Strumpet City (53 page)

She heard Fitz on the landing outside and heard him opening the door.

‘You’re sitting in the dark,’ he said.

She looked round, noticing for the first time that by now there was hardly any light falling into the room. She rose and said: ‘I’ll light the lamp. How did your meeting go?’

He left his cap on the dresser, a habit she had given up trying to cure him of. He saw her hair falling forward across her cheek and saw the outline of her features in the lamplight and remembered their wedding night.

‘They’re releasing Larkin,’ he answered. ‘The Government have stepped in.’

That was probably good news. She did not know the ins and outs of the trouble.

‘That’s good,’ she said.

‘And the strike pay will be ten shillings a week—for a while at any rate.’

‘Is it going to go on, do you think?’

‘They say it can’t,’ Fitz answered.

She was aware of him watching her as she bent over the lamp. She knew he was watching her closely. He was troubled. She felt that too.

‘But you think it will,’ she said, knowing by his tone.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She put the chimney back on the lamp and adjusted the wick.

‘What are we to do, Fitz?’

He had been thinking about that for some days. The only hope had been that the general refusal would lead to a withdrawal of the form and a return to work until the whole thing had been argued out. But that had not happened. Instead the employers had hardened in their attitude.

‘As well as releasing Larkin, the Government have promised an inquiry,’ he said.

‘Please God something will come of it.’

‘I doubt it,’ Fitz said bitterly. ‘If they want the thing settled why don’t they withdraw the help of the military and the police. We might have some chance of making the Federation listen to us.’

He had not answered her question. What were they to do if it dragged on? But she knew the answer. She had seen it happen to others countless times before. The homes, piece by piece, would go to the pawnshops. That was what Mrs. Hennessy had meant. The grocers, for a while, would give a little credit. The moneylenders would step in, taking a profit in keeping with the risk.

When the chimney had heated and there was no danger of cracking it she turned up the wick to its full strength. It made the transition from evening to night seem quite sudden. But the yellow glow of the lamp was more cheerful than the dusky half-light. She began to cut bread and to make him cocoa.

‘Maybe you should spare it,’ he suggested.

‘We still have our savings,’ she said, ‘and I shouldn’t complain. We’re better off than most poor souls.’

They sat down to table together. He had been over with Mulhall to tell him the latest and now he told Mary about Mulhall, how he looked, what he said, what Mrs. Mulhall had said, how he thought she would fare now that Willie and her husband were both idle. It was the small talk they always indulged in over supper. But tonight the full meaning of what was happening seemed to sit along with them. He had to say something about it.

‘You’ve never asked why I wouldn’t leave the union,’ he said.

She surprised him by saying: ‘It’s because of Bernard Mulhall. I didn’t have to ask.’

Her voice was gentle and sympathetic and he knew she was thinking not of the accident only but of what the Mulhalls were left to face.

‘Mulhall was a tower of strength,’ he said.

He would never betray Mulhall’s trust. But it was not altogether that. There were Pat and Joe and the men who worked with them. There were Farrell and the dockers and thousands of others throughout the city, some long resigned to perpetual squalor as to the Will of God, others rebelling with recurring desperation whenever there was a leader to lead them. Never before had they stood so solidly together. He said to Mary:

‘The men in the despatch department of the Tram Company were dismissed simply for belonging to Larkin’s union. There was no other reason. The tram men had to support them. Then this form was issued to everyone all over the city. The rest of us had to take our stand with the tram men.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t be asked to sign it?’ she said.

‘I wasn’t,’ he admitted, ‘but I couldn’t stay in when the others were locked out. I couldn’t do that.’

‘I know you couldn’t,’ she said.

‘Are you angry?’

‘No. I’m glad you wouldn’t do something you knew you shouldn’t do. In the long run it wouldn’t work out.’

The gratitude in his face moved her deeply. She came to him and kissed him. Then she said:

‘The children are the real worry.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘I was thinking about it before you came in. If we put a little of what we have aside—and never touch it, no matter how bad things may be—we’ll know that if the worst happens we’ll be able to send them to stay for a while with my father.’

