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The Hairy Ape, a play by Eugene O'Neill |
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Scene 2 |
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_ SCENE II SCENE--Two days out. A section of the promenade deck. MILDRED DOUGLAS and her aunt are discovered reclining in deck chairs. The former is a girl of twenty, slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful superiority. She looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia. Her aunt is a pompous and proud--and fat--old lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, as if afraid her face alone would never indicate her position in life. MILDRED is dressed all in white. The impression to be conveyed by this scene is one of the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about--sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it. In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending. MILDRED How the black smoke swirls back against the sky! Is it not beautiful? AUNT I dislike smoke of any kind. MILDRED AUNT Vulgar! MILDRED AUNT Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that--to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your great-grandmother rest in her grave? MILDRED With her pipe beside her--puffing in Paradise. AUNT Yes, you are a natural born ghoul. You are even MILDRED I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] [She closes her eyes.] AUNT Merci for your candor. But since I am and must be your chaperone--in appearance, at least--let us patch up some sort of armed truce. For my part you are quite free to indulge any pose of eccentricity that beguiles you--as long as you observe the amenities-- MILDRED The inanities? AUNT After exhausting the morbid thrills of social service work on New York's East Side--how they must have hated you, by the way, the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!--you are now bent on making your slumming international. Well, I hope Whitechapel will provide the needed nerve tonic. Do not ask me to chaperone you there, however. I told your father I would not. I loathe deformity. We will hire an army of detectives and you may investigate everything--they allow you to see. MILDRED Please do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives. Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at least. I would like to help them. I would like to be some use in the world. Is it my fault I don't know how? I would like to be sincere, to touch life somewhere. [With weary bitterness.] AUNT You seem to be going in for sincerity to-day. It isn't becoming to you, really--except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better. MILDRED Yes, I suppose I do. Pardon me for my outburst. When a leopard [In a mocking tone.] AUNT MILDRED [She looks at her wrist watch.] AUNT You don't mean to say you're really going? The dirt--the heat must be frightful-- MILDRED AUNT MILDRED I have it--both his and the chief engineer's. Oh, they didn't want to at first, in spite of my social service credentials. They didn't seem a bit anxious that I should investigate how the other half lives and works on a ship. So I had to tell them that my father, the president of Nazareth Steel, chairman of the board of directors of this line, had told me it would be all right. AUNT He didn't. MILDRED [Excitedly.] [Looking at her watch again.] [The SECOND ENGINEER enters, He is a husky, fine-looking man of thirty-five or so. He stops before the two and tips his cap, visibly embarrassed and ill-at-ease.] SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED [Throwing off her rugs and getting to her feet.] SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER Two are better than one. [Disturbed by her eyes, glances out to sea--blurts out.] MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER Well, you'll find it hot enough where you're going. MILDRED. SECOND ENGINEER Ho-ho! No, I mean the stokehole. MILDRED. SECOND ENGINEER Is that so? Hum, you'll excuse me, ma'am, but are you MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED SECOND ENGINEER There's ladders to climb down that are none too clean--and dark alleyways-- MILDRED. SECOND ENGINEER. MILDRED. SECOND ENGINEER MILDRED. [He goes. Mildred turns a mocking smile on her aunt.] AUNT Poser! MILDRED. AUNT Poser! MILDRED You are right. But would that my millions were not so anemically chaste! AUNT MILDRED AUNT MILDRED Old hag! [She slaps her aunt insultingly across the face and walks off, laughing gaily.] AUNT I said poser!
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