by W. B. Yeats
Paudeen. It is with that banner we will march and the lads in the quarry with us; it is they will have the welcome before him! It won’t be long till we’ll be attacking the Square House! Arms there are in it; riches that would smother the world; rooms full of guineas — we will put wax on our shoes walking them; the horses themselves shod with no less than silver!
Martin [holding up the banner]. There it is ready! We are very few now, but the army of the Unicorns will be a great army! [To Johnny B.] Why have you brought me the message? Can you remember any more? Has anything more come to you? Who told you to come to me? Who gave you the message?... Can you see anything or hear anything that is beyond the world?
Johnny B. I cannot. I don’t know what do you want me to tell you at all.
Martin. I want to begin the destruction, but I don’t know where to begin ... you do not hear any other voice?
Johnny B. I do not. I have nothing at all to do with freemasons or witchcraft.
Paudeen. It is Biddy Lally has to do with witchcraft. It is often she threw the cups and gave out prophecies the same as Columcille.
Martin. You are one of the knowledgeable women. You can tell me where it is best to begin, and what will happen in the end.
Biddy. I will foretell nothing at all. I rose out of it this good while, with the stiffness and the swelling it brought upon my joints.
Martin. If you have foreknowledge, you have no right to keep silent. If you do not help me, I may go to work in the wrong way. I know I have to destroy, but when I ask myself what I am to begin with, I am full of uncertainty.
Paudeen. Here now are the cups handy and the leavings in them.
Biddy [taking cups and pouring one from another]. Throw a bit of white money into the four corners of the house.
Martin. There! [Throwing it.]
Biddy. There can be nothing told without silver. It is not myself will have the profit of it. Along with that I will be forced to throw out gold.
Martin. There is a guinea for you. Tell me what comes before your eyes.
Biddy. What is it you are wanting to have news of?
Martin. Of what I have to go out against at the beginning ... there is so much ... the whole world, it may be.
Biddy [throwing from one cup to another and looking]. You have no care for yourself. You have been across the sea; you are not long back. You are coming within the best day of your life.
Martin. What is it? What is it I have to do?
Biddy. I see a great smoke, I see burning ... there is a great smoke overhead.
Martin. That means we have to burn away a great deal that men have piled up upon the earth. We must bring men once more to the wildness of the clean green earth.
Biddy. Herbs for my healing, the big herb and the little herb; it is true enough they get their great strength out of the earth.
Johnny B. Who was it the green sod of Ireland belonged to in the olden times? Wasn’t it to the ancient race it belonged? And who has possession of it now but the race that came robbing over the sea? The meaning of that is to destroy the big houses and the towns, and the fields to be given back to the ancient race.
Martin. That is it. You don’t put it as I do, but what matter? Battle is all.
Paudeen. Columcille said the four corners to be burned, and then the middle of the field to be burned. I tell you it was Columcille’s prophecy said that.
Biddy. Iron handcuffs I see and a rope and a gallows, and it maybe is not for yourself I see it, but for some I have acquaintance with a good way back.
Martin. That means the law. We must destroy the law. That was the first sin, the first mouthful of the apple.
Johnny B. So it was, so it was. The law is the worst loss. The ancient law was for the benefit of all. It is the law of the English is the only sin.
Martin. When there were no laws men warred on one another and man to man, not with one machine against another as they do now, and they grew hard and strong in body. They were altogether alive like Him that made them in His image, like people in that unfallen country. But presently they thought it better to be safe, as if safety mattered, or anything but the exaltation of the heart and to have eyes that danger had made grave and piercing. We must overthrow the laws and banish them!
Johnny B. It is what I say, to put out the laws is to put out the whole nation of the English. Laws for themselves they made for their own profit and left us nothing at all, no more than a dog or a sow.
Biddy. An old priest I see, and I would not say is he the one was here or another. Vexed and troubled he is, kneeling fretting, and ever fretting, in some lonesome, ruined place.
Martin. I thought it would come to that. Yes, the church too ... that is to be destroyed. Once men fought with their desires and their fears, with all that they call their sins, unhelped, and their souls became hard and strong. When we have brought back the clean earth and destroyed the law and the church, all life will become like a flame of fire, like a burning eye.... Oh, how to find words for it all ... all that is not life will pass away!
Johnny B. It is Luther’s church he means, and the humpbacked discourse of Seaghan Calvin’s Bible. So we will break it and make an end of it.
Martin [rising]. We will go out against the world and break it and unmake it. We are the army of the Unicorn from the Stars! We will trample it to pieces. We will consume the world, we will burn it away. Father John said the world has yet to be consumed by fire. Bring me fire.
