Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  The newspapers that continued to be distributed claimed that the shipping strike was a flagrant breach of an agreement only one month old. Mr. Larkin protested that he could not get the men back to work.

  ‘If an army rebels,’ he was reported as saying, ‘what is the commander to do?’

  ‘He should be hanged for a rogue,’ Bradshaw said furiously, when he read it.

  ‘He’s a very wicked man,’ his wife agreed, ‘think of all those poor, suffering children.’

  ‘And a liar,’ Mr. Bradshaw added, as though she had not allowed him to finish.

  Yearling noted at the beginning of August that the men in the parcels department of the Tramway Company had been dismissed because they refused a managerial instruction to relinquish their membership of the Larkinite union. The dismissals were an obvious challenge. There would have to be a counter-stroke. Both the men in the parcels department of the Tramway Company and the boys dismissed from Independent Newspapers were employees of William Martin Murphy. He began to follow events with considerable interest, but without passion. He had no special feeling about the social order. It bored him. But he could understand the hatred it inspired in the many who suffered the brunt of its inequalities. Hunger was a great irritant. One day when a copy of the Larkinite paper The Irish Worker was offered to him in the street, he bought it and found the style fascinating. He read:

  ‘Every dog and devil, thief and saint, is getting an invitation to come to work for the Dublin Tramway Company. Every man applying is asked: Do you belong to Larkin’s Union?—if so, no employment.

  ‘Well, William Martin Murphy will know—I hope to his and Alderman Cotton’s satisfaction and the shareholders’ benefit—who is in Larkin’s Union, and who will have to be in it. Every man he is employing is known to us. What say Howard and Paddy Byrne? What say scab O’Neill? What say Kenna and Lawlor & Co.?

  ‘We have Them All on The List.

  ‘Mr. William Martin Murphy’s satellites, Gordon and Tresillian, have discharged some ten men for being in the Union.

  ‘Right, William the Saint. We have not moved yet and will not move until we are ready.

  ‘Woe betide Scabs then!’

  He made a point of calling on his newsagent. There was a picket outside.

  ‘I wish to add an extra paper to my weekly list,’ he said.

  ‘Certainly sir—which one?’

  ‘The Irish Worker.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said—The Irish Worker.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is not a publication we can obtain through any of the usual distributors.’

  ‘In that case you’ll have to get it through the unusual ones, I suppose.’

  ‘It may be difficult.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ Yearling said. ‘At least twenty of them were stuck under my nose in the course of half an hour’s walk through the city. There are some men prancing up and down outside your shop at this minute who, I am sure, can put you in touch with the most reliable of sources. Anyway, I am assuming you will see to it.’

  ‘We’ll do our very best, sir.’

  ‘Thank you. In that case I know I may expect it regularly.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Regularly. You may rely on it.’

  As he passed through the picket on his way out he paused to speak to the leader.

  ‘Interesting paper you get out,’ he said conversationally. ‘I like the style.’

  They stared in unison after him.

  Fitz had news for Mulhall during the same week. He went across each evening when he was not on shift work. He would bring a little tobacco and light Mulhall’s pipe for him, so that he could enjoy his one smoke of the day. He now occupied Willie’s bed, in the little room just off the living room. There were only two beds, so Willie now slept on the floor. He did not mind. Crippled, stricken, unable as yet to attend without help to any small, personal need, his father was still something of a god to him, a hero of great strength, gentle and good at home, without fear or price in the world outside it.

  ‘I’ve news for you this evening,’ Fitz said.

  ‘Pull over the chair,’ Mulhall invited.

  ‘On Saturday William Martin Murphy called all the tram men to a meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms. It started at midnight.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have gone,’ Mulhall said, getting angry.

  ‘Wait now,’ Fitz said. ‘Let me finish. He offered half a day’s pay to anyone who went to the meeting and when they went he offered them a shilling a week rise.’

  ‘Their demand is for two shillings.’

  ‘Wait now. The shilling was to be on condition that they’ll remain loyal and refuse to come out if Larkin calls them. He said if they go on strike he’ll spend a hundred thousand pounds to fight them.’

  ‘Had it any effect?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Fitz said, ‘The tram men will do what Larkin tells them.’

  ‘They’ll have to come out,’ Mulhall said, ‘not for the sake of the two shillings, but to stand by the messengers and the men in the parcels department.’

  He remained quiet for a time. Then he stirred with impatience and said: ‘If only I could be out and about.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk like that,’ Fitz said, ‘I’ll never give you another bit of news.’

  He found Mulhall’s pipe, filled it with tobacco and lit it for him. The small window let in so little of the evening light that he could see the tobacco reddening in the bowl. Then he helped to hoist up Mulhall so that he could smoke it.

  ‘Do you think Larkin will move?’

  ‘Certainly Larkin will move,’ Mulhall said, ‘he never drew back yet.’ Mulhall’s belief was unshakable.

  ‘I knew Jim,’ he said, ‘when we had nothing. We started the union in a back room in Townsend Street and two candles stuck in bottles was all the light we could afford. We were fighting the employers and we had to fight Sexton and the National Union of Dockers at the same time. Jim won’t draw back.’

