One-Act Plays Part 53

JAMES RYAN. Is it back from the grave you are come?

SHAWN EARLY. Is it alive you are, or is it dead you are?

TIM CASEY. Is it yourself at all that's in it?

MRS. TULLY. Is it letting on you were to be dead?

MRS. FALLON. Dead or alive, let you stop Kitty Keary, your wife, from bringing my man away with her to America!

JACK SMITH. It is what I think, the wits are gone astray on the whole of you. What would my wife want bringing Bartley Fallon to America?

MRS. FALLON. To leave yourself, and to get quit of you she wants, Jack Smith, and to bring him away from myself. That's what the two of them had settled together.

JACK SMITH. I'll break the head of any man that says that! Who is it says it? [_To TIM CASEY._] Was it you said it? [_To SHAWN EARLY._] Was it you?

ALL TOGETHER [_backing and shaking their heads_]. It wasn't I said it!

JACK SMITH. Tell me the name of any man that said it!

ALL TOGETHER [_pointing to BARTLEY_]. It was him that said it!

JACK SMITH. Let me at him till I break his head! [_BARTLEY backs in terror. Neighbors hold JACK SMITH back._]

JACK SMITH [_trying to free himself_]. Let me at him! Isn't he the pleasant sort of a scarecrow for any woman to be crossing the ocean with! It's back from the docks of New York he'd be turned [_trying to rush at him again_], with a lie in his mouth and treachery in his heart, and another man's wife by his side, and he pa.s.sing her off as his own! Let me at him, can't you. [_Makes another rush, but is held back._]

MAGISTRATE [_pointing to JACK SMITH_]. Policeman, put the handcuffs on this man. I see it all now. A case of false impersonation, a conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. There was a case in the Andaman Islands, a murderer of the Mopsa tribe, a religious enthusiast--

POLICEMAN. So he might be, too.

MAGISTRATE. We must take both these men to the scene of the murder. We must confront them with the body of the real Jack Smith.

JACK SMITH. I'll break the head of any man that will find my dead body!

MAGISTRATE. I'll call more help from the barracks. [_Blows POLICEMAN's whistle._]

BARTLEY. It is what I am thinking, if myself and Jack Smith are put together in the one cell for the night, the handcuffs will be taken off him, and his hands will be free, and murder will be done that time surely!

MAGISTRATE. Come on! [_They turn to the right._]

[THE CURTAIN.]

MUSIC FOR THE SONG IN THE PLAY

THE RED-HAIRED MAN'S WIFE

Spreading the News.

I thought, my first love, there'd be but one house be-tween you and me, And I thought I would find your-self coax-ing my child on your knee. O-ver the tide I would leap with the leap of a swan, Till I came to the side of the wife of the red-haired man.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The idea of this play first came to me as a tragedy. I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl pa.s.sing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her pa.s.sing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had s.n.a.t.c.hed away her good name.

But comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work, _The King's Threshold_, _The Shadowy Waters_, _On Baile's Strand_, _The Well of the Saints_; and I let laughter have its way with the little play. I was delayed in beginning it for a while, because I could only think of Bartley Fallon as dull-witted or silly or ignorant, and the handcuffs seemed too harsh a punishment. But one day by the seat at Duras a melancholy man who was telling me of the crosses he had gone through at home said--"But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long ago to-day I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America." Bartley was born at that moment, and, far from harshness, I felt I was providing him with a happy old age in giving him the lasting glory of that great and crowning day of misfortune.

It has been acted very often by other companies as well as our own, and the Boers have done me the honor of translating and pirating it.

WELSH HONEYMOON[38]

By JEANNETTE MARKS

[Footnote 38: Copyright, 1912, 1916, 1917, by Jeannette Marks. The professional and amateur stage rights of this play are strictly reserved by the author. Application for permission to produce the play should be made to the author, who may be addressed in care of the publishers, Little, Brown and Company, Boston. All rights reserved.]

