Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  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.

  The rain increased until his clothes clung so tightly against his body that it was hard to walk. All their spite hung over him, trapped between rain-soaked houses, leaking roofs, gutter gurgling, wind-tormented streets. As he walked he looked about for shelter, passing door after door endlessly, until above gas-lit windows and frames of blackened paint he saw, reading laboriously through the rain: ‘Choice Wines James Gill & Son, And Spirits’. And went in.

  He had never been in a public house before and hesitated to find his bearings. The floor was bare wood, covered with a layer of sawdust. Three gas-lamps suspended in a row from the ceiling lit it. At the far end a group of men were in conversation. The man behind the counter had noticed him and stoo
d transfixed with shock.

  ‘A glass of whiskey,’ Father Giffley said.

  The man recovered a little and said: ‘Certainly, Father.’

  He went away.

  Father Giffley examined the fittings behind the bar. There was an oval mirror, with the words ‘Three Swallow Potstill Whiskey’ encircling it. From the middle of the oval his face looked back at him. The grey locks of hair were flattened about it by the rain. His clerical collar looked ridiculous. When the barman brought the whiskey he leaned forward and suggested:

  ‘There’s a snug at the back, Father.’

  ‘Snug? I don’t understand. Snug?’

  ‘A private room.’

  ‘Leave it there,’ Father Giffley insisted. The barman left the whiskey on the counter.

  ‘Certainly, Father.’

  ‘Bejaysus,’ one of the men told the group, ‘but it put the wind up me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you clatter it?’

  ‘With what might I ask?’

  ‘With your belt.’

  ‘A mad cow coming at me down the gangplank?’ the man asked. ‘Oh no bejaysus—none of that for yours truly.’

  The barman moved anxiously towards them.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Jumped into the water.’

  ‘You were right,’ another said. ‘Better a watery grave than a gory end.’

  The thought of his friend taking to the water before the charge of an enraged animal amused one of the company so much that he spluttered over his drink and said:

  ‘Well, Jaysus, Mary and Joseph but that’s a good one.’

  The barman with signs and whispered admonishments drew their attention. Then they all turned round and lapsed one by one into silence. One of them said sheepishly:

  ‘I beg your pardon, Father.’

  Father Giffley removed his eyes from the caricature in the mirror and said:

  ‘Why apologise to me? My name is not Jesus.’

  An astonishing thing happened. When he said the name ‘Jesus’ the men automatically raised their hats. That was habit. He had said the Name. Not at all the same thing as swearing with It. What were they? Dockers, cattle-drovers, seamen back home from voyaging? Dublinmen anyway. The raising of the hats proved it.

  He looked again at the caricature; the oval advertisement, the grey, drowned locks, the priestly collar, aware as he did so of the unease which his presence was causing. He was a Catholic priest in a public bar. He was giving scandal. That could be put right.

  ‘I was caught by the rain,’ he explained, ‘don’t let me disturb you.’

  After a moment one of them, more courageous than the rest, said heartily. ‘Divil the disturb, Father.’

  Then he called to the barman:

  ‘Why don’t you offer a towel to his reverence. He’s soaked to the skin.’

  But Father Giffley held up his hand and forbade it.

  ‘This is the best towel of them all,’ he said, finishing the whiskey. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘give me another for my journey, so that I won’t take pneumonia. And give the men here whatever they fancy.’

  They protested, but he insisted. They had a consultation of some sort while they waited for the drinks. At the end one man left. Then the drinks came and they vied with each other to be agreeable to him, saying what a terrible evening it was and how easy it would be to take a sickness out of such a wetting and how wise he had been to take the right kind of precaution. They told him they were dockers. He noticed the buttons in their coats.

  ‘Followers of Mr. Larkin, I see,’ he remarked. They said they were. Then, to their surprise he said firmly: ‘You do right.’

  At that moment the door opened and the man who had left earlier reappeared. He was now almost as wet as Father Giffley.

  ‘Did you get it?’ they asked him.

  ‘It’s outside the door,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this?’ Father Giffley asked.

  ‘He went to find you a cab, Father, it’ll save you another drenching.’

  For the first time in several lonely years someone had done him a kindness. Father Giffley was moved.

  ‘I am extremely obliged and grateful.’

  ‘For nothing, Father,’ the men assured him, ‘you’re more than welcome.’

  They saw him to the cab, which brought him home to a warm bath and a change of clothes. That was why he had taken the unusual course of using the general sitting room. His jacket and trousers were drying at the fire in his own room.

