She stares at him; another moment. Then he rises, still watching her; she stares steadily and implacably back. Then he moves.
Good night.
STEVENS
Good night.
He goes back to the chair, takes up his coat and hat, then goes on to the hall door, has put his hand on the knob.
TEMPLE
Gavin.
(he pauses, his hand on the knob, and looks back at her)
Maybe I’ll have the handkerchief, after all.
(he looks at her a moment longer, then releases the knob, takes the handkerchief from his breast pocket as he crosses back toward her, extends it. She doesn’t take it)
All right. What will I have to do? What do you suggest, then?
STEVENS
Everything.
TEMPLE
Which of course I won’t. I will not. You can understand that, can’t you? At least you can hear it. So let’s start over, shall we? How much will I have to tell?
STEVENS
Everything.
TEMPLE
Then I won’t need the handkerchief, after all. Good night. Close the front door when you go out, please. It’s getting cold again.
He turns, crosses again to the door without stopping nor looking back, exits, closes the door behind him. She is not watching him either now. For a moment after the door has closed, she doesn’t move. Then she makes a gesture something like Gowan’s in Scene Two, except that she merely presses her palms for a moment hard against her face, her face calm, expressionless, cold, drops her hands, turns, picks up the crushed cigarette from beside the tray and puts it into the tray and takes up the tray and crosses to the fireplace, glancing down at the sleeping child as she passes the sofa, empties the tray into the fireplace and returns to the table and puts the tray on it and this time pauses at the sofa and stoops and tucks the blanket closer about the sleeping child and then goes on to the telephone and lifts the receiver.
(into the phone)
Three-two-nine, please.
(while she stands waiting for the answer, there is a slight movement in the darkness beyond the open door at rear, just enough silent movement to show that something or someone is there or has moved there. Temple is unaware of it since her back is turned. Then she speaks into the phone)
Maggie? Temple. . . . Yes, suddenly . . . Oh, I don’t know; perhaps we got bored with sunshine. . . . Of course, I may drop in tomorrow. I wanted to leave a message for Gavin . . . I know; he’s just left here. Something I forgot . . . If you’ll ask him to call me when he comes in. . . . Yes. . . . Wasn’t it. . . . Yes. . . . If you will . . . Thank you.
(she puts the receiver down and starts to turn back into the room when the telephone rings. She turns back, takes up the receiver, speaks into it)
Hello . . . Yes. Coincidence again; I had my hand on it; I had just called Maggie. . . . Oh, the filling station. I didn’t think you had had time. I can be ready in thirty minutes. Your car, or ours? . . . All right. Listen. . . . Yes, I’m here. Gavin . . . How much will I have to tell?
(hurriedly)
Oh, I know: you’ve already told me eight or ten times. But maybe I didn’t hear it right. How much will I have to tell?
(she listens a moment, quiet, frozen-faced, then slowly begins to lower the receiver toward the stand; she speaks quietly, without inflection)
Oh, God. Oh, God.
She puts the receiver down, crosses to the sofa, snaps off the table lamp and takes up the child and crosses to the door to the hall, snaps off the remaining room lights as she goes out, so that the only light in the room now enters from the hall. As soon as she has disappeared from sight, Gowan enters from the door at rear, dressed except for his coat, waistcoat and tie. He has obviously taken no sleeping pill. He goes to the phone and stands quietly beside it, facing the hall door and obviously listening until Temple is safely away. Now the hall light snaps off, and the stage is in complete darkness.
GOWAN’S VOICE
(quietly)
Three-two-nine, please . . . Good evening, Aunt Maggie. Gowan . . . All right, thank you . . . Sure, some time tomorrow. As soon as Uncle Gavin comes in, will you have him call me? I’ll be right here. Thank you.
Sound of the receiver as he puts it back.
(CURTAIN)
Act II
THE GOLDEN DOME (Beginning Was the Word)
JACKSON. ALT. 294 ft. Pop. (a.d. 1950) 201,092.
Located by an expedition of three Commissioners selected appointed and dispatched for that single purpose, on a high bluff above Pearl River at the approximate geographical centre of the State, to be not a market nor industrial town, nor even as a place for men to live, but to be a capital, the Capital of a Commonwealth;
In the beginning was already decreed this rounded knob, this gilded pustule, already before and beyond the steamy chiaroscuro, untimed unseasoned winterless miasma not any one of water or earth or life yet all of each, inextricable and indivisible; that one seethe one spawn one mother-womb, one furious tumescence, father-mother-one, one vast incubant ejaculation already fissionating in one boiling moil of litter from the celestial experimental Work Bench; that one spawning crawl and creep printing with three-toed mastodonic tracks the steamy-green swaddling clothes of the coal and the oil, above which the pea-brained reptilian heads curved the heavy leather-flapped air;
Then the ice, but still this knob, this pimple-dome, this buried half-ball hemisphere; the earth lurched, heaving darkward the long continental flank, dragging upward beneath the polar cap that furious equatorial womb, the shutter-lid of cold severing off into blank and heedless void one last sound, one cry, one puny myriad indictment already fading and then no more, the blind and tongueless earth spinning on, looping the long recordless astral orbit, frozen, tideless, yet still was there this tiny gleam, this spark, this gilded crumb of man’s eternal aspiration, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this minuscule fœtus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze; the earth lurched again, sloughing; the ice with infinitesimal speed, scouring out the valleys, scoring the hills, and vanished; the earth tilted further to recede the sea rim by necklace-rim of crustacean husks in recessional contour lines like the concentric whorls within the sawn stump telling the tree’s age, bearing south by recessional south toward that mute and beckoning gleam the confluent continental swale, baring to light and air the broad blank mid-continental page for the first scratch of orderly recording — a laboratory-factory covering what would be twenty states, established and ordained for the purpose of manufacturing one: the ordered unhurried whirl of seasons, of rain and snow and freeze and thaw and sun and drouth to aerate and slack the soil, the conflux of a hundred rivers into one vast father of rivers carrying the rich dirt, the rich garnering, south and south, carving the bluffs to bear the long march of the river towns, flooding the Mississippi lowlands, spawning the rich alluvial dirt layer by vernal layer, raising inch by foot by year by century the surface of the earth which in time (not distant now, measured against that long signatureless chronicle) would tremble to the passing of trains like when the cat crosses the suspension bridge;
The rich deep black alluvial soil which would grow cotton taller than the head of a man on a horse, already one jungle one brake one impassable density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash, printed now by the tracks of unalien shapes — bear and deer and panthers and bison and wolves and alligators and the myriad smaller beasts, and unalien men to name them too perhaps — the (themselves) nameless though recorded predecessors who built the mounds to escape the spring floods and left their meagre artifacts: the obsolete and the dispossessed, dispossessed by those who were dispossessed in turn because they too were obsolete: the wild Algonquian, Chickasaw and Choctaw and Natchez and Pascagoula, peering in virgin astonishment down from the tall bluffs at a Chippeway canoe bearing three Frenchmen — and had barely time to whirl and look behind him at ten and then a hundred and then a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic Ocean:
a tide, a wash, a thrice flux-and-ebb of motion so rapid and quick across the land’s slow alluvial chronicle as to resemble the limber flicking of the magician’s one hand before the other holding the deck of inconstant cards: the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second, half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer, the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey, Bible and jug in one hand and (like as not) a native tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent not through viciousness but simply because of his over-revved glands; uxorious and polygamous: a married invincible bachelor, dragging his gravid wife and most of the rest of his mother-in-law’s family behind him into the trackless infested forest, spawning that child as like as not
