The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Devil's Disciple, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: The Devil's Disciple

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Posting Date: April 24, 2009 [EBook #3638]
Release Date: January, 2003
First Posted: June 27, 2001
Last Updated: April 12, 2006

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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, resistan