Strumpet City

CHAPTER SEVEN

Yearling, back in the city for the first time in six weeks, remarked anew its characteristic odours; the smell of soot and hot metal in Westland Row station, the dust-laden air in streets, the strong tang of horse urine where the cabbies had their stand, the waft of beer and stale sawdust when a public house door swung open. If the fishing in Connemara had been poor this season, at least the open spaces had given him back his nose.

He stood at the corner, a jaunty figure in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a walking-stick which he wagged contentedly to and fro as he considered his surroundings. He liked to smell things. Smell was part of place. It was more. It seeped into forgotten storerooms of the mind and unlocked hidden memories. Smell, like music, could produce the latchkey to pain and pleasure.

He looked down Brunswick Street to read the clock above the fire brigade station. Twenty-five minutes to three. That gave him an hour before his appointment with the chairman of Morgan & Co. He was glad. The October afternoon was fine. There were plenty of pleasant, inconsequential things to do.

Wondering if there was anything of interest going on at the Antient Concert Rooms, he crossed the road and turned left down Brunswick Street. He found the place was locked and the notice board outside blank. Too early yet, he remembered, for any of the concerts of the Dublin Orchestral Society. He had played with the orchestra some years before, when they presented all the Beethoven symphonies. They had to leave out the last movement of the Ninth, though, because there was no choir. Michele Esposito had conducted, an accomplished musician, Yearling considered, unanimously respected by musical citizens. Pity they were also unanimous in mispronouncing his name.

In the graveyard of St. Mark’s Church an old man was sweeping up the leaves. The trees that had shed them were covered with grime from the nearby railway bridge, as black as the coal carters who lived in the surrounding tenements. Yet they budded in spring and decked themselves in summer, with a gnarled and grimy courage which moved Yearling to admiration. The old man swept the leaves into little heaps along the paths. From time to time he exchanged his sweeping brush for a barrow and brought them to the fire that smouldered by a stone wall. There was no flame visible, only a plume of blue smoke rising steadily towards the sky. On all sides were tombstones, upright, angled, grimy as the trees. The iron railings of the graveyard ran parallel with the street, a barrier to divide the kingdoms of the living and the dead.

The metal-shod wheels of a dray ground on the cobbles behind Yearling’s back. The noise was deafening. He turned impatiently to shake his stick at the driver and put his fingers in his ears. The driver, unabashed, winked to convey his good humour. As the dray passed Yearling saw the board on the back. It read: ‘Morgan & Co.’

The reminder of his appointment was unwelcome. His mother had been Cecilia Morgan and from his grandfather, George Morgan, he had inherited an aptitude for music and his influential place on the Board. His brother-in-law, John Bullman, was now chairman. Neither approved of the other.

As Yearling turned to resume his walk, a man passed him with a barrel-organ and a monkey on a chain. One of Signor Esposito’s fellow-countrymen, a twin soul, a musician. The man was thin and famished looking and the monkey, in its red flannel jacket, clung to the organ and scrutinised the passers-by with quick, continuous movements of its head. When a group of children waved and shouted to it, the monkey responded by leaping up and down several times. Showing-off, Yearling thought.

He crossed the road. The children had now gathered about a shop window. They were ragged and poor. The boys wore trousers that had been cut down to fit, the girls’ dresses were made of oddments run clumsily together by their mothers. All of them were barefooted. For the moment the window held their unanimous interest. It displayed drumsticks and liquorice pipes, toffee apples, jelly babies, cough-no-mores, aniseed balls, conversation lozenges.

Yearling, aware suddenly of a conglomeration of appetites, tapped the nearest shoulder and asked: ‘Who’d like sweets?’

The faces turned in unison to look up at him. They examined in unison the knickerbockers, the Norfolk jacket, the cane.

‘Come,’ Yearling encouraged, ‘first in gets the most.’

He went into the shop. There were bundles of firewood in one corner and a large drum with tin measures beside it. The tap, dripping occasionally, filled the air with the smell of paraffin. The shelves behind the counter supported trays of money balls, potato balls, peggy’s legs, jaw stickers, bulls-eyes and lemon drops. There was a closed box which contained something called Kruger’s Soothers. Slices of snow cake and plum pudding were stacked on the counter itself and a tumbler stood for a measure beside a basin of cooked peas.

Yearling, aware now that the small space about him was crammed, wondered where to begin. A middle-aged woman faced him. She was smiling.

‘Give them what they want,’ he said, smiling back at her.

For some minutes there was chaos, until the woman said no one would get anything until they were all quiet and waited their turns. Then she began to select from the boxes, counting sweets and measuring out peas. The snow cake and plum pudding disappeared altogether. When all had been served he paid her. It was a modest amount. Never, Yearling thought, had a mob been so economically mollified. He dismissed them and they went whooping out the door.

‘Thank you,’ he said to the woman who had served him.

‘You’re welcome, sir.’

He was about to remark on their appetites, their excitement, the bewildering combination of poverty and high spirits. He changed his mind. What seemed remarkable to him was everyday to her. Raising his hat ceremoniously, he left.

The traffic in Townsend Street, preponderantly horse-drawn, displayed the familiar names—the Gas Company, the Glass Bottle Company, Boland’s Bakery, Tedcastle McCormack, Palgraves, W. & R. Jacob, the Foundry of Morgan, the Dublin United Tramway Company. Most of the drivers had sacks pinned about their shoulders. Many of them wore moustaches that made them look curiously alike. All of them seemed lost in some slow-minded afternoon reverie. Yet these were the revolutionaries and the Larkinites, Yearling reflected, patiently revolving God knows what plans for further mischief behind short clay pipes.