  ‘I think my presence here made Father O’Connor uneasy,’ he said.

  ‘He always retires early when he has the early mass,’ Father O’Sullivan explained.

  ‘That is not what I meant. He forgot this.’

  Father Giffley rose and picked up Yearling’s letter from the arm of the chair that Father O’Connor had been using. He took it back to his own chair with him; then, holding it up, he asked: ‘His Kingstown friends—do you think?’

  Father O’Sullivan avoided reply by rising to put the whiskey bottle back in the press.

  ‘Leave it where it is,’ Father Giffley commanded sharply.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Father O’Sullivan said. ‘I thought you were going to bed.’

  ‘We’ll see what his friends have to say first,’ Father Giffley said. ‘Listen.’

  As he deliberately opened the letter Father O’Sullivan advanced quickly towards him and said: ‘Please—I beg you not to.’

  Father Giffley looked up at him. ‘You will sit down, John. Over there, opposite me. Do as I tell you.’

  Knowing there would be a scene if he refused, Father O’Sullivan did so. As the other read the letter aloud, deliberating on it sentence by sentence, he gripped the arms of his chair and strove to keep the horror from his face. Opposition of any kind would precipitate a storm. His parish priest, he realised, was very near to madness.

  In the morning, when Father O’Connor and Father O’Sullivan were at breakfast, Father Giffley joined them briefly. He took the letter from his pocket and pushed it towards Father O’Connor.

  ‘Your property, I believe.’

  Father O’Connor stared at the pages; Father O’Sullivan lowered the cup he had been raising to his lips.

  ‘I am sorry your friend finds difficulty with the doctrine of the Fall,’ Father Giffley said, ‘his sympathies otherwise are admirable.’

  He turned to Father O’Sullivan. The skin of his face was blotched and taut, a pulse beat in the black vein which showed as a knot in his left temple.

  ‘Of France I know very little,’ he continued, ‘but Darwin, I believe, holds that we are descended from the apes. Isn’t that so, John?’

  Father O’Sullivan remained frozen, with nothing at all to say, until at last Father Giffley turned away from him and went to the door, where he paused and said generally:

  ‘It is possible—I think it eminently possible.’

  The door closed. They looked at each other.

  ‘He read it,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘he read my letter.’

  ‘The man is not well.’

  ‘My private correspondence—how dare he!’

  ‘He’s become very odd. You must try to understand him.’

  ‘I understand him very well,’ Father O’Connor said.

  ‘Father Giffley is sick.’

  Father O’Connor rose angrily and pushed back his chair.

  ‘A drunkard,’ he said, ‘who hates me.’

  He had almost reached the door when Father O’Sullivan’s quiet voice stopped him. ‘Your letter, Father.’

  Once again he had forgotten it. It lay on the tablecloth where Father Giffley had thrown it. This second oversight embarrassed him. He put the letter in his pocket without thanking Father O’Sullivan.

  ‘I am beginning to consider seriously what I should do,’ he said.

  ‘Forgive him,’ Father O’Sullivan suggested gently.

  ‘It is no longer a question of forgiveness only,’ Father O’Connor said bitterly. ‘Ther
e are other considerations.’

  He closed the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was raining. Mulhall, taking his breakfast by candlelight, heard the sprinkling of drops against the window as he ate.

  ‘Is it bad?’ he asked.

  His wife went over to peer out. In windows down the length of Chandlers Court the light of candles wavered above a pitch black street. A squall rattled the window pane as she looked, taking her by surprise.

  ‘It’ll be bad enough,’ she said.

  He filled his pipe, feeling the cold of the morning in his fingers. It would be two hours to the first of the light and by that time he would have the horse yoked and the cart loaded for the first delivery of the day.

  ‘Wear the sack about your shoulders,’ she advised him.

  She was now on her knees in front of the fire, preparing to light it.

  He puffed at his pipe.

  ‘Call Willie,’ she said, busy.

  ‘In a minute.’

  He was thinking of the day ahead; yoking up, driving through wintry streets, hoisting wet sacks and labouring up and down stairs with them. He was in no humour.

  ‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when I think Hennessy above has more sense than any of us. He only works when the weather is fine.’

  ‘Call Willie for me, like a good man,’ she urged.

  ‘It’s too early to call him.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ she said. ‘He wants to practise for half an hour before he goes out.’