Bernard Shaw

“ BURGOYNE.
My good lady, our only desire is to save unpleasantness. What satisfaction would it give you to have a solemn fuss made, with my friend Swindon in a black cap and so forth? I am sure we are greatly indebted to the admirable tact and gentlemanly feeling shown by your husband.
JUDITH.
(throwing the words in his face) . Oh, you are mad. Is it nothing to you what wicked thing you do if only you do it like a gentleman? Is it nothing to you whether you are a murderer or not, if only you murder in a red coat? (Desperately) You shall not hang him: that man is not my husband. ”

“ RICHARD.
(in the strong voice of a man who has conquered the bitterness of death) . Your watch is two minutes slow by the town clock, which I can see from here, General. (The town clock strikes the first stroke of twelve. Involuntarily the people flinch at the sound, and a subdued groan breaks from them.) Amen! my life for the world’s future!
ANDERSON.
(shouting as he rushes into the market place) . Amen; and stop the execution. (He bursts through the line of soldiers opposite Burgoyne, and rushes, panting, to the gallows.) I am Anthony Anderson, the man you want. ”

“ ANDERSON.
(perfectly self-possessed) . Come, my dear: he is only trying to frighten you. There is no danger. (He takes her out of the house. The rest crowd to the door to follow him, except Essie, who remains near Richard.)
RICHARD.
(boisterously derisive) . Now then: how many of you will stay with me; run up the American flag on the devil’s house; and make a fight for freedom? (They scramble out, Christy among them, hustling one another in their haste.) Ha ha! Long live the devil! (To Mrs. Dudgeon, who is following them) What mother! are you off too? ”

“ ANDERSON.
Not vain, my boy. It takes all sorts to make a world—saints as well as soldiers. (Turning to Burgoyne) And now, General, time presses; and America is in a hurry. Have you realized that though you may occupy towns and win battles, you cannot conquer a nation?
BURGOYNE.
My good sir, without a Conquest you cannot have an aristocracy. Come and settle the matter at my quarters.
ANDERSON.
At your service, sir. (To Richard) See Judith home for me, will you, my boy? (He hands her over to him.) Now General. ”

“ BURGOYNE.
Sit down, Mr. Anderson—if I may call you so for the present. (Richard sits down.) Sit down, madam, whilst we wait. Give the lady a newspaper.
RICHARD.
(indignantly) . Shame!
BURGOYNE.
(keenly, with a half smile) . If you are not her husband, sir, the case is not a serious one—for her. (Richard bites his lip silenced.)
JUDITH.
(to Richard, as she returns to her seat) . I couldn’t help it. (He shakes his head. She sits down.)
BURGOYNE.
You will understand of course, Mr. Anderson, that you must not build on this little incident. We are bound to make an example of somebody. ”

“ Judith Anderson, the minister’s wife, comes in. Judith is more than twenty years younger than her husband, though she will never be as young as he in vitality. She is pretty and proper and ladylike, and has been admired and petted into an opinion of herself sufficiently favorable to give her a self-assurance which serves her instead of strength. She has a pretty taste in dress, and in her face the pretty lines of a sentimental character formed by dreams. Even her little self-complacency is pretty, like a child’s vanity. ”

“ They are determined to cow us by making an example of somebody on that gallows to-day. Well, let us cow them by showing that we can stand by one another to the death. That is the only force that can send Burgoyne back across the Atlantic and make America a nation.
JUDITH.
(impatiently) . Oh, what does all that matter?
RICHARD.
(laughing) . True: what does it matter? what does anything matter? You see, men have these strange notions, Mrs. Anderson; and women see the folly of them.
JUDITH.
Women have to lose those they love through them.
RICHARD.
They can easily get fresh lovers. ”

“ He rises and takes a step towards his own coat; then recollects himself, and, with his back to the sergeant, moves his gaze slowly round the room without turning his head until he sees Anderson’s black coat hanging up on the press. He goes composedly to it; takes it down; and puts it on. The idea of himself as a parson tickles him: he looks down at the black sleeve on his arm, and then smiles slyly at Judith, whose white face shows him that what she is painfully struggling to grasp is not the humor of the situation but its horror. ”

“ Anderson. We are told that the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. My heart belonged, not to Timothy, but to that poor wretched brother of his that has just ended his days with a rope round his neck—aye, to Peter Dudgeon. You know it: old Eli Hawkins, the man to whose pulpit you succeeded, though you are not worthy to loose his shoe latchet, told it you when he gave over our souls into your charge. He warned me and strengthened me against my heart, and made me marry a Godfearing man—as he thought. What else but that discipline has made me the woman I am? ”