The thought gave him zest for his appointment, which, his watch informed him, was now imminent. He began to swing his cane again, in time with a jingle which had begun to repeat itself in his head.

‘Edward Carson had a cat

It sat upon the fender

And every time it caught a rat

It shouted: No Surrender.’

Carson, arming his Ulster volunteers in the Northern counties of Ireland, wanted a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people. Home Rule is Rome Rule.

‘Ulster will Fight

And Ulster will be Right.’

‘The men of Ulster, loyal subjects of King George V, will use all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament in Ireland, and in the event of such a parliament being forced upon them, will refuse to recognise its authority.’

Edward Carson signed the Solemn Covenant, and immediately after him came the pillars of Northern society: Lord Londonderry, the Bishop of Down, the Moderator of the General Assembly. It would be a fight between John Redmond and Edward Carson, Dear-Harp-of-my-Country-In-Darkness-I-found-Thee against the Protestant Boys and the Ould Orange Flute.

There would be excitement, whatever way the cat jumped. Was it this that had his brother-in-law worried? Or was it the labour unrest? He turned in by the works gate and stood for a while to wonder at the endless belt of buckets which groaned and rattled as they climbed the mechanical hoist. He would soon know.

Rashers, summoned urgently into the street, examined the monkey and the barrel-organ at Hennessy’s request.

‘Where the hell did you get it?’

‘This little Italian collapsed in front of my eyes. I know him well and went over to him. When they were taking him away in the ambulance he asked me to mind the monkey for him.’

‘How can you mind a monkey?’

‘Take him into the room with the rest of the brood, I suppose. I’m wondering what he’ll eat.’

‘One of your misfortunate kids, the minute you turn your back.’

Hennessy looked worried for a moment. Then he said: ‘Monkeys is vegetarians.’

‘I wouldn’t be sure. That fellow there has the look of a bloody cannibal.’

Hennessy scrutinised the monkey closely. It frowned at him and gave an unexpected leap. He jerked away.

‘What did I tell you?’ Rashers said.

‘Ah no,’ Hennessy said, ‘I frightened him. They don’t like to be stared at.’ They sat down on the steps.

‘What am I to do?’ Hennessy asked again.

The barrel-organ and the monkey, overshadowing both of them, cut off the rest of the street and for a long time seemed quite insoluble.

Rashers, applying his mind to the matter, began at the beginning. Anything that lived; men, women, children; dogs, pigeons, monkeys; even lesser things like cockroaches, flies and fleas, had to eat. He had been of their company for long enough to sympathise with them all—the child rooting in the ashbin, the cat slinking along the gutter, the cockroach delicately questing along the wooden joins of the floor, its grey blue body corrugated with anxiety. These were sometimes his competitors, but more often his brothers. He could never watch a dog nosing in a bin without a feeling of sympathy and fellowship. The monkey, too, was a questor, who could pick out fortunes for the curious and collect their pennies in his little black bag. They could work together, the monkey and himself.

Rising from the steps, he began to investigate the handle of the organ. He moved it slightly.

‘Don’t touch it,’ Hennessy warned him.

‘What do you mean—don’t touch it?’

‘You might break it.’

Rashers became angry.

‘Break, me arse,’ he said.

He took a firm grip of the handle and turned it rapidly. The organ, galvanised into action, began at a breathtaking tempo to emit a waltz.

‘For the love of God, will you stop?’ Hennessy appealed. ‘You’ll banjax it.’

But Rashers continued. The burst of music at the turning of the handle astonished him. He cocked his head to it and tried it at different speeds.

‘“Over the Waves”’ he announced finally.

‘Over what waves?’ Hennessy asked. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘It’s a waltz called “Over the Waves”.’

Rashers found the right speed at last. The tune rattled out beneath roofs and windows and flowed down the length of the street, past broken fanlights and open hall doors. Rashers, his head to one side, listened with delight.

‘Elegant,’ he said.

As he turned to invite approval, the behaviour of the monkey caught his attention.

‘Look,’ he said to Hennessy.

The monkey had taken the little black bag in his paw. It’s body trembled a little, its eyes were alive and full of intelligence. The head, moving constantly from one side to the other, left no doubt about its thoughts. It was watching for the approach of a client to beg from.

‘Come on,’ Rashers decided, ‘if we don’t make a few bob, we’ll have a damn good try.’

Hennessy agreed to push the barrel-organ from place to place, a task Rashers found impossible because of his bad leg. He was persuaded to try the handle too, but after the terrifying burst of music which answered his first attempt he refused to have anything further to do with it. It was decided that Rashers, who had a more professional understanding of music anyway, should be solely responsible for performance. He became expert at it in the course of the afternoon and learned to vary the tempo to suit his mood. Turn the handle rapidly and the air was lively. Turn it more slowly and the effect was pensive—even melancholy.

‘It’s more impressive than the tin whistle,’ Hennessy remarked.

‘More orchestral,’ Rashers agreed.

By evening they had arrived at their last stand, a vantage point at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk and Sackville Street. It was here that Pat and Lily, on their way to one of their rare walks in Phoenix Park, saw them.

‘There’s some friends of mine,’ Pat said. She looked around her. People were passing continuously. She searched.

‘Where?’

‘Over there.’

