the world theatre,” and the young lady’s translation of the play which bore the vigorous title of You Shall Be Free When You Have Cut Your Father’s Throat, ran somewhat in this manner:
Elektra: (advancing a step to the top of the raised dais, her face blue with a ghastly light, and her voice low and hoarse with passion as she addresses the dark mass of men below her.) Listen, man! To you it is now proper that I speak must. Do you by any manner of means know who this woman who now before you speaking stands may be? (With a sudden swift movement she, the purple-reddish silk-stuff of the tunic which she wearing is, asunder in two pieces rips, her two breasts exposing.)
(A low swiftly-growing-and-to-the-outer-edges-of-the-crowd-thunder-becoming mutter of astonishment through the great crowd surges.)
Elektra: (Thunder louder becomes, and even with every moment growing yet) Elektra! (The sound to a mighty roar arisen has, and now from every throat is in a single shout torn.) ELEKTRA!
Elektra: (quietly) Ja! Man, thou hast said it. I am Elektra!
The Crowd: (with from their throats an even-stronger roar yet) ELEKTRA. It is Elektra!
Elektra: (her voice even lower and more hoarse becoming, her eyes with the red blood-pains of all her heart-grief with still greater love-sorrow at the man-mass gleaming.) Listen, man. Slaves, workers, the of your fathers’sons not yet awakened—hear! Out of the night-dark of your not yet born souls to deliver you have I come! So, hear! (Her voice even lower with the low blood-pain heart-hate hoarse becoming.) To-night must you your old with-crime-blackened and by-ignorance-blinded father’s throat cut! I have spoken: so must it be.
A voice, Homunculus: (from the crowd, pleadingly, with protest.) Ach! Elektra! Spare us! Please! With the blood-lust malice-blinded your old father’s throat to cut not nice is.
Elektra: (raising her arm with a cold imperious gesture of command.) As I have spoken, must it be! Silence!
(Homunculus starts to interrupt: again she speaks, her voice more loud and stern becoming.) Silence! Silence!
At this moment there was a loud and sibilant hiss from the door. Miss Potter, who had been on the point of entering the room, had been halted by the sight of Miss Thrall’s arm uplifted in command and by the imperious coldness of her voice as she said “Silence!” Now as Miss Thrall stopped and looked up in a startled manner, Miss Potter, still hissing loudly, tiptoed ponderously into the room. The old woman advanced with the grace of a hydropic hippopotamus, laying her finger to her lips as she came on, looking all around her with her fixed grin and bulging eyes, and hissing loudly for the silence she had thus violently disrupted every time she laid her finger to her lips.
