John Bull's Other Island, Bernard Shaw

• Act 1
• The setting, Doyle and Broadbent's office,
  It is a room which no woman would tolerate, smelling of tobacco, and much in need of repapering, repainting, and recarpeting; but this is the effect of bachelor untidiness and indifference, not want of means; for nothing that DOYLE and BROADBENT themselves have purchased is cheap; nor is anything they want lacking.
• HODSON (hesitant). Is it a dangerous part youre going to, sir? Should I be expected to carry a revolver, sir?
  BROADBENT. Perhaps it might be as well. I'm going to Ireland.
• BROADBENT. Oh, he's all right. He's an Irishman, and not very particular about his appearance.
  HODSON. Yes sir: I noticed that he was rather Irish.
• HAFFIGAN. Tim Haffigan, sir, at your service. The top o the mornin to you, Misther Broadbent.
  BRAODBENT [delighted with his Irish visitor]. Good afternoon, Mr Haffigan.
• BROADBENT [laughing]. You Irishmen certainly do know how to drink. [Pouring some whisky for himself.] Not thats my poor English idea of a whisky and soda.
  TIM. An a very good idea it is too. Dhrink is the curse o me unhappy counthry. I take it myself because Ive a wake heart and a poor digestion; but in principle I'm a tee-toatler.
• BROADBENT. I'm going to develop an estate there for the Land Development Syndicate, in which I am interested. I am convinced that all it needs to make it pay is to handle it properly, as estates are handled in England. You know the English plan, Mr Haffigan, dont you?
  TIM. Bedad I do, sir. Take all you can out of Ireland and spend it in England: thats it.
• BROADBENT. There are difficulties. I shall overcome them; but there are difficulties. When I first arrive in Ireland I shall be hated as an Englishman. As a Protestant, I shall be denounced from every alter. My life may be in danger. Well, I am prepared to face that.
• BROADBENT. May I put it this way? that I saw at once that you are a thorough Irishman, with all the faults and all the qualities of your race: rash and improvident but brave and goodnatured; not likely to succeed in business on your own account perhaps, but eloquent, humorous, a lover of freedom, and a true follower of that great English Gladstone.
  TIM. Spare me blushes. I mustnt sit here to be praised to me face. But I confess to the goodnature; it's an Irish wakeness. I'd share me last shillin with a friend.
• BROADBENT. Not at all, not at all. Come in. [To TIM.] This gentleman is a man who lives with me here: my partner, MR DOYLE. [To DOYLE.] This is a new Irish friend of mine, Mr Tim Haffigan.
• BROADBENT [chuckling]. Wrong for once, Tim. My friend Mr Doyle is a countryman of yours.
• DOYLE [returning]. Where the devil did you pick up that seedy swindler? What was he doing here?
• DOYLE. A nice introduction, by George! Do you suppose the whole population of Ireland consists of drunken begging letter writers, or that even if it did, they would accept one another as references?
• DOYLE. No: he's too lazy to take the trouble. All he has to do is to sit there and drink your whisky while you humbug yourself. However, we neednt argue about Haffigan, for two reasons. First, with your money in his pocket he will never reach Paddington: there are too many public houses on the way. Second, he's not an Irishman at all.
• DOYLE. Never mind my heart: an Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination. How many of all those millions that have left Ireland have ever come back or wanted to come back?
• BROADBENT. True. All the capable people in Ireland are of English extraction. It has often struck me as a most remarkable circumstance that the only party in parliament that shews the genuine old English character and spirit is the Irish party. Look at its independence, its determination, its defiance of bad Governments, its sympathies with oppressed nationalities all the world over! How English!
• BROADBENT [roused to intense earnestness by DOYLE's eloquence]. Never despair, Larry. There are great possibilities for Ireland. Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.
  DOYLE [pulled up short, his face twitching with a reluctant smile]. Tom, why do you select my most tragic moments for your most irresistible strokes of humor?
• DOYLE [interrupting him]. You mean that you keep clear of your father because he differs from you about Free Trade, and you dont want to quarrel with him. Well, think of me and my father! He's a Nationalist and a Separatist. I'm a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever else metallurgic chemistry may be, it's not national. It's international. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not to separate them. The one real political conviction that our business has rubbed into us is that frontiers are hindrances and flags confounded nuisances.
