voice, for the time is come, and bid him go up into his forge, and be sitting there by himself, sneezing and sweating, and he beating pot-hooks till the judgment day.

He seizes her arm again

Molly Byrne. Keep him off from me, Timmy!

Timmy (pushing Martin Doul aside). Would you have me strike you, Martin Doul? Go along now after your wife, who’s a fit match for you, and leave Molly with myself.

Martin Doul (despairingly). Won’t you raise your voice, Molly, and lay hell’s long curse on his tongue?

Molly Byrne (on Timmy’s left). I’ll be telling him it’s destroyed I am with the sight of you and the sound of your voice Go off now after your wife, and if she beats you again, let you go after the tinker girls is above running the hills, or down among the sluts of the town, and you’ll learn one day, maybe, the way a man should speak with a well-reared, civil girl the like of me. (She takes Timmy by the arm.) Come up now into the forge till he’ll be gone down a bit on the road, for it’s near afeard I am of the wild look he has come in his eyes.

She goes into the forge. Timmy stops in the doorway.

Timmy. Let me not find you out here again, Martin Doul. (He bares his arm.) It’s well you know Timmy the smith has great strength in his arm, and it’s a power of things it has broken a sight harder than the old bone of your skull.

He goes into the forge and pulls the door after him.

Martin Doul (stands a moment with his hand to his eyes). And that’s the last thing I’m to set my sight on in the life of the world—the villainy of a woman and the bloody strength of a man. Oh, God, pity a poor blind fellow, the way I am this day with no strength in me to do hurt to them at all. (He begins groping about for a moment, then stops.) Yet if I’ve no strength in me I’ve a voice left for my prayers, and may God blight them this day, and my own soul the same hour with them, the way I’ll see them after, Molly Byrne and Timmy the smith, the two of them on a high bed, and they screeching in hell.… It’ll be a grand thing that time to look on the two of them; and they twisting and roaring out, and twisting and roaring again, one day and the next day, and each day always and ever. It’s not blind I’ll be that time, and it won’t be hell to me, I’m thinking, but the like of heaven itself; and it’s fine care I’ll be taking the Lord Almighty doesn’t know.

He turns to grope out.

Curtain.