Andrew. Here is Thomas coming! [All except Martin hurry into next room. Thomas comes in.]
Thomas. Come with me, Martin. There is terrible work going on in the town! There is mischief gone abroad! Very strange things are happening!
Martin. What are you talking of? What has happened?
Thomas. Come along, I say; it must be put a stop to! We must call to every decent man!... It is as if the devil himself had gone through the town on a blast and set every drinking house open!
Martin. I wonder how that has happened. Can it have anything to do with Andrew’s plan?
Thomas. Are you giving no heed to what I’m saying? There is not a man, I tell you, in the parish, and beyond the parish, but has left the work he was doing, whether in the field or in the mill.
Martin. Then all work has come to an end? Perhaps that was a good thought of Andrew’s.
Thomas. There is not a man has come to sensible years that is not drunk or drinking! My own labourers and my own serving-man are sitting on counters and on barrels! I give you my word the smell of the spirits and the porter and the shouting and the cheering within made the hair to rise up on my scalp.
Martin. And there is not one of them that does not feel that he could bridle the four winds.
Thomas [sitting down in despair]. You are drunk, too. I never thought you had a fancy for it.
Martin. It is hard for you to understand. You have worked all your life. You have said to yourself every morning, “What is to be done to-day?” and when you are tired out you have thought of the next day’s work. If you gave yourself an hour’s idleness, it was but that you might work the better. Yet it is only when one has put work away that one begins to live.
Thomas. It is those French wines that did it.
Martin. I have been beyond the earth, in paradise, in that happy townland. I have seen the shining people. They were all doing one thing or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but the overflowing of their idleness, and their days were a dance bred of the secret frenzy of their hearts, or a battle where the sword made a sound that was like laughter.
Thomas. You went away sober from out of my hands; they had a right to have minded you better.
Martin. No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fulness of life, if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if th
e joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment.
Thomas. And I offered to let you go to Dublin in the coach! [Andrew and the beggars have returned cautiously.]
Martin [giving banner to Paudeen]. Give me the lamp. The lamp has not yet been lighted, and the world is to be consumed! [Goes into inner room.]
Thomas [seeing Andrew]. Is it here you are, Andrew? What are the beggars doing? Was this door thrown open, too?... Why did you not keep order? I will go for the constables to help us!
Andrew. You will not find them to help you. They were scattering themselves through the drinking houses of the town; and why wouldn’t they?
Thomas. Are you drunk, too? You are worse than Martin. You are a disgrace.
Andrew. Disgrace yourself! Coming here to be making an attack on me and badgering me and disparaging me. And what about yourself that turned me to be a hypocrite?
Thomas. What are you saying?
Andrew. You did, I tell you. Weren’t you always at me to be regular and to be working and to be going through the day and the night without company and to be thinking of nothing but the trade? What did I want with a trade? I got a sight of the fairy gold one time in the mountains. I would have found it again and brought riches from it but for you keeping me so close to the work.
Thomas. Oh, of all the ungrateful creatures! You know well that I cherished you, leading you to live a decent, respectable life.
Andrew. You never had respect for the ancient ways. It is after the mother you take it, that was too soft and too lumpish, having too much of the English in her blood. Martin is a Hearne like myself. It is he has the generous heart! It is not Martin would make a hypocrite of me and force me to do night walking secretly, watching to be back by the setting of the seven stars! [He begins to play his flute.]
Thomas. I will turn you out of this, yourself and this filthy troop! I will have them lodged in gaol.
Johnny B. Filthy troop, is it? Mind yourself! The change is coming! The pikes will be up and the traders will go down!
[All seize him and sing.]
When the Lion shall lose his strength,
And the braket thistle begin to pine, —
The harp shall sound sweet, sweet at length
Between the eight and the nine!
Thomas. Let me out of this, you villains!
Nanny. We’ll make a sieve of holes of you, you old bag of treachery!
Biddy. How well you threatened us with gaol! You skim of a weasel’s milk!
Johnny B. You heap of sicknesses! You blinking hangman! That you may never die till you’ll get a blue hag for a wife!
[Martin comes back with lighted lamp.]
Martin. Let him go. [They let Thomas go and fall back.] Spread out the banner. The moment has come to begin the war.
Johnny B. Up with the Unicorn and destroy the Lion! Success to Johnny Gibbons and all good men!
Martin. Heap all those things together there. Heap those pieces of the coach one upon another. Put that straw under them. It is with this flame I will begin the work of destruction. All nature destroys and laughs.
Thomas. Destroy your own golden coach!