Jeannette Marks, playwright, poet, essayist, and writer of short stories, was born in 1875 at Chattanooga, Tennessee. She grew up in Philadelphia, however, where her father was a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Her education in this country was supplemented by a sojourn at a school in Dresden. She took her first degree at Wellesley College in 1900, and her master's degree there in 1903. Her graduate studies were pursued at the Bodleian Library and at the British Museum. Since 1901 she has taught English literature at Mount Holyoke.

The play here reprinted, _Welsh Honeymoon_, was one of the two--the other was her _The Merry, Merry Cuckoo_--that won the Welsh National Theatre First Prize for the best Welsh plays in November, 1911, the year after Josephine Preston Peabody had carried off the palm at Stratford-on-Avon.

She writes in her preface to _Three Welsh Plays_, the collection from which _Welsh Honeymoon_ is drawn:

"'Poetry' and 'song' are words which convey, better than any other two words could, the priceless gifts of the Welsh people to the world.

With their love for music, for beauty, for the significance of their land and its folklore, their inherent romance in the difficult art of living, they have transformed ugliness into beauty, turned loneliness into speech, and ever recalled life to its only permanent possessions in wonder and romance.

"Curiously enough, the Welsh, rich in poetry and music, have been almost altogether devoid of plays. But no one who has read those first Welsh tales in the 'Mabinogion' (c. 1260) could for an instant think the Cymru devoid of the dramatic instinct. The Welsh way of interpreting experience is essentially dramatic. _The Dream of Maxen Wledig_, _The Dream of Rhonabwy_, both from the 'Mabinogion,' are sharply dramatic, although then and later Welsh literature remained practically devoid of the play form. Experience dramatized is, too, that Pilgrim's Progress of Gwalia: 'Y Bardd Cwsg' (1703).

"Every gift of the Welsh would seem to promise the realization some day of a great national drama, for they have not only the gift of poetry and the power to seize the symbol--short cut through experience--which can, even as the crutch of Ibsen's Little Eyolf, lift a play into greatness; they have, also, natures profoundly emotional and yet intellectually critical. They are, humanly speaking, perfect tools for the achievement of great drama. But it is a drab journey from those 'Mabinogion' days of wonder, coa.r.s.e and crude as they were in many ways, yet intensely vital, through the 'Bardd Cwsg'

to Twm o'r Nant (1739-1810) the so-called 'Welsh Shakespeare,' whose Interludes might, with sufficient worrying, afford delectation to the rock-ribbed Puritanism which has stood, as much as any other oppression, in the way of Gwalia's full development of her genius for beauty.

"It was, then, a significant moment when 'The Welsh National Theatre'

came into existence with so powerful a patron as Lord Howard de Walden, lessee of the Haymarket, and Owen Rhoscomyl (Captain Owen Vaughan) and other gifted Welsh literati for its sponsors. And it did not seem an insignificant moment to one person, the playwright of _The Merry Merry Cuckoo_ and _Welsh Honeymoon_, when she learned through her friendly agent, Curtis Brown of London, that she had received one of the Welsh National Theatre's first prizes (1911)."

Jeannette Marks's interest in Wales is the result of a number of holidays spent in wandering through its highways and byways. Books of hers like _Through Welsh Doorways_ and _Gallant Little Wales_ bespeak an affectionate intimacy with homes and inhabitants. In the last named, especially, the chapters called "Cambrian Cottages" and "Welsh Wales" contain material that is highly illuminating in connection with the interpretation of her plays. Edward k.n.o.bloch, the playwright, is said to have pointed out to the author the dramatic situations inherent in her short stories and sketches, a suggestion which bore fruit in _Three Welsh Plays_.

The first performance of _Welsh Honeymoon_ was given by the American Drama Society in Boston in February, 1916. It has also been produced by the Boston Women's City Club, the Vagabond Players in Baltimore, the Hull House Players in Chicago, and the Prince Street Players in Rochester.

WELSH HONEYMOON[39]

CHARACTERS

VAVASOUR JONES.