New Comedies Part 9

_Bartley Fallon:_ Isn't it enough to have madness before me, that you will not let me go fall in my own choice place?

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ The neighbours would think it bad of me to let a raving man out into their midst.

_Bartley Fallon:_ Is it to shoot me you are going?

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I will call to the doctor to say is the padded room at the workhouse the most place where you will be safe, till such time as it will be known did the poison wear away.

_Bartley Fallon:_ I will not go in it! It is likely I might be forgot in it, or the nurses to be in dread to bring me nourishment, and they to hear me barking within the door. I'm thinking it was allotted by nature I never would die an easy death.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I will keep a watch over you myself.

_Bartley Fallon:_ Where's the use of that the time the breath will be gone out of me, and you maybe playing cards on my coffin, and I having nothing around or about me but the shroud, and the habit, and the little board?

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Sure, I cannot leave you the way you are.

_Bartley Fallon:_ It is what I ever and always heard, a dog to bite you, all you have to do is to take a pinch of its hair and to lay it into the wound.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ So I heard that myself. A dog to bite any person he is ent.i.tled to be plucked of his hair.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I'll go out; I might chance to see him.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ You will not, without getting advice from the priest that is coming in the train. Let his Reverence come into this place, and say is it Bartley or is it Peter Tannian was done destruction on by the dog.

_Shawn Early:_ There is a surer way than that.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ What way?

_Shawn Early:_ It takes madness to find out madness. Let you call to the cracked woman that should know.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Come hither, Mary, and tell us is there any one of your own sort in this shed?

_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is a good thought. It is only themselves that recognise one another.

_Bartley Fallon:_ Do not ask her! I will not leave it to her!

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Sure, she cannot say more than what yourself has said against yourself.

_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm in dread she might know too much, and be telling out what is within in my mind.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That's foolishness. These are not the ancient times, when Ireland was full of haunted people.

_Bartley Fallon:_ Is a man having a wife and three acres of land to be put under the judgment of a witch?

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I would not give in to any pagan thing, but to recognise one of her own sort, that is a thing can be understood.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ So it could be too, the same as witnesses in a court.

_Bartley Fallon:_ I will not give in to going to demons or druids or freemasons! Wasn't there enough of misfortune set before my path through every day of my lifetime without it to be linked with me after my death? Is it that you would force me to lose the comforts of heaven and to get the poverty of h.e.l.l? I tell you I will have no trade with witches! I would sooner go face the featherbeds.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Say out, girl, do you see any craziness here or anything of the sort?

_Cracked Mary:_ Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ That is it, a venomous dew, as in the year of the famine. There is no astronomer can say it is from the earth or the sky.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is what we are asking you, did any of that malice get its scope in this place?

_Cracked Mary:_ That was settled in Mayo two thousand years ago.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, there's no head or tail to that one's story.

You 'd be left at the latter end the same as at the commencement.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That dog you were talking of, that is raging through the district and the town--did it leave any madness after it?

_Cracked Mary:_ It will go in the wind, there is a certain time for that. It might go off in the wind again. It might go shaping off and do no harm.

_Bartley Fallon:_ Where is that dog presently, till some person might go pluck out a few ribs of its hair?

_Cracked Mary:_ Raging ever and always it is, raging wild. Sure, that is a dog was in it before the foundations of the world.

_Peter Tannian:_ Who is it now that venom fell on, whatever beast's jaws may have scattered it?

_Cracked Mary:_ It is the full moon knows that. The moon to slacken it is safe, there is no harm in it. Almighty G.o.d will do that much. He'll slacken it like you 'd slacken lime.

_Shawn Early:_ There is reason in what she is saying. Set open the door and let the full moon call its own!

_Bartley Fallon:_ Don't let in the rays of it upon us or I'm a gone man. It to shine on them that are going wrong in the head, it would raise a great stir in the mind. Sure, it's in the asylum at that time they do have whips to chastise them.

_(Goes to corner.)_

_Cracked Mary:_ That's it. The moon is terrible. The full moon cracks them out and out, any one that would have any spleen or any relics in them.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Do not let in the light of it. I would scruple to look at it myself.

_Cracked Mary:_ Let you throw open the door, Davideen. It is not ourselves are in dread that the white man in the sky will be calling names after us and ridiculing us. Ha! ha! I might be as foolish as yourselves and as fearful, but for the Almighty that left a little cleft in my skull, that would let in His candle through the night time.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Hurry on now, tell us is there any one in this place is wild and astray like yourself.

_(He opens the door. The light falls on him.)_

_Cracked Mary: (Putting her hand on him.)_ There was great shouting in the big round house, and you coming into it last night.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What are you saying? I never went frolicking in the night time since the day I came into Cloon.

_Cracked Mary:_ We were talking of it a while ago. I knew you by the smile and by the laugh of you. A queen having a yellow dress, and the hair on her smooth like marble. All the dead of the village were in it, and of the living myself and yourself.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ I thought it was of Carrow she was talking; it is of the other world she is raving, and of the shadow-shapes of the forth.