Inheritors

Abstract Now that she was on “sabbatical,” Susan had the luxury of stepping back from the daily demands of the Players to think about new directions. “The Nervous Pig,” one of the two stories she wrote during the summer of 1919, explores this question of “busyness” and what happens to a person when “the mechanics of living ate life up.” The protagonist is a scholar who nervously burrows in details “in order to deepen his knowledge of life,” only to find he has somehow forgotten to live. He is like the pig of the title, who, nervous over motherhood, has eaten one of her young. For Susan, too, during the past few years, the mechanics of establishing and running the theatre had made it impossible for her to do much else. She and Jig were now free to break this pattern. One thing they did was to buy a Model Ford to start enjoying the surrounding areas on the Cape. Susan approached the car with much trepidation as she did all mechanical things that required that she do something with them.