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

PAUDEEN

You that have been gaoled this eight months know little of this countryside. It isn’t a limping stroller like yourself the Boys would let come among them. But I know. I went to the drill a few nights and I skinning kids for the mountainy men. In a quarry beyond the drill is – they have their plans made – it’s the square house of the Brownes is to be made an attack on and plundered. Do you know, now, who is the leader they are waiting for?

JOHNNY

How would I know that?

PAUDEEN [singing]Oh, Johnny Gibbons, my five hundred healths to you.It is long you are away from us over the sea!JOHNNY [standing up excitedly]

Sure that man could not be Johnny Gibbons that is outlawed!

PAUDEEN

I asked news of him from the old lad, and I bringing in the drink along with him. ‘Don’t be asking questions,’ says he; ‘take the treat he gives you,’ says he. ‘If a lad that has a high heart has a mind to rouse the neighbours,’ says he, ‘and to stretch out his hand to all that pass the road, it is in France he learned it,’ says he, ‘the place he is but lately come from, and where the wine does be standing open in tubs. Take your treat when you get it,’ says he, ‘and make no delay or all might be discovered and put an end to.’

JOHNNY

He came over the sea from France! It is Johnny Gibbons, surely, but it seems to me they were calling him by some other name.

PAUDEEN

A man on his keeping might go by a hundred names. Would he be telling it out to us that he never saw before, and we with that clutch of chattering women along with us? Here he is coming now. Wait till you see is he the lad I think him to be.

MARTIN [coming in]

I will make my banner, I will paint the unicorn on it. Give me that bit of canvas, there is paint over here. We will get no help from the settled men – we will call to the lawbreakers, the tinkers, the sievemakers, the sheepstealers.

[He begins to make banner.BIDDY

That sounds to be a queer name of an army. Ribbons I can understand, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Threshers, and Peep o’ Day, but Unicorns I never heard of before.

JOHNNY

It is not a queer name but a very good name. [Takes up lion and unicorn.] It is often you saw that before you in the dock. There is the unicorn with the one horn, and what it is he is going against? The lion of course. When he has the lion destroyed, the crown must fall and be shivered. Can’t you see it is the League of the Unicorns is the league that will fight and destroy the power of England and King George?

PAUDEEN

It is with that banner we will march and the lads in the quarry with us, it is they will have the welcome before him! It won’t be long till we’ll be attacking the Square House! Arms there are in it, riches that would smother the world, rooms full of guineas we will put wax on our shoes walking them; the horses themselves shod with no less than silver!

MARTIN [holding up banner]

There it is ready! We are very few now, but the army of the Unicorns will be a great army! [To JOHNNY.] Why have you brought me the message? Can you remember any more? Has anything more come to you? You have been drinking, the clouds upon your mind have been destroyed… Can you see anything or hear anything that is beyond the world?

JOHNNY

I can not. I don’t know what do you want me to tell you at all?

MARTIN

I want to begin the destruction, but I don’t know where to begin.. you do not hear any other voice?

JOHNNY

I do not. I have nothing at all to do with Freemasons or witchcraft.

PAUDEEN

It is Biddy Lally has to do with witchcraft. It is often she threw the cups and gave out prophecies the same as Columcille.

MARTIN

You are one of the knowledgeable women. You can tell me where it is best to begin, and what will happen in the end.

BIDDY

I will foretell nothing at all. I rose out of it this good while, with the stiffness and the swelling it brought upon my joints.

MARTIN

If you have foreknowledge you have no right to keep silent. If you do not help me I may go to work in the wrong way. I know I have to destroy, but when I ask myself what I am to begin with, I am full of uncertainty.

PAUDEEN

Here now are the cups handy and the leavings in them.

BIDDY[Taking cups and pouring one from another.]

Throw a bit of white money into the four corners of the house.

MARTIN

There! [Throwing it.]

BIDDY

There can be nothing told without silver. It is not myself will have the profit of it. Along with that I will be forced to throw out gold.

MARTIN

There is a guinea for you. Tell me what comes before your eyes.

BIDDY

What is it you are wanting to have news of?

MARTIN

Of what I have to go out against at the beginning.. there is so much.. the whole world it may be.