‘The barrel-organ?’

‘The thin fella is Hennessy. The one with the beard is Rashers.’

‘And the monkey . . . ?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t yet had the pleasure,’ Pat said.

He took her over to introduce her. Hennessy was polite and raised his hat. Rashers stared for some moments until he recognised Pat as the friend of Fitz and Mulhall.

‘Have you gone into partnership?’ Pat asked him.

Hennessy explained about the Italian who had collapsed. Then, because he was by nature gallant, he insisted that the monkey should draw Lily’s fortune. He refused to hear of any payment. The monkey selected a card from the fortune box. Lily took it.

‘Let’s see,’ Pat asked her.

‘Fortunes are private,’ she said, keeping it out of his reach. He shrugged. They walked all the way to the Park, following the river to Kingsbridge and entering at last by the main gate. The trees were rich with the colour of autumn, grassland and paths were strewn with fallen leaves. It was their habit to be together once a week. Lily would not agree to meet him more often and he had given up his earlier attempts to persuade her. A string of horses, returning from exercise, went by at a distance. Riders and animals made beautiful silhouettes against the autumn sky.

‘There goes the Quality,’ Pat commented.

‘Are you jealous?’ Lily asked.

‘Why should I be jealous?’

‘Because the gentry have horses.’

‘I have a horse of my own,’ Pat said, ‘the one I drive for Nolan & Keyes.’

Lily laughed and reached out her hand to him. He took it gently. She was wrong if she thought he coveted any of the things the Quality enjoyed. He would fight them only because people of his own class were hungry and in want and those who were taking too much must give something back. And because he would refuse any longer to cringe before their lackeys or fawn on them for his livelihood. When a banner swaying above a meeting said ‘Arise, Ye Slaves’ the words stirred him like the sound of a great band. He would not be a slave for the sake of livelihood, and he would not tolerate the company of slaves. Riders and animals passed by in silhouette, far away and beautiful in the autumn evening.

When he had been silent for some time Lily said to him: ‘Don’t you want to know my fortune?’

‘You said it was private.’

She took from her bag the card the monkey had given her and said: ‘There’s a Dark Man and a Fair Man in my life and I’m supposed to fall in love very soon with one or the other of them. Oh—and I’m to go on a journey by water too.’

‘If I’m the Dark Man,’ Pat said, ‘who’s this fair fella?’

‘I don’t care for fair fellas,’ Lily told him.

‘Neither do I,’ Pat decided.

The horsemen had gone and the Park all about them was empty.

From time to time the telpher circled above the works yard, a small cabin suspended from a rail, with a trolley which crackled now and then and threw out a cascade of blue sparks. It was almost level with the windows of the boardroom, which occupied the top storey. Watching it as it passed, Yearling wondered what it would be like to drive. What purpose it served he could not remember, although he had been watching it during Board meetings since his youth. Sometimes it broke down, and the driver would climb out on to the roof to adjust the trolley. Some years ago a man had been blown off the roof by a sudden squall of wind. Yearling, who had been watching him throughout a particularly boring meeting, saw him fall and rushed down to help. He found a knot of workmen gathered about a mangled and unrecognisable body. The telpher had remained driverless for most of the afternoon, tiny and inaccessible on its rail above the yard, marooned in mid journey until the riggers worked out a plan to lift another driver to it by means of a hoist chair. The wind tore at the ropes and tossed the chair about, until Yearling stopped watching because apprehension was making him sick. But the new man got there and after an hour or so the telpher was moving about its business once again. Yearling sent twenty pounds to the widow—anonymously. How long ago was that? Twenty years, perhaps.

‘You haven’t been listening,’ his brother-in-law said. Mr. Yearling shifted his gaze from the window. He had been conscious of the voice in the background.

‘You joined the Employers’ Federation several months ago,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing very new in what you’ve been saying.’

‘I feel it my duty to bring you up to date. There were several important meetings of the Board while you were away shooting.’

‘Fishing,’ Yearling corrected.

Bullman, controlling his irritation, said: ‘I beg your pardon—fishing.’

He was well named, Yearling thought. Deep voice, thick neck, heavy shoulders that were beginning to stoop. When he had married into Morgan & Co. he was already a man of influence in other fields, particularly shipping. The indiscipline of the working class of the city, after years of docility, confused and frightened him. The world of industry, so long stable, so entrenched in its authority, was sliding on its foundations.

‘We are going to make a stand against Larkinism,’ he said.

‘You said that several months ago.’

‘A determined stand,’ Bullman insisted. ‘You see, you haven’t been listening. The shipping crisis brought matters to a head.’

‘You were beaten by Larkin in the shipping business,’ Yearling said. ‘You gave everything he asked for. So much for your Federation.’

‘We weren’t ready then.’

‘And are you ready now?’

‘More than ready. We’ve been promised help from the Castle. The police will be used—the military if necessary. We’ve approached employers in England for financial assistance. They’ll help if we call on them.’

Yearling smiled.

‘I see you are learning from Larkin. Each for all and all for each. What will be the first step?’

‘To outlaw Larkinism. The members of his union will be given the option of resigning from it or being sacked. Those who are not members of the union must give an undertaking never to join it.’

Bullman paused. He was coming to the crucial part.

‘Before putting the matter to the Board I made a count of the firms involved. Almost four hundred will take concerted action. The Board was unanimous in giving a solemn pledge.’

