Civil engineers -- Drama; English drama (Comedy); Ireland -- Drama; Real estate development -- Drama
PATSY. I can take the goose too, sir. Put it on me back and gimme
the neck of it in me mouth. [Cornelius is about to comply
thoughtlessly].
AUNT JUDY [feeling that Broadbent's presence demands special
punctiliousness]. For shame, Patsy! to offer to take the goose in
your mouth that we have to eat after you! The master'll bring it
in for you. [Patsy, abashed, yet irritated by this ridiculous
fastidiousness, takes his load up the hill].
CORNELIUS. What the jeuce does Nora want to go to the Roun Tower
for?
AUNT JUDY. Oh, the Lord knows! Romancin, I suppose. Props she
thinks Larry would go there to look for her and see her safe
home.
BROADBENT. I'm afraid it's all the fault of my motor. Miss Reilly
must not be left to wait and walk home alone at night. Shall I go
for her?
AUNT JUDY [contemptuously]. Arra hwat ud happen to her? Hurry in
now, Corny. Come, Mr Broadbent. I left the tea on the hob to
draw; and it'll be black if we don't go in an drink it.
They go up the hill. It is dark by this time.
Broadbent does not fare so badly after all at Aunt Judy's board.
He gets not only tea and bread-and-butter, but more mutton chops
than he has ever conceived it possible to eat at one sitting.
There is also a most filling substance called potato cake. Hardly
have his fears of being starved been replaced by his first
misgiving that he is eating too much and will be sorry for it
tomorrow, when his appetite is revived by the production of a
bottle of illicitly distilled whisky, called pocheen, which he
has read and dreamed of [he calls it pottine] and is now at last
to taste. His good humor rises almost to excitement before
Cornelius shows signs of sleepiness. The contrast between Aunt
Judy's table service and that of the south and east coast hotels
at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London,
seems to him delightfully Irish. The almost total atrophy of any
sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or
toleration of the possibility of life being something better than
a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine
mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes with
his guest as the whimsical affectation of a shrewd Irish humorist
and incorrigible spendthrift. Aunt Judy seems to him an incarnate
joke. The likelihood that the joke will pall after a month or so,
and is probably not apparent at any time to born Rossculleners,
or that he himself unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his
fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations, does
not occur to him for a moment. In the end he is so charmed, and
so loth to go to bed and perhaps dream of prosaic England, that
he insists on going out to smoke a cigar and look for Nora Reilly
at the Round Tower. Not that any special insistence is needed;
for the English inhibitive instinct does not seem to exist in
Rosscullen. Just as Nora's liking to miss a meal and stay out at
the Round Tower is accepted as a sufficient reason for her doing
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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