Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  ‘You might be right,’ he conceded.

  ‘Of course I’m right.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll chance bringing him down an odd night,’ he agreed. Again he passed the bottle to Hennessy. He thought in silence for a while.

  ‘A bit of music mightn’t be out of place.’

  ‘What music?’ Hennessy asked.

  ‘This,’ Rashers said. He rooted in his inner pockets and drew out a tin whistle. It was a superior toned Italian Flageolet.

  ‘I got a present of a shilling at Christmas from Father Giffley,’ he explained, ‘and I squandered it on this.’

  ‘Are you not afraid they’d hear you above?’

  ‘Divil the bit.’ He held the whistle towards Hennessy. ‘What do you think of it?’

  Its slender column took on the rosy hue of the firelight. They both regarded it, Rashers affectionately, Hennessy, his mouth full of food, with an expression of bulbous curiosity.

  ‘You spent a shilling on that?’ he asked when it was physically possible.

  Rashers turned it about and about in the firelight and said: ‘I often spent a shilling on less.’ He took a swig from the bottle and passed it to Hennessy.

  ‘Isn’t this the life of Reilly?’ Hennessy exclaimed. They bent forward together to let the fireglow play on their bodies, unaware of the antics of their gigantic shadows in the flickering candlelight.

  ‘I knew you’d like the wine,’ Rashers said. ‘It’s made out of grapes.’

  ‘Play the oul whistle,’ Hennessy invited. He disposed himself comfortably to listen.

  Rashers began to do so. The notes came out sweetly and slowly. Hennessy, listening politely, now and then gathered food crumbs from the paper on his knee with fingers that courteously avoided noise. Rashers thrust his chin forward and found again a simple consolation he had lost months before in race crowds and drink.

  Celebrating late mass in the church above them, Father Giffley bent down to the altar and breathed the Domine Non Sum Dignus. The act of stooping sent a stab of pain shooting from his neck to his throbbing eyes. The server struck the altar gong three times with the felt-headed hammer and the worshippers bent low also and beat their breasts.

  BOOK TWO

  1910–1912

  CHAPTER ONE

  At fifteen minutes to midnight on the sixth day of May 1910, in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princess Royal and the Duke of Fife, Princess Victoria, Princess Louise and the Duchess of Argyll, Edward VII breathed his last.

  The Archbishop of Dublin had called for prayers for his recovery. When these were seen to have gone unanswered, the city did the next best thing. It went into deep mourning. Prescott’s, the cleaners, who claimed to have enormous facilities for such work, offered to dye all articles of clothing black at the shortest notice. Mrs. Bradshaw availed of their services and during his lying-instate she began to read the newspapers closely, keeping her husband well informed on the day-to-day events. The report of a storm, particularly, caught her interest. It occurred on the Wednesday and involved the historic scene at Westminster in a wild splendour. It broke about the heads of his loyal subjects who waited hour after hour to pay their last tribute. Vivid flashes of lightning streaked the sky and thunder crashed above the hall in which the King lay, guarded by his silent and motionless watchers. He was the least troubled of them all. The Liberals had threatened to abolish his house of peers; they could do so now without causing him the least pain. John Redmond had urged his Irish followers to hasten Home Rule by supporting the Liberal policy; he could now lean over to bawl it in the King’s ear and no flicker of the royal eyelids would reprove or admonish him. For months his subjects had wondered if in such a crisis the King could remain above politics. Death, with an unexpected gesture, had assured them that he would.

  ‘What a terrible storm last night,’ Mrs. Bradshaw said to her husband, when he had returned from his morning walk along the front.

  ‘A fog,’ he corrected. ‘I’d hardly call it a storm.’

  ‘I mean in London.’

  ‘Oh—that.’

  ‘It’s all here in the paper.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, ‘the Kish was going all night.’

  She had heard it too. All night the boom of the fog signal had disturbed her rest, a regular, disembodied moan that made the night restless.

  ‘There’s a thick mist at sea,’ he reported.

  ‘I felt there would be. How I pity the poor sailors.’

  ‘Didn’t stop the Navy. Part of the Home Fleet have anchored down below—I could make out the Lord Nelson.’ Bradshaw was very good at ships. He knew their names and could tell the difference between battleships and cruisers, gunboats and destroyers. The gentlemen of Kingstown, of course, took a very special pride in such things. Naturally so.

  ‘It’s a beautiful name—the Peacemaker.’

  Bradshaw looked puzzled. Then he understood.

  ‘You mean the King?’

  ‘Of course. That is what they are calling him.’

  ‘Ah. For a moment I thought you meant one of the battleships,’ he explained.

  The next day public departments, banks and business establishments closed. The Most Reverend Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, presided at Votive Mass in the Pro-Cathedral.

  Yearling, who was staying at a remote hotel in Connemara for the mayfly fishing, forgot the significance of the day until very late that night. He was drinking whiskey, not in the hotel, but unobtrusively in a little public house. One of the local people was playing a fiddle and Yearling had the seat beside the turf fire. There was a smoky oil lamp hanging from the ceiling which gave the room a small, shadowed look, and the men near him, to his delight, were speaking quietly together in Gaelic. Their voices, unaccountably, reminded him that this had been the day of the royal funeral. He thought of William Martin Murphy and, with the merest ghost of a smile, he remembered his refusal to be tapped on the shoulder by the dead king’s sword.

