Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  ‘I am not interested in damned horse trams at the moment. I am entirely occupied with the problem of getting Florence and myself home in safety.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Yearling explained. ‘I’ve been thinking about it on and off all evening. Well—safe journey.’

  ‘And to you. Wish the same to Father O’Connor.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Yearling assured him.

  Bradshaw rang off. His wife, who had heard only one side of the conversation was curious.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

  ‘I think it typical of Yearling,’ Bradshaw complained. ‘I tell him the city is in the throes of a revolution and he asks me if I remember the time he stole a horse tram.’

  ‘What horse tram?’ Mrs. Bradshaw asked. Bradshaw went purple.

  ‘Damn it, Florence,’ he exploded, ‘you are every bit as bad as he is.’

  Pat found himself after an unreckonable time at the door of Lily’s house. At first the rioting stopped him from crossing to the south side of the city. He wandered northwards instead, dazed and without any particular goal. His horse and cart had disappeared altogether, the blood had caked hard on his collar. At some point he took off his scarf and wound it tightly about his head, hoping in that way to stop the flow of blood. He was weak, his wound throbbed, but for most of his journey he felt light and happy. The streets he passed gave him the idea that he was calling on Lily to take her somewhere, to a music-hall, or to the Park—he could not quite remember where. He would apologise for the blood and dirt on his clothes. She would understand. Lily nearly always understood. Yet when he reached her door he stood for a long time, undecided whether he should knock or go away again. The feeling of lightness and happiness left him. There was something wrong. She was not expecting him. He was not dressed to take her out. He had forgotten his money. He should be back at Nolan & Keyes, to unyoke and stable his horse, to collect and sort his delivery dockets for the next day. He leaned his back against the door and began to think it out.

  The street was dark and untrafficked, the air soothing and warm. A cat, methodically investigating the line of refuse bins, took a long time to approach and pass him. It moved with great stealth, a furry silence, strangely soothing to watch. When it had gone he made up his mind and knocked on the door.

  At first Lily thought he had been drinking. She warned him to be quiet and led him into the parlour.

  ‘Give me a match,’ she said.

  She lit the gas and turned to take stock of him.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you’re destroyed!’

  At her words his hands went automatically to the scarf on his head.

  ‘You’ve been in a fight. Was it a policeman?’

  ‘Not a policeman, Lily. It happened down the city.’ He looked around.

  She took his arm and said: ‘Sit here—you look terrible.’

  He began to tell her what had happened. The throbbing made it difficult. She undid the scarf as he spoke and gently lifted the matted hair away from the wound. It was long and jagged. Blood oozed very slowly from it.

  ‘Come down to the kitchen, I’ll wash and dress it for you.’

  ‘Where’s the household?’

  ‘The landlady is in bed. I’ll have to tell her you’re here.’

  ‘Give me ten minutes. Then I’ll go.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Lily said, ‘you can’t go travelling home with that.’

  She cleaned the wound and washed the blood from his neck. For the hundredth time he noted how small and delicate her hands were. They were the hands he had always loved. They soothed more than the mere physical pain. Because they were Lily’s hands he closed his eyes, the hurt that had nothing to do with bottles and broken flesh dying away under their compassionate movements.

  ‘I’m only getting you into trouble,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll go up and explain to her. She can’t turn you out the way you are. Wait here.’

  Lily was gone a long time. When she came back she had a couple of blankets on her arm. She led him into the parlour again.

  ‘She says you can sleep here.’

  Lily arranged the blankets about him and settled cushions under his head.

  ‘Now I’ll make tea.’

  ‘Lily . . .’ he began.

  ‘Don’t stir.’ She went back down to the kitchen.

  He found a cigarette and lit it. Lying on the carpeted floor did not bother him. He had slept on harder beds. The room was heavily furnished. There was a picture of Queen Victoria on one wall and photographs of uniformed groups. Souvenirs and trophies in the china cabinet recorded domestic comings and goings that had finished with the Boer War.

