Strumpet City

CHAPTER EIGHT

There had been a time, Yearling remembered, and it did not seem to be so long ago, when he had wished to be forty again. Now, re-lathering the face that stared back at him from the mirror, he would have settled cheerfully enough for fifty. But the morning sun which had found a chink in his bedroom curtains had announced it and the calendar in his pocket diary had confirmed it; another birthday was upon him. He was fifty-three. If he ever saw fifty again, he told himself (pouting the under lip and removing an area of lather and hair with a deft upward stoke of the open razor) it would be on a hall door. That was the way life went. You closed your eyes a while. You opened them and the thief had been and gone. What could one do, except go on shaving. There was a time when he had intended to grow a beard because it seemed a pity not to give expression to one’s total potentiality. He would never do so now. It was too late for revolutionary changes. Procrastination had undone him. If, in the next life, the Master chided him for burying one of his talents, he would point to the moustache as an earnest of his good intentions.

With his fingers he explored minutely his face for areas that might have been skimped, but the job was satisfactory. He emptied the shaving mug (the water had grown tepid) cleaned his razor, stropped it, put it away. As he did so he whistled ‘Is Life A Boon?’

The sun sent a finger of light into the hallway and the house smelled agreeably of bacon and eggs. The barometer, an habitual liar, declared for wet and windy. Like the barber’s cat, Yearling decided, tapping it from habit. A solitary postcard on the breakfast table had a basket of flowers worked in crochet on the front and on the back it said: ‘Many happy returns—Florence Bradshaw’. She had not forgotton. There was no address but the stamp was Italian.

‘Robert,’ he said to his servant, ‘you may wish me a happy birthday.’

‘Many happy returns, sir.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Will there be anything else?’

‘Nothing that you could provide, Robert. Isn’t that unfortunate?’

‘Indeed it is, sir.’

‘You’ll find some envelopes on my dressing table, Robert, with something for each of you. I’ve also ordered some refreshment which will arrive in the evening. It’s addressed to you. Share it out and drink my health.’

‘You’re very generous, sir.’

‘But please watch Mrs. Lambert. Last year she wanted to come up and play the piano.’

‘I’ll certainly guard against any repetition, sir.’

‘Thank you—you could bring me the marmalade.’

‘I’m sorry, sir—I thought you had made a ruling against marmalade.’

‘It gives me indigestion. But it’s my birthday and I’ll risk it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sunshine gleamed on the roofs of the town and the sea lapping on the rocks was as gentle as summer. A gull on the wall stared intently at the horizon, as though expecting a ship. In the streets women with empty shopping bags were hurrying to ten o’clock mass. The Pope’s green island. Carson was fearful of it. No Home Rule for Signor Carsoni. Home Rule is Rome Rule. Ulster will fight. And Ulster will be Right. A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People.

The poet William Mathews met him as arranged at the Merrion Row gate of the Green. They lunched in the Shelbourne. Yearling drove his new motor car and found comfort in being rich. It was a Straker-Squire 15.9 horse power, price four hundred and sixty-eight pounds. It took them afterwards by Bray and Kilmacanogue, where Parnell had changed horses and sometimes slept on his way from Avondale to Dublin, then across the brown expanse of Calary bog and eventually to Glendalough. They parked and entered the ruined monastic city on foot. An ancient gate gave them access. The Round Tower rose into a clear sky. Beyond it the lake was a mirror for blue, precipitous mountains.

‘Very lovely,’ Mathews remarked.

‘I was here with my father exactly forty years ago,’ Yearling said. ‘It was my thirteenth birthday. That day, too, was sunny and beautiful.’

‘Were you fond of him?’ Mathews asked.

‘Very,’ Yearling said. ‘He was one of the few human beings I have ever loved. This is a little pilgrimage to honour the past. I hope it doesn’t bore you.’

‘On the contrary, I am surrounded not by the past but by the literature of the immediate present. Round towers, seventh-century saints, harps, legends and shamrocks.’

‘Mother Erin,’ Yearling suggested.

