ABIGAIL: She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about me! She is a cold, sniveling woman, and you bend to her! Let her turn you like a—
PROCTOR,
shaking her:
Do you look for whippin’?
A psalm is heard being sung below.
ABIGAIL,
in tears:
I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!
He turns abruptly to go out. She rushes to him.
John, pity me, pity me!
The words “going up to Jesus” are heard in the psalm, and Betty claps her ears suddenly and whines loudly.
ABIGAIL: Betty?
She hurries to Betty, who is now sitting up and screaming. Proctor goes to Betty as Abigail is trying to pull her hands down, calling “Betty!”
PROCTOR,
growing unnerved:
What’s she doing? Girl, what ails you? Stop that wailing!
The singing has stopped in the midst of this, and now Parris rushes in.
PARRIS: What happened? What are you doing to her? Betty!
He rushes to the bed, crying, “Betty, Betty!” Mrs. Putnam enters, feverish with curiosity, and with her Thomas Putnam and Mercy Lewis. Parris, at the bed, keeps lightly slapping Betty’s face, while she moans and tries to get up.
ABIGAIL: She heard you singin’ and suddenly she’s up and screamin’.
MRS. PUTNAM: The psalm! The psalm! She cannot bear to hear the Lord’s name!
PARRIS: No, God forbid. Mercy, run to the doctor! Tell him what’s happened here!
Mercy Lewis rushes out.
MRS. PUTNAM: Mark it for a sign, mark it!
Rebecca Nurse, seventy-two, enters. She is white-haired, leaning upon her walking-stick.
PUTNAM,
pointing at the whimpering Betty : That is a
notorious sign of witchcraft afoot, Goody Nurse, a prodigious sign!
MRS. PUTNAM: My mother told me that! When they cannot bear to hear the name of—
PARRIS,
trembling:
Rebecca, Rebecca, go to her, we’re lost. She suddenly cannot bear to hear the Lord’s—
Giles Corey, eighty-three, enters. He is knotted with muscle, canny, inquisitive, and still powerful.
REBECCA: There is hard sickness here, Giles Corey, so please to keep the quiet.
GILES: I’ve not said a word. No one here can testify I’ve said a word. Is she going to fly again? I hear she flies.
PUTNAM: Man, be quiet now!
Everything is quiet. Rebecca walks across the room to the bed. Gentleness exudes from her. Betty is quietly whimpering, eyes shut. Rebecca simply stands over the child, who gradually quiets.
And while they are so absorbed, we may put a word in for Rebecca. Rebecca was the wife of Francis Nurse, who, from all accounts, was one of those men for whom both sides of the argument had to have respect. He was called upon to arbitrate disputes as though he were an unofficial judge, and Rebecca also enjoyed the high opinion most people had for him. By the time of the delusion, they had three hundred acres, and their children were settled in separate homesteads within the same estate. However, Francis had originally rented the land, and one theory has it that, as he gradually paid for it and raised his social status, there were those who resented his rise.
Another suggestion to explain the systematic campaign against Rebecca, and inferentially against Francis, is the land war he fought with his neighbors, one of whom was a Putnam. This squabble grew to the proportions of a battle in the woods between partisans of both sides, and it is said to have lasted for two days. As for Rebecca herself, the general opinion of her character was so high that to explain how anyone dared cry her out for a witch—and more, how adults could bring themselves to lay hands on her—we must look to the fields and boundaries of that time.
As we have seen, Thomas Putnam’s man for the Salem ministry was Bayley. The Nurse clan had been in the faction that prevented Bayley’s taking office. In addition, certain families allied to the Nurses by blood or friendship, and whose farms were contiguous with the Nurse farm or close to it, combined to break away from the Salem town authority and set up Topsfield, a new and independent entity whose existence was resented by old Salemites.
