Volume 9 / Act 3 — SCENE II
Reading edition
Enter, CLARA.
CLARA.
Good evening, Leonard!
LEONARD.
Clara! [To himself.]
This is something I did not expect!
[Aloud.]
Did you not receive my letter? Surely—Perhaps you are coming for your father to pay the taxes! How much is it?
[He fumbles in a ledger.]
I really ought to have it in my head!
CLARA.
I have come to give back your letter! Read it again!
LEONARD (reads it with great seriousness).
It is a perfectly sensible letter! How can a man who has public money in trust marry into a family to which [he swallows a word]—to which your brother belongs?
CLARA.
Leonard!
LEONARD.
But perhaps the whole town is mistaken! Your brother is not in prison? He never was in prison? You are not the sister of a—of your brother?
CLARA.
Leonard, I am my father's daughter! Not as the sister of an accused, innocent man, who has been set free—for my brother is at liberty—not as a girl who trembles before undeserved disgrace, for [in a low voice] I tremble still more before you, only as the daughter of the old man who gave me life, do I stand here!
LEONARD.
And you wish?—
CLARA.
Can you ask? Oh, that I might go away! My father will cut his throat, unless—Marry me!
LEONARD.
Your father—
CLARA.
He has sworn it! Marry me!
LEONARD.
Hand and neck are near cousins—they never do harm to each other! Don't be anxious!
CLARA.
He has sworn it! Marry me! And, afterward, kill me! I will thank you even more for the latter than for the former!
LEONARD.
Do you love me? Did your heart prompt you to come here? Am I the man without whom you cannot live and die?
CLARA.
Answer that yourself!
LEONARD.
Can you swear that you love me? That you love me as a girl loves a man to whom she is to bind herself forever?
CLARA.
No, that I cannot swear! But this I can swear Whether I love you or do not love you, that you shall never know! I will wait on you, I will work for you, you need give me nothing to eat, I will support myself, I will do sewing and spinning for other people at night, I will go hungry when I have nothing to do, I will rather bite a piece out of my own arm than go to my father and let him suspect anything! When you beat me, because your dog is not at hand, or because you have kicked him out, I will rather swallow my own tongue than emit a cry which will betray to the neighbors what is going on. I cannot promise that my skin will not show the welts caused by your whip, for that is not in my power. But I will lie about it, I will say that I fell head foremost against the cupboard, or that I slipped on the floor because it was too smooth—that I will do before anybody has time to ask me where the black and blue marks came from!—Marry me! I shall not live long! And if it lasts too long for you, if you do not care to meet the expenses of the divorce proceedings necessary to get rid of me, them buy some poison of the apothecary and put it somewhere as if it were for your rats. I will take it without your even nodding to me, and tell the neighbors with my dying breath that I took it for pulverized sugar!
LEANARD.
A man of whom you expect all this will certainly not surprise you if he says no!
CLARA.
Then may God not frown too severely on me if I come before he calls me! If I had myself alone to consider I would endure it patiently. If the world kicked me in my misery, instead of standing by me, I would bear it submissively and regard it as just punishment for I know not what! I would love my child, even if it had your features, and I would cry so much before the poor innocent thing that, when it grew older and wiser, it would certainly not despise and curse its mother. But it is not myself alone; and on Judgement Day I shall much more easily find an answer to the Judge's question: why did you drive your father to it?
LEANARD.
You talk as if you were the first woman and the last to find herself in your predicament! Thousands have gone through it before you and submitted to their fate. Thousands after you will be confronted with the same situation and accept their fate. Are all these others strumpets, that you are so anxious to stand in the corner by yourself? They also had fathers who invented a score of new oaths when they first heard of it, and talked about murder and homicide! Afterward they were ashamed of themselves and repented their oaths and blasphemies; they sat down and rocked the child, or fanned the flies away!
CLARA.
I readily believe that you fail to understand why anybody in the world should keep an oath.