  He sat up when Lily brought him tea and bread and butter. In an effort to conceal how he felt he asked. ‘How do you stick that oul wan?’

  Lily, thinking he meant the landlady, said sharply: ‘I like that. She’s been good enough to let you stay.’

  ‘I mean her nibs,’ Pat said, indicating Queen Victoria.

  Lily dismissed the picture with a shrug.

  ‘That oul wan let Ireland starve,’ Pat insisted.

  ‘She’s dead and Ireland is still starving,’ Lily said, ‘so I don’t see that you can put all the blame on Her Majesty.’

  ‘Ireland will be free one day. Royalty will go and the employers will go.’

  ‘You should have explained all that to your comrades-in-arms that gave you the clatter with the bottle.’

  He gave up pretending.

  ‘God, Lily,’ he said, ‘I feel awful.’

  ‘Then lie back,’ she advised.

  She took away the tea things and settled him comfortably.

  ‘I’ll take away your jacket and wash the collar.’

  He took her hand and said: ‘Don’t go, Lily.’

  She hesitated. Her face became sad. Then she disengaged her hand and touched his cheek.

  ‘I must,’ she told him gently, ‘you know I must.’ She put out the light and closed the door. Some time later he heard footsteps moving back and forth on the floor above his head. He knew it was Lily going to bed. He listened until at last they ceased. Then he lay thinking about her. It was hard to sleep, knowing her to be so near. It was hard not to rise and go searching in the darkness. His love for her had been like that for a long time, a lonely desire searching vainly for a room. When he closed his eyes the air became heavy and hard to breathe. He dreamed fitfully, knocking on door after door in search of Lily. Each in turn was opened by Queen Victoria.

  ‘This will do me,’ Father O’Connor said.

  The cab stopped and he got out.

  ‘Sleep well,’ Yearling said, lowering the window.

  ‘Thank you for a most hospitable evening.’

  ‘A great pleasure,’ Yearling assured him and waved benevolently as the cab jolted forward again.

  The night was mild and starless. In front of Father O’Connor the railings of the church were faintly visible and behind them the bulk of the church rose darkly. It had been a distressing journey through streets that looked as though they had been hit by a hurricane. Shop windows had gaping holes, lamp-posts were shattered and bent, the wheels crunched over scattered glass and skidded against bricks and debris. In Father O’Connor’s memory nothing like it had happened before. Yearling had refused to agree that it was the handiwork of the strikers. If not, then it was an indirect effect. The lowest elements of the city were prepared now to engage the police, challenging the law and social order in pitched battles. It was a sign that revolt had percolated to the degraded depths of slumland. Here was proof, if indeed proof were needed, of the evil fruits one must be prepared to expect. The challenge to God and religion would not be long delayed.

  Opening the hall door he let himself in quietly and turned up the gas light. He put his hat on the hallstand and arranged his umbrella, taking care that it would not fall during the night, as Father Giffley’s so often did. As he turned the hall door opened and Father O’Sullivan stepped in. With a shock he saw that the
re was blood on his face and his hands and on the white band of his collar.

  ‘Father,’ he said, ‘you are hurt.’

  ‘Hush,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘don’t waken Father Giffley.’

  Father O’Connor lowered his voice.

  ‘You were caught in the riots?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Father O’Sullivan said. ‘I’ve been out seeing what I could do. There were some who were badly hurt. A little soap and water will clean it all away.’ When Father O’Connor continued to look doubtful, he became concerned and said apologetically.

  ‘I assure you, Father, that I haven’t a scratch. Please don’t worry.’

