Theft | Page 9

that I am beginning to have a--how shall I call it?--a tolerance for tea in your fashion.
{Margaret}
You are very kind in overlooking our shortcomings.
{Sakari}
(Bowing.) On the contrary, I am unaware, always unaware, of any shortcomings of this marvelous country of yours.
{Margaret}
(Laughing.) You are incorrigibly gracious, Mr. Sakari. (Knox appears at threshold of rear entrance and pauses irresolutely for a moment)
{Sakari}
(Noticing Knox, and looking about him to select which group he will join.) If I may be allowed, I shall now retire and consume this--tea.
(Joins group composed of Connie, Mrs. Dowsett, and Hubbard.)
(Knox comes forward to Margaret, betraying a certain awkwardness due to lack of experience in such social functions. He greets Margaret and those in the group nearest her.)
{Knox}
(To Margaret.) I don't know why I come here. I do not belong. All the ways are strange.
{Margaret}
(Lightly, at the same time preparing his tea.) The same Ali Baba--once again in the den of the forty thieves. But your watch and pocket-book are safe here, really they are.
(Knox makes a gesture of dissent at her facetiousness.) Now don't be serious. You should relax sometimes. You live too tensely.
(Looking at Starkweather.) There's the arch-anarch over there, the dragon you are trying to slay.
(Knox looks at Starkweather and is plainly perplexed.) The man who handles all the life insurance funds, who controls more strings of banks and trust companies than all the Rothschilds a hundred times over--the merger of iron and steel and coal and shipping and all the other things--the man who blocks your child labor bill and all the rest of the remedial legislation you advocate. In short, my father.
{Knox}
(Looking intently at Starkweather.) I should have recognized him from his photographs. But why do you say such things?
{Margaret}
Because they are true.
(He remains silent.) Now, aren't they? (She laughs.) Oh, you don't need to answer. You know the truth, the whole bitter truth. This is a den of thieves. There is Mr. Hubbard over there, for instance, the trusty journalist lieutenant of the corporations.
{Knox}
(With an expression of disgust.) I know him. It was he that wrote the Standard Oil side of the story, after having abused Standard Oil for years in the pseudo-muck-raking magazines. He made them come up to his price, that was all. He's the star writer on Cartwright's, now, since that magazine changed its policy and became subsidizedly reactionary. I know him--a thoroughly dishonest man. Truly am I Ali Baba, and truly I wonder why I am here.
{Margaret}
You are here, sir, because I like you to come.
{Knox}
We do have much in common, you and I.
{Margaret}
The future.
{Knox}
(Gravely, looking at her with shining eyes.) I sometimes fear for more immediate reasons than that.
(Margaret looks at him in alarm, and at the same time betrays pleasure in what he has said.) For you.
{Margaret}
(Hastily.) Don't look at me that way. Your eyes are flashing. Some one might see and misunderstand.
{Knox}
(In confusion, awkwardly.) I was unaware that I--that I was looking at you----in any way that----
{Margaret}
I'll tell you why you are here. Because I sent for you.
{Knox}
(With signs of ardor.) I would come whenever you sent for me, and go wherever you might send me.
{Margaret}
(Reprovingly.)
Please, please---- It was about that speech. I have been hearing about it from everybody--rumblings and mutterings and dire prophecies. I know how busy you are, and I ought not to have asked you to come. But there was no other way, and I was so anxious.
{Knox}
(Pleased.) It seems so strange that you, being what you are, affiliated as you are, should be interested in the welfare of the common people.
{Margaret}
(Judicially.) I do seem like a traitor in my own camp. But as father said a while ago, I, too, have dreamed my dream. I did it as a girl--Plato's Republic, Moore's Utopia--I was steeped in all the dreams of the social dreamers.
(During all that follows of her speech, Knox is keenly interested, his eyes glisten and he hangs on her words.)
And I dreamed that I, too, might do something to bring on the era of universal justice and fair play. In my heart I dedicated myself to the cause of humanity. I made Lincoln my hero-he still is. But I was only a girl, and where was I to find this cause?--how to work for it? I was shut in by a thousand restrictions, hedged in by a thousand conventions. Everybody laughed at me when I expressed the thoughts that burned in me. What could I do? I was only a woman. I had neither vote nor right of utterance. I must remain silent. I must do nothing. Men, in their lordly wisdom, did all. They voted, orated, governed. The place for women was in the home, taking care of some lordly man who did all these lordly things.
{Knox}
You understand, then, why I am for equal suffrage.
{Margaret}
But I learned--or thought