BIDDY[Throwing from one cup to another and looking.]

You have no care for yourself. You have been across the sea, you are not long back. You are coming within the best day of your life.

MARTIN

What is it? What is it I have to do?

BIDDY

I see a great smoke, I see burning.. there is a great smoke overhead.

MARTIN

That means we have to burn away a great deal that men have piled up upon the earth. We must bring men once more to the wildness of the clean green earth.

BIDDY

Herbs for my healing, the big herb and the little herb, it is true enough they get their great strength out of the earth.

JOHNNY

Who was it the green sod of Ireland belonged to in the olden times? Wasn’t it to the ancient race it belonged? And who has possession of it now but the race that came robbing over the sea? The meaning of that is to destroy the big houses and the towns, and the fields to be given back to the ancient race.

MARTIN

That is it. You don’t put it as I do, but what matter? Battle is all.

PAUDEEN

Columcille said, the four corners to be burned, and then the middle of the field to be burned. I tell you it was Columcille’s prophecy said that.

BIDDY

Iron handcuffs I see and a rope and a gallows, and it maybe is not for yourself I see it, but for some I have acquaintance with a good way back.

MARTIN

That means the law. We must destroy the law. That was the first sin, the first mouthful of the apple.

JOHNNY

So it was, so it was. The law is the worst loss. The ancient law was for the benefit of all. It is the law of the English is the only sin.

MARTIN

When there were no laws men warred on one another and man to man, not with machines made in towns as they do now, and they grew hard and strong in body. They were altogether alive like him that made them in his image, like people in that unfallen country. But presently they thought it better to be safe, as if safety mattered or anything but the exaltation of the heart, and to have eyes that danger had made grave and piercing. We must overthrow the laws and banish them.

JOHNNY

It is what I say, to put out the laws is to put out the whole nation of the English. Laws for themselves they made for their own profit, and left us nothing at all, no more than a dog or a sow.

BIDDY

An old priest I see, and I would not say is he the one was here or another. Vexed and troubled he is, kneeling fretting and ever-fretting in some lonesome ruined place.

MARTIN

I thought it would come to that. Yes, the Church too – that is to be destroyed. Once men fought with their desires and their fears, with all that they call their sins, unhelped, and their souls became hard and strong. When we have brought back the clean earth and destroyed the law and the Church all life will become like a flame of fire, like a burning eye.. Oh, how to find words for it all.. all that is not life will pass away.

JOHNNY

It is Luther’s Church he means, and the humpbacked discourse of Seaghan Calvin’s Bible. So we will break it, and make an end of it.

MARTIN

We will go out against the world and break it and unmake it. [Rising.] We are the army of the Unicorn from the Stars! We will trample it to pieces. – We will consume the world, we will burn it away – Father John said the world has yet to be consumed by fire. Bring me fire.

ANDREW [to Beggars]

Here is Thomas. Hide – let you hide.

[All except MARTIN hurry into next room. THOMAS comes in.THOMAS

Come with me, Martin. There is terrible work going on in the town! There is mischief gone abroad. Very strange things are happening!

MARTIN

What are you talking of? What has happened?

THOMAS

Come along, I say, it must be put a stop to. We must call to every decent man. It is as if the devil himself had gone through the town on a blast and set every drinking-house open!

MARTIN

I wonder how that has happened. Can it have anything to do with Andrew’s plan?

THOMAS

Are you giving no heed to what I’m saying? There is not a man, I tell you, in the parish and beyond the parish but has left the work he was doing whether in the field or in the mill.

MARTIN

Then all work has come to an end? Perhaps that was a good thought of Andrew’s.

THOMAS

There is not a man has come to sensible years that is not drunk or drinking! My own labourers and my own serving-men are sitting on counters and on barrels! I give you my word, the smell of the spirits and the porter and the shouting and the cheering within, made the hair to rise up on my scalp.

MARTIN

And yet there is not one of them that does not feel that he could bridle the four winds.

THOMAS [sitting down in despair]

You are drunk too. I never thought you had a fancy for it.

