But, while
I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going
to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man
of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve
again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good as to listen
to the evidence on the present charge.
In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I had to go
down to Dorsetshire. In those days the more enterprising farm-laborers
used still to annually dress themselves up in order to tickle the
gentry into disbursing the money needed to supplement a local-minimum
wage. They called themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed
a play entitled Snt George. As my education had been of the typical
Irish kind, and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely
the ideas that once in Tara's Hall were regarded as dangerous
novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being suddenly
bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of the time I
had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a matter of five
hundred years old, it would have the same effect to-day on the average
London playgoer if it was produced in a west end theatre.) The plot
was simple. It is set forth in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native";
but, as the people who read my books have no energy left over to cope
with other authors, I must supply an outline of it myself.
Pages:
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114