Strumpet City

CHAPTER THREE

Father O’Connor’s parishioners marked the change. There was a quietness about him in the weeks that followed, an abstracted dedication which marked his attitude to even the most unrewarding and inconvenient of his parish duties. In private he practised small privations, which included doing without lunch on each Friday. His devotion during his daily mass had the effect of making it unduly long, so that his parish priest had to remind him that those attending it had worldly duties and must not be detained unduly. Only in his sermons did he seem to become aware of the living church arrayed dutifully beneath his pulpit. On the second Sunday in Advent his vehement condemnation of worldly show and snobbery set a number of critical tongues wagging. Mr. Bradshaw was greatly offended.

‘That man O’Connor gave another most extraordinary sermon today,’ he said. I wonder the parish priest doesn’t speak to him.’

‘Whatever for?’ Mrs. Bradshaw asked. ‘Wasn’t he speaking on the day’s gospel? I’m sure he didn’t say anything that wasn’t in it.’

‘It’s not that,’ Mr. Bradshaw said, ‘it’s the construction he puts on things. You’d think it was a crime to wear a coat without a hole in it.’

‘He was only reminding us of our duty,’ Mrs. Bradshaw said, ‘and I’m very glad too, because it’s bound to help our collection for the poor at Christmas.’

She finished the letter she was writing and sealed the envelope.

‘Thank goodness that’s done,’ she said.

‘Who is it for?’

‘Mary’s father. I undertook to tell him of her progress at least twice in the year. He is a strict and good man.’

‘You surprise me. I didn’t know he could read,’ Mr. Bradshaw said, returning to his paper.

Mary met Fitz and they looked at the Christmas displays in the shops. The evening was cold and overcast, the Liffey wrinkled at intervals as the sharp breeze drove down it from the mountains. Gaslight from the busy shops shed a mellow glow on damp pavements. At Westland Row the jarveys in worn caps loitered beside their cabs, waiting for incoming trains and their laden passengers. In the lamplight a white mist hovered above the bodies of their horses, harness clanked at each movement of the patient heads or the stamping of metal-shod feet. They stopped for a moment at a shop window. There were long red and yellow Christmas candles, which reminded Mary of her home, where in childhood they would stand in all the windows on Christmas night. There were iced cakes with sugar robin redbreasts on marzipan logs; there were boxes of candied peel and raisins and nutmeg packets and glasses filled with cloves. Turkeys and geese dangled from a gallows by the legs.

‘This time next year,’ Fitz said, ‘we’ll have Christmas together.’

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Mary said. She would put up paper chains and mottoes saying ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Adeste Fideles’ or ‘Christus Natus Est’ done on glossy paper with coloured letters.

They left the main thoroughfare and found themselves among tall tenements. Children were playing on the streets and on the steps. All the doors stood open. The smells from the hallways were heavy and unpleasant.

‘There he is,’ Mary said suddenly, pointing. A man with a beard was hobbling along on the opposite path. He had half a dozen balloons strung from his left hand.

‘Who?’ Fitz asked.

‘The man I saw being beaten by the policeman.’ She followed him with her eyes. Rashers had an unmistakable gait, a way of stooping his shoulders and pushing his neck forward so that his face and pendulant beard had an aggressive tilt. It took Fitz a little time to recollect what she was referring to. When he did he said:

‘They had little to do.’

They went through back streets to the cottage where Fitz lodged with Mr. and Mrs. Farrell, who were expecting Mary and had the table set for tea for both of them. Farrell was at the fire, smoking a pipe and spitting now and then into the flames.

‘That’s a nice way to receive anybody,’ Mrs. Farrell chided him.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘Sitting there in your stocking feet.’

‘The girl knows us all by now,’ Farrell said, amicably.

‘I do indeed,’ Mary agreed.

‘We’ll leave them to themselves just the same,’ Mrs. Farrell suggested to her husband.

‘Anything strange at the foundry?’ Farrell asked, ignoring her.

‘Not a thing,’ Fitz said. He sat down opposite Mary while Mrs. Farrell, having failed to move her husband, covered her defeat by picking up the pot and pouring tea for them.

‘I thought you might. I heard talk myself of a strike with the carters.’

‘They were working up to twelve.’

‘Ah—it didn’t come off so.’

‘It’s a bit near Christmas for anything like that,’ Fitz suggested.

‘Not when I tell you who’s in town.’

Fitz looked at him enquiringly.

Farrell spat into the fire before replying.

‘Jim Larkin.’

‘Larkin,’ Fitz repeated.

‘He had a meeting with the carters and with a crowd from the purifier sheds in the Gas Company. He had a word with us too.’ Farrell was a docker.

‘When was that?’

‘After the morning read.’

‘Did you speak to him yourself?’