‘Two divine persons in one,’ Mathews said. ‘A mother lamenting her children in bondage. A girl ravished by the Saxon, who weeps over her stringless harp. But her young champions keep watch in the mountains, awaiting the dawn of the bright sun of Freedom. They will gather around her with pikes and swords.’

‘I thought they were waiting to do that at the rising of the moon.’

‘There are two schools—the nocturnal and the matutinal,’ Mathews conceded, ‘but one basic thought. Arm. Rise. Cast off the Saxon yoke.’

‘We are great dreamers,’ Yearling said. Pensive, indulgent, he poked with his stick the grass about the base of a gravestone. Monastic Ireland lay broken about him. St. Kevin’s kitchen, St. Kevin’s cell, St. Kieran’s church, a Celtic cross. Beyond the wall was the deer stone, in the hollow of which by command of the saint, a deer had shed its milk each day to nourish a baby whose mother had died in childbirth. Illuminated manuscripts of the tonsured saints, bronze bell and tallow candle, latin text and colloquy in the soft tongue of the Gael, these upon the rising of a mysterious sun or in a night of full moon would all be restored. A shepherd walking in the dew of morning would find milk again in the hollow of the stone. Young men, taught by old men, believed it.

On the gravestone a horseman and Roman soldiers followed Christ to his Crucifixion. The horseman, he noticed, wore a cocked hat and eighteenth-century costume. He looked closer. The Roman soldiers carried guns. He drew Mathews’ attention.

‘Do you notice anything?’

Mathews peered for some time.

‘Ah,’ he said at last, ‘a latter-day Saviour.’

‘The stone is by Cullen,’ Yearling told him, ‘a local mason, if I remember rightly. There should be other examples.’

They went searching. At the end of half an hour they had located three. It was quite enough.

The path took them by the shores of the lake, with the forest on their left. The day remained calm and beautiful. As they walked Yearling returned to an earlier thought.

‘Do you consider the removal of the Saxon yoke possible?’

‘Everything is possible,’ Mathews said.

‘Desirable, then?’

‘Carson doesn’t think so, but then he doesn’t regard it as a yoke.’

‘The Gaelic League?’

‘A confused body. They had a clash the other day over whether the Portarlington Branch should have mixed classes.’

Yearling stopped, relished it as a titbit. Then he pursued:

‘Arthur Griffith?’

‘A formidable man—in the tradition of Swift. Burn everything English except their coal. Have you read his Resurrection of Hungary?’

‘No. But I’ve heard his Sinn Feiners referred to as the Green Hungarian Band.’

‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Mathews said. ‘Their policy is national self-sufficiency. And there are young men with him who will keep vigil on the mountains. Dangerous young men, from the Saxon point of view. That suit you’re wearing—where was it made?’

‘In London.’

‘And your shoes and your shirt?’

‘English.’

‘And your new motor car?’

‘You could call it a Saxon yoke,’ Yearling admitted.

‘If you spend all that abroad,’ Mathews said, ‘what hope can there be for Irish workmen.’

‘Are you a Sinn Feiner?’

‘No,’ Mathews said. ‘I’m a follower of Jim Larkin.’

Yearling, examining the elegant figure beside him, smiled. Larkinism was the fashion now among the writers and the intellectuals. Moran in the Leader had suggested that Liberty Hall ought to form a Poet’s Branch. Russell had written a moving letter in the Irish Times on the strikers’ behalf. Shaw had championed them at a meeting in London.

‘You should write them a marching song,’ he suggested, ‘something bloodthirsty, in dactylic pentameters.’

‘I’ve done a little more than that,’ Mathews said, ‘I’ve helped in Liberty Hall.’

Yearling stopped smiling. Mathews, he realised, despite the light manner, was in earnest. With delicacy he asked: ‘I am interested to know in what way a man of letters can help?’

‘There are several ways. By canvassing editors to publish articles for instance. By sending testimony about conditions here to writers in England and asking them to speak and write about it. It all helps.’

