Strumpet City (48 page)

‘You played very nicely, Florence,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid I was out of practice.’

‘No,’ he insisted, ‘you were in excellent fettle. Most pleasing.’ He poured himself a small measure of port for a night-cap. ‘What was your opinion of Yearling?’

‘He seemed very well disposed.’

Bradshaw nodded agreeably.

‘Warm. Unusually so. Whatever was troubling him, he seems to have got over it. I think the evening did him good. It took him out of himself.’

On the way home Yearling and Father O’Connor spoke of Ireland in a sentimental way, of her sad history, of her hopes of nationhood so often and so bloodily thwarted, of the theatre of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge. Father O’Connor confessed that he had not seen any of the plays, but he had heard that they were in tone and language somewhat immoral. How much better Tom Moore had served Ireland through the medium of music and literature. He quoted:

‘Dear Harp of my country in darkness I found thee

The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long.

When proudly, my own Island Harp I unbound thee

And gave all thy chords to light Freedom and Song.’

Yearling agreed. He said he wished often that he could have been present when the brave Tom was bringing tears to the eyes of pretty ladies in early nineteenth-century London drawing rooms by singing them songs that were sweetly seditious. Then he threw back his head and sang defiantly:

‘Dear Harp of my Country, farewell to thy slumbers

This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine.

Go—sleep with the sunshine of fame on thy slumbers

Till touched by some hand less unworthy than mine.’

He paused to say, ‘Come now, Father, join in,’ and continued, helped timidly by Father O’Connor, who was not happy about the seemliness of singing at the top of the voice in a motor car on the public street:

‘If the pulse of the patriot, soldier or lover

Have throbbed at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone

I was but as the wind passing heedlessly over

And all the wild sweetness I waked was thine own.’

‘Very beautiful,’ Father O’Connor said, when Yearling had adjusted his hat, which had tilted askew during his lusty chorus.

‘Did you know, Father, that Byron praised Moore’s verses highly?’

Father O’Connor confessed that he had not known.

‘It’s a fact,’ Yearling said. ‘The same Don Juan had a reputation for practising more than his poetry, but he had the magnanimity to acknowledge another man’s genius.’

‘Admirable,’ Father O’Connor said. He had to raise his voice. The motor, in the dark, deserted streets, was making a lot of noise.

‘Home Rule, of course, is a mirage,’ Yearling said, surprisingly, since the Bill had been passed in January by the House of Commons.

‘But the Lords can no longer veto it,’ Father O’Connor objected, ‘it must automatically become law in two years.’

‘It will be stopped.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Carson,’ Yearling said. ‘Carson will stop it. He has a hundred thousand volunteers drilling to fight it.’

‘I understand they have nothing but dummy rifles.’

‘They’ll get the real things when the time comes. If the British Unionists don’t supply them, our splendiferous and grandiloquent cousin—I refer to his Imperial Sublimity the Kaiser Wilhelm—will oblige. Do you know who Carson’s grandfather was?’

Father O’Connor could not say.

‘An immigrant Italian who resided in Dublin called Carsoni. The name of the present bould Orange blade is an abbreviation.’

Father O’Connor was astounded.

‘True bill.’ Yearling said.

‘Now that you mention it,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘his skin is very dark.’

‘A combination of liver trouble and the pigmentation of the Middle Sea,’ Yearling said. He turned a corner with a flamboyant twist of the wheel. A moment later he slowed to a standstill.

‘Your destination,’ he announced.

‘I’ve brought you very far out of your way.’

‘A pleasure. Think nothing of it. By the way, what did you think of Bradshaw?’

‘He seemed anxious to be agreeable.’

‘That’s what I thought too. I knew him at school, you know.’

‘So you’ve told me.’

‘He should never have married,’ Yearling said. ‘He’s becoming quite odd. I’ve noticed the change over the years.’

‘In what way?’ Father O’Connor asked.

‘Well, for one thing, the peculiar way he looks at me when I raise my glass to him and say “Good health”. Almost inimical.’

‘I think you exaggerate.’

‘No indeed. It happens almost every time. Still, I’m glad we went. I think the evening took him out of himself. Well—good night.’

‘God bless you,’ Father O’Connor said.

