III
I
The passage from Montego Bay to the Caymans, where the children had written their letters, is only a matter of a few hours: indeed, in clear weather one can look right across from Jamaica to the peak of Turquino in Cuba.
There is no harbour; and the anchorage, owing to the reefs and ledges, is difficult. The Clorinda brought up off the Grand Cayman, the lookout man in the chains feeling his way to a white, sandy patch of bottom which affords the only safe resting-place there, and causing the anchor to be let go to windward of it. Luckily, the weather was fine.
The island, a longish one at the western end of the group, is low, and covered with palms. Presently a succession of boats brought out a quantity of turtles, as Emily described. The natives also brought parrots to sell to the sailors: but failed to dispose of many.
At last, however, the uncomfortable Caymans were left behind, and they set their course towards the Isle of Pines, a large island in a gulf of the Cuban coast. One of the sailors, called Curtis, had once been wrecked there, and was full of stories about it. It is a very unpleasant place; sparsely inhabited, and covered with labyrinthine woods. The only food available is a kind of tree. There is also a species of bean which looks tempting: but it is deadly poison. The crocodiles, Curtis said, were so fierce they chased him and his companions into trees: the only way to escape from them was to throw them your cap to worry: or if you were bold, to disable them with a blow of a stick on the loins. There were also a great many snakes, including a kind of boa.
The current off the Isle of Pines sets strongly to the east: so the Clorinda kept close inshore, to cheat it. They passed Cape Corrientes—looking, when first sighted, like two hummocks in the sea: they passed Holandes Point, known as False C. Antonio: but were prevented for some time, as Captain Marpole told in his letter, from rounding the true one. For to attempt C. Antonio in a Norther is to waste your labour.
They lay-to in sight of that long, low, rocky, treeless promontory in which the great island of Cuba terminates, and waited. They were so close that the fisherman’s hut on its southern side was clearly discernible.
For the children, those first few days at sea had flashed by like a kind of prolonged circus. There is no machine invented for sober purposes so well adapted also to play as the rigging of a ship: and the kindly captain, as Mrs. Thornton had divined, was willing to give them a lot of freedom. First came the climbing of a few rungs of the ratlines in a sailor’s charge: higher each time, till John attained a gingerly touching of the yard: then hugged it: then straddled it. Soon, running up the ratlines and prancing on the yard (as if it were a mere tabletop) had no further thrill for John or Emily either. (To go out on the yard was not allowed.)
But when the ratlines had palled, the most lasting joy undoubtedly lay in that network of foot-ropes and chains and stays which spreads out under and on each side of the bowsprit. Here, familiarity only bred content. Here, in fine weather, one could climb or be still: stand, sit, hang, swing, or lie: now this end up, now that: and all with the cream of the blue sea being whipt up for one’s own especial pleasure, almost within touching distance: and the big white wooden lady (Clorinda herself), bearing the whole vessel so lightly on her back, her knees in the hubble-bubble, her cracks almost filled up with so much painting, vaster than any living lady, as a constant and unannoying companion.
In the midst there was a kind of spear, its haft set against the underside of the bowsprit, its point perpendicularly down towards the water—the dolphin-striker. Here it was that the old monkey (who had the Sore tail) loved to hang, by the mere stub which was all a devouring cancer had left him, chattering to the water. He took no notice of the children, nor they of him: but both parties grew attached to each other, for all that.
—How small the children all looked, on a ship, when you saw them beside the sailors! It was as if they were a different order of beings! Yet they were living creatures just the same, full of promise.
John, with his downy, freckled face, and general round energeticalness.
Emily, with her huge palm-leaf hat, and colourless cotton frock tight over her minute impish erect body: her thin, almost expressionless face: her dark grey eyes contracted to escape the blaze, yet shining as it were in spite of themselves: and her really beautiful lips, that looked almost as if they were sculptured.
Margaret Fernandez, taller (as midgets go: she was just thirteen), with her square white face and tangled hair, her elaboratish clothes.
Her little brother Harry, by some throwback for all the world like a manikin Spaniard.
And the smaller Thorntons: Edward, mouse-coloured, with a general mousy (but pleasing) expression: Rachel, with tight short gold curls and a fat pink face (John’s colouring watered down): and last of all Laura, a queer mite of three with heavy dark eyebrows, and blue eyes, a big head-top and a receding chin—as if the Procreative Spirit was getting a little hysterical by the time it reached her. A silver-age conception, Laura’s, decidedly.
