slack and idle that I need a whip
Before I serve you?
CONCHUBAR.
No, no whip, Cuchulain,
But every day my children come and say:
‘This man is growing harder to endure.
How can we be at safety with this man
That nobody can buy or bid or bind?
We shall be at his mercy when you are gone;
He burns the earth as if he were a fire,
And time can never touch him.’
CUCHULAIN.
And so the tale
Grows finer yet; and I am to obey
Whatever child you set upon the throne,
As if it were yourself!
CONCHUBAR.
Most certainly.
I am High King, my son shall be High King;
And you for all the wildness of your blood,
And though your father came out of the sun,
Are but a little king and weigh but light
In anything that touches government,
If put into the balance with my children.
CUCHULAIN.
It’s well that we should speak our minds out plainly,
For when we die we shall be spoken of
In many countries. We in our young days
Have seen the heavens like a burning cloud
Brooding upon the world, and being more
Than men can be now that cloud’s lifted up,
We should be the more truthful. Conchubar,
I do not like your children—they have no pith,
No marrow in their bones, and will lie soft
Where you and I lie hard.
CONCHUBAR.
You rail at them
Because you have no children of your own.
CUCHULAIN.
I think myself most lucky that I leave
No pallid ghost or mockery of a man
To drift and mutter in the corridors,
Where I have laughed and sung.
CONCHUBAR.
That is not true,
For all your boasting of the truth between us;
For, there is no man having house and lands,
That have been in the one family
And called by the one name for centuries,
But is made miserable if he know
They are to pass into a stranger’s keeping,
As yours will pass.
CUCHULAIN.
The most of men feel that,
But you and I leave names upon the harp.
CONCHUBAR.
You play with arguments as lawyers do,
And put no heart in them. I know your thoughts,
For we have slept under the one cloak and drunk
From the one wine cup. I know you to the bone.
I have heard you cry, aye in your very sleep,
‘I have no son,’ and with such bitterness
That I have gone upon my knees and prayed
That it might be amended.
CUCHULAIN.
For you thought
That I should be as biddable as others
Had I their reason for it; but that’s not true,
For I would need a weightier argument
Than one that marred me in the copying,
As I have that clean hawk out of the air
That, as men say, begot this body of mine
Upon a mortal woman.
CONCHUBAR.
Now as ever
You mock at every reasonable hope,
And would have nothing, or impossible things.
What eye has ever looked upon the child
Would satisfy a mind like that?
CUCHULAIN.
I would leave
My house and name to none that would not face
Even myself in battle.
CONCHUBAR.
Being swift of foot,
And making light of every common chance,
You should have overtaken on the hills
Some daughter of the air, or on the shore
A daughter of the Country-under-Wave.
CUCHULAIN.
I am not blasphemous.
CONCHUBAR.
Yet you despise
Our queens, and would not call a child your own,
If one of them had borne him.
CUCHULAIN.
I have not said it.
CONCHUBAR.
