married! That don’t seem possible. But what’s all this ado about, Mother, and who’s the lucky man that’s gone and taken my little girl?”
Hiram comes over affectionately and takes Hope’s two hands.
“Only yesterday, it seems,” he says, “that I held you on my knees, little gal, and now to be married.”
All the audience waits in a luxury of expectation. They know that the farmer is going to get an awful jolt.
Then he gets it.
“He’s the son of a rich Boston lawyer, Father, who — has a mortgage on a farm—”
The farmer has dropped Hope’s hands, his face is darkening.
“And Ned is to have the farm — Ned Ellwood is his name, Father, see it here.”
Hope timidly takes out a paper from her dress.
“Here on my marriage certificate.”
But the farmer doesn’t hear her. He stands a moment, his fists clenched, then bursts into wild rage.
“Ellwood, Lawyer Ellwood. My daughter marry a son of that man! By the living God, Hope, sooner than see you married to a son of his, I’d see you lying fathoms deep under the sea beside my son. God hears me say it, and may God so order it!”
And as Hiram Haycroft stands, with this fateful invocation on his lips, the freckled boy runs on the stage and says:
“Say, Hope, ain’t you never coming to see that brindle cow?”
And with that the curtain slowly falls, and Act I is over.
No wonder that as the curtain falls there’s a terrible feeling of sadness and apprehension all over the audience. No wonder that even before the curtain has reached the floor a great many of the men in that 1880 audience have risen and are walking up the aisles to get out of the theatre. They can’t stand the strain of it, — the thought of the beautiful old New England homestead all brought to sorrow and tragedy like this. It’s too much for them. They must have air. They’ve gone to look for it outside the theatre. Even though the playbill says that only ten hours elapse between Act I and II (pretty rapid work for 1880) they’re taking a chance on it.
So the able-bodied men in the audience go out leaving behind only the young, the infirm, and the women (women never took anything to drink, anyway, before prohibition). There is a great sadness over the audience now because they know by experience that once the old homestead starts going to pieces like this things will go from bad to worse. Even the fact that the orchestra is now playing In the Gloaming, Oh, My Darling doesn’t help things much.
So presently the men come back and the orchestra is stopped and the gas cut down and the curtain is hauled away up to the roof and it’s —
ACT II — Same Evening. The Kitchen of the Haycroft Farm.
“You’ll find us plain folk, sir, just plain folk. But if it’ll please you to take what plain folk can offer you’re heartily welcome. Now then, Phœbe girl, a chair here for the gentleman. Put another stick in the stove, Rube, it’s a cold night in this November wind.”
The stranger, in a strange voice, “Ay, it’s a cold night.”
The scene is in the farm kitchen, one of those big old farm kitchens of 1880 that filled the whole stage. There was a cooking stove, — about ten feet by six in the centre stage and a fireplace with a mantel off at one side, and doors and windows, — in fact all the things that will be needed in the act, not forgetting a shotgun hanging ominously on two hooks. At the back is a big table all laid out for about a dozen guests, with Phœbe all done up in her best things fussing round laying dishes. Martha Haycroft, also in her best things (black satin with a sort of crispiness to it) is cooking at the stove. Putting the farm people with their best clothes was always supposed to imply a comic touch. Rube has on clothes like a congressman’s, only lower in the coat tails and higher in the collar.
This, of course, was the supper that the farmer spoke of when he said they’d call in the neighbours.
Only for the moment all the eyes of the audience are turned on the stranger. He has a crop of straight white hair (a wig evidently) and a white beard — false, of course — and he walks partly bent with a stick, and he looks all about him, all round the room with such a queer look, as if he recognized it.
All the audience feel instinctively that that stranger is disguised. Indeed in this sort of play there always had to be somebody who turned out to be someone else.
“A raw night, sir,” repeats the farmer, “there’s an evil howl in the wind; I reckon there’ll be stormy weather at sea, to-night, sir—”
The farmer is evidently right — for just as he says it somebody behind the scene turns on the wind with a wild and mournful howl. Luckily they don’t leave it on long, just enough to let the audience know it’s there.
“I just been down to the shore, sir,” the farmer goes on, “I tend the light here at the foot of the farm. ‘Twill be a bad night at sea to-night.”
“A bad night for those at sea,” repeats the stranger.
The wind howls again. Martha pauses in her cooking, looks a moment towards the window and murmurs, “The sea, the sea.”
