Timebends by Arthur Miller Page B

a blank expression repeated, “Your jewelry?” With which the old man raised his stick and brought it down on the rabbi’s neck before the poor man could dodge out of the way. Bedlam. But new life had sprung into the old man’s sinews as he pursued the rabbi around the room with people trying to grab his flailing rod of righteousness. At last the rabbifaced him, both of them gasping for breath, and with hands raised he backed to the coat draped over his chair, reached into a pocket, and produced a knotted linen cloth. The old man unknotted it with his bent fingers and after a glancing count stuffed it into his own coat and walked out. He got home but barely made it back upstairs through the narrow brown-painted hallway and into his bed. The news had flown, and my mother and her father and a whole troop of heirs quickly assembled and watched as from his pillow he distributed his life among them, then sighed and closed his eyes, never to wake again.
    Thirty years later, on a cold spring day in 1952, I was the only visitor in the Historical Society “Witch Museum,” the exhaustive collection of papers on witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, at the time an institution known to few outside scholarly ranks but far more widely frequented when my play
The Crucible
had registered in the public mind. My eye had been caught by some framed etchings and woodcuts made in 1692 during the lethal court proceedings of Salem’s tragedy. The pictures showed the goings-on in Salem so the people in Boston and other remote locations might have some firsthand idea of how fantastically people were behaving under the prickings and seducing tricks of witches. Portrayed were the afflicted innocent girls pointing in terror at some farmer’s wife who was secretly persecuting them and yet stood in proud contempt of their Christian accusations. Nearby, in front of an enormous window indicating a church or courthouse, loomed a judge and some fifteen subordinate officials and Christian ministers dressed in floor-length robes, with long prophetic beards, looking wildly outraged at the incredible Devil-driven adamancy of the accused. The shafted light on the scene sharply contrasted with the sinister shadowed areas.
    I was researching
The Crucible
then, and in this handful of pictures I suddenly felt a familiar inner connection with witchcraft and the Puritan cult, its illusions, its stupidities, and its sublimity too, something more mysteriously personal than even a devotion to civil liberty and justice, reaching back much further into my life. I had all but committed myself to writing the play, but only at this moment did I realize that I felt strangely at home with these New Englanders, moved in the darkest part of my mind by some instinct that they were putative ur-Hebrews, with the same fierce idealism, devotion to God, tendency to legalistic reductiveness, the same longings for the pure and intellectually elegant argument. And God was driving them as crazy as He did the Jews trying to maintaintheir uniquely stainless vessel of faith in Him. And now, in these pictures, they also had the beards and, oddly, a building and lighting suggestive of the somber synagogue on 114th Street, where light—and I had done a lot of looking up there—seemed to vanish into dim paradisaical indefinition before the eye reached the man-made ceiling, so that all the humans moved as though suspended in a luminescence not quite of this world, lacking a hardness of outline—an impression derived, I suppose, from my having first seen that incantatory dancing through the fuzziness of my own eyelashes. More than once in the future, on crossing paths with some Ancient of Days, some very old man with a child’s spirit, I would sense an unnameable weight upon our relationship, the weight of repetition of an archaic reappearance. Perhaps one of these is Gregory Solomon in
The Price,
another, the silent Old Jew in
Incident at Vichy.
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