The Iceman Cometh by Harold Bloom, Eugene O’Neill Read Free Book Online Page A

pined in confinement. And so he died. Forgive these reminiscences. Undoubtedly all this is well known to you. Everyone in the world knows.
    PARRITT
    Uncomfortably .
    Tough luck. No, I never heard of him.
    WILLIE
    Blinks at him incredulously .
    Never heard? I thought everyone in the world—Why, even at Harvard I discovered my father was well known by reputation, although that was some time before the District Attorney gave him so much unwelcome publicity. Yes, even as a freshman I was notorious. I was accepted socially with all the warm cordiality that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would have shown a drunken Negress dancing the can can at high noon on Brattle Street. Harvard was my father’s idea. He was an ambitious man. Dictatorial, too. Always knowing what was best for me. But I did make myself a brilliant student. A dirty trick on my classmates, inspired by revenge, I fear.
    He quotes .
    “Dear college days, with pleasure rife! The grandest gladdest days of life!” But, of course, that is a Yale hymn, and they’re given to rah-rah exaggeration at New Haven. I was a brilliant student at Law School, too. My father wanted a lawyer in the family. He was a calculating man. A thorough knowledge of the law close at hand in the house to help him find fresh ways to evade it. But I discovered the loophole of whiskey and escaped his jurisdiction.
    Abruptly to PARRITT .
    Speaking of whiskey, sir, reminds me—and, I hope, reminds you—that when meeting a Prince the customary salutation is “What’ll you have?”
    PARRITT
    With defensive resentment .
    Nix! All you guys seem to think I’m made of dough. Where would
    I get the coin to blow everyone?
    WILLIE
    Sceptically .
    Broke? You haven’t the thirsty look of the impecunious. I’d judge you to be a plutocrat, your pockets stuffed with ill-gotten gains. Two or three dollars, at least. And don’t think we will question how you got it. As Vespasian remarked, the smell of all whiskey is sweet.
    PARRITT
    What do you mean, how I got it?
    To larry, forcing a la ugh .
    It’s a laugh, calling me a plutocrat, isn’t it, Larry, when I’ve been in the Movement all my life.
    LARRY gives him an uneasy suspicious g la nce, then looks away, as if avoiding something he does not wish to see .
    WILLIE
    Disgustedly .
    Ah, one of those, eh? I believe you now, all right! Go away and blow yourself up, that’s a good lad. Hugo is the only licensed preacher of that gospel here. A dangerous terrorist, Hugo! He would as soon blow the collar off a schooner of beer as look at you!
    To LARRY .
    Let us ignore this useless youth, Larry. Let us join in prayer that Hickey, the Great Salesman, will soon arrive bringing the blessed bourgeois long green! Would that Hickey or Death would come! Meanwhile, I will sing a song. A beautiful old New England folk ballad which I picked up at Harvard amid the debris of education.
    He sings in a boisterous baritone, rapping on the tab le with his knuckles at the indicated spots in the song .
    Jack, oh, Jack, was a sailor lad
    And he came to a tavern for gin.
    He rapped and he rapped with a
    Rap, rap, rap .
    But never a soul seemed in.
    The drunks at the tables stir . rocky gets up from his chair in the bar and starts back for the entrance to the back room . hope cocks one irritable eye over his specs . joe mott opens both of his and grins . willie interposes some drunken whimsical exposition to LARRY.
    The origin of this beautiful ditty is veiled in mystery, Larry. There was a legend bruited about in Cambridge lavatories that Waldo Emerson composed it during his uninformative period as a minister, while he was trying to write a sermon. But my own opinion is, it goes back much further, and Jonathan Edwards was the author of both words and music.
    He sings .
    He rapped and rapped, and tapped and tapped
    Enough to wake the dead Till he heard a damsel
    Rap, rap, rap .
    On a window right over his head.
    The drunks are blinking their eyes now, grumbling and cursing . rocky