The railings were black and forbidding and the bulk of the church rose darkly against the sky. Yearling honked the horn in a friendly way and went off. The noise was ear-splitting.

In June again there was a shipping strike, followed by a building strike, followed by a strike of engineers. There were Larkinite processions, Larkinite banners, Larkinite slogans scrawled on the walls and footpaths of every street in Father O’Connor’s parish. Throughout the weeks of summer he watched them. The weather was fine and yet the air that lingered over evening thoroughfares seemed heavy not with the sun’s aftermath but with veiled and terrible anger. Men, no longer awed by his cloth, shook collection boxes under his nose at street corners; the little children begged coppers from him whenever he passed them. He had made a rule not to give charity because it only prolonged and encouraged discontent, yet he broke it on many occasions because the children had a pinched and hungry look in their faces. It was his duty, he felt, to harden his heart, but it was impossible not to have pity for the young and the innocent. These were not at fault. The air of the city told Father O’Connor that it must end badly. He could smell evil in the streets.

Pat and Joe were involved, and then they were back at work—then once again they were called out. Farrell stood idle for some weeks when the dockers refused to handle cargo. Fitz alone escaped. He set out to work each morning with growing uncertainty, yet when he returned each evening nothing had happened. The foundry workers had the rumour that a general strike was imminent, that the workers in Britain were waiting to join them in a complete close down in every part of the British Isles. In July Mulhall, back home from hospital and bedridden, sent across for him one evening and told him Willie and the rest of the messengers in Independent Newspapers had been dismissed for being members of Larkin’s Union. Mulhall was still weak. His face had a grey and bloodless pallor. But he clung tenaciously to the subject and the steps that should be taken and they sat talking until a late hour. The next day Independent Newspapers were blacklisted, shops and even railway kiosks that sold it were picketed. The distributors’ vans went about their business under police escort. The arrangement, only partly successful, added to the general tension.

The newspapers that continued to be distributed claimed that the shipping strike was a flagrant breach of an agreement only one month old. Mr. Larkin protested that he could not get the men back to work.

‘If an army rebels,’ he was reported as saying, ‘what is the commander to do?’

‘He should be hanged for a rogue,’ Bradshaw said furiously, when he read it.

‘He’s a very wicked man,’ his wife agreed, ‘think of all those poor, suffering children.’

‘And a liar,’ Mr. Bradshaw added, as though she had not allowed him to finish.

Yearling noted at the beginning of August that the men in the parcels department of the Tramway Company had been dismissed because they refused a managerial instruction to relinquish their membership of the Larkinite union. The dismissals were an obvious challenge. There would have to be a counter-stroke. Both the men in the parcels department of the Tramway Company and the boys dismissed from Independent Newspapers were employees of William Martin Murphy. He began to follow events with considerable interest, but without passion. He had no special feeling about the social order. It bored him. But he could understand the hatred it inspired in the many who suffered the brunt of its inequalities. Hunger was a great irritant. One day when a copy of the Larkinite paper
The Irish Worker
was offered to him in the street, he bought it and found the style fascinating. He read:

‘Every dog and devil, thief and saint, is getting an invitation to come to work for the Dublin Tramway Company. Every man applying is asked: Do you belong to Larkin’s Union?—if so, no employment.

‘Well, William Martin Murphy will know—I hope to his and Alderman Cotton’s satisfaction and the shareholders’ benefit—who is in Larkin’s Union, and who will have to be in it. Every man he is employing is known to us. What say Howard and Paddy Byrne? What say scab O’Neill? What say Kenna and Lawlor & Co.?

‘We have Them All on The List.

‘Mr. William Martin Murphy’s satellites, Gordon and Tresillian, have discharged some ten men for being in the Union.

‘Right, William the Saint. We have not moved yet and will not move until we are ready.

‘Woe betide Scabs then!’

He made a point of calling on his newsagent. There was a picket outside.

‘I wish to add an extra paper to my weekly list,’ he said.

‘Certainly sir—which one?’

‘The Irish Worker.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said—
The Irish Worker.’

‘I’m afraid it is not a publication we can obtain through any of the usual distributors.’

‘In that case you’ll have to get it through the unusual ones, I suppose.’

‘It may be difficult.’