MARTIN

It is hard for you to understand. You have worked all your life. You have said to yourself every morning, ‘What is to be done to-day?’ and when you are tired out you have thought of the next day’s work. If you gave yourself an hour’s idleness, it was but that you might work the better. Yet it is only when one has put work away that one begins to live.

THOMAS

It is those French wines that did it.

MARTIN

I have been beyond the earth. In Paradise, in that happy townland, I have seen the shining people. They were all doing one thing or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but the overflowing of their idleness, and their days were a dance bred of the secret frenzy of their hearts, or a battle where the sword made a sound that was like laughter.

THOMAS

You went away sober from out of my hands; they had a right to have minded you better.

MARTIN

No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fulness of life, if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment.

THOMAS

And I offered to let you go to Dublin in the coach!

MARTIN [giving banner to PAUDEEN]

Give me the lamp. The lamp has not yet been lighted and the world is to be consumed!

[Goes into inner room.THOMAS [seeing ANDREW]

Is it here you are, Andrew? What are these beggars doing? Was this door thrown open too? Why did you not keep order? I will go for the constables to help us!

ANDREW

You will not find them to help you. They were scattering themselves through the drinking-houses of the town, and why wouldn’t they?

THOMAS

Are you drunk too? You are worse than Martin. You are a disgrace!

ANDREW

Disgrace yourself! Coming here to be making an attack on me and badgering me and disparaging me! And what about yourself that turned me to be a hypocrite?

THOMAS

What are you saying?

ANDREW

You did, I tell you! Weren’t you always at me to be regular and to be working and to be going through the day and the night without company and to be thinking of nothing but the trade? What did I want with a trade? I got a sight of the fairy gold one time in the mountains. I would have found it again and brought riches from it but for you keeping me so close to the work.

THOMAS

Oh, of all the ungrateful creatures! You know well that I cherished you, leading you to live a decent, respectable life.

ANDREW

You never had respect for the ancient ways. It is after the mother you take it, that was too soft and too lumpish, having too much of the English in her blood. Martin is a Hearne like myself. It is he has the generous heart! It is not Martin would make a hypocrite of me and force me to do night-walking secretly, watching to be back by the setting of the seven stars!

[He begins to play his flute.THOMAS

I will turn you out of this, yourself and this filthy troop! I will have them lodged in gaol.

JOHNNY

Filthy troop, is it? Mind yourself! The change is coming. The pikes will be up and the traders will go down!

All seize THOMAS and singWhen the Lion will lose his strength,And the braket-thistle begin to pine,The harp shall sound sweet, sweet at length,Between the eight and the nine!THOMAS

Let me out of this, you villains!

NANNY

We’ll make a sieve of holes of you, you old bag of treachery!

BIDDY

How well you threatened us with gaol, you skim of a weasel’s milk!

JOHNNY

You heap of sicknesses! You blinking hangman! That you may never die till you’ll get a blue hag for a wife!

[MARTIN comes back with lighted lamp.MARTIN

Let him go. [They let THOMAS go, and fall back.] Spread out the banner. The moment has come to begin the war.

JOHNNY

Up with the Unicorn and destroy the Lion! Success to Johnny Gibbons and all good men!

MARTIN

Heap all those things together there. Heap those pieces of the coach one upon another. Put that straw under them. It is with this flame I will begin the work of destruction. All nature destroys and laughs.

THOMAS

Destroy your own golden coach!

MARTIN [kneeling before THOMAS]

I am sorry to go a way that you do not like and to do a thing that will vex you. I have been a great trouble to you since I was a child in the house, and I am a great trouble to you yet. It is not my fault. I have been chosen for what I have to do. [Stands up.] I have to free myself first and those that are near me. The love of God is a very terrible thing! [THOMAS tries to stop him, but is prevented by Beggars. MARTIN takes a wisp of straw and lights it.] We will destroy all that can perish! It is only the soul that can suffer no injury. The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

[He throws wisp into heap – it blazes up.

ACT III

Before dawn. A wild rocky place, NANNY and BIDDY LALLY squatting by a fire. Rich stuffs, etc., strewn about. PAUDEEN watching by MARTIN, who is lying as if dead, a sack over him.