  ‘You fought hard,’ Fitz said, ‘all your life.’

  ‘While I could,’ Mulhall agreed. ‘Now I’ll fight no more.’

  ‘You did your bit—and more than it.’

  ‘Never any more,’ Mulhall repeated.

  He did not want comfort and his tone rejected Fitz’s offer of it. As they sat in silence and the dusk deepened he stared straight in front of him. The room became even smaller. It had a closed-in air. Even when he was not smoking it smelled of tobacco, of successive pipes lit and smoked and laid aside on days that looked at him with expressionless eyes. No gaoler was necessary now. He was its prisoner for ever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The bustle was familiar—and yet there was something odd about it, something that made it seem not quite the same as in previous years. It puzzled Yearling, this strange difference in an annual event he had looked at year after year since his childhood days. The ingredients were the same; the stream of hackneys and motor cars on their way to the grounds of the Royal Dublin Society, the foreign visitors, the military, the strings of horses, the riders in black caps and scarlet coats and tightly cut breeches. The ladies as usual engaged his special interest. Most of them were at their best; fashionable and feminine and agreeably pretty. A hefty and horselike few displeased him. That was as usual too. He had once described the ladies of the Dublin Horse Show as a mixture of Sweeties and Tweedies. The remark came back to him from his remote student days. Perhaps youth was the missing ingredient. He was getting old. He sighed and consulted his pocket watch again. Father O’Connor was now half an hour late. It was uncharacteristic and puzzling.

  His interest in the traffic flagged. Yearling returned his watch to his pocket and walked as far as the bridge, in the hope that the name on the parapet would restore his good spirits:

  ‘Balls Bridge

  Erected 1791

  Rebuilt 1835

  Widened and improved

  1904’

  Henry Grattan, he remembered, had fought a duel
here when Ireland still had a parliament of her own. Self-government had been sold in return for place and pension. Pitt’s fear then had been a French invasion. Now England’s anxiety was that the same old Home Rule question would cause a civil war between the Redmondites and the Carsonites with weapons supplied to both sides by courtesy of the Kaiser. A distressful country. Napper Tandy was right.

  It was an August morning of bright sunshine. When he lifted his eyes to the water and then upstream towards Herbert Park its beauty filled him with pleasure. The trees crowding over the river from either bank broke the sunshine into gleaming shafts; the water was a living floor of black and gold in a tunnel of green. At a point where the bank sloped gently into the water a little girl was washing a handkerchief. The sight put him in mind of a street rhyme which he was trying hard to recall when Bradshaw tapped him on the shoulder and said urgently:

  ‘Where on earth is Father O’Connor. Hasn’t he arrived?’

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ Yearling said.

  ‘But you were to meet him on the corner. What are you doing on the bridge?’

  ‘Trying to remember a street rhyme,’ Yearling admitted.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve missed him.’

  ‘I missed something,’ Yearling confessed, ‘but not Father O’Connor. Youth, probably.’

  Bradshaw stared at him.

  ‘Yearling,’ he said seriously, ‘you are becoming distinctly odd. Florence and I sometimes worry about you. Do you realise that you’re talking a lot of incomprehensible nonsense?’

  ‘Is it incomprehensible that a man should mourn over his youth?’

  Bradshaw fumbled impatiently for his watch.

  ‘It’s half past eleven,’ Yearling informed him, ‘I’ve just looked at mine.’

  Bradshaw pushed his watch back again.

  ‘I am anxious about Father O’Connor. And you take it all so lightly.’

  ‘I can see the corner perfectly well from here. Besides, I like the name of this bridge. It amuses me.’

  Bradshaw hesitated, saw what he meant and said:

  ‘I am not entertained by undergraduate bawdiness.’

  ‘I remember now that you never were.’

  ‘Some day,’ Bradshaw added, ‘it will land you in trouble. It comes out sometimes in the wrong company.’ Yearling turned again to the parapet, sorry to have roused the other to ill temper. It was an easy thing to do. Bradshaw did not mean it. Blood pressure was responsible. Or some abiding anxiety about society and the world.

  The child was still gravely at play.

  ‘Look at the little girl.’

  ‘What’s she up to?’ Bradshaw asked, peering.

  ‘She’s washing her handkerchief.’

  ‘That’s an odd thing.’

  ‘She’s playing at being a mother, I imagine. The instinct comes out, even at that age. Don’t you find it moving?’

  Bradshaw peered more intently.

  ‘She’ll fall in,’ he decided.

  ‘Now I’ve remembered the street rhyme,’ Yearling said, ‘it goes like this.’

  He closed his eyes, digging deep into his memory for the words.

  ‘Down by the river where the green grass grows

  Where Mary Murphy washes her clothes

  She sang and she sang and she sang so sweet

  And she called for her sweetheart down the street

  Sweetheart, sweetheart will you marry me?

  Yes love, yes love at half past three

  Half past three is very very late

  So we’ll have our party at half past eight.’

