MARTHA: Surely I made it clear enough. We did to your husband last night what we had done to other travelers before; we killed him and took his money.
MARIA: So his mother and sister were criminals?
MARTHA: Yes. But that’s their business, and no one else’s.
MARIA [still controlling herself with an effort]: Had you learned he was your brother when you did it?
MARTHA: If you must know, there was a misunderstanding. And if you have any experience at all of the world, that won’t surprise you.
MARIA [going toward the table, her hands clenched on her breast; in a low, sad voice]: Oh, my God, I knew it! I knew this play acting was bound to end in tragedy and we’d be punished, he and I, for having lent ourselves to it. I felt danger in the very air one breathes in this country. [She stops in front of the table and goes on speaking, without looking at MARTHA.] He wanted to make his home-coming a surprise, to get you to recognize him and to bring you happiness. Only at first he couldn’t find the words that were needed. And then, while he was groping for the words, he was killed. [Weeping.] And you, like two madwomen, blind to the marvelous son who had returned to you—for marvelous he was, and you will never know the greatheartedness, the noble soul, of the man you killed last night.… He might have been your pride, as he was mine. But, no, you were his enemy—oh, the pity of it!—for else how could you bring yourself to speak so calmly of what should make you rush into the street, screaming out your heart, like a wounded animal?
MARTHA: You have no right to sit in judgment without knowing all. By now my mother’s lying with her son, pressed to the sluice-gate, and the current is beginning to gnaw their faces, and buffeting them against the rotting piles. Soon their bodies will be drawn up and buried together in the same earth. But I cannot see what there is even in this to set me screaming with pain. I have a very different idea of the human heart, and, to be frank, your tears revolt me.
MARIA [swinging round on her fiercely]: My tears are for the joys I’ve lost for ever; for a life’s happiness stolen from me. And this is better for you than the tearless grief I shall have presently, which could kill you without the flutter of an eyelid.
MARTHA: Do not imagine talk like that affects me; really it would make little difference. For I, too, have seen and heard enough; I, too, have resolved to die. But I shall not join them; why, indeed, would I want their company? I shall leave them to their new-found love, to their dark embraces. Neither you nor I have any part in these; all that is ended and they are unfaithful to us—forever. Luckily I have my bedroom and its roof-beam is strong.
MARIA: What does it matter to me that you die or the whole world falls in ruins, if through you I have lost the man I love, and henceforth I am doomed to live in a dark night of loneliness, where every memory is a torture?
[MARTHA comes behind her and speaks over her head.]
MARTHA: Let’s not exaggerate. You have lost your husband and I have lost my mother. We are even. But you have only lost him once, after enjoying his love for years and without his having cast you off. My lot is worse. First my mother cast me off, and now she is dead. I have lost her twice.
MARIA: Yes, perhaps I might be tempted to pity you and share my grief with you, if I did not know what was awaiting him, alone in his room last night, when you were plotting his death.
MARTHA [her voice has a sudden accent of despair]: I’m even with your husband, too, for I have suffered as he suffered. Like him, I thought I had made my home sure for always; I thought that crime had forged a bond between me and my mother that nothing could ever break. And on whom in all the world should I rely, if not on the woman who had killed beside me? I was mistaken. Crime, too, means solitude, even if a thousand people join together to commit it. And it is fitting that I should die alone, after having lived and killed alone. [MARIA turns toward her, tears streaming down her cheeks. MARTHA moves back, her voice grows hard again.] Stop! I told you not to touch me. At the mere thought that a human hand could lay its warmth on me before I die; at the mere thought that anything at all resembling the foul love of men is dogging me still, I feel the blood pulsing in my temples in a fury of disgust.
[MARIA has risen to her feet. The two women now are face to face, standing very near each other.]
MARIA: Have no fear. I shall do nothing to prevent your dying as you wish. For with this hideous pain that grips my body like a vise, I feel a sort of blindness falling on my eyes and everything around me is growing dim. Neither you nor your mother will ever be more to me than vague, fleeting faces that came and went in the course of a tragedy which can never end. For you, Martha, I have no hatred and no pity. I have lost the power of loving or hating anybody. [Suddenly she buries her face in her hands.] But then—I have hardly had time to suffer or to rebel. My calamity was … too big for me.
MARTHA [who has taken some steps toward the door, comes back toward MARIA]: But still not big enough; it has left you eyes to weep with. And I see that something remains for me to do before leaving you for ever. I have yet to drive you to despair.
MARIA [gazing at her, horror-stricken]: Oh, please leave me alone! Go away, and let me be!
MARTHA: Yes, I am going, and it will be a relief for me, as well. Your love and your tears are odious to me. But before I go to die, I must rid you of the illusion that you are right, that love isn’t futile, and that what has happened was an accident. On the contrary, it’s now that we are in the normal order of things, and I must convince you of it.
MARIA: What do you mean by that?
MARTHA: That in the normal order of things no one is ever recognized.
MARIA [distractedly]: Oh, what do I care? I only know that my heart is torn to shreds, and nothing, nothing matters to it except the man you killed.
MARTHA [savagely]: Be silent! I will not have you speak of that man; I loathe him. And he is nothing to you now. He has gone down into the bitter house of eternal exile. The fool! Well, he has got what he wanted; he is with the woman he crossed the sea to find. So all of us are served now, as we should be, in the order of things. But fix this in your mind; neither for him nor for us, neither in life nor in death, is there any peace or homeland. [With a scornful laugh] For you’ll agree one can hardly call it a home, that place of clotted darkness underground, to which we go from here to feed blind animals.
MARIA [weeping]: I can’t, oh, no, I can’t bear to hear you talk like that. And I know he, too, wouldn’t have borne it. It was to find another homeland that he crossed the sea.
MARTHA [who has walked to the door, swings round on her]: His folly has received its wages. And soon you will receive yours. [Laughing as before] We’re cheated, I tell you. Cheated! What do they serve, those blind impulses that surge up in us, the yearnings that rack our souls? Why cry out for the sea, or for love? What futility! Your husband knows now what the answer is: that charnel house where in the end we shall lie huddled together, side by side. [Vindictively] A time will come when you, too, know it, and then, could you remember anything, you would recall as a delightful memory this day which seems to you the beginning of the cruelest of exiles. Try to realize that no grief of yours can ever equal the injustice done to man.
And now—before I go, let me give a word of advice; I owe it to you, since I killed your husband. Pray your God to harden you to stone. It’s the happiness. He has assigned Himself, and the one true happiness. Do as He does, be deaf to all appeals, and turn your heart to stone while there still is time. But if you feel you lack the courage to enter into this hard, blind peace—then come and join us in our common house. Good-by, my sister. As you see, it’s all quite simple. You have a choice between the mindless happiness of stones and the slimy bed in which we are awaiting you.
[She goes out. MARIA, who has been listening in horrified amazement, sways, stretching out her