When the Norther blew itself out, it soon fell away almost dead calm. The morning they finally rounded Cape San Antonio was hot, blazing hot. But it is never stuffy at sea: there is only this disadvantage, that while on land a shady hat protects you from the sun, at sea nothing can protect you from that second sun which is mirrored upwards from the water, strikes under all defences, and burns the unseasoned skin from all your undersides. Poor John! His throat and chin were a blistered red.
From the point itself there is a whitish bank in two fathoms, bowed from north to northeast. The outer side is clean and steep-to, and in fine weather one can steer along it by eye. It ends in Black Key, a rock standing out of the water like a ship’s hull. Beyond that lies a channel, very foul and difficult to navigate: and beyond that again the Coloradoes Reef begins, the first of a long chain of reefs following the coast in a northeasterly direction as far as Honde Bay, two-thirds the way to Havana. Within the reefs lies the intricate Canal de Guaniguanico, of which this channel is the westernmost outlet, with its own rather dubious little ports. But ocean traffic, needless to say, shuns the whole box of tricks: and the Clorinda advisedly stood well away to the northward, keeping her course at a gentle amble for the open Atlantic.
John was sitting outside the galley with the sailor called Curtis, who was instructing him in the neat mystery of a Turk’s-head. Young Henry Marpole was steering. Emily was messing around—not talking, just being by him.
As for the other sailors, they were all congregated in a ring, up in the bows, so that one saw nothing but their backs. But every now and then a general guffaw, and a sudden surging of the whole group, showed they were up to something or other.
John presently tiptoed forward, to see what it might be. He thrust his bullet-head among their legs, and worked his way in till he had as good a view as the earliest comer.
He found they had got the old monkey, and were filling him up with rum. First they gave him biscuit soaked in it: then they dipped rags in a pannikin of the stuff, and squeezed them into his mouth. Then they tried to make him drink direct: but that he would not do—it only wasted a lot of spirit.
John felt a vague horror at all this: though of course he did not guess the purpose behind it.
The poor brute shivered and chattered, rolled his eyes, spluttered. I suppose it must have been an excruciatingly funny sight. Every now and then he would seem altogether overcome by the spirit. Then one of them would lay him on the top of an old beef barrel—but hey presto, he would be up like lightning, trying to streak through the air over their heads. But he was no bird: they caught him each time, and set to work to dope him again.
As for John, he could no more have left the scene now than Jacko the monkey could.
It was astonishing what a lot of spirit the wizened little brute could absorb. He was drunk, of course: hopelessly, blindly, madly drunk. But he was not paralytic, not even somnolent: and it seemed as if nothing could overcome him. So at last they gave up the attempt. They fetched a wooden box, and cut a notch in the edge. Then they put him on the barrel-top, and clapped the box over him, and after much manoeuvring his gangrenous tail was made to come out through the notch. Anaesthetised or not, the operation on him was to proceed. John stared, transfixed, at that obscene wriggling stump which was all one could see of the animal: and out of the corner of his eye he could see at the same time the uproarious operators, the tar-stained knife.
But the moment the blade touched flesh, with an awful screech the mommet contrived to fling off his cage—leapt on the surgeon’s head—leapt from there high in the air—caught the forestay—and in a twinkling was away and up high in the fore-rigging.
Then began the hue and cry. Sixteen men flinging about in lofty acrobatics, all to catch one poor old drunk monkey. For he was drunk as a lord, and sick as a cat. His course varied between wild and hair-raising leaps (a sort of inspired gymnastics), and doleful incompetent reelings on a taut rope which threatened at every moment to catapult him into the sea. But even so they could never quite catch him.
No wonder that all the children, now, stood open-mouthed and open-eyed on the deck beneath in the sun till their necks nearly broke—such a Free Fun Fair and Circus!
And no wonder that on that passenger-schooner which Marpole, before going below, had sighted drifting towards them from the direction of the Black Key channel, the ladies had left the shade of the awning and were crowding at the rail, parasols twirling, lorgnettes and opera-glasses in action, all twittering like a cage of linnets. Just too far off to distinguish the tiny quarry, they might well have wondered what sort of a bedlam-vessel of sea-acrobats the light easterly air was bearing them down upon.
They were so interested that presently a boat was hoisted out, and the ladies—and some gentlemen as well—crowded into it.
Poor little Jacko missed his hold at last: fell plump on the deck and broke his neck. That was the end of him—and of the hunt too, of course. The aerial ballet was over, in its middle, with no final tableau. The sailors began, in twos and threes, to slide to the deck.
But the visitors were already on board.