‘Do you know Larkin personally?’

‘I’ve conspired to hide him when there were warrants for his arrest. I’ve done the same for others among the leaders too. I’ve even gone out at night with buckets of paste and pasted notices of meetings.’

‘I see. Are you not afraid I might have you’—Yearling searched for the expression—‘turned-in?’

‘Not at all. The police know already. They won’t arrest a gentleman. The Castle, I imagine, has told them not to. It creates the wrong kind of reaction.’

Yearling stopped again.

‘Mathews,’ he asked, ‘do you intend to renounce riches?’

‘Never,’ Mathews said, ‘Riches and I will remain inseparable.’

‘Good,’ Yearling said. ‘Now I know I am in the company of a true poet. You must take me down to Liberty Hall sometime. I’d like to see it at work.’

‘It will be a pleasure,’ Mathews assured him.

They reached the end of the lakeside path and stood again to remark the quietness. They could see the Round Tower, now far away to their right, a finger of stone that men had built a thousand years before. It rose now above their bones and the rubble of their dwelling places. There was no stir on the lake nor among the reeds at its edge. White clouds hung without movement in a blue sky. The sun was warm. It drew an Autumn smell from the bracken. There had been a day like this forty years before and there had been days like this when men were putting stone upon stone to raise their tower; there would be days like this in years to come when he himself would have joined the dreamers under the monument and the nettle.

He shouldered his walking stick and remembered the barometer in the hall. It had never been so wrong. As he walked back he said to Mathews:

‘Do you know the expression—wet and windy, like the barber’s cat?’

‘I know it well,’ Mathews confessed.

‘Why the barber’s cat, I wonder?’

‘A consequence of frugality,’ the poet explained. ‘Its staple diet is hair and soapsuds.’

The explanation was unexpected but, on reflection, curiously satisfactory.

‘I see,’ Yearling said.

The day which filled Yearling with nostalgia for the lost world of boyhood found Mr. Silverwater in a contrary mood. He was not a lover of sunshine. At the best of times it hurt his eyes. When unseasonable its unexpected warmth was uncomfortable. He was a man who regulated the weight of his underwear in accordance with the calendar on a rigid basis calculated over a lifetime. It was his misfortune to have a constitution intolerant of cold and an occupation which obliged him to work in what he was convinced was the draughtiest shop in Dublin. The unseasonable day caught him in two sets of vests and underpants, in addition to the usual jacket, waistcoat and woollen cardigan. The result was a feeling of prickly suffocation. He endured it. The alternative of taking something off would expose his health to the mercy of more seasonable temperatures likely (at the drop of a hat) to return. But the discomfiture preyed on his spirit. He snapped at his customers and drove ruinous bargains. He was not sure that he wanted custom. His shelves and his storerooms were choked with paraphernalia which, if the lock-out went on very much longer, would never be redeemed. On an already glutted market their present value was negligible. At lunchtime he discussed it with his senior clerk. They went through the storerooms together. There was too much in goods and too little in capital.

‘From Monday, Mr. Johnston,’ he decided as they were both opening the doors for the afternoon trade, ‘from Monday, business with regular customers only.’

Mr. Johnston approved by nodding his head until it was in danger of flying off.

The sound of Rashers’ bell in the distance held them listening for a moment in the shop door.

‘That’s another thing, Mr. Johnston,’ Silverwater said, but did not finish his thought.

‘Of course,’ Mr. Johnston answered, as though there could be no possible doubt about whatever it was.

Rashers, who had no underwear at all, praised God for the heat of the sun. It would do him good; his cough, the creaking in his bones. He rang his bell at gatherings of men and women, at dogs that barked back in fury at him, at terrified cats that arched their backs and then shot away from him. He rang it for the amusement of the children. They no longer leered at him. His sandwich boards and his bell had transformed him into a person of consequence, someone they wanted to be when they grew up. Their admiration filled him with pleasure.

At lunchtime he went to the waste lot where the man in the striped pyjamas still smiled from his perch on the unsinkable bovril bottle. The religious text had been changed. It now read: Take up your Cross, and follow Me.