• DOYLE [firmly]. Now look here, Tom: you want to get in a speech on Free Trade; and youre not going to do it: I wont stand it. My father wants to make St George's Channel a frontier and hoist a green flag on College Green; and I want to bring Galway within 3 hours of Colchester and 24 of New York. I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island. Then theres religious difficulty. My Catholicism is the Catholicism of Charlemagne or Dante, qualified by a great deal of modern science and folklore which Father Dempsey would call the ravings of an Atheist. Well, my father's Catholicism is the Catholicism of Father Dempsey.
• DOYLE [insisting]. I say a caterpillar and I mean a caterpillar. Youll understand presently. A caterpillar [BROADBENT mutters a slight protest but does not press it.] when it gets into a tree, instinctively makes itself look exactly like a leaf; so that both its enemies and its prey may mistake it for one and think it is not worth bothering about.
• DOYLE. I'll tell you. The world is as full of fools as a tree is full of leaves. Well, the Englishman does what the caterpillar does. He instinctively makes himself look like a fool, and eats up all the real fools at his ease while his enemies let him alone and laugh at him for being a fool like the rest. Oh, nature is cunning! cunning!
• DOYLE. A girl with a dowry of five pounds calls it a fortune in Rosscullen. Whats more £40 a year is a fortune there; and Nora Reilly enjoys a good deal of social consideration as an heiress on the strength of it. It has helped my father's household through many a tight place. My father was her father's agent. She came to us on a visit when he died, and has lived with us ever since.
• DOYLE. She writes to me--on her birthday. She used to write on mine, and send me little things as presents; but I stopped that by pretending that it was no use when I was travelling, as they got lost in the foreign post-offices.
• BROADBENT. Of course I know that the moral code is different in Ireland. But in England it's not considered fair to trifle with a woman's affections.
• DOYLE. Would it? I wonder. One thing I can tell you; and that is that Nora would wait until she died of old age sooner than ask my intentions or condescend to hint at the possibility of my having any. You dont know what Irish pride is. England may have knocked a good deal of it out of me; but she's never going to England; and if I had to choose between wounding that delicacy in her and hitting her in the face, I'd hit her in the face without a moments hesitation.
• BROADBENT [irrepressible]. Never fear. Youre all descended from ancient kings: I know that. [Complacently.] I'm not so tactless as you think, my boy. [Earnest again.] I expect to find Miss Reilly a perfect lady; and I strongly advise you to come and have another look at her before you make up your mind about her. By the way, have you a photograph of her?
• BROADBENT. She wouldnt like it, would she! Of course not. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, Larry. [More and more carried away by his new fancy.] You know, I have a sort of presentiment that Miss Reilly is a very superior woman.
• DOYLE. Pack for me too. I'm going to Ireland with Mr Broadbent.
• Act 2
• KEEGAN. The Church let me be its priest as long as it thought me fit for its work. When it took away my papers it meant you to know that I was only a poor madman, unfit and unworthy to take charge of the souls of the people.
  PATSY. But wasnt it only because you knew more Latin than Father Dempsey that he was jealous of you?
• For TOM BROADBENT therefore, an attractive woman , whom he would even call ethereal. To LARRY DOYLE, an everyday woman fit only for the eighteenth century, helpless, useless, almost sexless, an invalid without the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove him out of it.
• KEEGAN. Well, you see I'm not a Mnooth man [he means he was not a student at Maynooth College] When I was young I admired the older generation of priests that had been educated in Salamanca. So when I felt sure of my vocation I went to Salamanca. Then I walked from Salamanca to Rome, an sted in a monastery there for a year. My pilgrimage to Rome taught me that walking is a better way of travelling than the train; and I wish I could have walked from Paris to Oxford; for I was sick on the sea. After a year in Oxford I had to walk to Jerusalem to walk the Oxford feeling off me. From Jerusalem I came back to Patmos, and spent six months at the monastery of Mount Athos. From that I came to Ireland and settled down as a parish priest until I went mad.
• KEEGAN. When I went to those great cities I saw wonders I had never seen in Ireland. But when I came back to Ireland I found all the wonders there waiting for me. You see they had been there the whole time; but my eyes had never been opened to them. I did not know what my own house was like, because I had never been outside it.
• KEEGAN. It's a priest's business to notice everything. I wont tell you all I noticed about women; but I'll tell you this. The more a man knows, and the farther he travels, the more likely he is to marry a country girl afterwards.
• NORA [tossing her chin up at once]. Oh, I'm not expecting him particularly. It's a wonder he's come back at all. After staying away eighteen years he can harly expect us to be very anxious to see him: can he now?
