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Why God Loves the Irish
39
there at the house of a ‘leading citizen.’ A lady met him in the street and asked if he had been to see the Irish Players. ‘See them !’ he said, ‘I’ve got four of ’em staying with me at the house.’
“ ‘And do they talk the same off the stage ?’
“ ‘Worse,’ replied the leading citizen.”
‘‘Mister O’Reilly! Mister Playboy!”
Mr. Sinclair looked at the page incredulously. “I’ll not believe it,” he said, his small and too beautiful hands playing with his checkered cuffs, playing with the many pearl buttons sewed on his green coat sleeve
above them. “ ’Tis the gin. I’ll not believe !”
“Mister O’Reilly !” plainly shouted the page. “Mr. Playboy !”
“Do you hear that, too, Molly?”
“God Almighty ! but the strange things do happen here today,” admitted Miss O’Neill. “ ‘Mister Playboy!’ It’s like a ghost of the living. Ah, I wish we were now playing ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ — even with but twenty persons in the house. It was Literature.”
“It was Life,” quoth Mr. Sinclair.
“It was Synge,” almost with reverence said the not habitually revering Maire O’Neill, whose humor, I think, makes her shy of seriousness.
“I’ll never forget the time we were hearing protests against ‘The Playboy’ at the old Abbey,” spoke Mr. Sinclair, “and a man clambered onto the stage to protest against the drunken scene. He reeled and would have fallen but for Yeats catching him. Then out of his pocket there crashed to the stage a bottle of whisky that would be worth much now in this country. The bottle broke, and every drop was lost, and the man thrown out on all fours.”
“I’ve seen more than bottles broken on the stage,”