SCENES FROM A PLAY
301
ber a passage, in a thing you wrote recently, about a man who by painful
degrees became aware of his humanity? Romeo gave me that article of
yours meaning me to print it; but when I was setting it up in type, that
passage stopped me. I could get no further, and I began thinking.
DoN PAoLo. You told me so already the last time we met in Agostino's
stable.
MurucA. Now here's the point I'd like you to think over: two years
ago when, by sheer accident as you know, I came into con–
tact with the clandestine movement and shortly afterwards joined it, I
was incapable of understanding even the literal meaning of those words
of yours. In the movement I found myself, consequently, from the very
beginning in the false position of the gambler staking a much higher
sum than he can really afford.
If
I'm talking like this to you now it's
mainly in order to ask you: do you think my case is an isolated one?
Don't you think a good many people stake far more than they possess?
DoN PAoLo. No one ever knows beforehand how much he really pos–
sesses. But we're not concerned with other people just now.
If
you felt
immature, why did you join a movement full of risks, like ours?
MurucA. I think people rebel against the existing order of things for
two diametrically opposite reasons: if they are very strong-minded and
if they are very weak. By a strong-minded man I mean a man who has
risen above the bourgeois order of things, repudiates it, scorns it, fights
against it and wants to put a more equitable society in its place. But I
was a poor timid awkward lonely provincial student in a big city; I was
incapable of facing the thousand petty hardships of daily life, the little
everyday humiliations and rebuffs. I was twenty years old and-forgive
me for mentioning this detail-! hadn't yet ventured to approach a wo–
man. And that thought kept me far busier and tormented me far more
than the destiny of the world. I realize now that I let myself be drawn
into the clandestine movement just because it enabled me to disguise
with a proud mask of rejection the resentment I harbored towards the
society from which I was shut out, and which nevertheless at the bottom
of my heart I envied, longed for and feared.
If
a weakling rebels against
the existing order of things....
DoN PAoLo. In the revolutionary party he can find a virile brother–
hood that gives him strength.
MurucA. He can also find in it something more convenient. Don't for–
get that the clandestine form of the revolutionary movement offers a
weakling the important and deceptive advantage of secrecy. He lives in
sacrilege and shudders at it, but in secret. He stands outside the abhorred
and greatly-dreaded law, but that's something the guardians of the law
don't know. His repudiation of the established order remains private and
secret, as in a dream, and for this very reason it's likely to assume a radi-
