Inherit the Wind Lines

Howard: Ahhh, your old man’s a monkey! Bye Lindy. What o you want a be when you grow up?

Mr. Meeker…?

Meeker: Who is it? Why hello, Rachel. ‘So use the way I look. Not goin’ away are you? Excitement’s just startin’.

Mr. Meeker, don’t let my father know I came here.

Meeker: The REverend don’t tell me his business. Don’t know why I should tell him mine.

I want to see Bert Cates. Is he all right?

Meeker: Don’t know why he shouldn’t be. I always figured the safest place in the world is in jail

Can I go down and see him?

Meeker: Ain’t a very proper place for a minister’s daughter

I only want to see him for a minute

Meeker: Sit down, Rachel. I’ll bring him up. You can talk to him right here in the courtroom. Long as I’ve been bailiff here, we’ve never had nothin’ but drunks, vagrants, couple of chicken thieves. Our best catch was that fella from Minnesota that chopped up his wife; we had to extradite him. Seems kinda queer havin’ a school-teacher in our jail. Might improve the writin’ on the walls. I’ll leave you two alone to talk. Don’t run off, Bert.

Hello, Bert

Cates: Rache, I told you not to come here

I couldn’t help it. Nobody saw me. Mr. Meeker won’t tell. I keep thinking of you, locked up here—

Cates: You know something funny? The food’s better than the boarding house. And you’d better not tell anyone how cool it is down there, or we’ll have a crime wave every summer.

I stopped by your place and picked up some of your things. A clean shirt, your best tie, some handkerchiefs.

Cates: Thanks.

Bert, why don’t you tell ‘em it was all a joke? Tell ‘em you didn’t mean to break the law, and you won’t do it again!

Cates: I suppose everybody’s all steamed up about Brady coming.

He’s coming in on a special train out of Chattanooga. Pa’s going to the station to meet him. Everybody is!

Cates: Strike up the band

Bert, it’s still not too late. Why can’t you just admit you were wrong? If the biggest man in the country—next to the President maybe—if Matthew Harrison Brady comes here to tell the whole world how wrong you are—

Cates: You still think I did wrong?

Why did you do it?

Cates: You know why I did it. I had the book in my hand, Hunter’s Civic Biology. I opened it up, and read my sophomore science class Chapter 17, Darwin’s Origin of Species. All it says is that man wasn’t just stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living comes from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days.

There’s a law against it

Cates: I know that

Everybody says what you did is bad.

Cates: It isn’t as simple as that. Good or bad, black or white, night or day. Do you know, at the top of the world the twilight is six months long?

But we don’t live at the top of the world. We live in HIllsboro, and when the sun goes down, it’s dark. And why do you try to make it different? Here.

Cates: Thanks, Rache

Why can’t you be on the right side of things?

Brady: Can someone tell me—is this fellow Cates a criminal by nature?

Bert isn’t a criminal. He’s good, really. He’s just—

Brady: Wait, my child. Is Mr. Cates your friend?

I can’t tell you anything about him—

Brady: Your daughter, Reverend? You must be proud, indeed. Now. How did you come to be acquainted with Mr. Cates?

At school. I’m a schoolteacher, too.

Brady: I’m sure you teach according to the precepts of the Lord.

I try. My pupils are only second graders.

Brady: Has Mr. Cates ever tried to pollute your mind with his heathen dogma?

Bert isn’t a heathen!

Brady: Have to build up my strength. Mother, for the battle ahead. Now what will Drummond do? He’ll try to make us forget the lawbreaker and put the law on trial. But we’ll have the answer for Mr. Drummond. Right here, in some of the things this sweet young lady has told me.

But Mr. Brady—

Brady: And if I seemed to pick at my food, I don’t want you to think I didn’t enjoy it. But you see, we had a box lunch on the train.

Mr. Meeker. Mr. Meeker? Bert, can you hear me? Bert, you’ve got to tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do—

Hornbeck: I give advice, at remarkably low hourly rates. Ten percent off to unmarried young ladies. And special discounts to the clergy and their daughters.

What are you doing here?

