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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
The Modern Section

A primly dressed mother sits at a table in a modern room. She is reading from the Bible to her two sons. It is San Francisco; the time is today or a just-passed yesterday...

One son, Dan, is bored and cynical. The other son, John, is tolerant and more than half impressed; at any rate, he is deferential to his mother.

"That's bunk," says Dan. He intimates that the Ten Commandments may have been all right for the dead ones, but that the world has changed.

The deeply religious mother, a Scotch-American woman who believes in the letter and fails to catch the spirit of religion, is affronted. Hugging her Bible to her flat breast, she turns her son out of her home because he says -he does not believe in God. Dan apologizes to his mother, but refuses to apologize to God because he does not believe in God.

A touching figure is Mary Leigh, ahand - to - mouth waif (her only friend her little terrier) who steals when she is hungry. Brought into the home circ!e, her tendrils of love twine round the hearts of the two brothers Dan and John.

The mother is relentless. She is warned by her good son that she is using the cross for a scourge, but will not relent. Later she does let Dan return, but the next Sunday she starts to leave home, Bible under her arm, because this sceptical son and his sweetheart are dancing on the Lord's Day.

Mary prefers him to John, and he marries her. It is a way of escape to them both from the narrow Covenanter faith of a household where the Holy Book is the literal rule of conduct and life is burdened by supplications and Scripture. They will defy the Commandments together, they say, and Dan's parting taunt to John is to the effect that he, Dan, will break the laws of Moses and wax rich and have the world at his feet, whereas the stay-at-home boy, if he lives up to the Ten Commandments will finish just where he began -- as a carpenter.

But John, still in love with Mary, sticks to the maternal hearth. and in bitterness of spirit he says: "I guess that's, all I'm fit for -- to be a carpenter."

His mother, her Bible in her arms, overhears his words and replies: "Many fine men have been carpenters, John."

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