The Playboy of the Western World: A Comedy in Three Acts — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Playboy of the Western World: A Comedy in Three Acts
John Stuart Mill · en
SCENE _as before. Later in the day. Jimmy comes in, slightly drunk._
JIMMY.
_calls._—Pegeen! (_Crosses to inner door._) Pegeen Mike! (_Comes back
again into the room._) Pegeen! (_Philly comes in in the same state. To
Philly._) Did you see herself?
PHILLY.
I did not; but I sent Shawn Keogh with the ass cart for to bear him
home. (_Trying cupboards which are locked._) Well, isn’t he a nasty man
to get into such staggers at a morning wake? and isn’t herself the
divil’s daughter for locking, and she so fussy after that young gaffer,
you might take your death with drought and none to heed you?
JIMMY.
It’s little wonder she’d be fussy, and he after bringing bankrupt ruin
on the roulette man, and the trick-o’-the-loop man, and breaking the
nose of the cockshot-man, and winning all in the sports below, racing,
lepping, dancing, and the Lord knows what! He’s right luck, I’m telling
you.
PHILLY.
If he has, he’ll be rightly hobbled yet, and he not able to say ten
words without making a brag of the way he killed his father, and the
great blow he hit with the loy.
JIMMY.
A man can’t hang by his own informing, and his father should be rotten
by now. [_Old Mahon passes window slowly._]
PHILLY.
Supposing a man’s digging spuds in that field with a long spade, and
supposing he flings up the two halves of that skull, what’ll be said
then in the papers and the courts of law?
JIMMY.
They’d say it was an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the flood. (_Old
Mahon comes in and sits down near door listening._) Did you never hear
tell of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin, ranged out like
blue jugs in a cabin of Connaught?
PHILLY.
And you believe that?
JIMMY.
_pugnaciously._—Didn’t a lad see them and he after coming from
harvesting in the Liverpool boat? “They have them there,” says he,
“making a show of the great people there was one time walking the
world. White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with
full teeth, and some haven’t only but one.”
PHILLY.
It was no lie, maybe, for when I was a young lad there was a graveyard
beyond the house with the remnants of a man who had thighs as long as
your arm. He was a horrid man, I’m telling you, and there was many a
fine Sunday I’d put him together for fun, and he with shiny bones, you
wouldn’t meet the like of these days in the cities of the world.
MAHON.
_getting up._—You wouldn’t is it? Lay your eyes on that skull, and tell
me where and when there was another the like of it, is splintered only
from the blow of a loy.
PHILLY.
Glory be to God! And who hit you at all?
MAHON.
_triumphantly._—It was my own son hit me. Would you believe that?
JIMMY.
Well, there’s wonders hidden in the heart of man!
PHILLY.
_suspiciously._—And what way was it done?