NANNY [to PAUDEEN]

Well, you are great heroes and great warriors and great lads altogether, to have put down the Brownes the way you did, yourselves and the Whiteboys of the quarry. To have ransacked the house and have plundered it! Look at the silks and the satins and the grandeurs I brought away! Look at that now! [Holds up a velvet cloak.] It’s a good little jacket for myself will come out of it. It’s the singers will be stopping their songs and the jobbers turning from their cattle in the fairs to be taking a view of the laces of it and the buttons! It’s my far-off cousins will be drawing from far and near!

BIDDY

There was not so much gold in it all as what they were saying there was. Or maybe that fleet of Whiteboys had the place ransacked before we ourselves came in. Bad cess to them that put it in my mind to go gather up the full of my bag of horseshoes out of the forge. Silver they were saying they were, pure white silver; and what are they in the end but only hardened iron! A bad end to them! [Flings away horseshoes.] The time I will go robbing big houses again it will not be in the light of the full moon I will go doing it, that does be causing every common thing to shine out as if for a deceit and a mockery. It’s not shining at all they are at this time, but duck yellow and dark.

NANNY

To leave the big house blazing after us, it was that crowned all! Two houses to be burned to ashes in the one night. It is likely the servant-girls were rising from the feathers and the cocks crowing from the rafters for seven miles around, taking the flames to be the whitening of the dawn.

BIDDY

It is the lad is stretched beyond you have to be thankful to for that. There was never seen a leader was his equal for spirit and for daring. Making a great scatter of the guards the way he did. Running up roofs and ladders, the fire in his hand, till you’d think he would be apt to strike his head against the stars.

NANNY

I partly guessed death was near him, and the queer shining look he had in his two eyes, and he throwing sparks east and west through the beams. I wonder now was it some inward wound he got, or did some hardy lad of the Brownes give him a tip on the skull unknownst in the fight? It was I myself found him, and the troop of the Whiteboys gone, and he lying by the side of a wall as weak as if he had knocked a mountain. I failed to waken him trying him with the sharpness of my nails, and his head fell back when I moved it, and I knew him to be spent and gone.

BIDDY

It’s a pity you not to have left him where he was lying and said no word at all to Paudeen or to that son you have, that kept us back from following on, bringing him here to this shelter on sacks and upon poles.

NANNY

What way could I help letting a screech out of myself, and the life but just gone out of him in the darkness, and not a living Christian by his side but myself and the great God?

BIDDY

It’s on ourselves the vengeance of the red soldiers will fall, they to find us sitting here the same as hares in a tuft. It would be best for us follow after the rest of the army of the Whiteboys.

NANNY

Whisht! I tell you. The lads are cracked about him. To get but the wind of the word of leaving him, it’s little but they’d knock the head off the two of us. Whisht!

Enter JOHNNY BACACH with candlesJOHNNY [standing over MARTIN]

Wouldn’t you say now there was some malice or some venom in the air, that is striking down one after another the whole of the heroes of the Gael?

PAUDEEN

It makes a person be thinking of the four last ends, death and judgment, heaven and hell. Indeed and indeed my heart lies with him. It is well I knew what man he was under his by-name and his disguise.

[Sings.] Oh, Johnny Gibbons, it’s you were the prop to us.You to have left us, we are put astray!JOHNNY

It is lost we are now and broken to the end of our days. There is no satisfaction at all but to be destroying the English, and where now will we get so good a leader again? Lay him out fair and straight upon a stone, till I will let loose the secret of my heart keening him!

[Sets out candles on a rock, propping them up with stones.NANNY

Is it mould candles you have brought to set around him, Johnny Bacach? It is great riches you should have in your pocket to be going to those lengths and not to be content with dips.

JOHNNY

It is lengths I will not be going to the time the life will be gone out of your own body. It is not your corpse I will be wishful to hold in honour the way I hold this corpse in honour.

NANNY

That’s the way always, there will be grief and quietness in the house if it is a young person has died, but funning and springing and tricking one another if it is an old person’s corpse is in it. There is no compassion at all for the old.

PAUDEEN

It is he would have got leave for the Gael to be as high as the Gall. Believe me, he was in the prophecies. Let you not be comparing yourself with the like of him.