“ RICHARD.
(quickly rising) . You want to preach to me. Excuse me: I prefer a walk in the rain. (He makes for his coat.)
ANDERSON.
(stopping him) . Don’t be alarmed, sir; I am no great preacher. You are quite safe. (Richard smiles in spite of himself. His glance softens: he even makes a gesture of excuse. Anderson, seeing that he has tamed him, now addresses him earnestly.) Mr. Dudgeon: you are in danger in this town.
RICHARD.
What danger?
ANDERSON.
Your uncle’s danger. Major Swindon’s gallows.
RICHARD.
It is you who are in danger. ”

“ SWINDON.
(flushing) . No, sir.
BURGOYNE.
What a pity! WHAT a pity! (Dropping his sarcastic tone and facing him suddenly and seriously) Do you at all realize, sir, that we have nothing standing between us and destruction but our own bluff and the sheepishness of these colonists? They are men of the same English stock as ourselves: six to one of us (repeating it emphatically) , six to one, sir; and nearly half our troops are Hessians, Brunswickers, German dragoons, and Indians with scalping knives. These are the countrymen on whose devotion you rely! Suppose the colonists find a leader! ”

“ THE SERGEANT.
(protesting) . No, Sir—
SWINDON.
(severely) . Fall back. (He obeys.)
RICHARD.
(imploringly to those around him, and finally to Burgoyne, as the least stolid of them) . Take her away. Do you think I want a woman near me now?
BURGOYNE.
(going to Judith and taking her hand) . Here, madam: you had better keep inside the lines; but stand here behind us; and don’t look.
Richard, with a great sobbing sigh of relief as she releases him and turns to Burgoyne, flies for refuge to the cart and mounts into it. The executioner takes off his coat and pinions him. ”

“ Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own house, stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women, accepting it, as she has been trained to accept all monstrous calamities, as proofs of the greatness of the power that inflicts them, and of her own wormlike insignificance. ”

“ Well, it is all the talk that Major Swindon is going to do what he did in Springtown—make an example of some notorious rebel, as he calls us. He pounced on Peter Dudgeon as the worst character there; and it is the general belief that he will pounce on Richard as the worst here.
JUDITH.
But Richard said—
ANDERSON.
(goodhumoredly cutting her short) . Pooh! Richard said! He said what he thought would frighten you and frighten me, my dear. He said what perhaps (God forgive him!) he would like to believe. It’s a terrible thing to think of what death must mean for a man like that. ”

“ Well, we’re all rebels; and you know it.
ALL THE MEN (except Anderson) .
No, no, no!
RICHARD.
Yes, you are. You haven’t damned King George up hill and down dale as I have; but you’ve prayed for his defeat; and you, Anthony Anderson, have conducted the service, and sold your family bible to buy a pair of pistols. They mayn’t hang me, perhaps; because the moral effect of the Devil’s Disciple dancing on nothing wouldn’t help them. But a Minister! (Judith, dismayed, clings to Anderson) or a lawyer! (Hawkins smiles like a man able to take care of himself) or an upright horsedealer! ”

“ The crowd becomes quiet at once; and the sergeant and petty officers, hurrying to the back of the square, with a few whispered orders and some stealthy hustling cause it to open and admit the funeral procession, which is protected from the crowd by a double file of soldiers. First come Burgoyne and Swindon, who, on entering the square, glance with distaste at the gallows, and avoid passing under it by wheeling a little to the right and stationing themselves on that side. ”

“ In the working class, which, like all classes, has its own official aristocracy, there is the same reluctance to discredit an institution or to “do a man out of his job.” At bottom, of course, this apparently shameless sacrifice of great public interests to petty personal ones, is simply the preference of the ordinary man for the things he can feel and understand to the things that are beyond his capacity. It is stupidity, not dishonesty.
Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways. ”

“ Anderson is a pleasanter person to live with than Mrs. Dudgeon. To which Mrs. Dudgeon would at once reply, with reason, that Mrs. Anderson has no children to look after; no poultry, pigs nor cattle; a steady and sufficient income not directly dependent on harvests and prices at fairs; an affectionate husband who is a tower of strength to her: in short, that life is as easy at the minister’s house as it is hard at the farm. ”