‘Not a bit,’ Yearling said. ‘At least twenty of them were stuck under my nose in the course of half an hour’s walk through the city. There are some men prancing up and down outside your shop at this minute who, I am sure, can put you in touch with the most reliable of sources. Anyway, I am assuming you will see to it.’

‘We’ll do our very best, sir.’

‘Thank you. In that case I know I may expect it regularly.’

‘Of course, sir. Regularly. You may rely on it.’

As he passed through the picket on his way out he paused to speak to the leader.

‘Interesting paper you get out,’ he said conversationally. ‘I like the style.’

They stared in unison after him.

Fitz had news for Mulhall during the same week. He went across each evening when he was not on shift work. He would bring a little tobacco and light Mulhall’s pipe for him, so that he could enjoy his one smoke of the day. He now occupied Willie’s bed, in the little room just off the living room. There were only two beds, so Willie now slept on the floor. He did not mind. Crippled, stricken, unable as yet to attend without help to any small, personal need, his father was still something of a god to him, a hero of great strength, gentle and good at home, without fear or price in the world outside it.

‘I’ve news for you this evening,’ Fitz said.

‘Pull over the chair,’ Mulhall invited.

‘On Saturday William Martin Murphy called all the tram men to a meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms. It started at midnight.’

‘They shouldn’t have gone,’ Mulhall said, getting angry.

‘Wait now,’ Fitz said. ‘Let me finish. He offered half a day’s pay to anyone who went to the meeting and when they went he offered them a shilling a week rise.’

‘Their demand is for two shillings.’

‘Wait now. The shilling was to be on condition that they’ll remain loyal and refuse to come out if Larkin calls them. He said if they go on strike he’ll spend a hundred thousand pounds to fight them.’

‘Had it any effect?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Fitz said, ‘The tram men will do what Larkin tells them.’

‘They’ll have to come out,’ Mulhall said, ‘not for the sake of the two shillings, but to stand by the messengers and the men in the parcels department.’

He remained quiet for a time. Then he stirred with impatience and said: ‘If only I could be out and about.’

‘If you’re going to talk like that,’ Fitz said, ‘I’ll never give you another bit of news.’

He found Mulhall’s pipe, filled it with tobacco and lit it for him. The small window let in so little of the evening light that he could see the tobacco reddening in the bowl. Then he helped to hoist up Mulhall so that he could smoke it.

‘Do you think Larkin will move?’

‘Certainly Larkin will move,’ Mulhall said, ‘he never drew back yet.’ Mulhall’s belief was unshakable.

‘I knew Jim,’ he said, ‘when we had nothing. We started the union in a back room in Townsend Street and two candles stuck in bottles was all the light we could afford. We were fighting the employers and we had to fight Sexton and the National Union of Dockers at the same time. Jim won’t draw back.’

‘You fought hard,’ Fitz said, ‘all your life.’

‘While I could,’ Mulhall agreed. ‘Now I’ll fight no more.’

‘You did your bit—and more than it.’

‘Never any more,’ Mulhall repeated.

He did not want comfort and his tone rejected Fitz’s offer of it. As they sat in silence and the dusk deepened he stared straight in front of him. The room became even smaller. It had a closed-in air. Even when he was not smoking it smelled of tobacco, of successive pipes lit and smoked and laid aside on days that looked at him with expressionless eyes. No gaoler was necessary now. He was its prisoner for ever.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

The bustle was familiar—and yet there was something odd about it, something that made it seem not quite the same as in previous years. It puzzled Yearling, this strange difference in an annual event he had looked at year after year since his childhood days. The ingredients were the same; the stream of hackneys and motor cars on their way to the grounds of the Royal Dublin Society, the foreign visitors, the military, the strings of horses, the riders in black caps and scarlet coats and tightly cut breeches. The ladies as usual engaged his special interest. Most of them were at their best; fashionable and feminine and agreeably pretty. A hefty and horselike few displeased him. That was as usual too. He had once described the ladies of the Dublin Horse Show as a mixture of Sweeties and Tweedies. The remark came back to him from his remote student days. Perhaps youth was the missing ingredient. He was getting old. He sighed and consulted his pocket watch again. Father O’Connor was now half an hour late. It was uncharacteristic and puzzling.