Strumpet City (43 page)

‘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.