“ After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully, you’ll be surprised to find how like hate is to love. (She starts, strangely touched—even appalled. He is amused at her.) Yes: I’m quite in earnest. Think of how some of our married friends worry one another, tax one another, are jealous of one another, can’t bear to let one another out of sight for a day, are more like jailers and slave-owners than lovers. Think of those very same people with their enemies, scrupulous, lofty, self-respecting, determined to be independent of one another, careful of how they speak of one another—pooh! ”

“ When you make up your mind to hang a man, you put yourself at a disadvantage with him. Why should I be civil to you? I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
SWINDON.
You have no right to assume that the court has made up its mind without a fair trial. And you will please not address me as General. I am Major Swindon.
RICHARD.
A thousand pardons. I thought I had the honor of addressing Gentlemanly Johnny.
Sensation among the officers. The sergeant has a narrow escape from a guffaw.
BURGOYNE.
(with extreme suavity) . I believe I am Gentlemanly Johnny, sir, at your service. ”

“ Dudgeon’s face, even at its best, is grimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride. She is an elderly matron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety and respectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and rectitude, that they conceive goodness simply as self-denial. ”

“ It is not particularly lively business, hanging this poor devil of a minister.
BURGOYNE.
(throwing himself onto Swindon’s chair) . No, sir, it is not. It is making too much of the fellow to execute him: what more could you have done if he had been a member of the Church of England? Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. ”

“ Why don’t you get up and let your uncle in? after me waiting up all night for him! (She pushes her rudely off the sofa.) There: I’ll open the door: much good you are to wait up. Go and mend that fire a bit.
The girl, cowed and wretched, goes to the fire and puts a log on. Mrs. Dudgeon unbars the door and opens it, letting into the stuffy kitchen a little of the freshness and a great deal of the chill of the dawn, also her second son Christy, a fattish, stupid, fair-haired, round-faced man of about 22, muffled in a plaid shawl and grey overcoat. ”

“ There: that’s right, that’s right. If only you are not hurt, nothing else matters.
JUDITH.
No, no, no: I’m not hurt.
ANDERSON.
Thank Heaven for that! Come now: (leading her to the railed seat and making her sit down beside him) sit down and rest: you can tell me about it to-morrow. Or, (misunderstanding her distress) you shall not tell me at all if it worries you. There, there! (Cheerfully.) I’ll make you some fresh tea: that will set you up again. (He goes to the table, and empties the teapot into the slop bowl.)
JUDITH.
(in a strained tone) . Tony.
ANDERSON.
Yes, dear? ”

“ ANDERSON.
I think that a man’s life is worth saving, whoever it belongs to. (Richard makes him an ironical bow. Anderson returns the bow humorously.) Come: you’ll have a cup of tea, to prevent you catching cold?
RICHARD.
I observe that Mrs. Anderson is not quite so pressing as you are, Pastor.
JUDITH.
(almost stifled with resentment, which she has been expecting her husband to share and express for her at every insult of Richard’s) . You are welcome for my husband’s sake. (She brings the teapot to the fireplace and sets it on the hob.) ”

“ He fell, and his ideal empire was dismembered, not through his own misconduct, but because Sir George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering those remote and inferior creatures, the colonists. And King George and the rest of the nation agreed, on the whole, with Germain. It is a significant point that in America, where Burgoyne was an enemy and an invader, he was admired and praised. The climate there is no doubt more favorable to intellectual vivacity. ”

“ I will. You should be burnt alive.
ESSIE.
But I don’t want to. (She shrinks back, leaving Richard and Judith face to face.)
RICHARD.
(to Judith) . Actually doesn’t want to, most virtuous lady!
UNCLE TITUS.
Have a care, Richard Dudgeon. The law—
RICHARD.
(turning threateningly on him) . Have a care, you. In an hour from this there will be no law here but martial law. I passed the soldiers within six miles on my way here: before noon Major Swindon’s gallows for rebels will be up in the market place.
ANDERSON.
(calmly) . What have we to fear from that, sir? ”

“ RICHARD.
(impatiently) . Yah! (To Christy) He wants to know am I Minister Anderson. Tell him, and stop grinning like a zany.
CHRISTY.
(grinning more than ever) . YOU Pastor Anderson! (To Swindon) Why, Mr. Anderson’s a minister—-a very good man; and Dick’s a bad character: the respectable people won’t speak to him. He’s the bad brother: I’m the good one, (The officers laugh outright. The soldiers grin.)
SWINDON.
Who arrested this man?
THE SERGEANT.
I did, sir. I found him in the minister’s house, sitting at tea with the lady with his coat off, quite at home. ”