That the guiding hand behind the outcry was Putnam’s is indicated by the fact that, as soon as it began, this Topsfield-Nurse faction absented themselves from church in protest and disbelief. It was Edward and Jonathan Putnam who signed the first complaint against Rebecca; and Thomas Putnam’s little daughter was the one who fell into a fit at the hearing and pointed to Rebecca as her attacker. To top it all, Mrs. Putnam —who is now staring at the bewitched child on the bed—soon accused Rebecca’s spirit of “tempting her to iniquity,” a charge that had more truth in it than Mrs. Putnam could know.
MRS. PUTNAM,
astonished:
What have you done?
Rebecca, in thought, now leaves the bedside and sits.
PARRIS,
wondrous and relieved:
What do you make of it, Rebecca?
PUTNAM,
eagerly:
Goody Nurse, will you go to my Ruth and see if you can wake her?
REBECCA,
sitting:
I think she’ll wake in time. Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she’ll wake when she tires of it. A child’s spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
PROCTOR: Aye, that’s the truth of it, Rebecca.
MRS. PUTNAM: This is no silly season, Rebecca. My Ruth is bewildered, Rebecca; she cannot eat.
REBECCA: Perhaps she is not hungered yet. To
Parris:
I hope you are not decided to go in search of loose spirits, Mr. Parris. I’ve heard promise of that outside.
PARRIS: A wide opinion’s running in the parish that the Devil may be among us, and I would satisfy them that they are wrong.
PROCTOR: Then let you come out and call them wrong. Did you consult the wardens before you called this minister to look for devils?
PARRIS: He is not coming to look for devils!
PROCTOR: Then what’s he coming for?
PUTNAM: There be children dyin’ in the village, Mister!
PROCTOR: I seen none dyin’. This society will not be a bag to swing around your head, Mr. Putnam. To
Parris:
Did you call a meeting before you—?
PUTNAM: I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?
PROCTOR: He may turn his head, but not to Hell!
REBECCA: Pray, John, be calm.
Pause. He defers to her.
Mr. Parris, I think you’d best send Reverend Hale back as soon as he come. This will set us all to arguin’ again in the society, and we thought to have peace this year. I think we ought rely on the doctor now, and good prayer.
MRS. PUTNAM: Rebecca, the doctor’s baffled!
REBECCA: If so he is, then let us go to God for the cause of it. There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I fear it. Let us rather blame ourselves and—
PUTNAM: How may we blame ourselves? I am one of nine sons; the Putnam seed have peopled this province. And yet I have but one child left of eight—and now she shrivels!
REBECCA: I cannot fathom that.
MRS. PUTNAM,
with a growing edge of sarcasm:
But I must! You think it God’s work you should never lose a child, nor grandchild either, and I bury all but one? There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!
PUTNAM,
to Parris :
When Reverend Hale comes, you will proceed to look for signs of witchcraft here.
PROCTOR,
to Putnam:
You cannot command Mr. Parris. We vote by name in this society, not by acreage.
PUTNAM : I never heard you worried so on this society, Mr. Proctor. I do not think I saw you at Sabbath meeting since snow flew.
PROCTOR: I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.
PARRIS,
now aroused:
Why, that’s a drastic charge!
REBECCA: It’s somewhat true; there are many that quail to bring their children—
PARRIS: I do not preach for children, Rebecca. It is not the children who are unmindful of their obligations toward this ministry.
REBECCA: Are there really those unmindful?
PARRIS: I should say the better half of Salem village—
PUTNAM: And more than that!
PARRIS: Where is my wood? My contract provides I be supplied with all my firewood. I am waiting since November for a stick, and even in November I had to show my frostbitten hands like some London beggar!
GILES: You are allowed six pound a year to buy your wood, Mr. Parris.
PARRIS: I regard that six pound as part of my salary. I am paid little enough without I spend six pound on firewood.
PROCTOR: Sixty, plus six for firewood—
PARRIS: The salary is sixty-six pound, Mr. Proctor! I am not some preaching farmer with a book under my arm; I am a graduate of Harvard College.
