Peter Arnott: Two Plays. Peter Arnott
listened to, and that the listeners think he’s being naïve.
NEISH We are intervening in the life of a single child…a single child who stands for many…whose lives are dictated to them from slum childhood to slum solitude and death as absolutely as if they were subjects of any Satrap.
MCQUARRIE (To the enjoyment of the listeners.) Control yourself, Mr Neish! Satraps and master criminals, is it? He seems a soulful wee chap to me…especially given the family of Neanderthals he springs from…
NEISH (Insisting against the crowd.) Should we not try to do right by him?
MCQUARRIE Do right? Possibly! The price for my assistance is the truth.
NEISH The truth?
MCQUARRIE Are you sure…when you think of young Master MacBride …that you’re not thinking of yourself at a similar age…plucked from similar obscurity by your own village domine? Up from rural ignorance to the University of Dundee. Years of struggle, study…of learning the manners and voices of a gentleman!
NEISH Aye. Mainners you were born wi...raised wi…I had to claw them oot ae the earth…
MCQUARRIE Like potatoes! And yet here we are…colleagues. You raised from your rural idiocy to the dizzy heights of a parochial schoolteacher…and me fallen from on high to exactly the same status. That you are here with me is testament to your years of industry…That I am here with you…is testament to my indolence and failure. Which of us is more poisoned with frustrated ambition? Me or you?
NEISH Will you help me with Euan MacBride? Will you support me with the headmaster? No matter what you think my motivations are?
MCQUARRIE You must not teach him to fly higher than his wings are made for. I hope you’ll not regret your ambition, like Daedalus…watching your Icarus fall into the Tay…
(The listeners laugh. NEISH silences them with the catechism.)
NEISH Does God know all things?
CHILDREN Yes; nothing can be hid from God, Mr Neish.
NEISH Nothing can be hid from God!
(Confessing, his hand touching his black armband.)
All right. It’s true. Without Mr Durisdeer, I would never have been ambitious. I would never have fallen into …this hatred…and disappointment.
(Euan steps forward to sit at a desk for solo instruction.)
But Euan MacBride…a faither lost at sea…a mither subsisting on charity…his family living in a single room with another family similarly indigent…against all odds, all expectation…he has a spark of…possibility. He has not an ounce of privilege…but merr ability…merr promise than I ever had.
Perhaps his best outcome will be as paltry as ma ain…But wi’oot my help…whatever hope he has will come to nothing. And whatever God in his heaven knows of me and my motivation…it is still the right thing to do.
One child at a time. We can save the world one child at a time.
(As he recites, the passengers slowly join in, as they did in the catechism.)
Amo, Amas, Amat. Amamis, Amatis, Amant.
I love, you love, he loves, we love. You love, they love
Discam Disces Discet Discemus Disceti Discent
I will learn, you will learn, he will learn, we will learn, you will learn…they will learn.
We will deserve it.
PASSENGERS We will deserve it.
(He has his audience listening to him now. Reaching the climax of his story.)
It took a year. A year of tuition and expense to myself…but Euan was ready…and on Friday morning a week ago, I closed off and heated a room for him to come and sit the scholarship exam…I had paid his entrance fee as the governors of the school would not…I had taken a day off work…officially…I had brought Professor Taft of the University…my old tutor… to conduct the examination in person. Latin. History. Geography. Theology and Moral Thought.
And we sat together. The Professor and I. As Nine O’Clock struck…as a minute went by…two minutes….five….and an awful certainty afflicted me…
(He hurries to ask at the school office.)
I went, I asked, and I discovered what I should have known. Euan had not come to school that morning. Yesterday, in the last lesson of the day. McQuarrie had beaten him. Beaten him savagely like a slave. Today…Euan had not come to school. God knows if he would ever come back.
I’d lost him.
I was stunned…staggered…and without forethought, I found myself in McQuarrie’s class room…where he was teaching the catechism.
(The children/listeners are now hostile to MCQUARRIE.)
MCQUARRIE What did God give Adam and Eve besides bodies?
CHILDREN He gave them souls that could never die, Mister McQuarrie.
MCQUARRIE Have you a soul as well as a body?
CHILDREN Yes; I have a soul that can never die, Mr McQuarrie
MCQUARRIE (Grins.) Can I help you, Mr Neish?
(NEISH strikes him. Uproar. We return to the train. NEISH addresses his fellow passengers.)
NEISH I lost my job. Of course I did. But by begging favours, perhaps I’ll find a position in some country school, the kind of school I went to. Where Mr Durisdeer taught me.
He died last week in his classroom. It took the last of my savings to bury him. He died of the work he had done all his life.
Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow will be better.
We will deserve it.
(Transition. Music. MRS EASTON is the next story teller so it is her experience of the disaster that we see…and to her story that we return. Train ambience.)
MRS EASTON’S STORY
MRS EASTON (Sits looking at her manuscript. To her fellow passengers.) I wish I could read to you from my manuscript. But the illumination from the paraffin lamps is as questionable as the insulation! I do know the beginning by heart. I begin the story of my life with this ‘Perhaps my husband was not a bad man, but taking him at his own estimation, I found myself so far below him, that I had no choice but to hate him, just a little.’ I do think that’s rather good!
The passengers, performing from her manuscript – of which they have all found pages in the silt, now as her husbands’ congregants, sing a hymn. Church sound picture.
REVEREND EASTON We complain, don’t we? We complain about everything. On and on and on. But let us reflect, dear friends, that as adherents of the Church of Scotland, we are blessed! Our missionaries bring our Presbyterian light to the darkness of the world! As the most dynamic servants of the British Empire, we Scots are the Chosen People of Today every bit as much as were the Children of Israel in the days of Gideon!
MRS EASTON (To the passengers.) That’s what he was like. That’s the kind of thing he said in the pulpit every Sunday. And was my husband not the expert in the workings of divine providence, having married my father’s money when he married me!
(Light fades on the REVEREND EASTON.)
When my husband had his living in the city, when I still believed I loved him, or at least that I ought to try, our parish included what was called the Holy Land, a place whose name derived from the strange presence in Whitehall Close of the most haunting and primitive carving on a wall…showing Adam and Eve…in paradise.
Paradise. Good God.
(THE REVEREND, in her memory, approaches her. He is accompanied by a young and intense medical inspector, DR COOPER.)
REVEREND EASTON It is my duty, my dear, to accompany Dr Cooper on his demonstrative