  The high grey walls of the workhouse shut out almost everything; they were a fortification against the life of the city, a barrier against time, which passed yet did not seem to pass. The visitors who came weekly were few; the inmates were many. Carts passed in and out on stated days with a jingling of harness and a creaking of shafts and a stumbling of hooves on the uneven cobbles, but these meant little to the old women who hobbled about the grounds in shapeless grey dresses, and nothing at all to those lying in the close-packed wards, their eyes fixed on the high ceilings for hours of silence. Here, too, Death came most frequently and with no noise at all. From where, Miss Gilchrist sometimes wondered: through the great arched gateway whether closed or open, up from the deep earth or down from the insubstantial sky? Three times it had come for her in the space of almost three years: once in daylight, when from beyond the screens about her bed the voices of the others and the clatter of crockery told her it was tea-time; once in the small hours when the candle in the hand of the sister lit the priest’s bending face; once when a giantlike thumb stretched down to anoint her from a limitless absence of either light or darkness. Yet she struggled back to the world again and at breakfast time the old woman whose turn it was to be on ward duty said:

  ‘We thought you were gone on us for certain yesterday, Gilchrist.’

  She was unable to speak. After a while she managed to assemble her surroundings once more; the rusted iron beds side by side, the high window, the bare uneven boards of the ward.

  ‘You’ll be off your feet for good this time, Gilchrist,’ the old woman said, coming back, ‘and you’re a lucky oul bitch in that. You won’t have to empty any more bedpans.’

  Miss Gilchrist smiled again. She had a sharp tongue, once well stocked for use. But now she kept to herself the answers that occurred so readily. They were no longer worth making. In a day or in a week; or in another three years, it would be all the same, whatever had been said or unsaid.

  She was content now to lie quietly and kn
ow nothing of what passed outside. She would not, she knew, ever again take her turn at emptying the slops or the bedpans, or scrub the walls down, or sweep the floors or attend at the morgue where Death laid out his conquests before they were carted off to the grave. Miss Gilchrist had taken her turn at washing them for their journey. One day in winter she had entered to do her work and screamed because there were seven dead babies on one of the slabs. She was to be reprimanded severely for her conduct, but nothing further was said to her because near dawn the next morning she had her second attack. After considerable thought she decided to speak to Father O’Connor about it. It was his habit now to make occasional visits. He had come first because Mrs. Bradshaw, her conscience still troubled about the servant she had been fond of, asked him. Then, seizing the opportunity for the exercise of Christian virtue, he decided to continue because he suffered each time he had to enter among the miserable and the destitute and it seemed good to him to offer it to God for salvation’s sake, for his own soul and that of his superior. It might be the means of saving Father Giffley from alcoholism; if not it was still part of his duty to practise the corporal works of mercy—to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick and imprisoned and to bury the dead.

  The thought of seven naked babies, side by side on the slab of the dead, was a terrible one. But then, everything about the workhouse was terrible; poverty and illness and loneliness and senility were its four guardian angels.

  ‘You must think of them as seven innocent souls,’ he told Miss Gilchrist, ‘seven new angels praising God in heaven.’

  Without changing her expression she said: ‘I want you to speak to Mrs. Bradshaw for me.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I want her to know what will happen to me when I die here.’

  ‘You’re distressing yourself . . .’ Father O’Connor said.

  ‘They’ll take me with the rest and bury me in a pauper’s grave. I want her to claim my body and save me from that.’

  He tried to say something, but it was difficult. Her face was grey and very small, her lips were colourless and ringed with dried spittle which cracked when she spoke. Her mind was fixed firmly now on what she wanted to say.

  ‘I’ve seen too many of them, Father, laid out there to be whipped off without a tear from a friend or a solitary soul to say goodbye. Do you know what I seen once?’

  She turned her face away and for a moment he thought she was wandering back to the incident of the babies again. But it wasn’t that.

  ‘Sometimes they forget to lock the back door of the morgue—the one that leads into the laneway. Once when I went in there was a scattering of little boys. Do you know what they were up to, Father? They were stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’

  He had learned enough these past few years to feel only regret. The children of need were capable of deeds far worse.

  ‘I would like to think that when I go someone will claim my poor body.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Mrs. Bradshaw,’ he promised. As always, his temptation to run away almost mastered his will to help. He fought it; for over two years it had been the same battle, trying not to surrender to disgust.

  ‘You mustn’t give way to morbid fancies,’ he insisted. ‘You can be sure you’ll see many and many a long day yet.’ He looked over at the high window. He saw, at a great distance it seemed, the Dublin mountains. They were, as always, fresh and beautiful. In surroundings such as that, among fields and hills, the old lady near him had been born. He looked back at the bed. She was shaking her head from side to side, denying something he had said.

  It was through Miss Gilchrist that he paid his first visit to Mary. He did so to ask Mary to visit the old woman. The meeting was embarrassing at first. Mary had been two years in his parish yet he had made no attempt to contact her, partly because of what had happened on the night she had called to the vestry with Fitz to arrange their marriage, partly because it was difficult to avoid reference to the world they had met in first. Mary offered him tea but he refused.

  ‘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 pus
hed 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.