Short Plays

have a wound pension, won’t you? O’Flaherty I will, please God. Teresa You’re going out again, aren’t you, Denny? O’Flaherty I can’t help myself. I’d be shot for a deserter if I didn’t go; and maybe I’ll be shot by the Boshes if I do go; so between the two of them I’m nicely fixed up. Mrs. O’Flaherty Calling from within the house. Tessie! Tessie darlint! Teresa Disengaging herself from his arm and rising. I’m wanted for the tea table. You’ll have a pension anyhow, Denny, won’t you, whether you’re wounded or not? Mrs. O’Flaherty Come, child, come. Teresa Impatiently. Oh, sure I’m coming. She tries to smile at Denny, not very convincingly, and hurries into the house. O’Flaherty Alone. And if I do get a pension itself, the divil a penny of it you’ll ever have the spending of. Mrs. O’Flaherty As she comes from the porch. Oh, it’s a shame for you to keep the girl from her juties, Dinny. You might get her into trouble. O’Flaherty Much I care whether she gets into trouble or not! I pity the man that gets her into trouble. He’ll get himself into worse. Mrs. O’Flaherty What’s that you tell me? Have you been falling out with her, and she a girl with a fortune of ten pounds? O’Flaherty Let her keep her fortune. I wouldn’t touch her with the tongs if she had thousands and millions. Mrs. O’Flaherty Oh fie for shame, Dinny! why would you say the like of that of a decent honest girl, and one of the Driscolls too? O’Flaherty Why wouldn’t I say it? She’s thinking of nothing but to get me out there again to be wounded so that she may spend my pension, bad scran to her! Mrs. O’Flaherty Why, what’s come over you, child, at all at all? O’Flaherty Knowledge and wisdom has come over me with pain and fear and trouble. I’ve been made a fool of and imposed upon all my life. I thought that covetious sthreal in there was a walking angel; and now if ever I marry at all I’ll marry a Frenchwoman. Mrs. O’Flaherty Fiercely. You’ll not, so; and don’t you dar repeat such a thing to me. O’Flaherty Won’t I, faith! I’ve been as good as married to a couple of them already. Mrs. O’Flaherty The Lord be praised, what wickedness have you been up to, you young blackguard? O’Flaherty One of them Frenchwomen would cook you a meal twice in the day and all days and every day that Sir Pearce himself might go begging through Ireland for, and never see the like of. I’ll have a French wife, I tell you; and when I settle down to be a farmer I’ll have a French farm, with a field as big as the continent of Europe that ten of your dirty little fields here wouldn’t so much as fill the ditch of. Mrs. O’Flaherty Furious. Then it’s a French mother you may go look for; for I’m done with you. O’Flaherty And it’s no great loss you’d be if it wasn’t for my natural feelings for you; for it’s only a silly ignorant old countrywoman you are with all your fine talk about Ireland: you that never stepped beyond the few acres of it you were born on! Mrs. O’Flaherty Tottering to the garden seat and showing signs of breaking down. Dinny darlint, why are you like this to me? What’s happened to you? O’Flaherty Gloomily. What’s happened to everybody? that’s what I want to know. What’s happened to you that I thought all the world of and was afeard of? What’s happened to Sir Pearce, that I thought was a great general, and that I now see to be no more fit to command an army than an old hen? What’s happened to Tessie, that I was mad to marry a year ago, and that I wouldn’t take now with all Ireland for her fortune? I tell you the world’s creation is crumbling in ruins about me; and then you come and ask what’s happened to me? Mrs. O’Flaherty Giving way to wild grief. Ochone! ochone! my son’s turned agen me. Oh, what’ll I do at all at all? Oh! oh! oh! oh! Sir Pearce Running out of the house. What’s this infernal noise? What on earth is the matter? O’Flaherty Arra hold your whisht, mother. Don’t you see his honor? Mrs. O’Flaherty Oh, sir, I’m ruined and destroyed. Oh, won’t you speak to Dinny, sir: I’m heart scalded with him. He wants to marry a Frenchwoman on me, and to go away and be a foreigner and desert his mother and betray his country. It’s mad he is with the roaring of the cannons and he killing the Germans and the Germans killing him, bad cess to them! My boy is taken from me and turned agen me; and who is to take care of me in my old age after all I’ve done for him, ochone! ochone! O’Flaherty Hold your noise, I tell you. Who’s going to leave you? I’m going to take you with me. There now: does that satisfy you? Mrs. O’Flaherty Is it take me into a strange land among heathens and pagans and savages, and me not knowing a word of their language nor them of mine? O’Flaherty A good job they don’t: maybe they’ll think you’re talking sense. Mrs. O’Flaherty Ask me to die out of Ireland, is it? and the angels not to find me when they come for me! O’Flaherty And would you ask me to live in Ireland where I’ve been imposed on and kept in ignorance, and to die where the divil himself wouldn’t take me as a gift, let alone the blessed angels? You can come or stay. You can take your old way or take my young way. But stick in this place I will not among a lot of good-for-nothing divils that’ll not do a hand’s turn but watch the grass growing and build up the stone wall where the cow walked through it. And Sir Horace Plunkett breaking his heart