‘We’ll do that,’ he agreed. Then he thought about it and added:

‘You could go with them yourself too. That’d be better still.’

‘I wouldn’t leave you here alone,’ she said.

He held her to him and said no more. If things became very bad he could talk to her again about it. They must wait. The gates were closed. The keys that could open them were in other hands.

‘You’ve taken a weight off my mind.’

‘I’m glad,’ she said.

She knew he would have acted as he did whether she approved or not. But she was happy she had spoken. She was close to him and part of him. That was what she wanted.

Rashers set out with the determination to try everything he knew. He was hungry. He had been hungry for weeks. It was a miserable kip of a city at the best of times. It had gone to hell altogether now. Day in and day out he stood in the gutter and played his whistle. Nobody minded him. Occasionally, when he had made certain there were no police to see him, he begged. They turned aside from him. He knocked at door after door for odd jobs. There were none, or some locked-out unfortunate had got there before him. Once he met Hennessy. He was aggrieved at the perversity of fate, the obduracy of the employers, the supineness of the Government, the stubbornness of the strikers, the deadlock that looked like paralysing the city for ever.

‘Is there any moves at all—or what?’ he asked irritably.

‘Not a damn thing,’ Hennessy answered. He too was gloomy.

‘Jaysus,’ Rashers exploded, ‘are they going to let the whole bloody population starve!’

‘That seems to be the programme,’ Hennessy confirmed.

‘You’re not working yourself—I suppose?’

‘No. I’m living on the expectations.’

‘Sit down a minute,’ Rashers said.

There were two abandoned buckets on the piece of waste ground. They upended them for seats. Grass and nettles surrounded them and in front of them, against the gable of a warehouse, a hoarding displayed its advertisements. One had been put there by some religious-minded body. It read:

‘Ask—and you shall receive.

Knock—and it shall be opened unto you.’

‘Me arse,’ Rashers said, when he had read aloud this message of hope.

‘Some Protestant crowd puts them up,’ Hennessy explained.

‘Yes, telling a pack of bloody lies. They shouldn’t be let,’ Rashers said.

Hennessy, prepared as always to be reasonable, said: ‘I suppose it gives employment.’

Then, in an effort to be cheerful he asked: ‘What do you think of the one beside it?’

Rashers studied the picture of a man with a ruddy, smiling face, dressed in blue striped pyjamas, straddling a Bovril bottle, that tossed on the waves of a blue ocean. It said: ‘Bovril—prevents that sinking feeling.’

He spat elaborately and glared fiercely at Hennessy.

‘Ah, now,’ Hennessy protested, ‘it makes you laugh.’

‘It makes me hungry,’ Rashers said.

It was no use trying to humour him. So Hennessy said: ‘The Government inquiry might bring this lock-out to an end sooner than we think.’

But it did nothing of the kind. When the inquiry pronounced and said the Federation form should be withdrawn, the employers refused, so the only result was a further spread of the lock-out. It set more and more pacing the streets, and there were fewer still in a position to give anything to Rashers. He walked through streets that were empty of any promise of help. The collecting boxes rattled, the pickets paced up and down, long convoys of carts and wagons moved through the city, always under escorts of police and military; the trams and the power stations were similarly guarded. Sometimes he went down to the monster meetings at Beresford Place, mingling with thousands of the out-of-works and listening, as the great orange sunsets of early October stained the waters of the nearby Liffey with colours of green and red and gold, to the speeches that thundered from the lighted windows of Liberty Hall. He heard the wild cheering and now and then the great outpouring of thousands of voices in song. He watched the startled gulls rising from grimy parapets and hovering with loud cries about the iridescent river. And as he did so he became conscious of belonging to nothing in particular. The thought increased his desperation. There was a time when he could have put a brick through a window and earned a few days in gaol, where there would be shelter and food of a sort. Now they would treat him as a rioter and beat him until he was half dead. He watched hungry faces that looked up at the speechmakers from under the peaks of caps. He saw the light of hope in thousands of eyes. But he was not one of them. The respectable and the good-living in neatly kept clothes passed him on their way home. They glanced at him quickly and turned away and wanted nothing to do with him. When the well-to-do looked at him they did not see him at all. That was in early October, when the days were drawing in and the evenings were coming early, making the pavements damp and the streets cold. His spirits sank lower. He was constantly hungry. He was always cold. Then, for the first time in many months, his luck changed.

