Strumpet City (23 page)

‘And have you children?’ he asked, letting his attention fix itself on his surroundings while he questioned her. He noted a table, a sideboard and some butter boxes. The clock on the mantelpiece seemed out of place.

‘Two, Father.’

He had to think hard to connect her answer and his question.

‘Two boys?’ he asked, relieved to remember.

‘A boy and a girl. The girl is only four weeks old.’

He had noticed she was looking unwell and had blamed poverty. Now he knew it was the usual combination of hunger and childbirth. The women had it hard. To ease the feeling of constraint he said: I’d like to see them.’

It was morning. Mary led him into the bedroom. Everything was clean. And they had two rooms. That was quite unusual.

‘Your husband is working?’

‘At the foundry.’

‘A blessing,’ he approved.

This made the extreme poverty hard to understand. Father O’Connor, turning the matter over in his mind as he talked, remembered there was an explanation. Mr. Larkin. Was this one of the homes that had refused the food parcels?

The children were wholesome and neat too. He put it down to the beneficial effect of training in a good house. The baby was sleeping, but the older child smiled at him. Father O’Connor crossed to the bed and then formally, gravely, he gave his blessing to both of them, touching each forehead lightly in turn, and murmuring the formula quietly but audibly. Mary moved to one side, knelt and crossed herself.

‘I must tell Mrs. Bradshaw you have a thriving family,’ he said, smiling and stretching out his hand to help her to rise. They were both suddenly at ease.

‘Give her my best respects,’ Mary said. Her voice trembled. At his blessing of the children she had felt a pang of emotion, an inexplicable happiness. For a moment, in a long barrenness, a vague hope filled her.

‘Of course.’ Her gratitude was moving.

‘I’ll visit Miss Gilchrist on Sunday.’

‘She’ll be delighted, I assure you.’ He held up his hand to prevent her when she moved to see him to the door.

He went down the stone steps and into the sunlight. The streets he passed through were familiar now; it was satisfactory to be able to name the side turns, to remember here and there a family to which he had ministered personally.

Father O’Connor paused to take a paper from a newsboy, who touched his hat and said ‘God bless you, Father’ when he waved aside the change. He put the paper in his pocket. The woman was unwell. As he walked he wondered what sting of the flesh could tempt a young girl to exchange service in a good house for a couple of rooms and a few butter boxes. He had been told something about Fitzpatrick. By Timothy Keever, was it? He could not remember what.

At lunchtime he said to Father O’Sullivan: ‘Would you oblige me in something, Father?’

Father O’Sullivan had been eating in silence, his eyes fixed more or less continuously on a devotional booklet. It was his mealtime habit. It took him a while to realise he had been spoken to, but when it penetrated he looked up and smiled pleasantly.

‘Certainly.’

‘I’d rather Father Giffley were here . . . I should really ask him, but it’s urgent and quite important.’

‘Father Giffley is still unwell.’

Father O’Connor, immediately suspicious, regarded the other closely. Then he said, casually, ‘Really. Today again?’

‘I went to his room to enquire, but he said he would rather be left alone.’

‘Was the door locked?’ Father O’Connor asked.

‘I didn’t try,’ the other said, looking surprised.

Father O’Connor paused. Then he said, in a confiding tone: ‘It might have been wiser to do so.’

‘I asked him if he would like a doctor, but he assured me it was unnecessary.’

Remembering other sessions behind locked doors and other refusals of his superior to leave his room, Father O’Connor pushed his plate roughly aside.

‘Are you so blind, Father,’ he asked, ‘do you not know as well as I do what is wrong with our Parish priest?’

‘He is not strong, the poor man,’ Father O’Sullivan said. Then, in almost the same tone, he added: ‘But you wanted my assistance, Father?’

This large, guileless man was either a saint or a humbug, Father O’Connor decided.

‘I would like you to take benediction for me this evening,’ Father O’Connor said, controlling himself, ‘I have some personal business.’

‘I shall be glad to, Father.’

Father O’Sullivan smiled. His soutane, with its faded, green-streaked sheen, its frayed cuffs and buttonholes that gaped loosely from long use, might have been the parish clerk’s second best, the one he did the heavy work in and from which he removed the dribbles of candle grease by scraping them with a knife. The booklet propped against the sugar bowl irritated Father O’Connor too. It was a gaudy-covered production dealing with the devotion to the Sacred Heart. But it intrigued him.