GILES: Aye, and well instructed in arithmetic!
PARRIS: Mr. Corey, you will look far for a man of my kind at sixty pound a year! I am not used to this poverty; I left a thrifty business in the Barbados to serve the Lord. I do not fathom it, why am I persecuted here? I cannot offer one proposition but there be a howling riot of argument. I have often wondered if the Devil be in it somewhere; I cannot understand you people otherwise.
PROCTOR: Mr. Parris, you are the first minister ever did demand the deed to this house—
PARRIS: Man! Don’t a minister deserve a house to live in?
PROCTOR: To live in, yes. But to ask ownership is like you shall own the meeting house itself; the last meeting I were at you spoke so long on deeds and mortgages I thought it were an auction.
PARRIS: I want a mark of confidence, is all! I am your third preacher in seven years. I do not wish to be put out like the cat whenever some majority feels the whim. You people seem not to comprehend that a minister is the Lord’s man in the parish; a minister is not to be so lightly crossed and contradicted—
PUTNAM: Aye!
PARRIS: There is either obedience or the church will burn like Hell is burning!
PROCTOR: Can you speak one minute without we land in Hell again? I am sick of Hell!
PARRIS: It is not for you to say what is good for you to hear!
PROCTOR: I may speak my heart, I think!
PARRIS,
in a fury:
What, are we Quakers? We are not Quakers here yet, Mr. Proctor. And you may tell that to your followers!
PROCTOR: My followers!
PARRIS—now
he’s out with it:
There is a party in this church. I am not blind; there is a faction and a party.
PROCTOR: Against you?
PUTNAM: Against him and all authority!
PROCTOR: Why, then I must find it and join it.
There is shock among the others.
REBECCA: He does not mean that.
PUTNAM: He confessed it now!
PROCTOR: I mean it solemnly, Rebecca; I like not the smell of this “authority.”
REBECCA: No, you cannot break charity with your minister. You are another kind, John. Clasp his hand, make your peace.
PROCTOR: I have a crop to sow and lumber to drag home.
He goes angrily to the door and turns to Corey with a smile.
What say you, Giles, let’s find the party. He says there’s a party.
GILES: I’ve changed my opinion of this man, John. Mr. Parris, I beg your pardon. I never thought you had so much iron in you.
PARRIS,
surprised:
Why, thank you, Giles!
GILES: It suggests to the mind what the trouble be among us all these years. To
all:
Think on it. Wherefore is everybody suing everybody else? Think on it now, it’s a deep thing, and dark as a pit. I have been six time in court this year—
PROCTOR,
familiarly, with warmth, although he knows he is approaching the edge of Giles’ tolerance with this:
Is it the Devil’s fault that a man cannot say you good morning without you clap him for defamation? You’re old, Giles, and you’re not hearin’ so well as you did.
GILES—he cannot be crossed:
John Proctor, I have only last month collected four pound damages for you publicly sayin’ I burned the roof off your house, and I—
PROCTOR,
laughing :
I never said no such thing, but I’ve paid you for it, so I hope I can call you deaf without charge. Now come along, Giles, and help me drag my lumber home.
PUTNAM: A moment, Mr. Proctor. What lumber is that you’re draggin’, if I may ask you?
PROCTOR: My lumber. From out my forest by the riverside.
PUTNAM: Why, we are surely gone wild this year. What anarchy is this? That tract is in my bounds, it’s in my bounds, Mr. Proctor.
PROCTOR: In your bounds!
Indicating Rebecca:
I bought that tract from Goody Nurse’s husband five months ago.
PUTNAM: He had no right to sell it. It stands clear in my grandfather’s will that all the land between the river and—
PROCTOR: Your grandfather had a habit of willing land that never belonged to him, if I may say it plain.
GILES: That’s God’s truth; he nearly willed away my north pasture but he knew I’d break his fingers before he’d set his name to it. Let’s get your lumber home, John. I feel a sudden will to work coming on.