MAHON.
I seen it’s my son.
WIDOW QUIN.
You seen that you’re mad. (Cheering outside.) Do you hear them cheering him in the zig-zags of the road? Aren’t you after saying that your son’s a fool, and how would they be cheering a true idiot born?
MAHON.
getting distressed.—It’s maybe out of reason that that man’s himself. (Cheering again.) There’s none surely will go cheering him. Oh, I’m raving with a madness that would fright the world! (He sits down with his hand to his head.) There was one time I seen ten scarlet divils letting on they’d cork my spirit in a gallon can; and one time I seen rats as big as badgers sucking the life blood from the butt of my lug; but I never till this day confused that dribbling idiot with a likely man. I’m destroyed surely.
WIDOW QUIN.
And who’d wonder when it’s your brain-pan that is gaping now?
MAHON.
Then the blight of the sacred drought upon myself and him, for I never went mad to this day, and I not three weeks with the Limerick girls drinking myself silly, and parlatic from the dusk to dawn. (To Widow Quin, suddenly.) Is my visage astray?
WIDOW QUIN.
It is then. You’re a sniggering maniac, a child could see.
MAHON.
getting up more cheerfully.—Then I’d best be going to the union beyond, and there’ll be a welcome before me, I tell you (with great pride), and I a terrible and fearful case, the way that there I was one time, screeching in a straightened waistcoat, with seven doctors writing out my sayings in a printed book. Would you believe that?
WIDOW QUIN.
If you’re a wonder itself, you’d best be hasty, for them lads caught a maniac one time and pelted the poor creature till he ran out, raving and foaming, and was drowned in the sea.
MAHON.
with philosophy.—It’s true mankind is the divil when your head’s astray. Let me out now and I’ll slip down the boreen, and not see them so.
WIDOW QUIN.
showing him out.—That’s it. Run to the right, and not a one will see. [He runs off.]