‘May I trouble you for the sugar, Father?’

‘Forgive me—how selfish.’

The Faith for The Family:
‘A series for the instruction of the Faithful simply rendered by “A Catholic Priest”, and approved by . . .’

As he had guessed, a popular concoction, aimed at the uneducated. But perhaps Father O’Sullivan was preparing a simple sermon. Or was he—at the unexpected thought Father O’Connor almost upset the sugar bowl—was he, perhaps, the anonymous priest who wrote them?

Yearling left his luggage at Westland Row Station and went across the street to the Grosvenor. There was a barmaid there he admired. In his hand he carried his two fishing rods, a green-heart and a split cane, both too precious to be left out of sight. After the serene quiet of Connemara, with its reed-grown lakes and blue, remote hills, the streets seemed more than usually airless. He dodged a hackney cab, winced at the rattle of trams and found the pavement. Almost immediately a hungry wretch thrust a collecting box under his nose. Yearling examined the letters on the side. They said: ‘Jim Larkin Defence Fund’. Mr. Yearling, with a magnanimous flourish, dropped in a shilling. He bowed when the man raised his cap.

Feeling much better, he entered the hotel and rang the bell. It was answered by an unfamiliar female. Disappointed, he asked her for a large Irish.

‘Yes, sir. Will you be wanting soda as well?’ He decided she was bulgy and unprepossessing.

‘Good God, no.’

The startled girl withdrew. She came back with whiskey and a small, stone jug containing water.

‘Where’s Rose?’ Yearling asked. He measured carefully the quantity of water.

‘Gone, sir.’

‘What do you mean—gone? Has she left?’

‘More or less, sir.’

The reply displeased him.

‘How much more than less?’ he snapped.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Was she sacked?’ Yearling barked.

The girl jumped and said: ‘She was, sir.’

‘And why?’ He bunched his bushy eyebrows at her, terrifying her.

‘Miss Harrigan thought she made a bit free with the gentlemen, sir.’

‘I wouldn’t call that a fault—would you?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Yearling sighed.

‘Never mind. Please bring me the morning paper. And another whiskey.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The girl went off. Yearling sipped his drink and listened in a melancholy mood to the constant clip-clop of hooves outside the wide uncurtained window, missing the pretty face of Rose and the pleasure of making her laugh with his drolleries. He opened his paper and read it over his second whiskey until it seemed time to go back to the station for his train to Kingstown. When he was paying her he asked her name.

‘Alice, sir.’

‘That’s a song,’ Yearling told her. ‘“Alice, Where Art Thou?” Pretty air. I hope you won’t disappoint the respected Miss Harrigan.’

She laughed and delighted him by venturing, shyly. ‘Sure what harm is a bit of gas, sir.’

‘That’s the ticket,’ he boomed at her. As they laughed together he began to see that she was pretty, after all. For her show of spirit he tipped her a shilling and went out in better humour.

At the entrance to the station he stood courteously aside to let a figure in clerical dress go first and discovered, with an exclamation of pleasure, that it was Father O’Connor.

‘My dear friend.’

Startled by the bellow, Father O’Connor swung round. He came to a standstill.

‘This is unexpected . . .’ he began.

Yearling pumped inordinately at his extended hand while he asked: ‘Are you going to Kingstown?’

Father O’Connor was.

‘Excellent,’ Yearling said. ‘So am I.’

Father O’Connor found it necessary to excuse himself while he went to the booking office. They rejoined each other and when the gateman had checked each ticket and raised his cap with great respect to Father O’Connor they searched out an empty carriage and took their seats. Conversation proved difficult. Clouds of steam, hissing upwards, coiled and were trapped under the great glass awning. Father O’Connor saw Yearling’s lips moving, but could not catch what he was saying. He had to raise his voice as though he were in the pulpit and say: ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Milkcans,’ Yearling shouted.

Father O’Connor looked puzzled.

Yearling shouted: ‘I said I have never entered this station yet but they were shifting milkcans—millions of damned milkcans.’

