Our Country’s Good: Act Two, Scene Three Summary & Analysis

Inside his tent at night, Harry drinks large quantities of rum and has a conversation with Handy Baker’s ghost, speaking out both as himself and as Handy. When he calls for Duckling, Handy says, “She’s on the beach, Harry, waiting for her young Handy Baker.” Tormented, Harry orders Handy to leave him alone, but Handy tells him that “the dead never go away.” Handy then taunts him by saying that he doesn’t have possession over Duckling. “I didn’t hang you,” Harry declares at one point, but Handy challenges this, knowing that Harry wanted him to die. “All right,” Harry admits, “I wanted you hanged, Go away!” Just when Handy finally leaves him, though, Thomas Barrett appears (again narrated by Harry himself) and talks about how “horrible” it is to be dead.

As he talks to the ghost of Thomas Barrett, Harry periodically calls out for Duckling, who eventually comes rushing to him. She tells him that she heard him all the way from the beach, and when he insists that he’s seeing ghosts, she tells him he’s just having a nightmare. “No. I see them,” he says. “Let me come inside you.” She asks him if this will calm him down, and he says that it will, so she agrees. However, he pauses for a moment and asks what she was doing on the beach. “You were with him, he told me, you were with Handy Baker,” he says.