by W. B. Yeats
And he squandered everything she had.
She never knew the worst, because
She died in giving birth to me,
But now she knows it all, being dead.
Great people lived and died in this house;
Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament,
Captains and governors, and long ago
Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.
Some that had gone on government work
To London or to India came home to die,
Or came from London every spring
To look at the may-blossom in the park.
They had loved the trees that he cut down
To pay what he had lost at cards
Or spent on horses, drink and women;
Had loved the house, had loved all
The intricate passages of the house,
But he killed the house; to kill a house
Where great men grew up, married, died,
I here declare a capital offence.
BOY. My God, but you had luck. Grand clothes,
And maybe a grand horse to ride.
OLD MAN. That he might keep me upon his level
He never sent me to school, but some
Half-loved me for my half of her.
A gamekeeper’s wife taught me to read,
A Catholic curate taught me Latin.
There were old books and books made fine
By eighteenth century French binding, books
Modern and ancient, books by the ton.
BOY. What education have you given me?
OLD MAN. I gave the education that befits
A bastard that a pedlar got
Upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch.
When I had come to sixteen years old
My father burned down the house when drunk.
BOY. But that is my age, sixteen years old
At the Puck Fair.
OLD MAN. — And everything was burnt;
Books, library, all were burnt.
BOY. IS what I have heard upon the road the truth,
That you killed him in the burning house?
OLD MAN. There’s nobody here but our two selves?
BOY. Nobody, Father.
OLD MAN. — I stuck him with a knife,
That knife that cuts my dinner now,
And after that I left him in the fire;
They dragged him out, somebody saw
The knife-wound but could not be certain
Because the body was all black and charred.
Then some that were his drunken friends
Swore they would put me upon trial,
Spoke of quarrels, a threat I had made.
The gamekeeper gave me some old clothes,
I ran away, worked here and there
Till I became a pedlar on the roads,
No good trade, but good enough
Because I am my father’s son,
Because of what I did or may do.
Listen to the hoof beats! Listen, listen!
BOY. I cannot hear a sound.
OLD MAN. — Beat! Beat!
This night is the anniversary
Of my mother’s wedding night,
Or of the night wherein I was begotten.
My father is riding from the public house
A whiskey bottle under his arm.
[A window is lit showing a young girl.
Look at the window; she stands there
Listening, the servants are all in bed,
She is alone, he has stayed late
Bragging and drinking in the public house.
BOY. There’s nothing but an empty gap in the wall.
You have made it up. No, you are mad!
You are getting madder every day.
OLD MAN. It’s louder now because he rides
Upon a gravelled avenue
All grass to-day. The hoof beat stops,
He has gone to the other side of the house,
Gone to the stable, put the horse up.
She has gone down to open the door.
This night she is no better than her man
And does not mind that he is half drunk,
She is mad about him. They mount the stairs;
She brings him into her own chamber.
And that is the marriage chamber. Now
The window is dimly lit again.
Do not let him touch you! It is not true
That drunken men cannot beget,
And if he touch he must beget
And you must bear his murderer.
Deaf! Both deaf! If I should throw
A stick or a stone they would not hear;
And that’s a proof my wits are out.
But there’s a problem: she must live
Through everything in exact detail,
Driven to it by remorse, and yet
Can she renew the sexual act
And find no pleasure in it, and if not,
If pleasure and remorse must both be there
Which is the greater?
I lack schooling.
Go fetch Tertullian; he and I
Will ravel all that problem out
Whilst those two lie upon the mattress
Begetting me.
Come back! Come back!
And so you thought to slip away,
My bag of money between your fingers,
And that I could not talk and see!
You have been rummaging in the pack.
[The light in the window has faded out.
BOY. YOU never gave me my right share.
OLD MAN. And had I given it, young as you are
You would have spent it upon drink.
BOY. What if I did? I had a right
To get it and spend it as I chose.
OLD MAN. Give me that bag and no more words.
BOY. I will not.
OLD MAN. — I will break your fingers.
[They struggle for the bag. In the struggle it drops, scattering the money. The old man staggers but does not fall. They stand looking at each other.
BOY. What if I killed you? You killed my grand-dad.
Because you were young and he was old.
Now I am young and you are old.
[A window is lit up. A man is seen pouring whiskey into a glass.