Rashers took off the sandwich boards and made a seat of an upturned bucket. He began his lunch. He had bread and dripping and a bottle of water. It was quiet and sunny. Three birds were dozing on a nearby chimney. They were silhouetted against the sun. He failed to determine whether they were gulls or crows. The grass at his feet and the warmth of the sun set him thinking of race meetings he had attended long ago, when he was active enough to walk long distances to play his tin whistle for the crowds and hardy enough to sleep at nightfall in the shelter of a ditch. Officers and their ladies, gentlemen with tall hats and binoculars, three-card-trick men, tipsters and fruit vendors. He had often bought himself an orange from one of their trays. If he had one now he’d eat it skin and all. A ditch was well enough in summer if you remembered to bring plenty of newspaper. One of these days, when the summer came, he’d buy himself an orange. To hell with the money.

He put on his boards again and tested his bell. The birds rose from the chimney stack in fright. He was stiff from sitting. He put one foot carefully before him and then the other and after a few difficult steps walking became a simple enough matter. More or less. The bloody boards were a weight. Take up your cross was right. Here I come, Jesus, one front and back.

At doors in the unexpected sun the old and the cripples had been left out to air. He greeted each of them. A Grand Day, he shouted. Thanks be to God, they shouted back. Or gave no answer but smiled. Or made no response whatever, neither hearing nor seeing him nor anything else, habituated to separateness, aware only of being put out and taken in like clothes off a line with each change of weather. When I can no longer fend for myself, Rashers prayed, then God, let me die.

The thought stirred him to activity. His voice resounded in the street that had opened its hall doors to let in the sunshine.

‘Have yiz e’er a blanket to pawn or sell

E’er a table or e’er a chair

Best prices in town for pairs of ornamental pieces.’

He worked contentedly through the afternoon, until at half past six or thereabouts his bell was heard once again outside Mr. Silverwater’s shop. By that time he was weary. He wondered about his dog, which had been locked up all day. He wanted to get home to it, to make himself tea with water which Mrs. Bartley wouldn’t mind boiling for him, to take off the boots which were crucifying his feet. There were no customers at that late hour. The interior of the shop was dark after the light of the streets. Mr. Johnston looked up from a ledger, blinking at him.

‘Tierney,’ he said, ‘Mr. Silverwater wants to see you.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the store at the back.’

Rashers, used to the place now, lifted the counter panel and let himself through. He groped his way down a dim passage. Mr. Silverwater was trying to make sense of the conglomeration which had built up as a result of the lock-out.

‘You wanted me,’ Rashers said.

Mr. Silverwater dragged his thoughts from the problem of his stock with some difficulty. He stared at Rashers.

‘I did, Tierney. Let me see. Yes. You can leave the boards and the bell here tonight.’

‘And what about the morning?’

‘You won’t need them. I’ve decided to stop this advertising.’

‘Are you not opening tomorrow?’ Rashers asked.

‘Our arrangement has come to an end,’ Mr. Silverwater said. He was still preoccupied.

‘Do you mean I’m sacked?’ Rashers asked. He was rooted to the ground.

‘You finish up tonight,’ Mr. Silverwater said, ‘Mr. Johnston will put away the bell somewhere. Give it to him on your way out.’

‘And my money—what about what’s due to me?’

‘Call at the end of the week for it,’ Mr. Silverwater said. ‘We’ll settle whatever you’re entitled to then.’

Rashers felt an ache inside him, as though something were eating at the wall of his stomach.

‘Could I not finish out the week?’ he asked.

‘Not another hour,’ Mr. Silverwater said to him. He waved at the junk which surrounded them.

‘Do you think I can afford to take any more of it. The half of it will never be redeemed and there’s no one I know who would buy it. It’s regular customers only from this out. I’m busy now. Call back on Saturday for your money.’