‘Who is to be the leader of the gallant four hundred?’ Yearling asked. He was anticipating the answer and made a quick gamble with himself. A further, prolonged week-end in Connemara if he was right—a ten-pound note to Father O’Connor’s fund if he was wrong.

‘William Martin Murphy,’ Bullman answered.

The undubbed knight. His guess had been correct. He would arrange to go the week-end after next.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because as a director you should know what went on while you were away . . . fishing. I also feel under a special obligation. After all, you are my brother-in-law.’

‘Thank you,’ Yearling said.

He smiled. As a brother-in-law he would hardly count. But as a considerable shareholder he could dissent and embarrass the Board’s determination and unanimity.

In the yard below men were working to pile coal into a huge rick. In the houses they fed furnaces with long-handled shovels. How many of them were Larkinites, Yearling wondered. They would resist, of course—that was why police and military must stand by. The telpher glided past the window again, suspended from the arced track. Yearling watched. It would be like being in a balloon—or more accurately, one of those new flying machines. He remembered something Mrs. Bradshaw had mentioned to him a long time before and began to search in his wallet. He found a piece of paper with the name Robert Fitzpatrick written on it. The meeting was obviously at an end, so he rose.

‘We’ve a man of that name on the staff,’ he said, handing it to Bullman. ‘If anything can be done to advance him it has the recommendation of a very dear friend of mine.’

Bullman was surprised, not at the request, but its source. He put the slip of paper under a weight and said, with a cordiality calculated to please:

‘We’ll be shuffling around the key men to get rid of Larkinites. I’ll see that he’s considered.’

They went down the stairs together and parted in the ground-floor office, where clerks on high stools, aware of their presence, wrote figures into ledgers with intense concentration. Yearling, left alone, surveyed the scene for some moments, tapping his stick lightly against his knickerbockers, enjoying the tense and artificial silence. He took a paper bag from his pocket and offered it to a bald stooped clerk whom he judged to be the senior.

‘Have a Kruger’s Soother,’ he invited pleasantly. The man gaped at him. Yearling placed the sweet on his desk, took one from the bag for himself, bowed gravely and began to eat it as he went out.

In the morning, when they called to the hospital, the Italian was dead. They stood awhile beside him in the morgue, where he lay all unknowing, his hands joined on his breast. They crossed themselves and said a prayer.

‘He won’t be playing “Over the Waves” any more,’ Hennessy whispered, when the prayer was finished.

‘Unless they give him a harp with a handle,’ Rashers whispered back.

‘We should have brought the monkey.’

‘What would we do that for?’

‘To see the last of him.’

The sentimental note in Hennessy’s voice made Rashers forget the presence of the dead.

‘And have him screeching and roaring crying,’ he shouted, ‘is that what you want? Monkeys is notoriously highly strung and emotional. If he saw your man stretched out there in a late and lamented condition he’d go berserk.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Hennessy pleaded, ‘remember where you are.’

‘When we get back home,’ Rashers said, once again whispering, ‘don’t breathe a word about this in front of the monkey because if he gets word of it at all he’ll go off his grub and die of a broken heart.’

They put their hats back on their heads.

‘The question is,’ Hennessy said as they closed the door of the morgue behind them, ‘what are we going to do with the poor brute. And how will we dispose of the barrel-organ?’

It was a problem which occupied them during their journey home. At first Rashers was in favour of keeping both. Providence, with an unusual show of favour, had placed at their disposal an easily mastered instrument and a well-trained animal. It would be a means of livelihood, a self-contained business. He proposed a partnership, in which Hennessy’s only responsibility would be to push the barrel-organ—the rest he would attend to personally.

‘It’s very tempting,’ Hennessy admitted.

‘We’ll be set up for life,’ Rashers urged.

‘Yes—until the police catch up with us.’

That was the difficulty. The Italian may have said something to the hospital staff. If there was an inquest something might come out. Or the relatives might have the police searching high and low already for the barrel-organ and the monkey.

‘It’s too much of a risk,’ Hennessy decided.

Rashers was forced to agree. There was hardly any way at all of earning an honest penny. The door opened and when you stepped forward with hope—bang—it slammed to again. Now and then, as when he was boilerman, it stayed open for a little while. But never for long. And the older you got, the less often it opened. Soon he would become too old to cope with poverty. What would he do then?

‘We’ll give it up to the police,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’ll be a reward.’

They brought the monkey and the organ to College Street Station. Rashers recognised the sergeant who had once given him a shilling, Sergeant Muldoon. Often since then he had met him on patrol, and they would stop for a joke and a friendly exchange. Usually he came away a few pence the richer.

‘Can you play it?’ the sergeant asked, indicating the barrel-organ.

‘I never tried,’ Rashers evaded. It might not be legal to have borrowed it for a whole day.

‘I’d imagine now,’ the sergeant said, with a great air of ingenuousness, ‘a man of your musical gifts would have little difficulty in mastering the likes of that. I’d nearly be able to knock a tune out of it myself. Hasn’t it a handle—like the gramophone?’

Rashers pretended to examine the instrument for the first time.

‘It has wheels on it too,’ he said finally, like the motor car. But that doesn’t mean you could drive it to mass of a Sunday.’

Hennessy withdrew a little. The movement caught the sergeant’s attention.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked suddenly.

Hennessy froze and said: ‘Hennessy, Sergeant—Aloysius Hennessy.’

‘Better known to his friends and well-wishers as the Toucher,’ Rashers provided. He was at ease with the sergeant in any matter that was on the right side of the law.