Hornbeck: I’m inspecting the battlefield—the night before the battle. Before it’s cluttered with the debris of journalistic camp-followers. I’m scouting myself an observation post to watch the fray. Wait. Why do you want to see Bert Cates? What’s he to you, or you to him? Can it be that both beauty and biology are on our side? There’s a newspaper here I’d like to have you see. It just arrived from that wicked modern Sodom and Gomorrah: Baltimore! Not the entire edition, of course. No Happy Hooligan, Barney Google, Abe Kabibble. Merely the part worth reading: E.K. Hornbeck’s brilliant little symphony of words. You should read it. My typewriter’s been singing a sweet, sad song about the Hillsboro heretic, B. Cates: Boy-socrates, latter-day Dreyfus, Romeo with a biology book. I may be rancid butter, but I’m on your side of the bread.

This sounds as if you’re a friend of Bert’s

Hornbeck: As much as a critic can be a friend to anyone. Have a bite? Don’t worry. I’m not the serpent, little eva. This isn’t from the Tree of Knowledge. You won’t find one in the orchards of Heavenly Hillsboro. Birches, beeches, butternuts. A few ignorance bushes. No Tree of Knowledge.

Will this be published here, in the local paper?

Hornbeck: In the Weekly Bugle? Or whatever it is they call the leaden stuff they blow through the local linotypes? I doubt it.

It would help Bert if the people here could read this. It would help them understand…! I never would have expected you to write an article like this. You seem so—

Hornbeck: Cynical? That’s my fascination. i do hateful things, for which people love me, and loveable things for which they hate me. I am the friend of enemies, the enemy of friends. I am admired for my detest ability. I am both Poles and the Equator, with no Temperate Zones in between.

You make it sound as if Bert is a hero. I’d like to think that, but I can’t. A schoolteacher is a public servant: I think he should do what the law and the school board want him to. If the superintendent comes to me and says, Miss Brown, you’re to teach from Whitley’s Second Reader, I don’t feel I have to give him an argument.

Hornbeck: Every give your pupils a snap-quiz on existence?

What?

Hornbeck: Where we are, where we came from, where we’re going?

All the answers to those questions are in the Bible.

Hornbeck: All? YOu feed the youth of Hillsboro from the little truck-garden of your mind?

I think there must be something wrong in what Bert believes, if a great man like Mr. Brady comes here to speak out against him.

Hornbeck: Matthew Harrison Brady came here to find himself a stump to shout from. That’s all.

You couldn’t understand. Mr. Brady is the champion of ordinary people, like us.

Brown: Rachel!

Yes, Father.

Meeker: Here.

Mr. Drummond. You’ve got to call the whole thing off. It’s not too late. Bert knows he did wrong. He didn’t mean to. And he’s sorry. Now why can’t he just stand up and say to everybody: “I didn’t wrong. I broke the law. I admit it. I won’t do it again.” Then they’d stop all this fuss, and—everything would be like it was.

Drummond: Who are you?

I’m—a friend of Bert’s

Drummond: We can call it off. You want to quit?

Yes!

Drummond: You murder a wife, it isn’t nearly as bad as murdering an old wives’ tale. Kill one of their fairy-tale notions , and they call down the wrath of God, Brady, and the state legislature.

You make a joke out of everything. YOu seem to think it’s all so funny!

Drummond: Good, you’d be a damned fool if you weren’t

YOu’re supposed to be helping Bert, and every time you swear you make it worse for him.

Drummond: I’m sorry if I offend you. But I don’t swear just for the hell of it. You seem, I figure that language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we ought to use all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damned few words that everybody understands.

You don’t care anything about Bert! You just want a chance to make speeches against the Bible!

Drummond: I care a great deal about Bert. I care a great deal about what Bert thinks.

Well, I care about what the people in this town think of him.

Drummond: Can you buy back his respectability by making him a coward?…I’ll pack my grip and go back to Chicago, where it’s a cool hundred in the shade.

Bert knows he’s wrong! Don’t you Bert?

Cates: No, sir. I’m not gonna quit.

Bert!

Cates: It wouldn’t do any good now, anyhow. If you’ll stick by me, Rache—well, we can fight it out!

I don’t know what to do; I don’t know what to do—!

