Strumpet City (54 page)

‘Jeremiah had three faults that make a bad publican,’ Rashers said. ‘He stocked only the best, he kept too easy a slate and his best customer was himself.’

‘A good man’s failing,’ Pat said.

‘It put Jeremiah in Stubbs,’ Rashers finished, ‘and in the heel of the hunt it put him in Glasnevin.’

The sound of a handbell attracted the attention of the waiting women as the man from Donegan’s turned the corner into the street. He nodded over at Pat. Then he began to parade up and down. The noise brought one of The Erin’s Isle clerks to the door. Eventually Mr. Silverwater himself appeared. He found the bellringer parading up and down, bawling out the claims of Mr. Donegan to the patronage of his own customers. Mr. Silverwater was astounded.

‘Hey, you,’ he shouted, ‘get to hell out of my street.’

The bellringer ignored him. Mr. Silverwater read the board in front and when the bellringer turned he suffered the shock of reading the same message on the back.

‘Donegan’s for Value

Best Prices

All Welcome’

‘My customers,’ Mr. Silverwater yelled at Pat, who had crossed over to sympathise with him. ‘He wants my customers.’

‘That’s shocking,’ Pat said.

‘What’s the matter with Donegan?’ Mr. Silverwater asked. ‘We’re good friends. We often play poker together.’

‘Maybe you beat him too often,’ Pat suggested.

‘We’ve been playing for maybe fifteen years,’ Silverwater said, ‘it couldn’t be that.’

‘He’s taking advantage of the times to extend his trade,’ Pat suggested. ‘Business is business.’

‘Business be damned,’ Mr. Silverwater said.

Then he yelled again.

‘Hey, get back to your own streets.’

‘You won’t shift him that way,’ Pat said, ‘let me talk to him.’

He went over to the bellringer. They held an animated discussion out of earshot of Mr. Silverwater. Pat returned. The bellringer went off.

‘How did you do it?’ Mr. Silverwater asked.

‘I told him you’re a friend of Mr. Donegan, and it wasn’t very nice to cause trouble between you. I said you played poker together.’

‘That was it. That was exactly my very strong emotions,’ Mr. Silverwater approved. ‘We are poker friends for years.’

‘The trouble is,’ Pat continued, ‘he’ll keep away from your shop all right—but will that stop him from parading the streets your customers live in?’

The villainy of it made Mr. Silverwater speechless. He nodded his head several times, unable to find words.

‘I could tell you what to do,’ Pat added. Mr. Silverwater clutched his arm.

‘You speak,’ he invited. ‘I like you. You tell me.’

‘Get a bellringer of your own. Send him around the neighbourhood every day.’ Pat pointed to Rashers. ‘There’s a man over there that’s popular and well known.’

He called to Rashers, who shuffled over. Mr. Silverwater looked him up and down.

‘Can you ring a bell?’ he asked Rashers.

‘Everything from a door bell to a church bell,’ Rashers confirmed.

‘And you know the neighbourhood?’

‘Born and reared in it—man and boy.’

‘Do you want a job?’

‘Lead the way,’ Rashers said.

Mr. Silverwater did not hesitate.

‘Come to me in the morning. I’ll give you a start.’

Rashers said he would consider it an honour.

‘I’ll fix Donegan,’ Mr. Silverwater swore.

They parted.

‘You’re a decent man,’ Rashers said to Pat as they walked back towards Chandlers Court.

‘It worked like a charm,’ Pat agreed.

‘If I’d the price of it I’d stand you a drink.’

‘We’ll take the wish for the deed,’ Pat said. He went off smiling. Rashers made his bargain with Mr. Silverwater. The job was worth ten shillings a week to him. He was furnished with sandwich boards which had the advantage of keeping out some of the cold. He was given a handbell and instructed to parade the neighbourhood during mornings and afternoons. One of his perquisites was a glass of milk and a bun on Saturdays when the shop closed and he had helped to put up the shutters. Life was a little better, but he was not happy. He found it hard to get about. Sometimes, especially on wet days, his bad leg ached and made him hobble. Sometimes his chest pained abominably and dizziness made the streets spin and spin about him. He began for the first time to be troubled by the hunger of others. The men who joked as he passed were gaunt and dispirited, the women he rang his bell at were hollow-eyed and worn. Little children pressed their faces to the glass on Saturdays to watch him eat and made the bun stick in his throat. He trudged through the streets and rang his bell and made up cheerful jingles to cry beneath the windows. But his heart was full of anxiety and his spirit was beginning to bow in defeat.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

