Act III

Next morning Broadbent and Larry are sitting at the ends of a
breakfast table in the middle of a small grass plot before
Cornelius Doyle's house. They have finished their meal, and are
buried in newspapers. Most of the crockery is crowded upon a
large square black tray of japanned metal. The teapot is of brown
delft ware. There is no silver; and the butter, on a dinner
plate, is en bloc. The background to this breakfast is the house,
a small white slated building, accessible by a half-glazed door.
A person coming out into the garden by this door would find the
table straight in front of him, and a gate leading to the road
half way down the garden on his right; or, if he turned sharp to
his left, he could pass round the end of the house through an
unkempt shrubbery. The mutilated remnant of a huge planter
statue, nearly dissolved by the rains of a century, and vaguely
resembling a majestic female in Roman draperies, with a wreath in
her hand, stands neglected amid the laurels. Such statues, though
apparently works of art, grow naturally in Irish gardens. Their
germination is a mystery to the oldest inhabitants, to whose
means and taste they are totally foreign.

There is a rustic bench, much roiled by the birds, and
decorticated and split by the weather, near the little gate. At
the opposite side, a basket lies unmolested because it might as
well be there as anywhere else. An empty chair at the table was
lately occupied by Cornelius, who has finished his breakfast and
gone in to the room in which he receives rents and keeps his
books and cash, known in the household as "the office." This
chair, like the two occupied by Larry and Broadbent, has a
mahogany frame and is upholstered in black horsehair.

Larry rises and goes off through the shrubbery with his
newspaper. Hodson comes in through the garden gate, disconsolate.
Broadbent, who sits facing the gate, augurs the worst from his
expression.

BROADBENT. Have you been to the village?

HODSON. No use, sir. We'll have to get everything from London by
parcel post.

BROADBENT. I hope they made you comfortable last night.

HODSON. I was no worse than you were on that sofa, sir. One
expects to rough it here, sir.

BROADBENT. We shall have to look out for some other arrangement.
[Cheering up irrepressibly] Still, it's no end of a joke. How do
you like the Irish, Hodson?

HODSON. Well, sir, they're all right anywhere but in their own
country. I've known lots of em in England, and generally liked
em. But here, sir, I seem simply to hate em. The feeling come
over me the moment we landed at Cork, sir. It's no use my
pretendin, sir: I can't bear em. My mind rises up agin their
ways, somehow: they