‘I see,’ the sergeant acknowledged. His face, Rashers observed, had a grey colour and his body, suspended from once burly shoulders, was thinning. That was unusual in a sergeant. Usually they grew fat and had big, well-nourished bellies. The sergeant was showing age. Policemen, when they could work no longer, were given pensions. That was the great difference.

The sergeant, having thought about it, decided to put the monkey in one of the cells. They accompanied him.

‘Would there be a reward, do you think?’ Rashers asked.

‘There might,’ the sergeant said, ‘and then again there might not. It depends on the relatives.’

He turned the key in the lock.

‘I’m wondering now will I have trouble with habeus corpus.’

‘Is that one of his Italian relatives?’ Hennessy asked.

‘It’s a conundrum of the law,’ the sergeant told him, ‘which I never, in all my years, understood properly myself.’

They walked back down the corridor with him and stopped once again beside the barrel-organ. It looked incomplete without the monkey. The sergeant leaned against it.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said to Rashers, ‘but a young policeman the name of Gallagher, that you may or may not know, reported yesterday evening that he saw yourself playing a yoke like this at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk. You were in company, he said, with a man unknown to him.’

‘That’s very strange,’ Rashers said, for want of something better.

‘It was probably someone like you,’ the sergeant agreed, ‘but not you at all.’ He brought them to the door.

‘Now—off you go—and good luck,’ he said.

He stood to watch their passage down the street. The gait of Rashers reminded him—as always—of the little boy dying of meningitis. After a while he went in, turning away not from the street only but from young eyes fixed on him and his own helplessness, from love unable to intervene. Everything in life was alone; his child dying whom he could not help, the brute dog lying with bloodied nose and lolling tongue on the pavement that he had been called on in the course of his duty the day before to shoot. He went inside again and hung the keys on their familiar hook.

‘He knew I was using the barrel-organ,’ Rashers confided.

‘I thought the same,’ Hennessy agreed.

‘In a way,’ Rashers said, ‘we have as much right to it as this relative—bloody habeus corpus.’

Hennessy shrugged. Blood, he felt, was thicker than water and had legitimate claims. As they turned at last into Chandlers Court, Rashers stopped and said:

‘That was my cell he put the monkey in.’

Then he began to tell him, not for the first time, of his day in prison that marked the visit of Edward VII.

The blinding rain of a bad Sunday evening kept the three of them housebound. Father O’Sullivan, armed with pen and ink and writing material, entered the sitting room about eight o’clock and found Father Giffley there—a rare occurrence. Father O’Connor, arriving later, was equally surprised at Father Giffley’s presence. Knowing an immediate withdrawal would betray uneasiness, he sat down.

‘What terrible rain,’ he remarked as he did so.

‘I’ve been expecting it all day,’ Father O’Sullivan said. He was now writing at the table, but left down his pen to raise his right arm and make a grimace which conveyed pain.

‘Rheumatism?’

‘Since early morning,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘it’s an infallible sign.’

Father Giffley lowered his paper to stare at him.

‘A little Kruschen salts, John,’ he said, ‘as much as will fit on a sixpence. Take it regularly each morning and you’ll have no further worries of that kind.’

‘You advised me about that before, but the pain goes away after a day or two and I never remember,’ Father O’Sullivan confessed.

‘Take the Kruschen,’ Father Giffley admonished, ‘or continue as you are—a walking weathercock.’

Father O’Sullivan smiled, picked up his pen and returned to his work.

After that the atmosphere was easier. The three settled down, great wind gusts sent the rain rattling against the window and made a dull roar in the chimney. But the fire burned brightly and the oil lamps—so disposed that reading or writing did not overtax the eyes—cast a soothing light.

It was a brown room, with heavy upright chairs in black about the great centre table, and heavy, comfortable armchairs, also in black, in an arc about the fire. Father O’Sullivan’s biretta for some reason crowned the pile of magazines that stood near the end of the table on his left. The enormous painting of the Crucifixion which hung on one wall was beyond the effective range of the lamps, so that only the white zigzag of a lightning streak above the cross stood out and an oval of grey countenance sagged under its thorny crown. In daylight there was a cobweb interlaced with the crown, Father O’Connor remembered—a real one—too high for the servant’s brush. Black letters on a brass plaque beneath said: Consummatum Est. On either side in daylight, but not now seen, were the Blessed Mother in a blue mantle, head bowed in grief, arms folded on her bosom; and the disciple beloved of Jesus. Son, behold thy mother—mother, behold thy son. John—same name as O’Sullivan.

The Kruschen worried Father O’Connor. Surely it was intended for the bowels. A little brandy, Giffley had once advised him, but he had refused. A wonder he had not recommended peppermints—his own unvarying physic.

Both prescribed for and prescriber were now lost in concentration, the one writing laboriously, the other reading. Father O’Connor searched his pocket and found Yearling’s letter. He began to read it again.

As a result of a wager with myself, which I had the good fortune to win, I am back here in Connemara. My intention was to fish, but in making the arrangement I overlooked a simple fact—that the fishing season had already closed. So, although I am determined to uphold my undertaking to myself by staying here for the promised duration, my rods are lying unpacked in the bedroom and there is no one left in the hotel to share the turf fire here in the lounge with me except the cat, an animal so overfed in the season on the left-overs of the best salmon and trout that he (perhaps she—cats always baffle me) is a phlegmatic egocentric who sleeps most of the time. What night life is there for a cat in Connemara, especially outside the holiday season? What Can It Do? Being one of the lower animals, not yet advanced sufficiently along Mr. Darwin’s evolutionary path, its accomplishments are limited. In centuries to come, I have no doubt, its descendants will vie with each other in the compilation of histories and the elaboration of philosophies, like Anatole France’s penguins. Meanwhile it yawns and waits.