For two months Father O’Connor ministered in his stricken city. It had become a world of picket lines, thundering speeches, convoys that moved under police protection, bitter outbreaks of street fighting that were followed by day after day of apathy and misery. They were reaping now the fruits of their disobedience. They shook collection boxes at him: ‘Help the locked-out workers.’ God helped those who helped themselves. If they signed the undertaking to obey the lawful instructions of their employers there would be an immediate end to collection boxes and violence. But no. They listened only to Larkin. Pride it was.

Hunger was in the sky. Rashers, limping on his rounds, read it above him in large letters. As the weeks of the lock-out passed it continued to surprise him that a condition he had grown to regard as exclusively his should have become so general. Even the Fitzpatricks were selling their sticks of furniture. He had spotted the wife a couple of times already in the queue at The Erin’s Isle and that yellow-faced bitch of a Hennessy one with her. Giving her a helping hand with the bargaining, moryah—in return never doubt it for a cut out of what was coming.

Yearling, walking the city too, found it all as he had predicted. The challenge of the employers’ ultimatum had been taken up, as he had known it would be. Now there was deadlock. They would fight it out through the autumn; perhaps into winter. By banding together to break Larkinism the employers had turned an industrial struggle into a crusade. That, of course, was what William Martin Murphy had wanted. He heard the revolution call from the lips of the little children as he walked to the foundry. They had new songs about it and they sang one of them for him to the air of the latest ragtime thing about Alexander’s Band.

‘Come on along, come on along

And join Jim Larkin’s Union

Come on along, come on along

And join Jim Larkin’s Union

You’ll get a loaf of bread and a pound of tea

And a belt of a baton from the D.M.P.’

They knew him well now and were no longer in any way afraid of him, and when he shared his loose change with them they gathered about him and they all talked at once. They told him their mammies got food packs from Liberty Hall where a countess and other ladies were making up parcels of bread and cocoa and giving them out to them and they said there were ships full of food belonging to Jim Larkin and they were coming from England today, all the people had marched down to meet them. He asked them if they knew where England was and one of them said yes it was over the sea in Liverpool and the rest said yes that’s where it was. So he said he would go down to see the food ships too if they would tell him the way and they led him along. But at the outskirts of the crowd he stopped them and said they must all go back now so as not to get hurt among all the people and he pushed his way through on his own.

The crowd was tightly packed. But his height gave him the advantage over most of the others and because he was well dressed and carried a cane under his arm and said excuse me with a voice of authority they made way for him.

The ship was covered from bow to stern with slogans and coloured bunting. Along the rails, smoking and talking and watching the activity, leaned several men whom Yearling recognised. They were members of the British Trade Union Congress. Jim Larkin was among them. He was a fine-looking man, full of confidence. There had been the usual speeches, you could feel it in the air. And whenever the men guided the laden trolleys down the gangplanks and pushed them through laneways of people to the waiting floats great cheers broke out. All this could be related with excellent effect to Ralph Bradshaw. Better, in a way, than that horse tram. The crowd cheered again and the bowler-hatted figure immediately in front of him joined in wildly. When it died away he tapped his shoulder. The head turned slightly. He had a glimpse of a thin excited face. Under the bowler a bandage showed bloodstains that were being gradually effaced by time and weather.

‘Has Mr. Larkin spoken?’

‘He has, sir.’

‘Pity . . .’

A conversational opening occurred to him and he said: ‘You’ve been injured recently, I see.’

Hennessy stiffened. He turned around as fully as the crowd permitted. The broad shoulders, the light cane tucked firmly under the well-tailored armpit, convinced him. He hedged.

‘Just a little knock, Superintendent.’

Yearling hid his surprise.

‘A baton charge, no doubt?’

Hennessy thought quickly.

