The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 3 of 8. The Countess Cathleen. The Land of Heart's Desire. The Unicorn from the Stars

MARTIN

Why should we be patient? To live seventy years, and others to come after us and live seventy years it may be; and so from age to age, and all the while the old splendour dying more and more.

[A noise of shouting. ANDREW, who has been standing at the door, comes in.

ANDREW

Martin says truth, and he says it well. Planing the side of a cart or a shaft, is that life? It is not. Sitting at a desk writing letters to the man that wants a coach, or to the man that won’t pay for the one he has got, is that life, I ask you? Thomas arguing at you and putting you down – ‘Andrew, dear Andrew, did you put the tyre on that wheel yet?’ Is that life? Not, it is not. I ask you all, what do you remember when you are dead? It’s the sweet cup in the corner of the widow’s drinking-house that you remember. Ha, ha, listen to that shouting! That is what the lads in the village will remember to the last day they live.

MARTIN

Why are they shouting? What have you told them?

ANDREW

Never you mind; you left that to me. You bade me to lift their hearts and I did lift them. There is not one among them but will have his head like a blazing tar-barrel before morning. What did your friend the beggar say? The juice of the grey barley, he said.

FATHER JOHN

You accursed villain! You have made them drunk!

ANDREW

Not at all, but lifting them to the stars. That is what Martin bade me to do, and there is no one can say I did not do it.

[A shout at door, and beggars push in a barrel. They cry, ‘Hi! for the noble master!’ and point at ANDREW.

JOHNNY

It’s not him, it’s that one! [Points at MARTIN.

FATHER JOHN

Are you bringing this devil’s work in at the very door? Go out of this, I say! get out! Take these others with you!

MARTIN

No, no; I asked them in, they must not be turned out. They are my guests.

FATHER JOHN

Drive them out of your uncle’s house!

MARTIN

Come, Father, it is better for you to go. Go back to your own place. I have taken the command. It is better perhaps for you that you did not take it.

    [FATHER JOHN and MARTIN go out.

BIDDY

It is well for that old lad he didn’t come between ourselves and our luck. Himself to be after his meal, and ourselves staggering with the hunger! It would be right to have flayed him and to have made bags of his skin.

NANNY

What a hurry you are in to get your enough! Look at the grease on your frock yet, with the dint of the dabs you put in your pocket! Doing cures and foretellings is it? You starved pot-picker, you!

BIDDY

That you may be put up to-morrow to take the place of that decent son of yours that had the yard of the gaol wore with walking it till this morning!

NANNY

If he had, he had a mother to come to, and he would know her when he did see her; and that is what no son of your own could do and he to meet you at the foot of the gallows.

JOHNNY

If I did know you, I knew too much of you since the first beginning of my life! What reward did I ever get travelling with you? What store did you give me of cattle or of goods? What provision did I get from you by day or by night but your own bad character to be joined on to my own, and I following at your heels, and your bags tied round about me!

NANNY

Disgrace and torment on you! Whatever you got from me, it was more than any reward or any bit I ever got from the father you had, or any honourable thing at all, but only the hurt and the harm of the world and its shame!

JOHNNY

What would he give you, and you going with him without leave! Crooked and foolish you were always, and you begging by the side of the ditch.

NANNY

Begging or sharing, the curse of my heart upon you! It’s better off I was before ever I met with you to my cost! What was on me at all that I did not cut a scourge in the wood to put manners and decency on you the time you were not hardened as you are!

JOHNNY

Leave talking to me of your rods and your scourges! All you taught me was robbery, and it is on yourself and not on myself the scourges will be laid at the day of the recognition of tricks.

PAUDEEN

’Faith, the pair of you together is better than Hector fighting before Troy!

NANNY

Ah, let you be quiet. It is not fighting we are craving, but the easing of the hunger that is on us and of the passion of sleep. Lend me a graineen of tobacco now till I’ll kindle my pipe – a blast of it will take the weight of the road off my heart.

    [ANDREW gives her some, NANNY grabs at it.

BIDDY

No, but it’s to myself you should give it. I that never smoked a pipe this forty year without saying the tobacco prayer. Let that one say did ever she do that much.