Father O’Connor leaned towards the window, smiled and nodded. Porters were rolling the empty cans from one end of the platform to the other. The din was ear-splitting. It was a relief when the coaches jerked and bumped and the train moved slowly towards open day. Sunshine came leaping into the carriage, the backyards with their lines of washing slipped past, there was motion and peacefulness. In the basin by Boland’s Mill, an old-time schooner lay to. Near one bank, where green reeds leaned in delicate clusters above their own reflections, three swans rested.

‘What a beautiful picture,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘A serene and beguiling lie,’ Yearling answered. Father O’Connor looked surprised. Yearling, with unexpected gravity, said:

‘I sometimes despair of this city of ours.’

‘Its poverty?’

‘Its contradictions.’

‘I work in its back streets every day and when I lie down to sleep I am conscious of its squalor being on my doorstep. But I don’t despair.’

‘You have one eye fixed on heaven,’ Yearling said, ‘try looking at it with both eyes sometimes.’

‘I assure you I’ve looked at it closely.’ Father O’Connor spoke the truth. He did not despair. But there were days after days of depression, of feeling lost in a nightmare. The excuse of business or good manners brought him now and then to the Bradshaws. They were welcome retreats.

‘What do you think of Larkin’s sentence?’

A little confused at what appeared to be a sudden change of subject, Father O’Connor hesitated before asking: ‘Has he been sentenced?’

‘To twelve months with hard labour, it’s in today’s paper.’ Yearling held out the paper he had been reading over his whiskey.

Father O’Connor, remembering having bought a paper himself at some stage, searched vaguely and found it stuck in his pocket, unopened and, until now, completely forgotten.

‘I hadn’t seen it,’ he explained.

‘Savage,’ Yearling pronounced.

Father O’Connor spread out his hands.

‘If he was dishonest . . .’ he began.

‘He collected money from one city and gave it to the wretches who were on strike in another. The only case against him is that the money should have been sent on first to Liverpool. Where’s the dishonesty?’

‘It was irregular . . .’ Father O’Connor suggested.

‘If it was, who are collecting for his defence? The very people he’s accused of defrauding. One of them shook a box under my nose less than an hour ago.’

That was what Timothy Keever had told him. Fitzpatrick had been collecting for Larkin—he remembered now. ‘I haven’t followed the trial very closely.’ As he said so he remembered a detail which had shocked him early on. It was a newspaper interview in which Mr. Sexton, the general secretary who had come over from Liverpool to give evidence against Larkin, confessed that he had had to go through the streets armed with a revolver.

‘They’ve bungled,’ Mr. Yearling said, ‘and bungled badly. First they delay the trial for two years. Now they convict him on a technicality and give him twelve months’ hard. They’re determined to make a popular martyr of the most dangerous man of our time. They’ll have the dregs of the city flocking to him.’

‘They seem to be flocking to him already,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘That is no reason why the law should become his recruiting sergeant.’

‘Is that what you meant when you said you despair of the city?’

‘I despair of the law and the Government,’ Yearling confessed, ‘and of the men who are supposed to be my business colleagues. They’re fools—all of them.’

They had stopped at Booterstown. On their left the tide was advancing towards the wall, a thin edge of foam along its border. A light breeze found its way into the carriage. It tasted of salt. Looking across towards Howth Hill, Father O’Connor said: ‘Men bungle and make mistakes. But you must at least agree that the city is beautiful.’

‘It depends on where you live and how much you earn, doesn’t it?’

‘I think we are talking of different things.’

‘What is your answer to poverty?’ Yearling challenged. He was not yet prepared to leave the subject alone.

Father O’Connor sighed and after a moment of reflection said: ‘From those who have wealth, charity for the sake of God; from those who suffer poverty, resignation for His sake also.’

‘Marx has a different answer. He says the expropriators must be expropriated. That means me,’ Yearling pointed out.

‘We condemn socialism, of course.’

‘I have read your condemnations, Father. But for all their hat-raising to you, I am beginning to doubt that they will always listen to you. Does that sound offensive?’

‘Not at all. We’ve pointed out already that Larkin is a dangerous man; he’s a self-professed socialist. He doesn’t hesitate to criticise the priests, yet the people still help him and listen to him.’

‘And you will leave it like that?’