Part 9

What way will I sow the field, and no man to drive the furrow? The sheaf to be scattered before springtime that was brought together at the harvest!

I would not begrudge you, Denis, and you leaving praises after you. The neighbours keening along with me would be better to me than an estate.

But my grief your name to be blackened in the time of the blackening of the rushes! Your name never to rise up again in the growing time of the year! (_She ceases keening and turns towards the old woman._) But tell me, Mary, do you think would they give us the body of Denis? I would lay him out with myself only; I would hire some man to dig the grave.

(_The Gatekeeper opens the gate and hands out some clothes._)

_Gatekeeper:_ There now is all he brought in with him; the flannels and the shirt and the shoes. It is little they are worth altogether; those mountainy boys do be poor.

_Mary Cushin:_ They had a right to give him time to ready himself the day they brought him to the magistrates. He to be wearing his Sunday coat, they would see he was a decent boy. Tell me where will they bury him, the way I can follow after him through the street? There is no other one to show respect to him but Mary Cahel, his mother, and myself.

_Gatekeeper:_ That is not to be done. He is buried since yesterday in the field that is belonging to the gaol.

_Mary Cushin:_ It is a great hardship that to have been done, and not one of his own there to follow after him at all.

_Gatekeeper:_ Those that break the law must be made an example of. Why would they be laid out like a well behaved man? A long rope and a short burying, that is the order for a man that is hanged.

_Mary Cushin:_ A man that was hanged! O Denis, was it they that made an end of you and not the great God at all? His curse and my own curse upon them that did not let you die on the pillow! The curse of God be fulfilled that was on them before they were born! My curse upon them that brought harm on you, and on Terry Fury that fired the shot!

_Mary Cahel:_ (_Standing up._) And the other boys, did they hang them along with him, Terry Fury and Pat Ruane that were brought from Daire-caol?

_Gatekeeper:_ They did not, but set them free twelve hours ago. It is likely you may have passed them in the night time.

_Mary Cushin:_ Set free is it, and Denis made an end of? What justice is there in the world at all?

_Gatekeeper:_ He was taken near the house. They knew his footmark. There was no witness given against the rest worth while.

_Mary Cahel:_ Then the sergeant was lying and the people were lying when they said Denis Cahel had informed in the gaol?

_Gatekeeper:_ I have no time to be stopping here talking. The judge got no evidence and the law set them free.

(_He goes in and shuts gate after him._)

_Mary Cahel:_ (_Holding out her hands._) Are there any people in the streets at all till I call on them to come hither? Did they ever hear in Galway such a thing to be done, a man to die for his neighbour?

Tell it out in the streets for the people to hear, Denis Cahel from Slieve Echtge is dead. It was Denis Cahel from Daire-caol that died in the place of his neighbour!

It is he was young and comely and strong, the best reaper and the best hurler. It was not a little thing for him to die, and he protecting his neighbour!

Gather up, Mary Cushin, the clothes for your child; they'll be wanted by this one and that one. The boys crossing the sea in the springtime will be craving a thread for a memory.

One word to the judge and Denis was free, they offered him all sorts of riches. They brought him drink in the gaol, and gold, to swear away the life of his neighbour!

Pat Ruane was no good friend to him at all, but a foolish, wild companion; it was Terry Fury knocked a gap in the wall and sent in the calves to our meadow.

Denis would not speak, he shut his mouth, he would never be an informer. It is no lie he would have said at all giving witness against Terry Fury.

I will go through Gort and Kilbecanty and Druimdarod and Daroda; I will call to the people and the singers at the fairs to make a great praise for Denis!

The child he left in the house that is shook, it is great will be his boast in his father! All Ireland will have a welcome before him, and all the people in Boston.

I to stoop on a stick through half a hundred years, I will never be tired with praising! Come hither, Mary Cushin, till we'll shout it through the roads, Denis Cahel died for his neighbour!

(_She goes off to the left, Mary Cushin following her._)

_Curtain_

MUSIC FOR THE SONGS IN THE PLAYS

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 passing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her passing 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 snatched 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 password 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 fishing 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, buttressed wall and slip away in the darkness by the canal to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fishing 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 passes 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 L50."

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 passionate 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.

FIRST PRODUCTIONS OF THE PLAYS

SPREADING THE NEWS was produced for the first time at the opening of the Abbey Theatre, on Tuesday, 27th December, 1904, with the following cast:

_Bartley Fallon_ W. G. FAY _Mrs. Fallon_ SARA ALGOOD _Mrs. Tully_ EMMA VERNON _Mrs. Tarpey_ MAIRE NI GHARBHAIGH _Shawn Early_ J. H. DUNNE _Tim Casey_ GEORGE ROBERTS _James Ryan_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR _Jack Smith_ P. MACSUIBHLAIGH _A Policeman_ R. S. NASH _A Removable Magistrate_ F. J. FAY

HYACINTH HALVEY was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on 19th February, 1906, with the following cast:

_Hyacinth Halvey_ F. J. FAY _James Quirke, a butcher_ W. G. FAY _Fardy Farrell, a telegraph boy_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR _Sergeant Carden_ WALTER MAGEE _Mrs. Delane, Postmistress at Cloon_ SARA ALLGOOD _Miss Joyce, the Priest's House-keeper_ BRIGIT O'DEMPSEY

THE GAOL GATE was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 20th October, 1906, with the following cast:

_Mary Cahel_ SARA ALLGOOD _Mary Cushin_ MAIRE O'NEILL _The Gate Keeper_ F. J. FAY

THE JACKDAW was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 23rd February, 1907, with the following cast:

_Joseph Nestor_ F. J. FAY _Michael Cooney_ W. G. FAY _Mrs. Broderick_ SARA ALLGOOD _Tommy Nally_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR _Sibby Fahy_ BRIGIT O'DEMPSEY _Timothy Ward_ J. M. KERRIGAN

THE RISING OF THE MOON was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 9th March, 1907, with the following cast:

_Sergeant_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR _Policeman X._ J. A. O'ROURKE _Policeman B._ J. M. KERRIGAN _Ballad Singer_ W. G. FAY

WORKHOUSE WARD was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 20th April, 1908, with the following cast:

_Mike M'Inerney_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR _Michael Miskell_ FRED O'DONOVAN _Mrs. Donohue_ MARIE O'NEILL

_A Selection from the Catalogue of_

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

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The Golden Apple

A Kiltartan Play for Children

By Lady Gregory

Author of "Seven Short Plays" "Our Irish Theatre" "Irish Folk-History Plays," etc.

_8vo Eight full-page Illustrations in color_ _$1.25 net._

This play deals with the adventures of the King of Ireland's son, who goes in search of the Golden Apple of Healing. The scenes are laid in the Witch's Garden, the Giant's House, the Wood of Wonders, and the King of Ireland's Room. It is both humorous and lyrical, and should please children and their elders, alike. The colored illustrations have the same old faery-tale air as the play itself.

Irish Folk-History Plays

By

LADY GREGORY

_First Series. The Tragedies_

GRANIA KINCORA DERVORGILLA

_Second Series. The Tragic Comedies_

THE CANAVANS THE WHITE COCKADE THE DELIVERER

_2 vols. Each, $1.5O net. By mail, $1.65_

Lady Gregory has preferred going for her material to the traditional folk-history rather than to the authorized printed versions, and she has been able, in so doing, to make her plays more living. One of these, Kincora, telling of Brian Boru, who reigned in the year 1000, evoked such keen local interest that an old farmer travelled from the neighborhood of Kincora to see it acted in Dublin.

The story of Grania, on which Lady Gregory has founded one of these plays, was taken entirely from tradition. Grania was a beautiful young woman and was to have been married to Finn, the great leader of the Fenians; but before the marriage, she went away from the bridegroom with his handsome young kinsman, Diarmuid. After many years, when Diarmuid had died (and Finn had a hand in his death), she went back to Finn and became his queen.

Another of Lady Gregory's plays, The Canavans dealt with the stormy times of Queen Elizabeth, whose memory is a horror in Ireland second only to that of Cromwell.

The White Cockade is founded on a tradition of King James having escaped from Ireland after the battle of the Boyne in a wine barrel.

The choice of folk history rather than written history gives a freshness of treatment and elasticity of material which made the late J. M. Synge say that "Lady Gregory's method had brought back the possibility of writing historic plays."

All these plays, except Grania, which has not yet been staged, have been very successfully performed in Ireland. They are written in the dialect of Kiltartan, which had already become familiar to readers of Lady Gregory's books.

New Comedies

By

LADY GREGORY

The Bogie Men--The Full Moon--Coats Damer's Gold--McDonough's Wife

_8vo, With Portrait in Photogravure. $1.50 net. By mail, $1.65_

The plays have been acted with great success by the Abbey Company, and have been highly extolled by appreciative audiences and an enthusiastic press. They are distinguished by a humor of unchallenged originality.

One of the plays in the collection, "Coats," depends for its plot upon the rivalry of two editors, each of whom has written an obituary notice of the other. The dialogue is full of crisp humor. "McDonough's Wife," another drama that appears in the volume, is based on a legend, and explains how a whole town rendered honor against its will. "The Bogie Men" has as its underlying situation an amusing misunderstanding of two chimney-sweeps. The wit and absurdity of the dialogue are in Lady Gregory's best vein. "Damer's Gold" contains the story of a miser beset by his gold-hungry relations. Their hopes and plans are upset by one they had believed to be of the simple of the world, but who confounds the Wisdom of the Wise. "The Full Moon" presents a little comedy enacted on an Irish railway station. It is characterized by humor of an original and delightful character and repartee that is distinctly clever.

Irish Plays

By LADY GREGORY

Lady Gregory's name has become a household word in America and her works should occupy an exclusive niche in every library. Mr. George Bernard Shaw, in a recently published interview, said Lady Gregory "is the greatest living Irishwoman.... Even in the plays of Lady Gregory, penetrated as they are by that intense love of Ireland which is unintelligible to the many drunken blackguards with Irish names who make their nationality an excuse for their vices and their worthlessness, there is no flattery of the Irish; she writes about the Irish as Moliere wrote about the French, having a talent curiously like Moliere."

"The witchery of Yeats, the vivid imagination of Synge, the amusing literalism mixed with the pronounced romance of their imitators, have their place and have been given their praise without stint. But none of these can compete with Lady Gregory for the quality of universality. The best beauty in Lady Gregory's art is its spontaneity. It is never forced.... She has read and dreamed and studied, and slept and wakened and worked, and the great ideas that have come to her have been nourished and trained till they have grown to be of great stature."--_Chicago Tribune._

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