  He went past and down the hall. The shoulders of his coat were stained and there was dust on its skirt. Father O’Connor stared after him. He stood in the hallway for some minutes after Father O’Sullivan had gone. It was very quiet and he could hear the buzzing of the gas mantle. His face, reflected in the mirror of the hallstand, was suddenly haggard, his jaw tense with pain.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Thursday, sixth of June 1912, Feast of Corpus Christi, white being the liturgical colour, Father Giffley took the eight o’clock mass. That evening, during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the Introit kept recurring to him. It had been his intention to speak briefly on it at mass, but at the last moment he had changed his mind. He could not bring himself to say:

  ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

  ‘He fed them on the fat of wheat, alleluia; and filled them with honey out of the rock!’

  To address metaphors of wheat and honey to unfortunates who were spending most of their time on strike seemed inappropriate. Father O’Connor, however, had found no such difficulty. During the ten o’clock mass his voice had penetrated to Father Giffley through the partly open door of the vestry. He told his listening congregation that however much they might lack for material comforts in comparison with the more well-to-do, as Catholics they had access to a daily Banquet which was nothing less than the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Here was a spiritual food, necessary to salvation, which was the daily right of the poorest Catholic in the world, but forbidden to the non-Catholic, however rich in worldly goods he might be. Here truly, said Father O’Connor, was no mere bodily fare, but the fat of wheat referred to in the Introit of the mass, here was the honey out of the rock. For these riches, the gift of the Father, let them join the psalmist in rejoicing to God our Helper on this great feast of the Body of Christ.

  Father Giffley walked rigidly and angrily as the procession moved about the church grounds. Under the canopy, borne by four Confraternity men, Father O’Connor held the monstrance aloft, the chasuble draped about his shoulders and upheld hands. He had been celebrant at solemn benediction. Father Giffley, dressed only in surplice and soutane, assisted by holding his cope on the right-hand side; Father O’Sullivan assisting in the same manner on his left. Before them, walking backwards with occasional wary glances behind, a young altar boy offered incense from the Thurible. Three puffs of aromatic smoke rose at each incensing, accompanied by the threefold tap of the Thurible against its silver-coloured chain. Behind the priests walked the little children. Some with surplices or white veils, some even with bunches of cheap flowers sang ‘O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine’ and kept glancing about to locate their parents among the onlookers. Their voices reached out beyond the church grounds into the streets, which were hot and stuffy under the evening sunshine.

  Where had the children got the flowers? Father Giffley wondered. Some had come from wasteland plots, for he himself had told them to gather the humble flowers that were free to all—the daisies, the buttercups, the wild, unnameable growths that for all he knew might be weeds. But some had the more cultivated kind. Father Giffley did not take much note of flowers. The wild kind that spread along grasslands and ditches were pleasant enough, but the gardens of the well-to-do he despised as so many useless acres of multi-coloured vegetation. Father O’Connor had suggested buying a supply of flowers to distribute to the first few ranks of processionists.

  ‘It is merely a suggestion,’ Father O’Connor had said.

  ‘We should distribute onions and turnips and cabbages to them to carry,’ Father Giffley said, ‘then we might have some right to admonish them to rejoice to God their Helper.’

  Father O’Sullivan, who heard the exchange, left the room, remembering that he must make ready the surplices and veils which Father Giffley kept for distribution among the children, most of whom were too poor to supply their own. Father O’Connor had made no reply.

  Anger accompanied Father Giffley through the length of the journey, anger at the plight of the children, anger at his own powerlessness, anger, most of all, at the pale face of Father O’Connor the celebrant, whose cope he held in apparent priestly brotherhood. This man was content (Father Giffley reflected) in the thought that the fat of wheat and the honey out of the rock were safely stored in the strongrooms of his middle-class friends, to be distributed to the destitute in small doses from time to time. Under the auspices of the good ladies of Kingstown, no doubt. The time had come when these outcasts were demanding something more than figurative nourishment. Walking in the sunshine, with the voices of the children in his ears, the Thurible tapping its three-beat praise in front of him, the cope of his hated curate held ceremoniously outward by his hand, Father Giffley, without any feelings of pity, but with an anger that was not altogether sane, wished them well. If they could succeed in toppling the society this insensitive young fool believed in, he would listen with joy to the crashing and the pandemonium.

