Seven Short Plays Part 35

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music sheet for JOHNNY HART

JOHNNY HART

_The Rising of the Moon._

There was a rich far-mer's daugh-ter lived near the town of Ross; She courted a High-land soldier, His name was John-ny Hart; Says the mother to her daughter, "I'll go distracted mad If you mar-ry that Highland soldier dressed up to his High-land plaid."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music sheet for THE RISING OF THE MOON

THE RISING OF THE MOON

O, then, tell me, Shawn O' Far-rell, where the gath'ring is to be.

In the old spot by the river, Right well known to you and me.

One word more, for signal token whistle up the march-ing tune, With your pike up - on your shoulder at the rising of the moon.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music sheet for GAOL GATE

GAOL GATE

Caions.

_Tempo, ad lib._

What way will I be the Sun-day And I going up the hill to the Ma.s.s; Ev'ry woman with her own comrade And Mary Cush-in to be walk-ing her lone.

{_Spoken_.} What way drive the furrow?

{_Sings_.} The sheaf to be scat-tered before spring-time that was brought together at the harvest!

{_Spoken_.} I would not-an estate.

{_Sings_.} But my grief your name to be blackened in the time of the black'ning of the rushes Your ... name never to rise up again In the growing time ... of ... the year.]

NOTES AND CASTS

SPREADING THE NEWS

The idea of this play first came to me as a tragedy. I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl pa.s.sing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her pa.s.sing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had s.n.a.t.c.hed away her good name.

But comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work, _The King's Threshold_, _The Shadowy Waters_, _On Baile's Strand_, _The Well of the Saints_; and I let laughter have its way with the little play. I was delayed in beginning it for a while, because I could only think of Bartley Fallon as dull-witted or silly or ignorant, and the handcuffs seemed too harsh a punishment. But one day by the sea at Duras a melancholy man who was telling me of the crosses he had gone through at home said-"But I'm thinking if I went to America, its long ago to-day I'd be dead. And its a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America." Bartley was born at that moment, and, far from harshness, I felt I was providing him with a happy old age in giving him the lasting glory of that great and crowning day of misfortune.

It has been acted very often by other companies as well as our own, and the Boers have done me the honour of translating and pirating it.

HYACINTH HALVEY

I was pointed out one evening a well-brushed, well-dressed man in the stalls, and was told gossip about him, perhaps not all true, which made me wonder if that appearance and behaviour as of extreme respectability might not now and again be felt a burden.

After a while he translated himself in my mind into Hyacinth; and as one must set one's original a little way off to get a translation rather than a tracing, he found himself in Cloon, where, as in other parts of our country, "character" is built up or destroyed by a pa.s.sword or an emotion, rather than by experience and deliberation.

The idea was more of a universal one than I knew at the first, and I have had but uneasy appreciation from some apparently blameless friends.

THE RISING OF THE MOON

When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fis.h.i.+ng in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. I used to wonder if ever a prisoner might by some means climb the high, b.u.t.tressed wall and slip away in the darkness by the ca.n.a.l to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fis.h.i.+ng boat, as happens to my ballad-singing man. The play was considered offensive to some extreme Nationalists before it was acted, because it showed the police in too favourable a light, and a Unionist paper attacked it after it was acted because the policeman was represented "as a coward and a traitor"; but after the Belfast police strike that same paper praised its "insight into Irish character." After all these ups and downs it pa.s.ses unchallenged on both sides of the Irish Sea.

THE JACKDAW

The first play I wrote was called "Twenty-five." It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America. It was about "A boy of Kilbecanty that saved his old sweetheart from being evicted. It was playing Twenty-five he did it; played with the husband he did, letting him win up to 50."

It was rather sentimental and weak in construction, and for a long time it was an overflowing storehouse of examples of "the faults of my dramatic method." I have at last laid its ghost in "The Jackdaw," and I have not been accused of sentimentality since the appearance of this.

THE WORKHOUSE WARD

I heard of an old man in the workhouse who had been disabled many years before by, I think, a knife thrown at him by his wife in some pa.s.sionate quarrel.

One day I heard the wife had been brought in there, poor and sick. I wondered how they would meet, and if the old quarrel was still alive, or if they who knew the worst of each other would be better pleased with one another's company than with that of strangers.

I wrote a scenario of the play, Dr. Douglas Hyde, getting in plot what he gave back in dialogue, for at that time we thought a dramatic movement in Irish would be helpful to our own as well as to the Gaelic League. Later I tried to rearrange it for our own theatre, and for three players only, but in doing this I found it necessary to write entirely new dialogue, the two old men in the original play obviously talking at an audience in the wards, which is no longer there.

I sometimes think the two scolding paupers are a symbol of ourselves in Ireland-[Gaelic script and words]-"it is better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome." The Rajputs, that great fighting race, when they were told they had been brought under the Pax Britannica and must give up war, gave themselves to opium in its place, but Connacht has not yet planted its poppy gardens.

THE TRAVELLING MAN

An old woman living in a cabin by a bog road on Slieve Echtge told me the legend on which this play is founded, and which I have already published in "Poets and Dreamers."

"There was a poor girl walking the road one night with no place to stop, and the Saviour met her on the road, and He said-'Go up to the house you see a light in; there's a woman dead there, and they'll let you in.' So she went, and she found the woman laid out, and the husband and other people; but she worked harder than they all, and she stopped in the house after; and after two quarters the man married her. And one day she was sitting outside the door, picking over a bag of wheat, and the Saviour came again, with the appearance of a poor man, and He asked her for a few grains of the wheat. And she said-'Wouldn't potatoes be good enough for you?' And she called to the girl within to bring out a few potatoes. But He took nine grains of the wheat in His hand and went away; and there wasn't a grain of wheat left in the bag, but all gone. So she ran after Him then to ask Him to forgive her; and she overtook Him on the road, and she asked forgiveness. And He said-'Don't you remember the time you had no house to go to, and I met you on the road, and sent you to a house where you'd live in plenty? And now you wouldn't give Me a few grains of wheat.' And she said-'But why didn't you give me a heart that would like to divide it?' That is how she came round on Him. And He said-'From this out, whenever you have plenty in your hands, divide it freely for My sake.'"

And an old woman who sold sweets in a little shop in Galway, and whose son became a great Dominican preacher, used to say-"Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ."

I owe the Rider's Song, and some of the rest, to W. B. Yeats.

THE GAOL GATE

I was told a story some one had heard, of a man who had gone to welcome his brother coming out of gaol, and heard he had died there before the gates had been opened for him.

I was going to Galway, and at the Gort station I met two cloaked and shawled countrywomen from the slopes of Slieve Echtge, who were obliged to go and see some law official in Galway because of some money left them by a kinsman in Australia. They had never been in a train or to any place farther than a few miles from their own village, and they felt astray and terrified "like blind beasts in a bog" they said, and I took care of them through the day.

An agent was fired at on the road from Athenry, and some men were taken up on suspicion. One of them was a young carpenter from my old home, and in a little time a rumour was put about that he had informed against the others in Galway gaol. When the prisoners were taken across the bridge to the courthouse he was hooted by the crowd. But at the trial it was found that he had not informed, that no evidence had been given at all; and bonfires were lighted for him as he went home.

These three incidents coming within a few months wove themselves into this little play, and within three days it had written itself, or been written. I like it better than any in the volume, and I have never changed a word of it.