I was pointed out one evening a well-brushed, well-dressed man in the stalls, and was told gossip about him, perhaps not all true, which made me wonder if that appearance and behaviour as of extreme respectability might not now and again be felt a burden.
After a while he translated himself in my mind into Hyacinth; and as one must set one’s original a little way off to get a translation rather than a tracing, he found himself in Cloon, where, as in other parts of our country, “character” is built up or destroyed by a password or an emotion, rather than by experience and deliberation.
The idea was more of a universal one than I knew at the first, and I have had but uneasy appreciation from some apparently blameless friends.
THE RISING OF THE MOON
When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. I used to wonder if ever a prisoner might by some means climb the high, buttressed wall and slip away in the darkness by the canal to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fishing boat, as happens to my ballad-singing man. The play was considered offensive to some extreme Nationalists before it was acted, because it showed the police in too favourable a light, and a Unionist paper attacked it after it was acted because the policeman was represented “as a coward and a traitor”; but after the Belfast police strike that same paper praised its “insight into Irish character.” After all these ups and downs it passes unchallenged on both sides of the Irish Sea.
THE JACKDAW
The first play I wrote was called “Twenty-five.” It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America. It was about “A boy of Kilbecanty that saved his old sweetheart from being evicted. It was playing Twenty-five he did it; played with the husband he did, letting him win up to £50.”
It was rather sentimental and weak in construction, and for a long time it was an overflowing storehouse of examples of “the faults of my dramatic method.” I have at last laid its ghost in “The Jackdaw,” and I have not been accused of sentimentality since the appearance of this.
THE WORKHOUSE WARD
I heard of an old man in the workhouse who had been disabled many years before by, I think, a knife thrown at him by his wife in some passionate quarrel.