NANNY

Why wouldn’t I be comparing myself? Look at all that was against me in the world. Would you be matching me against a man of his sort, that had the people shouting him and that had nothing to do but to die and to go to heaven?

JOHNNY

The day you go to heaven that you may never come back alive out of it! But it is not yourself will ever hear the saints hammering at their musics! It is you will be moving through the ages, chains upon you, and you in the form of a dog or a monster. I tell you that one will go through Purgatory as quick as lightning through a thorn-bush.

NANNY

That’s the way, that the way.

[Croons.] Three that are watching my time to run,The worm, the devil, and my son,To see a loop around their neckIt’s that would make my heart to lep!JOHNNY

Five white candles. I wouldn’t begrudge them to him indeed. If he had held out and held up it is my belief he would have freed Ireland!

PAUDEEN

Wait till the full light of the day and you’ll see the burying he’ll have. It is not in this place we will be waking him. I’ll make a call to the two hundred Ribbons he was to lead on to the attack on the barracks at Aughanish. They will bring him marching to his grave upon the hill. He had surely some gift from the other world, I wouldn’t say but he had power from the other side.

ANDREW [coming in very shaky]

Well, it was a great night he gave to the village, and it is long till it will be forgotten. I tell you the whole of the neighbours are up against him. There is no one at all this morning to set the mills going. There was no bread baked in the night-time, the horses are not fed in the stalls, the cows are not milked in the sheds. I met no man able to make a curse this night but he put it on my head and on the head of the boy that is lying there before us.. Is there no sign of life in him at all?

JOHNNY

What way would there be a sign of life and the life gone out of him this three hours or more?

ANDREW

He was lying in his sleep for a while yesterday, and he wakened again after another while.

NANNY

He will not waken, I tell you. I held his hand in my own and it getting cold as if you were pouring on it the coldest cold water, and no running in his blood. He is gone sure enough and the life is gone out of him.

ANDREW

Maybe so, maybe so. It seems to me yesterday his cheeks were bloomy all the while, and now he is as pale as wood ashes. Sure we all must come to it at the last. Well, my white-headed darling, it is you were the bush among us all, and you to be cut down in your prime. Gentle and simple, everyone liked you. It is no narrow heart you had, it is you were for spending and not for getting. It is you made a good wake for yourself, scattering your estate in one night only in beer and in wine for the whole province; and that you may be sitting in the middle of Paradise and in the chair of the Graces!

JOHNNY

Amen to that. It’s pity I didn’t think the time I sent for yourself to send the little lad of a messenger looking for a priest to overtake him. It might be in the end the Almighty is the best man for us all!

ANDREW

Sure I sent him on myself to bid the priest to come. Living or dead I would wish to do all that is rightful for the last and the best of my own race and generation.

BIDDY [jumping up]

Is it the priest you are bringing in among us? Where is the sense in that? Aren’t we robbed enough up to this with the expense of the candles and the like?

JOHNNY

If it is that poor starved priest he called to that came talking in secret signs to the man that is gone, it is likely he will ask nothing for what he has to do. There is many a priest is a Whiteboy in his heart.

NANNY

I tell you, if you brought him tied in a bag he would not say an Our Father for you, without you having a half-crown at the top of your fingers.

BIDDY

There is no priest is any good at all but a spoiled priest. A one that would take a drop of drink, it is he would have courage to face the hosts of trouble. Rout them out he would, the same as a shoal of fish from out the weeds. It’s best not to vex a priest, or to run against them at all.

NANNY

It’s yourself humbled yourself well to one the time you were sick in the gaol and had like to die, and he bade you to give over the throwing of the cups.

BIDDY

Ah, plaster of Paris I gave him. I took to it again and I free upon the roads.

NANNY

Much good you are doing with it to yourself or any other one. Aren’t you after telling that corpse no later than yesterday that he was coming within the best day of his life?

JOHNNY

Whisht, let ye. Here is the priest coming.

FATHER JOHN comes inFATHER JOHN

It is surely not true that he is dead?

JOHNNY

The spirit went from him about the middle hour of the night. We brought him here to this sheltered place. We were loth to leave him without friends.

FATHER JOHN

Where is he?