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?