That is how the Clorinda really was taken. There was no display of artillery—but then, Captain Marpole could hardly know this, seeing he was below in his bunk at the time. Henry was steering by that sixth sense which only comes into operation when the other five are asleep. The mate and crew had been so intent on what they were doing that the Flying Dutchman himself might have laid alongside, for all they cared.
II
Indeed, the whole manoeuvre was executed so quietly that Captain Marpole never even woke—incredible though this will seem to a seaman. But then, Marpole had begun life as a successful coal-merchant.
The mate and crew were bundled into the fo’c’sle (the Foxhole, the children thought it was called), and confined there, the scuttle being secured with a couple of nails.
The children themselves were shepherded, as related, into the deck-house, where the chairs, and perfectly useless pieces of old rope, and broken tools, and dried-up paint-pots were kept, without taking alarm. But the door was immediately shut on them. They had to wait for hours and hours before anything else happened—nearly all day, in fact: and they got very bored, and rather cross.
The actual number of the men who had effected the capture cannot have been more than eight or nine, most of them “women” at that, and not armed—at least with any visible weapon. But a second boatload soon followed them from the schooner. These, for form’s sake, were armed with muskets. But there was no possible resistance to fear. Two long nails through the scuttle can secure any number of men pretty effectually.
With this second boatload came both the captain and the mate. The former was a clumsy great fellow, with a sad, silly face. He was bulky; yet so ill-proportioned one got no impression of power. He was modestly dressed in a drab shore-going suit: he was newly shaven, and his sparse hair was pomaded so that it lay in a few dark ribbons across his baldish head-top. But all this shore-decency of appearance only accentuated his big splodgy brown hands, stained and scarred and corned with his calling. Moreover, instead of boots he wore a pair of gigantic heel-less slippers in the Moorish manner, which he must have sliced with a knife out of some pair of dead sea-boots. Even his great spreading feet could hardly keep them on, so that he was obliged to walk at the slowest of shuffles, flop-flop along the deck. He stooped, as if always afraid of banging his head on something; and carried the backs of his hands forward, like an orangutan.
Meanwhile the men set to work methodically but very quietly to remove the wedges that held the battens of the hatches, getting ready to haul up the cargo.
Their leader took several turns up and down the deck before he seemed able to make up his mind to the interview: then lowered himself into Marpole’s cabin, followed by his mate.
This mate was a small man: very fair, and intelligent-looking beside his chief. He was almost dapper, in a quiet way, in his dress.
They found Captain Marpole even now only half awake: and the stranger stood for a moment in silence, nervously twiddling his cap in his hands. When he spoke at last, it was with a soft German accent:
“Excuse me,” he began, “but would you have the goodness to lend me a few stores?”
Captain Marpole stared in astonishment, first at him and then at the much be-painted faces of the “ladies” pressed against his cabin skylight.
“Who the devil are you?” he contrived to ask at last.
“I hold a commission in the Columbian navy,” the stranger explained: “and I am in need of a few stores.”
(Meanwhile his men had the hatches off, and were preparing to help themselves to everything in the ship.)
Marpole looked him up and down. It was barely conceivable that even the Columbian navy should have such a figure of an officer. Then his eye wandered back to the skylight:
“If you call yourself a man-of-war, sir, who in Heaven’s name are those?” As he pointed, the smirking faces hastily retreated.
The stranger blushed.
“They are rather difficult to explain,” he admitted ingenuously.
“If you had said Turkish navy, that would have been more reasonable-sounding!” said Marpole.
But the stranger did not seem to take the joke. He stood, silent, in a characteristic attitude: rocking himself from foot to foot, and rubbing his cheek on his shoulder.
Suddenly Marpole’s ear caught the muffled racketing forward. Almost at the same time a bump that shivered the whole barque told that the schooner had been laid alongside.
“What’s that?” he exclaimed. “Is there someone in my hold?”
“Stores …” mumbled the stranger.
Marpole up to now had lain growling in his bunk like a dog in its kennel. Now for the first time realising that something serious was afoot he flung himself out and made for the companionway. The little silent fair man tripped him up, and he fell against the table.
“You had much better stay here, yes?” said the big man. “My fellows shall keep a tally, you shall be paid in full for everything we take.”
The eyes of the marine coal-merchant gleamed momentarily:
“You’ll have to pay for this outrage to a pretty tune!” he growled.
“I will pay you,” said the stranger, with a sudden magnificence in his voice, “at the very least five thousand pounds!”
Marpole stared in astonishment.