• KEEGAN. You couldn't do better than fine evening. [Gravely.] I'll tell him where youve gone. [She turns as if to forbid him; but the deep understanding in his eyes make that impossible; and she only looks at him earnestly and goes. He watches her disappear on the other side of the hill; then says] Aye, he's come to torment you; and youre driven already to torment him.
• CORNELIUS. Hwats Nora doin at the Roun Tower?
  AUNT JUDY. Oh, the Lord knows! Romancin, I suppose. Praps she thinks Larry would go there to look for her and see her safe home.
  BROADBENT. Miss Reilly must not be left to wait and walk alone at night. Shall I go for her?
• BROADBENT [advancing]. I'm really so sorry to have alarmed you, Miss Reilly. My name is Broadbent. Larry's friend, you know.
• BROADBENT [suddenly betraying a condition of extreme sentimentality]. I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it. The magic of this Irish scene, and--I really dont want to be personal, Miss Reilly, but the charm of your Irish voice--
  NORA [quite accustomed to gallantry, and attaching no seriousness whatever to it]. Oh, get along with you, Mr Broadbent! Youre breaking your heart about me already, I daresay, after seeing me for two minutes in the dark.
• NORA. I think you ought to be ashamed. I think if you were a gentleman, and me alone with you in this place at night, you would die rather than do such a thing.
  BROADBENT. You mean that it's an act of treachery to Larry?
  NORA. Deed I dont. What has Larry to do with it? It's an act of disrespect and rudeness to me: it shews what you take me for. You can go your way now; and I'll go mine. Goodnight, Mr Broadbent.
• BROADBENT [quickly]. Of course you didnt: I'm not so stupid as that. But I couldnt bear your laughing at the feeling it gave me. You-- [again struggling with a surge of emotion] you dont know what I-- [he chokes for a moment and then blurts out with unnatural steadiness] Will you be my wife?
• Act 3
• BROADBENT. Did you notice anything about me last night when I came in with the lady?
• THE NEW-COME [at the gate]. God save all here! [He comes a little way into the garden.]
• MATTHEW [to LARRY]. I hear you done well in America.
• LARRY. He's not the same to me. He used to be very civil to Masther Larry: a deal too civil, I used to think. Now he's as surly and stand-off as a bear.
  AUNT JUDY. Oh sure he's bought his farm in the Land Purchase. He's independent now.
  NORA. It's made a great change, Larry. Youd harly know the old tenants now. Youd think it was a liberty to speak t'dhem--some o dhem.
• LARRY. No wonder! Of course they all hated us like the devil. Ugh. [Moodily.] Ive seen them in that office, telling my father what a fine boy I was, and plastering him with compliments, with your honor here and your honor there, when all the time their fingers were itching to be at his throat.
• LARRY. Industrious! That man's industry used to make me sick, even as a boy. I tell you, and Irish peasant's industry is not human: it's worse than the industry of a coral insect. An Englishman has some sense about working: he never does more than he can help--and hard enough to to do that without scamping it; but an Irishman will work as if he'd die the moment he stopped. That man Matthew Haffigan and his brother Andy made a farm out of a patch of stones on the hillside: cleared it and dug it with their own naked hands and bought their first spade out of their first crop of potatoes. Talk about making two blades of wheat grow where one grew before! those two men made a whole field of wheat grow where not even a furze bush had ever got its head up between the stones.
• LARRY. Such fools, you mean! What good was it to them? The moment theyd done it, the landlord put a rent of £5 a year on them, and turned them out because they couldnt pay it.
• BROADBENT. Yes. I--I--I--I-- [stammering with fury] I should have shot the confounded landlord, and wrung the neck of the damned agent, and blown the farm up with dynamite, and Dublin Castle along with it.
• LARRY. Oh yes; youd have done great things; and a fat lot of good youd have got out of it, too! That's an Englishman all over! make bad laws and give away all the land, and then, when your economic incompetence produces its natural and inevitable results, get virtuously indignant and kill the people that carry out your laws.
• BROADBENT. I got drunk last night, and proposed to Miss Reilly.
• BROADBENT. You think every Englishwoman an angel. You really have coarse taste in that way, Larry. Miss Reilly is one of the finer types: a type rare in England, except perhaps the best of aristocracy.
• MATTHEW [breaking out with surly bitterness]. Weve had enough of his foolish talk agen landlords. Hwat call has he to talk about the lan, that was never outside of a city office in his life?
• CORNELIUS. We're tired of him. He doesn't know hwere to stop. Every man cant own land; and some men must own it to employ them. It was all very well when solid men like Doran an Matt were kep from owning land. But hwat man in his senses ever wanted to give land to Patsy Farrll an dhe like o him?
