The Men of Gunn: Gee whiz!!
The Widow: How do you say, Eamon! Will you take this country and people and make a new Ireland there; and be leaving the North and the South to slit the throats on each other?
Eamon (in a great voice): I’ll do it, so.... And won’t it be the fine adventure to hold it over the heads of Cosgrave and Mulcahy, when I’m sitting in the seat of Lloyd George with the Kings and Emperors and Presidents of the world around under my feet, and Boûgus beside me, and Naisi and Narsti on my either hand, and the Men of Gunn holding the fair land of England, and me Lord of it all?
Bridgeen: And haven’t you the right, Mister honey, to be sitting in that place and taking your ease, and a sup of whiskey itself maybe; for it’s you surely is destroyed by thinking and fighting in these days in Ireland, and where would there be your match for craft and savagery in all the western islands?
Eamon: I have so. (To Naisi and Narsti): Call up the Men of Gunn, and let Boûgus be there, and Seamus, and Sean, and Peadar Roabensôn, and any other man would make his future, so; and I’ll lead them out to England, or Russia itself if need be, and split the brainpan on Lloyd George and all of them, and be master of the world in their places; and so I will. (They go out.)
The Widow Markiewicz (looking after them as they go): And isn’t he the fine handsome lad to be riding forth on a great adventure; and he, God help him, nothing but a poor crazy scholar, with a great savagery and bitterness in his heart?
IMPOLITICS
A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
A man, or woman, who has just been elected to Parliament may be pardoned if, in the words of Gilbert, “the compliment implied, inflates” him (or her) “with legitimate pride.” It is rather difficult, when the declaration of the poll is announced by the Returning Officer, and you find yourself, by a swinging (or narrow) majority, the elected representative of some 30,000 people, to avoid a certain feeling of pleasurable self-congratulation. For the first time in your life you are, suddenly, the central figure of a great demonstration. You are astonished at your own popularity. Strangers rush up and clasp you by the hand; bearded men kiss you on both cheeks; you are taken in charge by the police, to save you from being torn limb from limb by your almost too enthusiastic friends. And, if there is a fleeting resemblance, in the triumphal march from the returning office to the headquarters of your organisation, to the old-time procession to the scaffold of a popular highwayman—a resemblance heightened by the necessity for making a speech on a crazy wooden erection usually known as “the hustings,” that air of spurious importance is, for the most part, effaced next day, when you leave your constituency by train, unrecognised and even unremarked. After the splendours of the previous night, this anonymity is an almost painful contrast; but there are lower depths of abasement to be reached. You have yet to pay your first visit to the House of Commons.
In the interval between your election and the summoning of Parliament, you have probably to some extent recovered your normal self-confidence. You have doubtless secured a home near Westminster, “to be near the House, you know.” You may even have been interviewed by a provincial paper. It is just possible that one of the leaders of your party—a junior one—in the first generous glow of the election results, may have shaken you by the hand. Perhaps (but this happens very rarely) the august personage who speaks from the Front Bench in the name of your party, may have stared you out of countenance at Lady Broadside’s reception. You are actually beginning to feel that you are Somebody after all; and so you nerve yourself to make your first visit to the scene of your future labours.