“I will write you an order on the Columbian government for that amount,” the other went on.
Marpole thumped the table, almost speechless:
“D’you think I believe that cock-and-bull story?” he thundered.
Captain Jonsen made no protest.
“Do you realise that you are technically guilty of piracy, making a forced requisition on a British ship like this, even if you pay every farthing?”
Still Jonsen made no reply: though the bored expression of his mate was lit up for a moment by a smile.
“You’ll pay me in cash!” Marpole concluded. Then he went off on a fresh tack: “Though how the devil you got on board without being called beats me!—Where’s my mate?”
Jonsen began in a toneless voice, as if by rote: “I will write you an order for five thousand pounds: three thousand for the stores, and two thousand you will give me in money.”
“We know you’ve got specie on board,” interjected the little fair mate, speaking for the first time.
“Our information is certain!” declared Jonsen.
Marpole at last went white and began to sweat. It took even Fear an extraordinarily long time to penetrate his thick skull. But he denied that he had any treasure on board.
“Is that your answer?” said Jonsen. He drew a heavy pistol from his side pocket. “If you do not tell us the truth, your life shall pay the forfeit.” His voice was peculiarly gentle, and mechanical, as if he did not attach much meaning to what he said. “Do not expect mercy, for this is my profession, and in it I am inured to blood.”
A frightful squawking from the deck above told Marpole that his chickens were being moved to new quarters.
In an agony of feeling Marpole told him that he had a wife and children, who would be left destitute if his life was taken.
Jonsen, with rather a perplexed look on his face, put the gun back in his pocket, and the two of them began to search for themselves, at the same time stripping the saloon and cabins of everything they contained: firearms, wearing apparel, the bedclothes, and even (as Marpole with a rare touch of accuracy mentioned in his report) the bellpulls.
Overhead there was a continuous bumping: the rolling of casks, cases, etc.
“Remember,” Jonsen went on over his shoulder while he searched, “money cannot recall life, nor in the least avail you when you are dead. If you regard your life in the least, at once acquaint me with the hiding-place, and your life shall be safe.”
Marpole’s only reply was again to invoke the thought of his wife and children (he was, as a matter of fact, a widower: and his only relative, a niece, would be the better off by his death to the tune of some ten thousand pounds).
But this reiteration seemed to give the mate an idea: and he began to talk to his chief rapidly in a language Marpole had never even heard. For a moment a curious glint came into Jonsen’s eye: but soon he was chuckling in the sentimentalest manner, and rubbing his hands.
The mate went on deck to prepare things.
Marpole had no inkling of what was afoot. The mate went on deck to prepare his plan, whatever it was: and Jonsen busied himself with a last futile search for the hiding-place, in silence.
Presently the mate shouted down to him, and he ordered Marpole on deck.
Poor Marpole groaned. Unloading cargo is inclined to be a messy business anyway: but these visitors had been none too careful. There is no smell in the world worse than when molasses and bilge-water marry: now it was let loose like ten thousand devils. His heart was almost broken when he saw the havoc that had been made with the cargo: broken cases, casks, bottles, all about the deck: everything in the greatest confusion: tarpaulins cut to pieces: hatches broken.
From the deck-house came the piercing voice of Laura:
“I want to come out!”
The Spanish ladies seemed to have returned to the schooner. His own men were shut up in the fo’c’sle. It was obvious where all the children were, for Laura was not the only vociferator. But the only persons to be seen were six members of the visiting crew, who stood in a line, facing the deck-house, a musket apiece.
It was the little mate who now took charge of the situation:
“Where is your specie hid, Captain?”
The musketeers having their backs to him, “Go to the Devil!” replied Marpole.
A startling volley rang out: six neat holes were punctured in the top of the deck-house.
“Hi! Steady there, what are you doing?” John cried out indignantly from within.
“If you refuse to tell us, next time their aim will be a foot lower.”
“You fiends!” cried Marpole.
“Will you tell me?”
“No!”
“Fire!”
The second row of holes can only have missed the taller children by a few inches.
There was a moment’s silence: then a sudden wild shriek from within the deck-house. It was so terrified a sound not their own mothers could have told which throat it came from. One only, though.
The stranger-captain had been slouching about in an agitated way: but at that shriek he turned on Marpole, his face purple with a sudden fury:
“Now will you say?”
But Marpole was now completely master of himself. He did not hesitate:
“No!”
“Next time he gives the order it will be to shoot right through their little bodies!”
So that was what Marpole had meant in his letter by “every possible threat which villainy could devise”! But even by this he was not to be daunted:
“No, I tell you!”