OLD MAN [staring at window]. Better looking, those sixteen years —
BOY. What are you muttering?
OLD MAN. — Younger — and yet
She should have known he was not her kind.
BOY. What are you saying? Out with it!
[Old Man points to window.
My God! The window is lit up
And somebody stands there, although
The floorboards are all burnt away.
OLD MAN. The window is lit up because my father
Has come to find a glass for his whiskey.
He leans there like some tired beast.
BOY. A dead, living, murdered man.
OLD MAN. “Then the bride sleep fell upon Adam:”
Where did I read those words?
And yet
There’s nothing leaning in the window
But the impression upon my mother’s mind,
Being dead she is alone in her remorse.
BOY. A body that was a bundle of old bones
Before I was born. Horrible! Horrible!
[He covers his eyes.
OLD MAN. That beast there would know nothing, being nothing,
If I should kill a man under the window;
He would not even turn his head.
[He stabs the Boy.
My father and my son on the same jack-knife!
That finishes — there — there — there —
[He stabs again and again. The window grows dark.
OLD MAN. “Hush-a-bye baby, thy father’s a knight,
Thy mother a lady, lovely and bright.”
No, that is something that I read in a book,
And if I sing it must be to my mother,
And I lack rhyme.
[The stage has grown dark except where the tree stands in white light.
Study that tree.
It stands there like a purified soul,
All cold, sweet, glistening light.
Dear mother, the window is dark again
But you are in the light because
I finished all that consequence.
I killed that lad because he had grown up.
He would have struck a woman’s fancy,
Begot, and passed pollution on.
I am a wretched foul old man
And therefore harmless. When I have stuck
This old jack-knife into a sod
And pulled it out all bright again,
And picked up all the money that he dropped,
I’ll to a distant place, and there
Tell my old jokes among new men.
[He cleans the knife and begins to pick up money.
Hoof beats! Dear God,
How quickly it returns — beat — beat —
Her mind cannot hold up that dream.
Twice a murderer and all for nothing,
And she must animate that dead night
Not once but many times!
O God!
Release my mother’s soul from its dream!
Mankind can do no more. Appease
The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead.
Curtain
THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN
PERSONS IN THE PLAY
Cuchulain —
An Old Man
Eithne Inguba —
A Blind Man
Aoife —
A Servant
Emer —
A Singer, a Piper, and a Drummer
The Morrigu, Goddess of War
THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN
A bare stage of any period. A very old man looking like something out of mythology.
OLD MAN. I have been asked to produce a play called The Death of Cuchulain. It is the last of a series of plays which has for theme his life and death. I have been selected because I am out of fashion and out of date like the antiquated romantic stuff the thing is made of. I am so old that I have forgotten the name of my father and mother, unless indeed I am, as I affirm, the son of Talma, and he was so old that his friends and acquaintances still read Virgil and Homer. When they told me that I could have my own way I wrote certain guiding principles on a bit of newspaper. I wanted an audience of fifty or a hundred, and if there are more I beg them not to shuffle their feet or talk when the actors are speaking. I am sure that as I am producing a play for people I like it is not probable in this vile age that they will be more in number than those who listened to the first performance of Milton’s Comus. On the present occasion they must know the old epics and Mr. Yeats’ plays about them. Such people, however poor, have libraries of their own. If there are more than a hundred I won’t be able to escape people who are educating themselves out of the book societies and the like, sciolists all, pickpockets and opinionated bitches. Why pickpockets? I will explain that, I will make it all quite clear.
[Drum and pipe behind the scene, then silence.
That’s from the musicians; I asked them to do that if I was getting excited. If you were as old you would find it easy to get excited. Before the night ends you will meet the music. There is a singer, a piper and a drummer. I have picked them up here and there about the streets, and I will teach them, if I live, the music of the beggarman, Homer’s music. I promise a dance. I wanted a dance because where there are no words there is less to spoil. Emer must dance, there must be severed heads — I am old, I belong to mythology — severed heads for her to dance before. I had thought to have had those heads carved, but no, if the dancer can dance properly no wood-carving can look as well as a parallelogram of painted wood. But I was at my wit’s end to find a good dancer; I could have got such a dancer once, but she has gone; the tragi-comedian dancer, the tragic dancer, upon the same neck love and loathing, life and death. I spit three times. I spit upon the dancers painted by
Degas. I spit upon their short bodices, their stiff stays, their toes whereon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Rameses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit!