Have you read Sketches of the Irish Highlands by Rev. H. McManus? Do you know of him? I think he may have been a friend of my father’s but I am not sure. He was the first missionary of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to learn the Irish language in order to spread his particular brand of enlightenment among the Connemara peasantry. I am reading him at present from a mildewed copy which I found in the bookcase here on a wet afternoon some few days ago. How he ever hoped his parsimonious bore of a God could succeed with these naturally gentlemanly and generous people I cannot imagine. I am entirely behind them in their rejection of a Deity disinclined to gaudy images, incantations, Holy Water and plenty of drink.

Autumn is not so noticeable here in Connemara as elsewhere, I think because there are so few trees (a stone wall is a stone wall, winter or summer). Yet I feel the melancholy of the season just as keenly. The glow of the fire, the smell of the turf smoke, the quality of the light which is now beginning to fail outside the window, all speak as certainly as any scurry of brown and yellow leaves of the turning of the year. Soon they will light the lamps and call me to my meal. Mutton. No possibility whatever of a surprise. In Connemara it is always either salmon or mutton.

Have you seen Bradshaw lately? He and I are not firm friends. When I dared some time ago to suggest that he ought to do something about repairing those tenement houses of his by the railway line, he concluded that I had become an honorary emissary of Mr. Larkin. You should speak to him if you get the opportunity. Some day they’ll collapse on the unfortunate tenantry. I know your main concern will not be whether they are killed but whether being killed, they are all in a fit state of saving grace to ascend straight to heaven to fill the vacant places left by Lucifer and his fallen angels, which, as you once so picturesquely explained to me, is the reason why your God creates his populous conglomeration of verminous and under-privileged slum-dwellers. Why can’t He make more angels on the spot, instead of taking such a roundabout means of filling the vacant celestial mansions. Look at the trouble and expense he puts good-living and well-to-do Christians to (including our friend Bradshaw) bribing the City and Borough Councillors to stop them serving an order on them to have their wretched hovels made habitable. And look at all the failures, whom he sends to hell to swell the enemy ranks and make Lucifer feel the revolt was well worth it. I was about to ask if you had read Anatole France but I seem to recollect that he is on the Index—Omnia Opera, lock stock and barrel.

Oh dear, I could go on in this vein for many pages, but they have come to tell me my meal is ready. How far away this little place is from your strike-tormented city; Larkin and Syndicalism, Carson and Home Rule, Griffith and his Sinn Fein desperadoes. By the way, did I ever tell you what I heard G. B. Shaw saying at a lecture several months ago in the Antient Concert Rooms, when he was asked what he had to say to the menace of Sinn Fein? He said: ‘I have met only one Sinn Feiner since I returned to Dublin. She is a very nice girl.’

Despite all this agnosticism, my continued regard and good wishes.

Father O’Connor left the letter down and sighed. It was cynical, like Yearling’s conversation, reflecting the attitudes of the authors he so often spoke about: this man France, that man Butler, the sceptic Shaw. The great thing was not to be clever but to have Faith. Faith was a gift from God, freely given, not earned. Without it the human mind questioned even its own efficacy and lost itself in the darkness. The slum-dwellers for whom he expressed concern were richer in real treasures than Yearling, despite his money and his education, for they had Faith and with grace they would merit Heaven. Yet Yearling was a good man, who gave generous financial help when Mrs. Bradshaw approached him for the collections for the poor of St. Brigid’s. His combination of generosity and culture could not go unacknowledged by a merciful and forgiving God. Yearling would be rewarded in due season.

The clock above the mantelpiece, a heavy affair, too, in black marble, gave out a single, musical stroke. Father O’Connor rose.

‘Are you off?’ Father O’Sullivan asked, looking up. It was his form of politeness.

‘I have the early mass tomorrow,’ Father O’Connor reminded him, ‘so it’s early to bed and early to rise.’ Both smiled. The cliché displeased Father Giffley, who frowned behind his newspaper. When the door had closed he lowered it slowly and said:

‘John—be a good fellow and get me my early-to-bed nightcap.’

Father O’Sullivan left what he was doing to get the bottle and a glass. There was a jug of water, which he examined dubiously.

‘Would you like me to get you some fresh water?’

‘It will do well enough. Sit down and join me.’ Father O’Sullivan said he would—a small drop to make him sleep. His arm was still troubling him. Writing with it had not helped.

When the glasses had been filled, Father O’Sullivan protesting at the over-liberal measure which the other poured for him, they raised them ceremoniously to each other and Father O’Sullivan said, without meaning anything more than a customary Dublin greeting: ‘The first today.’

‘I wish I could say the same,’ Father Giffley responded with a sad smile. He looked over at the manuscript which lay open on the table.

‘Is it still the same devotional pamphlet—the one about the Holy Family and the humble Catholic home?’

‘I am trying to revise it.’

‘I once promised to read it for you and failed.’

‘A man of your experience,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘. . . I quite understand.’

‘I found I couldn’t. There are already far too many pious homilies addressed to the poor.’

‘I’ve never worked among well-to-do people. I don’t think I’d know what to say to them.’