‘Ah no, Superintendent, nothing like that. A wardrobe I was moving for a lady fell on me.’

Yearling looked severe and squared his shoulders.

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Take my advice and keep well away from the other thing. Our chaps are well equipped to deal with trouble.’

‘I know that,’ Hennessy said. ‘I seen it often enough.’

The crowd cheered again. This time Hennessy remained silent.

‘What name has the foodship?’

‘The Hare,
Superintendent.

‘The Hare,’
Yearling repeated. ‘And your own name?’

‘Hennessy. Aloysius Hennessy.’

The face looking up at him reminded him of a small dog waiting to be struck. Yet there was refinement in it. And the eyes, large, long suffering, had liveliness and intelligence.

‘How did you know I was a superintendent?’ he asked, dropping his severity and becoming conversational.

‘The build,’ Hennessy said immediately, ‘and the cane. Sure what would you be doing here otherwise?’

As he spoke Hennessy smiled. Yearling responded. His deception shamed him a little. Had he not enough advantage, without this. The crowd cheered again, still without help from Hennessy. Yearling, troubled a little by what he had done, said in a friendly tone:

‘Cheer away and never mind me. There’s no law in the book against cheering.’

‘I suppose there isn’t,’ Hennessy agreed. But he stayed silent. It would be unmannerly, to say the least, in front of a plain clothes superintendent.

That evening on the train to Kingstown he met Bradshaw. Opening his paper and sitting beside him he said:

‘Do I look like a superintendent?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Today I was mistaken for a superintendent of police. It’s a useful thing to know.’

He spread out the paper. There was a long report about the ship and the speeches. Larkin, thanking the workers of England for their magnificent support, had said:

‘You have broken the starvation boom.’

‘An odd name—
The Hare,
’ Yearling remarked.

‘I’ve been reading about that,’ Bradshaw said, ‘why don’t they mind their own business over there and leave us to mind ours. They are only prolonging the thing.’

‘It cost five thousand pounds.’

‘And a ship. Surely from their own point of view that’s a criminal waste. Why not send the money?’

Because a name on a subscription list meant nothing. But a ship sailing in with food while the bands played and the flags and the slogans waved above cheering crowds, that was poetry. Dublin—a besieged city. ‘You have broken the Starvation Boom.’

‘Do you remember Mary Murphy?’

‘Mary Murphy?’ Bradshaw repeated.

Yearling quoted:

‘Down by the river where the green grass grows

Where Mary Murphy washes her clothes . . . you remember?’

‘Ah,’ Bradshaw said, mystified.

‘She’s found a new sweetheart,’ Yearling confided. He returned to his newspaper and became engrossed, unaware it seemed, of Bradshaw’s occasional, anxious side-glances.

At the food kitchens of Liberty Hall Catholic families were selling their souls to self-professed socialists for a bowl of soup. Father O’Connor saw them frequently, for he found it difficult to stay away. They stood for hours, some of them from his own parish, with mugs, jamjars, anything at all that would serve to carry away what was being given out. Sometimes, instead of soup, they got small parcels of bread and tea and sugar. There was the usual joking, most of it vulgar, as was to be expected from them. He leaned on his umbrella at times to listen. He would have admonished them publicly, but he had been forbidden to intervene. He was not even allowed to give them counsel in his sermons.

‘I want no pulpit-thumping,’ Father Giffley had replied when he spoke to him about it. ‘Let them fight it out between them.’

That was early on in the trouble, when the three of them were seated, as was customary on Sunday evenings, in the depressing common room with its great centre table and heavy black armchairs and its enormous painting of the Crucifixion. The evening was warm and the fire made the air in the room stifling.

‘The situation is so critical,’ Father O’Connor pressed, ‘should they not be instructed in the dangers of socialism?’

‘They are very fully instructed in the dangers of socialism. The press instructs them daily. The Catholic papers do so weekly. The Jesuits have all relaxed throats running retreats. Every half-baked sociologist with a Roman collar thinks he does a service to Christ by upbraiding the destitute.’

‘I do not pretend to be a sociologist,’ Father O’Connor said coldly.

‘You must find it very lonely,’ Father Giffley snapped.