The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays by J. M. Synge

that gash in his da.
    MAHON. Is it me?
    WIDOW QUIN (amusing herself). Aye. And isn’t it great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?
    MAHON (raging). Torment him is it? And I after holding out with the patience of a martyred saint till there’s nothing but destruction on, and I’m driven out in my old age with none to aid me.
    WIDOW QUIN (greatly amused). It’s a sacred wonder the way that wickedness will spoil a man.
    MAHON. My wickedness, is it? Amn’t I after saying it is himself has me destroyed, and he a liar on walls, a talker of folly, a man you’d see stretched the half of the day in the brown ferns with his belly to the sun.
    WIDOW QUIN. Not working at all?
    MAHON. The divil a work, or if he did itself, you’d see him raising up a haystack like the stalk of a rush, or driving our last cow till he broke her leg at the hip, and when he wasn’t at that he’d be fooling over little birds he had—finches and felts—or making mugs at his own self in the bit of a glass we had hung on the wall.
    WIDOW QUIN (looking at CHRISTY). What way was he so foolish? It was running wild after the girls maybe?
    MAHON (with a shout of derision). Running wild, is it? If he seen a red petticoat coming swinging over the hill, he’d be off to hide in the sticks, and you’d see him shooting out his sheep’s eyes between the little twigs and the leaves, and his two ears rising like a hare looking out through a gap. Girls, indeed!
    WIDOW QUIN. It was drink maybe?
    MAHON. And he a poor fellow would get drunk on the smell of a pint. He’d a queer rotten stomach, I’m telling you, and when I gave him three pulls from my pipe a while since, he was taken with contortions till I had to send him in the ass cart to the females’ nurse.
    WIDOW QUIN (clasping her hands). Well, I never till this day heard tell of a man the like of that!
    MAHON. I’d take a mighty oath you didn’t surely, and wasn’t he the laughing joke of every female woman where four baronies meet, the way the girls would stop their weeding if they seen him coming the road to let a roar at him, and call him the looney of Mahon’s.
    WIDOW QUIN. I’d give the world and all to see the like of him. What kind was he?
    MAHON. A small low fellow.
    WIDOW QUIN. And dark?
    MAHON. Dark and dirty.
    WIDOW QUIN (considering). I’m thinking I seen him.
    MAHON (eagerly). An ugly young blackguard.
    WIDOW QUIN. A hideous, fearful villain, and the spit of you.
    MAHON. What way is he fled?
    WIDOW QUIN. Gone over the hills to catch a coasting steamer to the north or south.
    MAHON. Could I pull up on him now?
    WIDOW QUIN. If you’ll cross the sands below where the tide is out, you’ll be in it as soon as himself, for he had to go round ten miles by the top of the bay.
    (She points to the door.) Strike down by the head beyond and then follow on the roadway to the north and east.
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    (MAHON goes abruptly.)
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    WIDOW QUIN (shouting after him). Let you give him a good vengeance when you come up with him, but don’t put yourself in the power of the law, for it’d be a poor thing to see a judge in his black cap reading out his sentence on a civil warrior the like of you.
    (She swings the door to and looks at CHRISTY, who is cowering in terror, for a moment, then she bursts into a laugh.)
    WIDOW QUIN. Well, you’re the walking Playboy of the Western World, and that’s the poor man you had divided to his breeches belt.
    CHRISTY (looking out: then, to her). What’ll Pegeen say when she hears that story? What’ll she be saying to me now?
    WIDOW QUIN. She’ll knock the head of you, I’m thinking, and drive you from the door. God help her to be taking you for a wonder, and you a little schemer making up the story you destroyed your da.
    CHRISTY (turning to the door, nearly speechless with rage, half to himself). To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to his life,