True. Looking over his glass at the grey face of his curate, Father Giffley thought there were few priests in whom humility and a sort of common or garden holiness were combined to such excellent purpose; he gave and, as admonished in the famous prayer, he did not count the cost; he fought—and did not heed the wounds; he toiled—and did not seek for rest; he laboured and looked for no reward save that of knowing that he did God’s Holy Will.

Amen. So be it.

To wear the yoke without complaint. To be busy. Not to raise the eyes too high or too long from the work surrounding you. Not to look inward for too long nor to quest beneath name and occupation for the you that had been born hopefully of woman so many years ago. To ask continually Whither am I going? but never Who Am I? for there began the war of individual appetite with circumstances and the sanctions of the community and the Laws of God.

Yet if all refused the challenge to explore, the world would still be flat, suspended on the ageing shoulders of Atlas, or on the tortoise swimming eternally in an eternity of sea.

Revolt was better, even at the risk of damnation. To examine His Universe with the eyes of the critic and His Order with an eye to its improvement. The meek shunned Thought to save their souls; the reckless went forward knowing that a slip might send them to the furnace.

‘Thank you, John,’ he said, suddenly holding out his glass.

When the other poured gingerly, he raised his voice sharply. ‘Don’t stint.’

Father O’Sullivan, avoiding the eyes, poured again. He left the bottle on the table. The face disturbed him, its hard, staring eyes, its lips set thinly, the veins thick and blue in the temples.

‘And yourself?’ Father Giffley invited.

‘No, thank you,’ Father O’Sullivan said, indicating what was still left in his glass. ‘I have more than enough here as it is.’

‘Please yourself.’

That afternoon he had walked through the parish. The mood took him after lunch as he stared from the window of his room. At that time the tall, decaying houses, rising against a sky black with cloud, were waiting for the rain to begin. The gloom outside drew him. He went on impulse, without his overcoat or the walking-stick it was his habit to carry. He went through the streets with his hands clasped behind him, noting with a bitterness no longer new to him the signs of deprivation and poverty. Every rotten doorpost and shattered fanlight reflected his own decay. He had a craving for alcohol that made him no better than the dogs and the cats that nosed about the bins and the gutter. His hopes lay littered with the filth and the garbage of the streets. They were responsible, those pious superiors who had planted him in the middle of all this because he was proud and refused to fawn. The others drank afternoon tea and were at one with solid, middle-class people; he had refused to flatter the merchants. The others thought themselves of consequence, my lords the Reverends Pious and Priestly, the publicans’ sons from the arsehole of Ireland. Ho!—but vulgarity released pain, you with your silk hats for the respectable; soft, pitiless comfort for the destitute.

It began to rain, great blobs of sooty water that fell reluctantly, disturbing the dust and with it the malignant odours of street and sewer. Then the wind freshened and the rain started heavily, until even the dogs and the cats disappeared and he had the street to himself. He walked alone, coatless, his hands still clenched firmly against the small of his back.

He had been too long in the wasteland, at war with his superiors, deprived of the company of his intellectual equals. Not much, these equals of his, but equals, such as they were, and as such, necessary. Their absence had dragged him down. His pious superiors had anticipated that too. It was part of their plot against him. Had he been stronger, he might have triumphed over his surroundings. If he had less compassion he might have ignored them. Compassion—that was his undoing. He could be selfish and do little or nothing for people for whom nothing could be done anyhow. But he could not be blind, like the others. He felt. He saw. That was more than the Silk Hat Brigade had ever been capable of.

The rain increased until his clothes clung so tightly against his body that it was hard to walk. All their spite hung over him, trapped between rain-soaked houses, leaking roofs, gutter gurgling, wind-tormented streets. As he walked he looked about for shelter, passing door after door endlessly, until above gas-lit windows and frames of blackened paint he saw, reading laboriously through the rain: ‘Choice Wines James Gill & Son, And Spirits’. And went in.

He had never been in a public house before and hesitated to find his bearings. The floor was bare wood, covered with a layer of sawdust. Three gas-lamps suspended in a row from the ceiling lit it. At the far end a group of men were in conversation. The man behind the counter had noticed him and stood transfixed with shock.

‘A glass of whiskey,’ Father Giffley said.

The man recovered a little and said: ‘Certainly, Father.’

He went away.

Father Giffley examined the fittings behind the bar. There was an oval mirror, with the words ‘Three Swallow Potstill Whiskey’ encircling it. From the middle of the oval his face looked back at him. The grey locks of hair were flattened about it by the rain. His clerical collar looked ridiculous. When the barman brought the whiskey he leaned forward and suggested:

‘There’s a snug at the back, Father.’

‘Snug? I don’t understand. Snug?’

‘A private room.’

‘Leave it there,’ Father Giffley insisted. The barman left the whiskey on the counter.

‘Certainly, Father.’

‘Bejaysus,’ one of the men told the group, ‘but it put the wind up me.’

‘Why didn’t you clatter it?’

‘With what might I ask?’

‘With your belt.’

‘A mad cow coming at me down the gangplank?’ the man asked. ‘Oh no bejaysus—none of that for yours truly.’

The barman moved anxiously towards them.

‘What did you do?’

‘Jumped into the water.’

‘You were right,’ another said. ‘Better a watery grave than a gory end.’

The thought of his friend taking to the water before the charge of an enraged animal amused one of the company so much that he spluttered over his drink and said:

‘Well, Jaysus, Mary and Joseph but that’s a good one.’