Cates: What’s the matter, Rache?

I don’t want to do it, Bert, but Mr. Brady says—I—

Drummond: What does Mr. Brady say?

They want me to testify against Bert!

Drummond: What’s your name? Rachel what?

Rachel Brown. Can they make me testify?

Drummond: I’m afraid so. It wouldn’t be nice if nobody ever had to make anybody do anything. But—Don’t let Brady scare you. He only seems to be bigger than the law.

It’s not Brady. It’s my father.

Drummond: Who’s your father?

The Reverend Jeremiah Brown. I used to feel this way when I was a little girl.. I used to wake up at night, terrified of the dark. I’d think sometimes that my bed was on the ceiling, and the whole house was upside down; and if I didn’t hang onto the mattress, I might fall outward into the stars. I wanted to run to my father, and have him tell me I was safe, that everything was all right. But I was always more frightened of him than I was of falling. It’s the same way now.

Drummond: Is your mother dead?

I never knew my mother. Is it true? Is Bert wicked?

Drummond: Bert Cates is a good man. Maybe even a great one. And it takes strength for a woman to love such a man. Especially when he’s a pariah in the community.

I’m only confusing him. And he’s confused enough as it is.

Brown: O Lord of the Tempest and the Thunder! O Lord of Righteousness and Wrath! We pray that thou wilt make a sign unto us! Strike down this sinner, as Thou Didst Thine enemies of old, in the days of the Pharaohs! Let him feel the terror of Thy sword! For all eternity, let his soul writhe in anguish and damnation—

NO! No, Father. Don’t pray to destroy Bert! No, no, no..!

Brady: Miss Brown. You are a teacher at the Hillsboro Consolidated School?

Yes.

Brady: So you have had ample opportunity to know the defendant, Mr. Cates, professionally?

Yes.

Judge: Uh—objection overruled.

I did answer it, didn’t I? What was the question?

Brady: Do you and Mr. Cates attend the same church?

Not any more. Bert dropped out two summers ago.

Brady: Would you tell us about that, please?

The boy was eleven years old, and he went swimming in the river, and got a cramp and drowned. Bert felt awful about it. He lived right next door, and Tommy Stebbins used to come over to the boarding house and look through Bert’s microscope. Bert said the boy had a quick mind, and he might even be a scientist when he grew up. At the funeral, Pa preached that Tommy didn’t die in a state of grace, because him folks had never had him baptized—

Brady: Will you merely repeat in your words some of the conversations you had with the defendant?

I don’t remember exactly—

Brady: What you told me the other day. That presumably “humorous” remark Mr. Cates made about the Heavenly Father.

Bert said—

Brady: Go ahead, my dear

I can’t—

Judge: May I remind you, Miss Brown, that you are testifying under oath , and it is unlawful to withhold pertinent information.

Bert was just talking about some of the things he’d read. He—he—

Drummond: Objection!

Bert didn’t say that! He was just joking. What he said was: “God created Man in his own image—and Man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.”

Brady: Go on, my dear. Tell us some more. What did he say about the holy state of matrimony? Did he compare it with the breeding of animals?

No, he didn’t say that—He didn’t mean that. That’s not what I told you. All he said was—

Cates: Rachel!

Hello, Bert.

Cates: I don’t need any more shirts. I’m free—for a while anyway

These are my things, Bert. I’m going away.

Cates: Where are you going?

I’m not sure. But I’m leaving my father.

Cates: Rache…

Bert, it’s my fault the jury found you guilty. Partly my fault. I helped. This is your book, Bert. I’ve read it. All the way through. I don’t understand it. What I do understand, I don’t like. I don’t want to think that men come from apes and monkeys. But I think that’s beside the point.

Drummond: That’s right. That’s beside the point.

Mr. Drummond, I hope I haven’t said anything to offend you. You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think—so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too. Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don’t know. Bad or good, it doesn’t make any difference. The ideas have to come out—like children. Some of ‘em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don’t you, Bert?

Drummond: I didn’t come here to be paid. Well, I’d better get myself on a train.

There’s one out at five-thirteen. Bert, you and I can be on that train too!

Cates: I’ll get my stuff!

I’ll help you!