[The stage is darkened, the curtain falls. Pipe and drum begin and continue until the curtain rises again on a bare stage. Half a minute later Eithne Inguba enters.
EITHNE. Cuchulain! Cuchulain!
Cuchulain enters from back
I am Emer’s messenger,
I am your wife’s messenger, she has bid me say
You must not linger here in sloth for Maeve
With all those Connacht ruffians at her back
Burns barns and houses up at Emain Macha:
Your house at Muirthemne already burns.
No matter what’s the odds, no matter though
Your death may come of it, ride out and fight.
The scene is set and you must out and fight.
CUCHULAIN. YOU have told me nothing. I am already armed.
I have sent a messenger to gather men,
And wait for his return. What have you there?
EITHNE. I have nothing.
CUCHULAIN. — There is something in your hand.
EITHNE. NO.
CUCHULAIN. Have you not a letter in your hand?
EITHNE. I do not know how it got into my hand.
I am straight from Emer. We were in some place.
She spoke. She saw.
CUCHULAIN. — This letter is from Emer.
It tells a different story. I am not to move
Until to-morrow morning, for, if now,
I must face odds no man can face and live.
To-morrow morning Conall Cearnach comes
With a great host.
EITHNE. — I do not understand.
Who can have put that letter in my hand?
CUCHULAIN. And there is something more to make it certain
I shall not stir till morning; you are sent
To be my bedfellow, but have no fear;
All that is written but I much prefer
Your own unwritten words. I am for the fight,
I and my handful are set upon the fight;
We have faced great odds before, a straw decided.
The Morrigu enters and stands between them
EITHNE. I know that somebody or something is there,
Yet nobody that I can see.
CUCHULAIN. — There is nobody.
EITHNE. Who among the gods of the air and the upper air
Has a bird’s head?
CUCHULAIN. — Morrigu is headed like a crow.
EITHNE [dazed]. Morrigu, war goddess, stands between.
Her black wing touched me upon the shoulder, and now
All is intelligible.
[The Morrigu goes out.
Maeve put me into a trance.
Though when Cuchulain slept with her as a boy
She seemed as pretty as a bird, she has changed.
She has an eye in the middle of her forehead.
CUCHULAIN. A woman that has an eye in the middle of her forehead,
A woman that is headed like a crow,
But she that put those words into your mouth
Had nothing monstrous; you put them there yourself.
You need a younger man, a friendlier man,
But fearing what my violence might do
Thought out those words to send me to my death,
And were in such excitement you forgot
The letter in your hand.
EITHNE. — NOW that I wake
I say that Maeve did nothing out of error;
What mouth could you believe if not my mouth?
CUCHULAIN. When I went mad at my son’s death and drew
My sword against the sea, it was my wife
That br
ought me back.
EITHNE. — Better women than I
Have served you well, but ‘twas to me you turned.
CUCHULAIN. You thought that if you changed Ed kill you for it,
When everything sublunary must change,
And if I have not changed that goes to prove
That I am monstrous.
EITHNE. — You’re not the man I loved,
That violent man forgave no treachery.
If thinking what you think you can forgive
It is because you are about to die.
CUCHULAIN. Spoken too loudly and too near the door;
Speak low if you would speak about my death,
Or not in that strange voice exulting in it.
Who knows what ears listen behind the door?
EITHNE. Some that would not forgive a traitor, some
That have the passion necessary to life,
Some not about to die. When you are gone
I shall denounce myself to all your cooks,
Scullions, armourers, bed-makers and messengers,
Until they hammer me with a ladle, cut me with a knife,
Impale me upon a spit, put me to death
By what foul way best please their fancy,
So that my shade can stand among the shades
And greet your shade and prove it is no traitor.
CUCHULAIN. Women have spoken so plotting a man’s death.
Enter a Servant
SERVANT. Your great horse is bitted. All wait the word.
CUCHULAIN. I come to give it, but must ask a question.
This woman, wild with grief, declares that she
Out of pure treachery has told me lies
That should have brought my death. What can I do?
How can I save her from her own wild words?
SERVANT. Is her confession true?