He was looking into a shop window in which he saw nothing but his own reflection, his long, ragged coat, the grey beard, the hat that had lost all semblance of shape and fitted over head and ears like a bowl. He was thinking of food. He had thought of little else for days. A hand tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Using the head?’ said the voice.

When he turned around it was Pat Bannister. A generous skin, Rashers knew, but unlikely to have anything to give away.

‘I’m thinking about hard times,’ he said.

‘It’s a general complaint,’ Pat said.

‘I don’t suppose you have anything you could spare?’

Pat shook his head.

‘Why aren’t you playing the whistle?’ he asked.

‘Because no one has the inclination to listen,’ Rashers said.

‘Some is too stingy and the rest is just too bloody hungry. Music is out of fashion.’

‘Did you ever try advertising?’

‘It isn’t one of my accomplishments,’ Rashers confessed.

‘There’s nothing to it,’ Pat said. ‘Come on for a walk with me and I’ll show you.’

They went through back streets that both of them had known since childhood. They now looked different. There were too many men moving about and there was too little traffic. Nothing was happening. Rashers thought it was like Sunday without the bells. As they walked Pat said there was little hope of the strike finishing soon. It would go on through the winter. They were setting up food kitchens for the women and children in Liberty Hall. The Countess Markiewicz was going to serve the meals with her own hands. He asked Rashers if he had ever heard of her. Rashers grunted. She was one of them high class oul wans that were sticking their noses into a hundred and one things nowadays. Trouble-makers. Like Madame Despard and Maud Gonne. Acting the hooligan about votes for women when they should be at home looking after their husbands and their unfortunate children. Mad Gonne and Mrs. Desperate, the people were calling them. No wonder the city was starving.

The distant ringing of a handbell interrupted his thoughts and Pat said: ‘Now you’ll see what I mean.’

They turned the corner. The gleam on the three brass balls outside Mr. Donegan’s shop caught his eyes first, then the long queue of women, each laden with ornaments or bundles of clothes, then the figure of the bellringer. He was a man of Rashers’ age, but more hale. His body was hidden beneath two sandwich boards which were suspended by straps from his shoulders. The boards announced:

‘Donegan’s for Value

Best Prices

All Welcome’

‘There you are now,’ Pat said. Rashers stared, puzzled.

‘What about it?’

‘The advertising business. A job like that would suit you down to the ground.’

‘What the hell use is that when this fella here has nabbed it already.’

‘If Donegan finds it worth while to take on a man, so will somebody else,’ Pat explained. ‘The thing for you to do is to persuade one of the other pawnbrokers. What about Silverwater in Macken Street?’

‘The Erin’s Isle?’ Rashers said. ‘I’d have a hope.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Pat said.

He went across to the man with the bell. They talked for a while. Then he rejoined Rashers.

‘Now we’ll make our way to The Erin’s Isle,’ Pat announced.

It took them about ten minutes to reach Mr. Silverwater’s establishment. It was an unusual building. Beneath the three brass balls the figure of Ireland, with golden tresses reaching down the green mantle about her shoulders, wept over her stringless harp. The scroll at her feet spelled out in white letters: ‘The Erin’s Isle’. A queue of patient women had formed outside.

‘Now what do we do?’ Rashers asked.

‘We wait,’ Pat said firmly.

Rashers wondered why. But it did not matter. There was nothing else to do.

‘That’s an occupation you get used to,’ he said.

The pawnshop had once been a public house. Rashers remembered having a drink in it as a young man. About forty years ago, he thought. In those days it had not been so hard to find a crust to eat. Or so it seemed now.

‘Do you remember Jeremiah Brady?’ he asked Pat.

‘Who was he?’

‘He owned The Erin’s Isle when it was a public house.’

‘I don’t remember it as a public house,’ Pat confessed.