  Some distance away, out of earshot of the children’s singing, Rashers leaned on the parapet of the bridge. The iron was hot and comforting under his elbows. When he looked down the water of the basin showed him the bridge with his own image planted in the centre. To his left, rising out of the water, was the grey stone wall of Boland’s granary, with great open doors where ships had been unloading some time earlier in the afternoon. Inside he could see the sacks of grain piled one on the other. Weeds grew at intervals from ancient cracks in the wall and these, too, were reflected in the water, profuse, colourful, without movement in the June evening. A pigeon which had discovered a hole in one of the grain bags at the bottom of the pile was pecking patiently at it to make it bigger, so that the grain would spill out. Rashers had seen them at it often; it was a trick that was part of the granary pigeon’s inheritance. Pigeons had it easy, Rashers reflected, as the bridge trembled under the wheels of the traffic and dislodged dust made tiny whirlpools in the water beneath it.

  When he looked down the street, Rashers could see the front of the bakery, a greystone building with lines of windows, granary floors, hoists and platforms. Somewhere near the top the pigeons had their nests. They came and went as he watched. They were sleek and fat with glossy coats. They exercised above the roof and watched the comings and goings of carts. In the wake of each load grain littered the cobbles and the pigeons flew down to search. The grain in the evening sunlight was golden, the green and purple feathers about the necks of the birds had a healthy sheen.

  Rashers was hungry. The warm odour of the bakery set up an aching in his mouth and his belly. Mrs. Bartley, if he asked her, would give him a cup of tea and a slice of bread when he got home, but his hunger was for more than that. He watched the pigeon still at work on the sack and thought of crisp, freshly baked loaves. It seemed a long way back to Chandlers Court. All day he had worked moving rubble from the garden of a woman in Sandymount, in the hope that she would offer him an evening meal as part of his payment. But when he finished she had left to attend benediction for the feast, leaving word that he should call back for his money tomorrow. Now the dog would be waiting for him and he would have nothing to give it. It was well for the pigeons flying high above the streets, mating, resting, pilfering grain. Tonight Rusty could be let out to root in the bins, with the chance of picking up God knows what class of poison
. He himself could impose on Mrs. Bartley, a thing that troubled him, for she had not much more than himself. He stared at his own reflection, trying to think of an alternative.

  The pigeon at the sack had been joined by three others. They knew what was afoot and stood waiting for the hole to grow and the grain to spill. They were patient. It was part of their way of existence and had happened many times before.

  Father Giffley, when the procession was over, called the clerk from the vestry to his study so that Father O’Connor had to disrobe without the assistance which was his due as celebrant. Father O’Sullivan collected the veils and surplices from the children and put them away in the wickerwork hamper. Father O’Connor knelt for some time in private prayer in the vestry, which smelled of incense and flowers. The odours and the hush were pleasant at first. Later they made him lonely, so that he longed for companionship. But he continued to pray, in thanksgiving to God for the gift of priesthood, the power of his hands to change bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Lord. There was a moment when his realisation of the mystery of it raised his thoughts into ecstasy. He continued to pray until all was as usual again and the vestry and the flowers and the lingering incense existed once more about him.

  Very quiet and still, Rashers thought the evening was. For the moment the pigeon had given over his work at the sack and stood with the other three, as though in consultation. Bob Fitzpatrick, crossing the bridge on his way home, waved a greeting. His face was black from the furnaces. Easy knowing the wife and the children were away. He would have washed his face before leaving the job if they were at home. A man who knew Rashers slightly stopped to stand beside him and together they watched as the pigeon resumed its work.

  ‘I’ve seen them at that a hundred times,’ the man commented.

  ‘You’d wonder at it,’ Rashers said, ‘you wouldn’t think a pigeon would have the brains.’

  ‘More brains than many a Christian,’ said the man, ‘like the rat.’