  With guarded politeness Bradshaw asked:

  ‘Where do you hear these things?’

  ‘From the children of the back streets when I’m on my way to the foundry. They play these singing games. I find them fascinating.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Bradshaw was fidgeting again.

  ‘It’s nice to have seen Mary Murphy,’ Yearling said. ‘I wonder will I ever meet her sweetheart?’

  Bradshaw turned suddenly away from him and waved.

  ‘There he is.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Father O’Connor, dammit, he’s crossing the street.’

  Yearling turned from the river too and saw the priest, with quick glances to left and right, hurrying through the traffic. When he joined them his face was red with exertion. He tried to shake hands with both of them at once.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you.’

  ‘Something happened, Father,’ Bradshaw said, ‘I know by your manner.’

  ‘Something dreadful,’ Father O’Connor said.

  ‘Rest for a moment,’ Yearling advised.

  Father O’Connor leaned against the parapet.

  ‘I had to walk,’ he said, ‘there were no hackneys available. Everything hirable has been snapped up.’

  ‘But . . . the trams?’ Bradshaw asked.

  The truth flashed suddenly into Yearling’s mind. Of course something had been missing, something so large and obvious that he had not thought of it until now.

  ‘The trams have stopped working,’ Father O’Connor said. ‘Mr. Larkin stopped them at ten o’clock.’

  They saw for themselves afterwards, while on their way to the Imperial Hotel for lunch. Tramcars lay abandoned all along the route, left at whatever spot they happened to have reached at the appointed hour of ten o’clock. Their numbers grew until at Nelson’s Pillar a whole fleet stood driverless, surrounded by an excited crowd. There were more policemen than Yearling had ever seen before. They had surrounded the drivers and conductors.

  ‘What are they up to?’ Yearling wondered.

  ‘Arresting them, I hope,’ Bradshaw said.

  ‘They can’t arrest them for going on strike.’

  ‘They can arrest them for causing obstruction,’ Bradshaw answered. ‘I’ve heard it argued very convincingly.’

  So Mr. Larkin had carried out his threat. Yearling pulled up his motor car some distance from the hotel. It would be better to walk the rest of the way. A police inspector, seeing them approach, called two policemen to escort them to the hotel.

  ‘Too bad this should happen during Show week,’ he said to them.

  ‘Is it a total stoppage?’ Yearling asked.

  ‘Seems to be,’ he said, ‘they’ve left the cars lying all over the routes. We’ll be making an effort to bring them in very soon.’

  ‘Plenty of your chaps around.’

  ‘Enough to keep the situation under control, I would hope,’ the inspector said, smiling.

  ‘I wonder,’ Yearling said.

  Mrs. Bradshaw found lunch a disappointment. She had looked forward so much to a day of elegance, fashion, interesting conversations, pleasant encounters. Instead the sole topic of the dining room was the situation. Men kept rising from their tables to stare through the windows at the crowded street below. Latecomers brought further news.

  ‘The company is organising a skeleton staff,’ one of them said to Yearling, ‘but the police say the cars won’t be allowed to run after dark.’

  She knew nothing of these matters and found the last remark quite frightening.

  ‘This is only giving in to them,’ Father O’Connor said.

  Bradshaw looked at Yearling, who raised his eyebrows.

  On their way back to the car they saw the police at the Pillar clearing a pathway through the crowd. A tramcar rattled past them. Two policemen stood on the front platform, guarding the driver. Later, in Mount Street, they saw the same tram. All its windows had been shattered, glass and woodwork littered the street. The driver and the two policemen were not to be seen.

  The incident made a deep impression. Father O’Connor, who was to have gone to the Bradshaws for dinner, decided it would be better in the circumstances to go straight home from the Show grounds. There would be no trams after dark to take him from Kingstown, hackneys would be uncertain, it would be unfair to let Mr. Yearling drive him. Darkness might well bring serious
trouble. He decided to walk back on his own, so that Mrs. Bradshaw would not be obliged to travel into the city with them. All agreed with reluctance that this was wise. There might be unpleasant scenes. He hoped they would enjoy their evening and set off.

  It was strange to walk back alone. A few trams were now running, each guarded in front and at the back by a policeman. Impulse brought him towards Mount Street. The shattered tram had gone. What had happened, he wondered, what outbreak of back-street violence had ambushed and wrecked it? He examined the fragments of wood and broken glass which had escaped whoever had tidied up. There was blood on the ground. The clotted stains made him feel sick. He remembered the night, years before, when a torchlight procession and the thunder of socialist speeches affected him in the same way. He had thought at first it was the wine Yearling had pressed on him, but it had not been that at all. Anger and violence and blood unmanned him, yet some morbid need now sent him searching the streets aimlessly for further evidence. Perhaps it was the need to look them in the face.

  He crossed back over Mount Street Bridge and found himself passing Beggars’ Bush Barracks on his way to Sandymount. At first the roads were busy with Horse Show traffic, but at Irishtown this was left behind. He saw no additional signs of violence and when a tram approached at last he signalled it to stop. The police sergeant at the back saluted and helped him to mount.