



Produced by Eve Sobol.  HTML version by Al Haines.









THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE


Bernard Shaw




ACT I

At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in
the year 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is sitting up in the
kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of
the town of Websterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman. No woman
looks her best after sitting up all night; and Mrs. 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. This conception is easily extended to
others--denial, and finally generalized as covering anything
disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon, being exceedingly disagreeable, is held
to be exceedingly good. Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete
license except for amiable weaknesses of any sort, and is consequently,
without knowing it, the most licentious woman in the parish on the
strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed a
Sunday at the Presbyterian church.

The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused of the breaking
off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight
than their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being
idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and
maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of
liberty, resistance to tyranny, and selfsacrifice on the altar of the
Rights of Man. Into the merits of these idealizations it is not here
necessary to inquire: suffice it to say, without prejudice, that they
have convinced both Americans and English that the most high minded
course for them to pursue is to kill as many of one another as
possible, and that military operations to that end are in full swing,
morally supported by confident requests from the clergy of both sides
for the blessing of God on their arms.

Under such circumstances many other women besides this disagreeable
Mrs. Dudgeon find themselves sitting up all night waiting for news.
Like her, too, they fall asleep towards morning at the risk of nodding
themselves into the kitchen fire. Mrs. Dudgeon sleeps with a shawl over
her head, and her feet on a broad fender of iron laths, the step of the
domestic altar of the fireplace, with its huge hobs and boiler, and its
hinged arm above the smoky mantel-shelf for roasting. The plain kitchen
table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, with a candle on it in a tin
sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, is uncushioned and
unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seat conventionally
moulded to the sitter's curves, it is comparatively a chair of state.
The room has three doors, one on the same side as the fireplace, near
the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the opposite end of
the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; and the house
door, with its latch, heavy lock, and clumsy wooden bar, in the front
wall, between the window in its middle and the corner next the bedroom
door. Between the door and the window a rack of pegs suggests to the
deductive observer that the men of the house are all away, as there are
no hats or coats on them. On the other side of the window the clock
hangs on a nail, with its white wooden dial, black iron weights, and
brass pendulum. Between the clock and the corner, a big cupboard,
locked, stands on a dwarf dresser full of common crockery.

On the side opposite the fireplace, between the door and the corner, a
shamelessly ugly black horsehair sofa stands against the wall. An
inspection of its stridulous surface shows that Mrs. Dudgeon is not
alone. A girl of sixteen or seventeen has fallen asleep on it. She is a
wild, timid looking creature with black hair and tanned skin. Her
frock, a scanty garment, is rent, weatherstained, berrystained, and by
no means scrupulously clean. It hangs on her with a freedom which,
taken with her brown legs and bare feet, suggests no great stock of
underclothing.

Suddenly there comes a tapping at the door, not loud enough to wake the
sleepers. Then knocking, which disturbs Mrs. Dudgeon a little. Finally
the latch is tried,