Martha, the farmer’s wife had to play alternatively a pathetic character and a comic one. It was hard to do, but the audience understood it. So she mutters “The sea! the sea!” with the yearning of a mother for her lost son, and then goes back to blowing up pancakes on the cook-stove. If that violated unity of the drama we didn’t know it in 1880, so it did no harm.
“But come, come,” says the farmer, “this ain’t no night for feeling down-hearted. I hear the neighbours outside. Come, Martha, we’ll go out and bring them in.”
This leaves Phœbe and Rube alone except for the stranger who has gone across the room and is standing with his back to them, lost in thought. So Rube and Phœbe do another love scene. Rube comes to her along side the table and has only just time to say “Phœbe!” with a slow grin and to try to take her by the waist when she lands him across the face with a pancake. The audience roar with delight and continue laughing till they suddenly come to a full stop when they see that there is something happening with the stranger.
He has been standing with his back turned, silent. Then without warning, he speaks, his back still turned, not in his counterfeited tone, but in a loud clear voice, the voice of youth:
“Rube!”
Rube and Phœbe start. “What voice is that?” says Rube, shaking with agitation.
The stranger turns, plucks away his white wig and his white beard and stands revealed.
“Jack! It’s Mr. Jack, come back from the dead!” cries Phœbe.
“Ain’t you drowned?” cries Rube.
They crowd close to him in eager recognition; and Jack, young and boyish now, laughs and greets them. “Let me run and call the boss and the missus,” pleads Phœbe, but Jack restrains her.
“Not now,” he says, “they mustn’t know yet.”
He goes on to reveal, all in whispers and in gestures which the audience are not intended to unravel, that his father and mother must not know yet. He takes from his pocket a bundle of something — is it paper or money or what? The audience can’t see it decently but Rube and Phœbe seem to understand and he is just explaining about it when the noise is heard of the farmer and his wife and the farm guests all coming back.
The stranger motions Rube and Phœbe to secrecy and is disguised again in a minute.
In they all come, the farm people all dressed in the queer pathos of their Sunday things and there follows the great supper scene, without which no rural melodrama was complete. Hear how they chatter and laugh. “Well, for the land’s sake, taste them doughnuts!” “Neighbour Jephson, try a slice of this pie.” “Well, I don’t mind if I do.” “Farmer Haycroft here’s your good health and Miss Hope’s good health and of all present.” “Hear! Hear!” and then someone chokes on a crumb and is beaten on the back.
The supper scene lasts ten minutes by the clock. The stranger has sat silent, beaming quiet approval and at the height of the merriment retired quietly to his room, a side room opening on the kitchen. Martha has lighted a candle for him and as he thanks her for it she says— “You’re a stranger in these parts, sir? There’s something in your voice I seem to know.” All the audience want to shout “He’s your son.” It is a touch taken right out of Sophocles. Hope meantime busies herself among the guests. Hiram Haycroft drinks great flagons of cider. At intervals the wind is turned on against the window panes to remain the audience that it’s a wild night outside.
Then for a moment the farmer leaves the room because he has to go and trim his light down on the shore.
While he is still out there is loud knocking at the door. Rube goes to it and opens it — with a special biff of wind produced for his benefit — and then shows in two strangers.
A young man and an old. The young man is tall and bronzed and sailorlike and Hope runs to him at once, with a glad cry of “Ned! My Ned!” His arms are about her in a moment and the whole theatre knows that it is her husband.
“We’ve put in under the point,” Ned explains, “and I come ashore. But it’s only to say good-bye. The Good Hope can’t lie there in this rising wind. We’ll have to put off at once. This is my father, Hope. You’ll be a daughter to him while I’m gone!”
Hope goes up to the old man and puts her two hands in his and says, oh, so sweetly, “I will indeed, sir, for Ned’s sake.”
But her mother has risen, shrinking, from her place.
“Ellwood,” she says, “Lawyer Ellwood.”
All the audience look at the old man. A fox certainly — oh, a sly old fox — just that look of mean cunning that stamped every rural lawyer in every melodrama for thirty years. But Hope sees nothing of it.
“No, Ned, you mustn’t put to sea to-night. It’s too wild a night. Hear how the rain is driving at the windows. You must stay here and your father, too. Mother, this is Ned, my husband, and this is his father, and these are our friends, Ned, and father’s only gone to the light. He’ll be back in just a minute—”
