"I wonder if it would have been possible to organise an excursion from Dublin. If the performance had been judiciously advertised—'Oberammergau in the West.'"
"I used to think," said he, "it is eight miles from Rathowen, and the road is a bad one, and when they got here there would be no place for them to stay; they would have to go all the way back again, and that would be sixteen miles."
"Yet it was as well to build this playhouse as to make a useless road—a road leading nowhere. While they were building this playhouse they thought they were accomplishing something. Never before did the poor people do anything, except for bare life. Do you know, Father MacTurnan, your playhouse touches me to the heart?" and I turned and looked.
"Once Pleasure hovered over your parish, but the bird did not alight! Let me start a subscription for you in Dublin!"
"I don't think," said the priest, "that it would be possible—"
"Not for me to get fifty pounds?"
"Yes," he said, "you might get the money, but I don't think we could ever get up a performance of the play."
"And why not?" I said.
"You see, the wind came and blew down the wall, and I think they look upon that wind as a manifestation of God's disapproval. The people are very pious, and looking back I think they felt that the time they spent in rehearsing might have been better spent. The idea of amusement shocks those who are not accustomed to the idea. The playhouse disturbed them in their ideas. They hear Mass on Sundays, and there are the Sacraments, and they remember that they have to die. It used to seem to me a very sad thing to see all the people going to America; it seemed to me the saddest thing in the world to see the poor Celt disappear in America, leaving his own country, leaving his language, and very often his religion."
"And does it no longer seem to you sad that such a thing should happen?"