• CORNELIUS. Well, you see how it is, Larry. Round about here, weve got the land at last; and we want no more Goverment meddlin. We want a new class o man in parliament: one dhat knows dhat the farmer's the real backbone o the country, n doesnt care a snap of his finger for the shout o the riff-raff in the towns, or for the foolishness of the laborers.
• CORNELIUS. But sure Larry's as good as English: arnt you, Larry?
• LARRY. No: the bold Fenian is now an older and possibly foolisher man.
• LARRY [coming down on MATT promptly]. I'll tell you, Matt. I always thought it was a stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing sort of thing to leave the land in the hands of the old landlords without calling them to a strict account for the use they made of it, and the condition of the people on it. I could see for myself that they thought of nothing but what they could get out of it to spend in England; and that they mortgaged and mortgaged until hardly one of them owned his own property or could have afforded to keep it up decently if he'd wanted to. But I tell you plump and plain, Matt, that if anybody thinks things will be any better now that the land is handed over to a lot of little men like you, without calling you to account either, theyre mistaken.
• LARRY. How is the man to marry and live a decent life on less?
• LARRY [now thoroughly roused]. Then let them make room for those who can. Is Ireland never to have a chance? First she was given to the rich; and now they have gorged on her flesh, her bones are to be flung to the poor, that can do nothing but suck the marrow out of her. If we cant have men of honor own the land, lets have men of ability. If we cant have men of ability, let us at least have men with capital. Anybody is better than Matt, who has neither honor, nor ability, nor capital, nor anything but mere brute labor and greed in him, Heaven help him!
• BROADBENT [not understanding him]. Quite so--er--oh yes. All that I can say is that as an Englishman I blush for the Union. It was the blackest stain on our national history. I look forward to the time--and it cannot be far distant, gentlemen, because Humanity is looking forward to it too, and insisting on it with no uncertain voice--I look forward to the time when an Irish legislature shall rise once more on the emerald pasture of College Green, and the Union Jack--that detestable symbol of a decadent Imperialism--be replaced by a flag as green as the island over which it waves: a flag on which we shall ask for England only a modest quartering in memory of our great party and of the immortal name of our grand old leader.
• BROADBENT [hugely self-satisfied]. I think Ive done the trick this time. I just gave them a bit of straight talk; and it went home. They were greatly impressed: everyone of those men believes in me and will vote for me when the question of selecting a candidate comes up. After all, whatever you say, Larry, they like an Englishman. They feel they can trust him, I suppose.
• BROADBENT [suddenly very solemn]. Yes: their sense of humor is in abeyance: I noticed it the moment we landed. Think of that in a country where every man is born a humorist! Think of what it means! [Impressively.] Larry: we are in the presence of a great national grief.
• LARRY. Yes, you. You say the Irish sense of humor is in abeyance. Well, if you drive through Rosscullen in a motor car with Haffigan's pig, it wont stay in abeyance. Now I warn you.
• Act 4
• DORAN [reflectively]. He has the divil's own luck, that Englishman, annyway; for hwen they picked him up he hadnt a scratch on him, barrn hwat the pig did to his cloes. Patsy had two finger out of jynt; but the smith pulled them sthraight for him.
• AUNT JUDY. Deedn we have, Mr Broadbent. It's a mercy you werent killed.
• BROADBENT. ... If it were legally possible I should become a naturalized Irishman; and if ever it be my good fortune to represent an Irish constituency in parliament, it shall be my first care to introduce a Bill legalizing such an operation. I believe a large section of the Liberal party would avail themselves of it.
• CORNELIUS. It's all up with his candidature. He'll be laughed out o the town.
• LARRY [turning quickly from the doorway]. Oh no he wont: he's not an Irishman. He'll never know theyre laughing at him; and while theyre laughing he'll win the seat.
• KEEGAN. I have no enthusiasm for your principles, sir. You will get into parliament because you want to get into it enough to be prepared to take the steps to induce the people to vote for you. That is how people usually get into that fantastic assembly.
• BROADBENT [encouraged]. Thats true: that is very true. When I see the windbags, the carpet-baggers, the charletons, the--the--the fools and ingnoramuses who corrupt the multitude by their wealth, or seduce them by spouting balderdash to them, I cannot help but think that an Englishman with no humbug about him, who will talk straight common sense and take his stand on the solid ground of principle and public duty, must win his way with men of all classes.
• LARRY. Tom: with the best intentions youre making an ass of yourself. You dont understand Mr Keegan's peculiar vein of humor.