The barman with signs and whispered admonishments drew their attention. Then they all turned round and lapsed one by one into silence. One of them said sheepishly:

‘I beg your pardon, Father.’

Father Giffley removed his eyes from the caricature in the mirror and said:

‘Why apologise to me? My name is not Jesus.’

An astonishing thing happened. When he said the name ‘Jesus’ the men automatically raised their hats. That was habit. He had said the Name. Not at all the same thing as swearing with It. What were they? Dockers, cattle-drovers, seamen back home from voyaging? Dublinmen anyway. The raising of the hats proved it.

He looked again at the caricature; the oval advertisement, the grey, drowned locks, the priestly collar, aware as he did so of the unease which his presence was causing. He was a Catholic priest in a public bar. He was giving scandal. That could be put right.

‘I was caught by the rain,’ he explained, ‘don’t let me disturb you.’

After a moment one of them, more courageous than the rest, said heartily. ‘Divil the disturb, Father.’

Then he called to the barman:

‘Why don’t you offer a towel to his reverence. He’s soaked to the skin.’

But Father Giffley held up his hand and forbade it.

‘This is the best towel of them all,’ he said, finishing the whiskey. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘give me another for my journey, so that I won’t take pneumonia. And give the men here whatever they fancy.’

They protested, but he insisted. They had a consultation of some sort while they waited for the drinks. At the end one man left. Then the drinks came and they vied with each other to be agreeable to him, saying what a terrible evening it was and how easy it would be to take a sickness out of such a wetting and how wise he had been to take the right kind of precaution. They told him they were dockers. He noticed the buttons in their coats.

‘Followers of Mr. Larkin, I see,’ he remarked. They said they were. Then, to their surprise he said firmly: ‘You do right.’

At that moment the door opened and the man who had left earlier reappeared. He was now almost as wet as Father Giffley.

‘Did you get it?’ they asked him.

‘It’s outside the door,’ he said.

‘What’s this?’ Father Giffley asked.

‘He went to find you a cab, Father, it’ll save you another drenching.’

For the first time in several lonely years someone had done him a kindness. Father Giffley was moved.

‘I am extremely obliged and grateful.’

‘For nothing, Father,’ the men assured him, ‘you’re more than welcome.’

They saw him to the cab, which brought him home to a warm bath and a change of clothes. That was why he had taken the unusual course of using the general sitting room. His jacket and trousers were drying at the fire in his own room.

‘I think my presence here made Father O’Connor uneasy,’ he said.

‘He always retires early when he has the early mass,’ Father O’Sullivan explained.

‘That is not what I meant. He forgot this.’

Father Giffley rose and picked up Yearling’s letter from the arm of the chair that Father O’Connor had been using. He took it back to his own chair with him; then, holding it up, he asked: ‘His Kingstown friends—do you think?’

Father O’Sullivan avoided reply by rising to put the whiskey bottle back in the press.

‘Leave it where it is,’ Father Giffley commanded sharply.

‘I am sorry,’ Father O’Sullivan said. ‘I thought you were going to bed.’

‘We’ll see what his friends have to say first,’ Father Giffley said. ‘Listen.’

As he deliberately opened the letter Father O’Sullivan advanced quickly towards him and said: ‘Please—I beg you not to.’

Father Giffley looked up at him. ‘You will sit down, John. Over there, opposite me. Do as I tell you.’

Knowing there would be a scene if he refused, Father O’Sullivan did so. As the other read the letter aloud, deliberating on it sentence by sentence, he gripped the arms of his chair and strove to keep the horror from his face. Opposition of any kind would precipitate a storm. His parish priest, he realised, was very near to madness.

In the morning, when Father O’Connor and Father O’Sullivan were at breakfast, Father Giffley joined them briefly. He took the letter from his pocket and pushed it towards Father O’Connor.

‘Your property, I believe.’

Father O’Connor stared at the pages; Father O’Sullivan lowered the cup he had been raising to his lips.

‘I am sorry your friend finds difficulty with the doctrine of the Fall,’ Father Giffley said, ‘his sympathies otherwise are admirable.’

He turned to Father O’Sullivan. The skin of his face was blotched and taut, a pulse beat in the black vein which showed as a knot in his left temple.

‘Of France I know very little,’ he continued, ‘but Darwin, I believe, holds that we are descended from the apes. Isn’t that so, John?’

Father O’Sullivan remained frozen, with nothing at all to say, until at last Father Giffley turned away from him and went to the door, where he paused and said generally:

‘It is possible—I think it eminently possible.’

The door closed. They looked at each other.

‘He read it,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘he read my letter.’

‘The man is not well.’

‘My private correspondence—how dare he!’

‘He’s become very odd. You must try to understand him.’

‘I understand him very well,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘Father Giffley is sick.’

Father O’Connor rose angrily and pushed back his chair.

‘A drunkard,’ he said, ‘who hates me.’

He had almost reached the door when Father O’Sullivan’s quiet voice stopped him. ‘Your letter, Father.’

Once again he had forgotten it. It lay on the tablecloth where Father Giffley had thrown it. This second oversight embarrassed him. He put the letter in his pocket without thanking Father O’Sullivan.

‘I am beginning to consider seriously what I should do,’ he said.

‘Forgive him,’ Father O’Sullivan suggested gently.

‘It is no longer a question of forgiveness only,’ Father O’Connor said bitterly. ‘There are other considerations.’

He closed the door.