(quickly takes up the burning cigarette from the tray and puffs at it, talking through the puffs)
Oh yes, I’m going to tell this too. A confidante. You know: the big-time ball player, the idol on the pedestal, the worshipped; and the worshipper, the acolyte, the one that never had and never would, no matter how willing or how hard she tried, get out of the sandlots, the bush league. You know: the long afternoons, with the last electric button pressed on the last cooking or washing or sweeping gadget and the baby safely asleep for a while, and the two sisters in sin swapping trade or anyway avocational secrets over Coca-Colas in the quiet kitchen. Somebody to talk to, as we all seem to need, want, have to have, not to converse with you nor even agree with you, but just keep quiet and listen.
Which is all that people really want, really need; I mean, to behave themselves, keep out of one another’s hair; the maladjustments which they tell us breed the arsonists and rapists and murderers and thieves and the rest of the antisocial enemies, are not really maladjustments but simply because the embryonic murderers and thieves didn’t have anybody to listen to them: which is an idea the Catholic Church discovered two thousand years ago only it just didn’t carry it far enough or maybe it was too busy being the Church to have time to bother with man, or maybe it wasn’t the Church’s fault at all but simply because it had to deal with human beings and maybe if the world was just populated with a kind of creature half of which were dumb, couldn’t do anything but listen, couldn’t even escape from having to listen to the other half, there wouldn’t even be any war. Which was what Temple had: somebody paid by the week, just to listen, which you would have thought would have been enough; and then the other baby came, the infant, the doomed sacrifice (though of course we don’t know that yet) and you would have thought that this was surely enough, that now even Temple Drake would consider herself safe, could be depended on, having two — what do sailors call them? oh yes, sheet-anchors — now. Only it wasn’t enough. Because Hemingway was right. I mean, the gir — woman in his book. All you have got to do is, refuse to accept. Only, you have got to . . . refuse ——
STEVENS
Now, the letters ——
GOVERNOR
(watching Temple)
Be quiet, Gavin.
STEVENS
No, I’m going to talk a while now. We’ll even stick to the sports metaphor and call it a relay race, with the senior member of the team carrying the . . . baton, twig, switch, sapling, tree — whatever you want to call the symbolical wood, up what remains of the symbolical hill.
(the lights flicker, grow slightly dimmer, then flare back up and steady again, as though in a signal, a warning)
The letters. The blackmail. The blackmailer was Red’s younger brother — a criminal of course, but at least a man ——
TEMPLE
No! No!
STEVENS
(to Temple)
Be quiet too. It only goes up a hill, not over a precipice. Besides, it’s only a stick. The letters were not first. The first thing was the gratitude. And now we have even come to the husband, my nephew. And when I say ‘past,’ I mean that part of it which the husband knows so far, which apparently was enough in his estimation. Because it was not long before she discovered, realised, that she was going to spend a good part of the rest of her days (nights too) being forgiven for it; in being not only constantly reminded — well, maybe not specifically reminded, but say made — kept — aware of it in order to be forgiven for it so that she might be grateful to the forgiver, but in having to employ more and more of what tact she had — and the patience which she probably didn’t know she had, since until now she had never occasion to need patience — to make the gratitude — in which she had probably had as little experience as she had had with patience — acceptable to meet with, match, the high standards of the forgiver. But she was not too concerned. Her husband — my nephew — had made what he probably considered the supreme sacrifice to expiate his part in her past; she had no doubts of her capacity to continue to supply whatever increasing degree of gratitude the increasing appetite — or capacity — of its addict would demand, in return for the sacrifice which, so she believed, she had accepted for the same reason of gratitude. Besides, she still had the legs and the eyes; she could walk away, escape, from it at any moment she wished, even though her past might have shown her that she probably would not use the ability to locomote to escape from threat and danger. Do you accept that?
GOVERNOR
All right. Go on.
STEVENS
Then she discovered that the child — the first one — was on the way. For that first instant, she must have known something almost like frenzy. Now she couldn’t escape; she had waited too long. But it was worse than that. It was as though she realised for the first time that you — everyone — must, or anyway may have to, pay for your past; that past is something like a promissory note with a trick clause in it which, as long as nothing goes wrong, can be manumitted in an orderly manner, but which fate or luck or chance can foreclose on you without warning. That is, she had known, accepted, this all the time and dismissed it because she knew that she could cope, was invulnerable through simple integration, own-womanness. But now there would be a child, tender and defenceless. But you never really give up hope, you know, not even after you finally realise that people not only can bear anything, but probably will have to, so probably even before the frenzy had had time to fade, she found a hope: which was the child’s own tender and defenceless innocence: that God — if there was one — would protect the child — not her: she asked no quarter and wanted none; she could cope, either cope or bear it, but the child from the sight draft of her past — because it was innocent, even though she knew better, all her observation having shown her that God either would not or could not — anyway, did not — save innocence just because it was innocent; that when He said ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me’ He meant exactly that: He meant suffer; that the adults, the fathers, the old in and capable of sin, must be ready and willing — nay, eager — to suffer at any time, that the little children shall come unto Him unanguished, unterrified, undefiled. Do you accept that?
GOVERNOR
Go on.
STEVENS
So at least she had ease. Not hope: ease. It was precarious of course, a balance, but she could walk a tight-rope too. It was as though she had struck, not a bargain, but an armistice with God — if there was one. She had not tried to cheat; she had not tried to evade the promissory note of her