Heroic obstinacy! But instead of giving the fatal order, Jonsen lifted a paw like a bear’s, and banged Marpole’s jaw with it. The latter fell to the deck, stunned.
It was then they took the children out of the deck-house.
They were not really much frightened; except Margaret, who did seem to be taking it all to heart rather. Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times. It is not half so startling as someone jumping out on you with a “Boo!” in the dark, for instance. The boys were crying a little: the girls were hot and cross and hungry.
“What were you doing?” Rachel asked brightly of one of the firing-party.
But only the captain and the mate could speak English. The latter, ignoring Rachel’s question, explained that they were all to go on board the schooner—“to have some supper,” he said.
He had all a sailor’s reassuring charm of manner. So under the charge of two Spanish seamen they were helped over the bulwarks onto the smaller vessel, which was just casting off.
There the strange sailors broke open a whole case of crystallised fruits, on which they might turn the edge of their long appetites as much as they would.
When poor stunned Captain Marpole came to his senses, it was to find himself tied to the mainmast. Several handfuls of shavings and splintered wood were piled round his feet, and Jonsen was sprinkling them plentifully with gunpowder—though not perhaps enough, it is true, to “blow up the ship and all in it.”
The small fair mate stood at hand in the gathering dusk with a lighted torch, ready to fire the pyre.
What could a man do in such straits? At that dreadful moment the gallant old fellow had to admit that he was beaten at last. He told them where his freight-money—some £900—was hidden: and they let him go.
Just as the darkness closed in, the last of the pirates returned to their ship. Not a sound was to be heard of the children: but Marpole guessed that they had been taken there too.
Before releasing his crew he lit a lantern and began a sort of inventory of what was gone. It was heartbreaking enough: besides the cargo, all his spare sails, cordage, provisions, guns, paint, powder: all his wearing apparel, and that of his mate: all nautical instruments gone, cabin stores—the saloon in fact gutted of everything, not even a knife or spoon left, tea or sugar, nor a second shirt to his back left. Only the children’s luggage was left untouched: and the turtles. Their melancholy sighing was the sole sound to be heard.
But it was almost as heartbreaking to see what the pirates had left: anything damaged, such worn-out and useless gear as he had been only waiting for some “storm” to wash overboard—not one of these eyesores was missing.
What, in Heaven’s name, was the use of an insurance policy? He began to collect the rubbish himself and dump it over the side.
But Captain Jonsen saw him:
“Hi!” he shouted: “You dirty svindler! I will write to Lloyds and expose you! I will write myself!” He was horribly shocked at the other’s dishonesty.
So Marpole had to give it up, for the time at any rate: took a spike and broke open the fo’c’sle: and as well as the sailors found Margaret’s brown nurse. She had hidden there the whole day: probably from motives of fright.
III
You would have thought that supper on the schooner that night would have been a hilarious affair. But, somehow, it was manqué.
A prize of such value had naturally put the crew in the best of humours: and a meal which consisted mainly of crystallised fruit, followed as an afterthought by bread and chopped onions served in one enormous communal bowl, eaten on the open deck under the stars, after bedtime, should have done the same by the children. But nevertheless both parties were seized by a sudden, overpowering, and most unexpected fit of shyness. Consequently no state banquet was ever so formal, or so boring.
I suppose it was the lack of a common language which first generated the infection. The Spanish sailors, used enough to this difficulty, grinned, pointed, and bobbed: but the children retired into a display of good manners which it would certainly have surprised their parents to see. Whereon the sailors became equally formal: and one poor monkeyfied little fellow who by nature belched continually was so be-nudged and be-winked by his companions, and so covered in confusion of his own accord, that presently he went away to eat by himself. Even then, so silent was this revel, he could still be heard faintly belching, half the ship’s length away.
Perhaps it would have gone better if the captain and mate had been there, with their English. But they were too busy, looking over the personal belongings they had brought from the barque, sorting out by the light of a lantern anything too easily identifiable and reluctantly committing it to the sea.
It was at the loud splashes made by a couple of empty trunks, stamped in large letters Jas. Marpole, that a roar of unassumed indignation arose from the neighbouring barque. The two paused in their work, astonished: why should a crew already spoiled of all they possessed take it so hardly when one heaved a couple of old worthless trunks in the sea?
It was inexplicable.
They continued their task, taking no further notice of the Clorinda.