He turned his whole attention to his stock. Rashers tried to piece an appeal together. It was useless. The ache wouldn’t allow it. He stared foolishly at Mr. Silverwater’s back. He could think of nothing. In the end there was nothing to be done except to take off the boards and leave them against the wall. He went back through the passage and into the shop. Mr. Johnston was still engrossed in his ledger, staring hard at it in the poor light. Rashers put the bell on the counter beside him. He looked up at that but Rashers made no effort to talk to him. He opened the door of the shop and stepped out into the street. Dusk was settling over it and the pavement was giving back a little of the heat it had stored during the course of the beautiful, unseasonable day. Its ghost still haunted the sky. As Rashers limped his way slowly towards Chandlers Court, it faded away. The sick and the dying had been taken in again from the steps.

In the night time hatred kept Mrs. Hennessy awake. She heard her children whimpering with hunger and cried out to God to curse those who had stopped her husband from earning. By day, though it tormented her unceasingly, she kept it hidden away. She searched out small charities and showered blessings on every giver. Her mouth seemed to have no lips at all, her eyes were those of a bird of prey. She borrowed daily and sent the older children out to beg. When hope of borrowing was exhausted she went into remote neighbourhoods where people would not know her and begged herself, until a policeman terrified her by asking her name and address.

He made a great show of taking out his notebook and examining the point of his pencil.

‘Is your husband on strike?’

‘No, sir. He’s a decent man and they stopped him from going to his work.’

‘Who stopped him?’

‘A bad neighbour, sir.’

‘What name?’

She hesitated. The notebook and the helmet terrified her.

‘A man named Fitzpatrick—and a butty.’

‘Where does Fitzpatrick live?’

‘In the same house as myself, sir.’

‘I see.’ She watched as the policeman wrote the information into his book. He closed it with a snap.

‘Be about your business now,’ he said to her. She hurried away. It was some time before it occurred to her that she had given information about her neighbours to the police. The thought brought her to a stop.

The evening sky drizzled rain, leaving fog patches in laneways. She was more terrified now and still without food. The Protestant charities she could go to would want her to turn away from her religion and deny the Blessed Virgin. That would bring worse luck still. Temptation began to trail her through street after street. At the gates of St. Brigid’s she stopped again. She peered through the rain at the church. If her own clergy refused her, there would be nothing else left.

The door of the vestry was opened to her by Timothy Keever.

‘Is Father O’Connor within?’

‘What name?’ he asked.

‘Mrs. Hennessy.’

He thought he recognised her.

‘From where?’

‘Chandlers Court.’

It was a street that was barred to him for ever.

‘And your business?’

‘I want a little help. I have a houseful of hungry children and my husband was stopped from working by a gang from the union. Don’t turn me away empty-handed.’

‘Who stopped him?’

‘Bob Fitzpatrick and Pat Bannister.’

She had informed again. It was too late now to turn back. She heard Keever saying:

‘I may be able to help you. Come inside.’

In the waiting room set apart for the altar boys he listened attentively to what she had to say.

‘Your husband is not in any union?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And the neighbours are against him?’

‘The most of them is, sir.’

‘Have you heard any talk among them about a scheme for sending children to England?’

‘There was a meeting about that only yesterday.’

‘Where?’

‘In Liberty Hall.’

‘Father O’Connor has been hearing rumours of this for some time past,’ Keever said, ‘and if it’s true he’ll want to know everything about it.’

‘It’s true enough,’ she said, ‘the mothers were told that homes could be found in Liverpool for hundreds of the children.’

‘Do you know of anyone who agreed to take part?’

‘A few weeks ago Mrs. Fitzpatrick told me she was thinking of sending her children away.’

‘To Liverpool?’

‘She didn’t say where. She said she’d have to ask her husband about it.’

‘I see,’ Keever said. It was his duty to keep Father O’Connor informed. The woman would be useful in the future.

‘I can’t assist you now,’ he told her, ‘because I’ve to wait here for Father O’Connor myself. But if you call to my house later—about nine o’clock—I’ll see you get a share of whatever help we can afford.’

