Strumpet City (60 page)

He stared at her.

‘There’s the money we laid by for the children’s train fares,’ she reminded him.

The suggestion took him by surprise.

‘And you’d lend them that?’ he asked.

‘If you think it would be the right thing to do,’ she answered.

He thought of Mulhall, his independence, his pride.

‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘I think that would be the right thing to do.’

His tone reassured her. She went to the hiding place where the few pound notes had been lying since the lock-out began. She counted them. Then, as though she must get it done before prudence tempted her to change her mind, she said: ‘I’ll give these to her straight away, before the neighbours begin to call on her. It’ll relieve her mind of that much at least.’

He nodded in agreement. It was a hard decision. But it was right. There was no option.

Mulhall had his wake. There was no tea to pass around and no drink for those who called. They did not expect it. No one nowadays had anything for hospitality. But he had candles and a habit and, when the customary two days had passed, a coffin and a hearse. The grave belonged to Mrs. Mulhall’s mother and father, whose bones already occupied it. The neighbours and his trade union colleagues walked behind him and men with hurling sticks on their shoulders escorted the procession, forming a guard of honour. The sticks were an innovation, defensive weapons against police interference, now carried at all trade union processions by men who called themselves soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army. It was a new body and its members drilled and studied military tactics. They knew they were an army of scarecrows but they did their best to keep their backs straight and to walk in step. They had been formed to protect trade union meetings against police interference. If the police charged it was their job to strike back.

Willie Mulhall was one of them and already a veteran of a number of engagements. The hurling stick on his shoulder, which had the shape and feel of a rifle, filled him with pride. So did the huge turn-out of workers and the fact that a detachment of police followed the procession all the way to the church. It showed that his father had been recognised as a leader by the authorities too. The police followed but kept their distance. The procession was big, but orderly. There was no band and there were no speeches. But there were blazing torches to carry which filled the air with the smell of pitch. Streamers of sparks were plucked from these by the wind and went scattering above the heads of the marchers. As Willie Mulhall watched them pride and grief struggled for supremacy in his heart. Fitz watched them too. Love, he thought, was better than prudence. The flaming torches were telling the city that the people of his class would not be starved for ever.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

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.