Once supper was over, the social situation became even more awkward. The children stood about, not knowing what to do with their hands, or even their legs: unable to talk to their hosts, and feeling it would be rude to talk to each other, wishing badly that it was time to leave. If only it had been light they could have been happy enough exploring: but in the darkness there was nothing to do, nothing whatever.
The sailors soon found occupations of their own: and the captain and mate, as I have said, were already busy.
Once the sorting was over, however, there was nothing for Jonsen to do except return the children to the barque, and get well clear while the breeze and the darkness lasted.
But on hearing those splashes, Marpole’s lively imagination had interpreted them in his own way. They suggested that there was now no reason to wait: indeed, every reason to be gone.
I think he was quite honestly misled.
It was after all but a small slip to say he had “seen with his own eyes” what he had heard with his own ears: and the intention was pious.
He set his men feverishly to work: and when Captain Jonsen looked his way again, the Clorinda, with every stitch spread in the starlight, was already half a mile to leeward.
To pursue her, right in the track of shipping, was out of the question. Jonsen had to content himself with staring after her through his night-glass.
IV
Captain Jonsen set the little monkeyfied sailor, who had been so mortified earlier in the evening, to clear the schooner’s fore-hold. The warps and brooms and fenders it contained were all piled to one side, and a sufficiency of bedclothes for the guests was provided from the plunder.
But nothing could now thaw them. They clambered down the ladder and received their blanket apiece in an uncomfortable silence. Jonsen hung about, anxious to be helpful in this matter of getting into beds which were not there, but not knowing how to set about it. So he gave it up at last, and swung himself up through the fore-hatch, talking to himself.
The last they saw of him was his fantastic slippers, hanging each from a big toe, outlined against the stars: but it never entered their heads to laugh.
Once, however, the familiar comfort of a blanket under their chins had begun to have its effect, and they were obviously quite alone, a little life did begin to return into these dumb statues.
The darkness was profound, only accentuated by the starlit square of the open hatchway. First the long silence was broken by someone turning over, almost freely. Then presently:
Laura
In slow sepulchral tones. I don’t like this bed.
Rachel
Ditto. I do.
Laura
It’s a horrid bed; there isn’t any!
Emily
John
Sh! Go to sleep!
Edward
I smell cockroaches.
Emily
Sh!
Edward
Loudly and hopefully. They’ll bite all our nails off, because we haven’t washed, and our skin, and our hair, and—
Laura
There’s a cockroach in my bed! Get out!
You could hear the brute go zooming away. But Laura was already out too.
Emily
Laura! Go back to bed!
Laura
I can’t when there’s a cockroach in it!
John
Get into bed again, you little fool! He’s gone long ago!
Laura
But I expect he has left his wife.
Harry
They don’t have wives, they’re wives themselves.
Rachel
Ow!—Laura, stop it!—Emily, Laura’s walking on me!
Emily
Lau-rer!
Laura
Well, I must walk on something!
Emily
Go to sleep!
Silence for a while.
Laura
I haven’t said my prayers.
Emily
Well, say them lying down.
Rachel
She mustn’t, that’s lazy.
John
Shut up, Rachel, she must.
Rachel
It’s wicked! You go to sleep in the middle then. People who go to sleep in the middle ought to be damned, they ought.—Oughtn’t they? Silence. Oughtn’t they? Still silence. Emily, I say, oughtn’t they?
John
No!
Rachel
Dreamily. I think there’s lots more people ought to be damned than are.
Silence again.
Harry
Marghie. Silence. Marghie!
John
What’s up with Marghie? Won’t she speak?
A faint sob is heard.
Harry
I don’t know.
Another sob.
John
Is she often like this?
Harry
She’s an awful ass sometimes.
John
Marghie, what’s up?
Margaret
Miserably. Let me alone!
Rachel
I believe she’s frightened! Chants tauntingly. Marghie’s got the bogies, the bogies, the bogies!
Margaret
Sobbing out loud. Oh you little fools!
John
Well, what’s the matter with you then?
Margaret
After a pause. I’m older than any of you.
Harry
Well, that’s a funny reason to be frightened!
Margaret
It isn’t.
Harry
It is!
Margaret
Warming to the argument. It isn’t, I tell you!
Harry
It is!
Margaret
Smugly. That’s simply because you’re all too young to know. …
John
Oh, hit her, Emily!
Emily
Sleepily. Hit her yourself.
Harry
But, Marghie, why are we here? No answer. Emily, why are we here?
Emily
Indifferently. I don’t know. I expect they just wanted to change us.
Harry
I expect so. But they never told us we were going to be changed.
Emily
Grownups never do tell us things.