• LARRY. ... [To KEEGAN.] Whats the true version of the story of that black man you confessed on his deathbed?
• KEEGAN. This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice. ... Therefore it is plain to me that this earth of ours must be hell, and that we all are here, as the Indian, revealed to me--perhaps he was sent to reveal it to me--to expiate crimes committed by us in as former existence.
• KEEGAN [To NORA]. When I look at you, I think that perhaps Ireland is only purgatory, after all.
• LARRY [glancing at NORA]. He will take more than that from me before he's done here.
• [LARRY and NORA are left together for the first time since his arrival.
• NORA. I suppose it didnt seem very long to you?
• LARRY. Yes: one does stick frightfully in the same place, unless some external force comes and routs one out.
• LARRY. Eighteen years is a devilish long time, Nora. Now if it had been eighteen minutes, or even eighteen months, we should be able to pick up the interrupted thread, and chatter like two magpies. But as it is, I have simply nothing to say; and you seem to have less.
• BROADBENT. Miss Reilly. Miss Reilly. Whats the matter? Dont cry: I cant stand it: you mustnt cry.
• BROADBENT [developing the most formidable symptoms of rage and grief]. Do you mean to say that you are going to refuse me: that you dont care for me?
• BROADBENT. ... I love you. I want you for my wife. [In despair.] I cant help your refusing. I'm helpless: I can do nothing. You have no right to ruin my whole life.
• BROADBENT [disposing of the idea at once]. Larry! Oh, that wouldnt have done at all, not at all. You dont know Larry as I do, my dear. He has absolutely no capacity for enjoyment: he couldnt make any woman happy. He's as clever as beblowed; but life's too earthly form him: he doesnt really care for anything or anybody.
• NORA. An would you let me demean meself like that, just to get yourself into parliament?
• NORA. You little know Peter Keegan. He'd see through me as if I was a pane o glass.
• LARRY. ... When I left you that time, I was just as wretched as you. I didnt rightly know what I wanted to say; and my tongue kept clacking to cover the loss I was at. Well, Ive been thinking ever since; and now I know what I ought to have said. Ive come back to say it.
• LARRY [with curt sincerity]. Yes of course I do: why should I tell you lies about it? Nora Reilly was a person of very little consequence to me or anyone else outside this miserable little hole. But Mrs Tom Broadbent will be a person of very considerable consequence indeed.
• NORA. ... An if I have to keep his house for him, at all events I can keep you out of it; for Ive done with you; and I wish I'd never seen you. So goodbye to you, Mister Larry Doyle.[She turns her back on him and goes home.]
• KEEGAN [with a courteous inclination]. The conquering Englishman, sir. Within 24 hours of your arrival you have carried off our only heiress, and practically secured the parliamentary seat.
• KEEGAN. You cannot build your golf links and hotels in the air. For that you must own the land.
• BROADBENT. My dear sir: to all intents and purposes the syndicate I represent already owns half Rosscullen.
• LARRY. We will lend everyone of these men half as much again on their land as it is worth, or ever can be worth, to them.
• KEEGAN. And we have none: only empty enthusiasms and patriotisms, and emptier memories and regrets. Ah yes: you have some excuse for believing that if there be any future, it will be yours; for our faith seems dead, and our hearts cold and cowed. An island of dreamers who wake up your jails, of critics and cowards whom you buy and tame for your service, of bold rogues who help you to plunder us that they may plunder you afterwards.
• BROADBENT [a little impatient of this unbusinesslike view]. Yes, yes; but you know you might say that of any country. The fact is, there are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient. It dont matter whether they are English or Irish. I shall collar this place, not because I'm an Englishman and Haffigan and Co are Irishmen, but because theyre duffers, and I know my way about.
• KEEGAN. And our place of torment shall be as clean and orderly as the cleanest and most orderly place I know in Ireland, which is our poetically named Mountjoy prison. Well, perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business.
• KEEGAN. ... Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven; and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse. It produces two kinds of men in strange perfection: saints and traitors.
• KEEGAN. Just as our idlers have for so many generations taken money from Ireland to England. Has that saved England from poverty and degradation more horrible than we have ever dreamed of? When I went to England, sir, I hated England. Now I pity it.
• KEEGAN. ... Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and this Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of you is more deeply damned; but I should be unfaithful to my calling if I opened the gates of my heart less widely to one than to the other.
• KEEGAN. In my dream it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman. [He goes away across the hill.]
• BROADBENT. ... Come along and help me to choose the site for the hotel.