Martin [kneeling]. I am sorry to go a way that you do not like, and to do a thing that will vex you. I have been a great trouble to you since I was a child in the house, and I am a great trouble to you yet. It is not my fault. I have been chosen for what I have to do. [Stands up.] I have to free myself first and those that are near me. The love of God is a very terrible thing!
[Thomas tries to stop him, but is prevented by tinkers. Martin takes a wisp of straw and lights it.]
We will destroy all that can perish! It is only the soul that can suffer no injury. The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!
[He throws his wisp into the heap. It blazes up.]
ACT III
Scene: Before dawn a few hours later. A wild, rocky place. Nanny and Biddy Lally squatting by fire. Rich stuffs, etc., strewn about. Paudeen sitting, watching by Martin, who is lying, as if dead, a sack over him.
Nanny [to Paudeen]. Well, you are great heroes and great warriors and great lads altogether to have put down the Browns the way you did, yourselves and the Whiteboys of the quarry. To have ransacked the house and have plundered it! Look at the silks and the satins and the grandeurs I brought away! Look at that now! [Holds up a velvet cloak.] It’s a good little jacket for myself will come out of it. It’s the singers will be stopping their songs and the jobbers turning from their cattle in the fairs to be taking a view of the laces of it and the buttons! It’s my far-off cousins will be drawing from far and near!
Biddy. There was not so much gold in it all as what they were saying there was. Or maybe that fleet of Whiteboys had the place ransacked before we ourselves came in. Bad cess to them that put it in my mind to go gather up the full of my bag of horseshoes out of the forge. Silver they were saying they were, pure white silver; and what are they in the end but only hardened iron! A bad end to them! [Flings away horseshoes.] The time I will go robbing big houses again it will not be in the light of the full moon I will go doing it, that does be causing every common thing to shine out as if for a deceit and a mockery. It’s not shining at all they are at this time, but duck yellow and dark.
Nanny. To leave the big house blazing after us, it was that crowned all! Two houses to be burned to ashes in the one night. It is likely the servant-girls were rising from the feathers, and the cocks crowing from the rafters for seven miles around, taking the flames to be the whitening of the dawn.
Biddy. It is the lad is stretched beyond you have to be thankful to for that. There was never seen a leader was his equal for spirit and for daring! Making a great scatter of the guards the way he did! Running up roofs and ladders, the fire in his hand, till you’d think he would be apt to strike his head against the stars.
Nanny. I partly guessed death was near him, and the queer shining look he had in his two eyes, and he throwing sparks east and west through the beams. I wonder now was it some inward wound he got, or did some hardy lad of the Browns give him a tip on the skull unknownst in the fight? It was I myself found him, and the troop of the Whiteboys gone, and he lying by the side of a wall as weak as if he had knocked a mountain. I failed to waken him, trying him with the sharpness of my nails, and his head fell back when I moved it, and I knew him to be spent and gone.
Biddy. It’s a pity you not to have left him where he was lying, and said no word at all to Paudeen or to that son you have, that kept us back from following on, bringing him here to this shelter on sacks and upon poles.
Nanny. What way could I help letting a screech out of myself and the life but just gone out of him in the darkness, and not a living Christian by his side but myself and the great God?
Biddy. It’s on ourselves the vengeance of the red soldiers will fall, they to find us sitting here the same as hares in a tuft. It would be best for us follow after the rest of the army of the Whiteboys.
Nanny. Whist, I tell you! The lads are cracked about him. To get but the wind of the word of leaving him, it’s little but they’d knock the head off the two of us. Whist!
[Enter Johnny B. with candles.]
Johnny B. [standing over Martin]. Wouldn’t you say now there was some malice or some venom in the air, that is striking down one after the other the whole of the heroes of the Gael?
Paudeen. It makes a person be thinking of the four last ends, death and judgment, heaven and hell. Indeed and indeed my heart lies with him. It is well I knew what man he was under his by-name and his disguise. [Sings.]
Oh, Johnny Gibbons, it’s you were the prop to us!
You to have left us we are put astray!
Johnny B. It is lost we are now and broken to the end of our days. There is no satisfaction at all but to be destroying the English; and where now will we get so good a leader again? Lay him out fair and straight upon a stone, till I will let loose the secret of my heart keening him! [Sets out candles on a rack, propping them w
ith stones.]
Nanny. Is it mould candles you have brought to set around him, Johnny Bacach? It is great riches you should have in your pocket to be going to those lengths and not to be content with dips.
Johnny B. It is lengths I will not be going to the time the life will be gone out of your own body. It is not your corpse I will be wishful to hold in honour the way I hold this corpse in honour.
Nanny. That’s the way always: there will be grief and quietness in the house if it is a young person has died, but funning and springing and tricking one another if it is an old person’s corpse is in it. There is no compassion at all for the old.