‘I told him what had happened to me and about the stevedores paying us in pubs,’ Farrell said. ‘He says he’ll put a stop to it.’

After almost a year of constant work, Farrell, in a moment of stubbornness, had refused to put up a drink for the stevedore. He had not been jobbed by him since. It was hard on Mrs. Farrell, especially with Christmas so near.

You can talk to Fitz tonight,’ Mrs. Farrell hinted once again.

This time her husband grunted and heaved himself from his chair. ‘Right,’ he said.

The Farrells retired into their bedroom. It was an understood thing by now.

After tea they sat a little while by the fire, then it was time to leave. She rose and Fitz took her in his arms.

‘I hate having to go,’ she told him. He held her tightly. It was a rare happiness to be together in a warm room, in the intimacy of firelight and lamplight. He kissed her. They went out into the street once again. The air was moist. The raw wind smelled and tasted of fog.

Later it rolled in from the sea, creeping across sandbanks and fingering its way up the river, curling across the sea-wall and fanning out lazily about houses and streets. It trapped the light from each lamp-post in turn and held it inescapably in a luminous tent. The foghorns at regulated intervals intoned their melancholy warnings. Rashers, returned to his cellar, drank tea in the light of a candle and shivered because of the rising damp. Fitz on his way to the foundry blinked constantly to remove its cobweb breath from his eyes.

On her way to bed Mary brought a glass of warm milk to Miss Gilchrist, who had been told to go early to her room because she had not been feeling well. The old woman was sitting at the fire which Mary had been allowed to light for her earlier. She gestured to Mary to sit.

‘We have plenty of work before us tomorrow,’ Miss Gilchrist said. ‘There’s the drawing room to do and every stick of furniture to move for the sweeping.’

‘You won’t be able for it,’ Mary said.

I’ll be right in the morning. It’s only a little turn.’

But Mary felt she would not be right. She looked drawn and wan.

‘Drink your milk,’ she said gently.

‘I was thinking to myself that I’m the lucky woman,’ Miss Gilchrist said, ‘with my own little room and my own fire. There’s many a one this night that’s cold and hungry.’

Mary wondered that she could be contented. She had spent her life giving to others what she could have spent on a home and children and she would die without one to mourn for her. But she said nothing of that. The lonely old woman was on the brink of uselessness. What would happen when that time came? Who would care for her?

‘Be a wise girl and stick to service,’ Miss Gilchrist continued, ‘it’s a great safeguard against poverty.’

Mary said, shyly:

‘There are some would say to go for a house and a husband.’

‘And hardship,’ Miss Gilchrist said. ‘They say nothing about the hardship. That’s what house and husband mean for people of our rearing and family. Take an old woman’s advice and don’t be led astray by a fancy.’

Mary, thinking of Fitz, knew she would follow her fancy wherever it led. Whatever hardship might come it would be better than loneliness. It would be better to share cold and want than have food and fire in a house that must always be a stranger’s. She said nothing of that either. How could she?

‘When I was a child,’ said Miss Gilchrist, ‘I saw the famine. They ate the grass out of the ditches and the leaves off the trees and when I walked as a little girl down the length of a lane the corpses I saw had the green juice still on their lips. That’s what I remember as a child. That and the smell of the potato blight.’

‘I heard about it from my own people,’ Mary said.

‘And those that tried to raise the people out of poverty were hanged or sent off in chains to Australia.’

Mary looked at the drawing on the mantelpiece, Miss Gilchrist’s Fenian; the handsome young rebel who had sheltered in her father’s house when she was a young girl. Miss Gilchrist followed her eyes.

‘That was one of them,’ she said gently, ‘the flower of them all.’

It occurred to Mary that Miss Gilchrist may have loved him. Had she watched him slip out into the dark one night, watched the bonfires on the hills, heard of the miserable failure of yet another rebellion?

‘Stick to service,’ Miss Gilchrist repeated. ‘In this country the ones that don’t fight are not worth your attention and the ones that do bring nothing but heartbreak.’

‘You should go to bed now,’ Mary prompted. ‘The rest will do you all the good in the world.’

Miss Gilchrist handed her the glass and rose with difficulty. ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ Miss Gilchrist agreed.

Mary went to sleep with the sound of foghorns still vibrating at intervals through the room. It was past midnight. Outside the fog spread and deepened, curling around the well-kept houses of Kingstown, creeping along the deserted roads of Blackrock and Booterstown, stealing along the quays and the crowded slums of the city where rooms became damper and more evil-smelling and the great tide of destitute humanity settled down to the familiar joys and miseries of its lot; in the stink of terrible houses quarrelling, loving, sinning, sleeping, cohabiting, praying and dying. The fog rolled over all with ever-shifting movements, so that the city lay submerged and paralysed and the foghorns had it all to themselves. They sang all night to the great and the little, telling them life was vanity and Death the only certainty.