‘The blessings of God and His Holy Mother on you for that.’

‘Say nothing to others about it,’ he warned her, ‘in case there’d be more blackguardism.’

‘I’ll say nothing at all,’ she assured him.

He saw her to the door. He felt sympathy and pity for her. She closed her shawl against the rain and walked the streets aimlessly, wearing the time away until it was nine o’clock. She refused to think about what she had done. The hours stretched endlessly. She bore them rather than face her children empty-handed.

Father O’Connor found Keever’s news confirmed in his newspaper. A Mrs. Rand and a Mrs. Montefiore had been organising accommodation for the children of the strikers in the homes of workers in England. The report said they had three hundred and forty offers already. The headlines and editorials reflected his own horror. Little Catholic children were to be sent to Protestant or even socialistic homes, regardless of the risk to their faith and their immortal souls. The scheme would be used as a trap by the proselytisers. Larkin had finally shown his hand.

Father O’Sullivan admitted the danger. The Catholic press seemed certain of it. There was little to be hoped for from Father Giffley. All he could expect from that quarter would be a snub. The notice hanging on the wall to the right of the picture of the Crucifixion still commanded him to be silent. He put the matter to Father O’Sullivan.

‘I think perhaps if you were to approach him.’

‘I wonder if I should?’

‘We have a duty. Surely you agree?’

‘Yes,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘I think we must at least ask for a direction.’

But he returned to report failure.

‘There is to be no preaching. We are still forbidden to take sides.’

‘Did you stress the danger of apostacy—that souls may be lost to us for ever?’

‘I told him I believed that possibility certainly existed.’

‘And what was his answer?’

Father O’Sullivan hesitated.

‘He is a hard person to understand. He said it would be a poor religion that couldn’t stand up to a few weeks’ holiday.’

‘If that is the view he takes,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘we will be forced to act in spite of him.’

Press reaction justified him. The editorials worked up a public outcry. A priest from Donnybrook led a picket of Catholic militants to patrol the quays and the railway stations, determined, he declared, to prevent the move by force if necessary. Other clergy joined with him. The archbishop addressed a letter to the mothers of the children. He asked them if they had abandoned their faith and put it to them that they could not be held worthy of the name of Catholic mothers if they co-operated. The headlines made a display.

‘Workers’ Children

to go to England

Catholic Mothers

Archbishop’s Warning’

Father O’Connor now knew where his duty lay. If he was forbidden the use of the pulpit, he could still make a physical protest. The souls of little children were at stake. His way was clear.

The controversy took a dramatic turn which caused Yearling to consult Mathews. He wrote:

My dear Mathews,

I have just read that Mrs. Rand and Mrs. Montefiore have been arrested (!) and are to answer a charge of KIDNAPPING!!

Can you throw any light on this? It seems quite preposterous. Is there anything I can do?

This public pandemonium about Proselytising is beginning to irk me, pallid Protestant though I am. There was a verse in the Leader the other day

‘Where naked children run and play

Oh, there we find the wily

The slum soul-snatching bird of prey

At work for Mrs. Smyley’

Is it yours, by any chance?’

B. Yearling

Mathews answered:

Dear Yearling,

It is true that the two ladies in question have been arrested and are being held on the charge which you rightly describe as preposterous. It cannot possibly stand up, but it will keep them out of the way and I suppose the authorities find this a convenient device for upsetting our plans. It shows the lengths they are prepared to go to support the employers. To hell with them. I have volunteered with some others to conduct the children to the ships and the railway stations. Would you care to join us?

The verse you quote shocks me. Naked children?

Here is one from the pen of a humble, working class scribe. I read it in The Worker the other day.

‘A toiling and a moiling

O what a life of bliss

They’ll promise you heaven in the next life

While they’re robbing you in this.’

Robust and down-to-earth—isn’t it? He has all this religious hocus-pocus in shrewd perspective.

T. Mathews

Yearling thought about it. He decided to write again:

My dear Mathews,

Yes, I will join you. But as an observer. Let us arrange it.

Yearling