‘No you don’t, we’re mad to get rid of you for one night,’ says Aidan, sticking his head around the parlour door, and the giggles of all Maggie’s eavesdropping siblings explode from inside the house. She turns vengefully but Aidan shuts the parlour door before she reaches it. She’s flustered.
‘It’s Charlie Chaplin. You’ll love him. He has the funniest walk,’ I say, and taking a step back I do the little waddle I’ve seen in the pictures. Maggie tries not to, but she lets a little titter escape her. She tries to reassert her poker face but she can’t help it. I do the little waddle again and she laughs. I jut out my arm again.
‘But I haven’t a stitch to wear,’ she says.
‘I’ll wait here, you go and get yourself ready.’
She reasserts her serious face once more, and raises her eyebrow. ‘Why should I go with you, Victor?’ she says.
‘Because you love me.’
The words hang in the air like gun smoke after a volley of muskets.
‘You love me,’ I say again, and her lip trembles.
‘You love me.’ A tear materialises like a jewel in her eye and escapes down her cheek.
‘You love me.’
She takes a little while to get ready but when she reappears at the door, I see she was lying about not having anything to wear. She wears a blouse, coat, stockings, shin-length dress showing off a bit of ankle; all black, save the occasional white trimming here and there. All pristine, classy, conservative even, except for angular, vivid red shoes. I help her climb onto the trap, and she remarks that she hasn’t seen it for years. We’ve done well to salvage it, she says. I admire her hat; it’s one of those ones shaped like a bell that I’ve only seen the most up-to-date girls in Dublin wear. Maggie keeps up, it seems.
‘It’s called a cloche,’ she says.
‘Clash?’
‘Cloche.’
‘Claw-she.’
‘It’s French.’
‘Well, you look beautiful,’ I say, and she does look beautiful. As we head out of Madden and onto the main Armagh road I steal glances at her and catch her stealing an odd glance back in my direction. My eyes are drawn especially to her shoes. They do strange things to me. Narrow heels and dainty uppers. I swear it’s as exciting as if she’s not wearing any clothes at all.
‘What was the name of that picture I read about, did you see it, the one about the negroes?’
‘Birth of a Nation?’
‘That’s it. Did you see that one? Was it good?’
‘I wouldn’t shy away from calling it a work of art.’
‘Really? I thought the moving pictures were just little entertainments? Like this Charlie Chaplin; he was in the music halls before he went to America, wasn’t he?’
I shake my head. I don’t know.
‘I read that somewhere. He’s actually from England. You’d hardly call a music hall comedian an artist, would you? Falling down and hitting your head doesn’t make you Sir Henry Irving.’
If I ever see her without her clothes, I’ll ask her to keep on those shoes. I can see it clearly in my head: Maggie, naked as a statue save for the red shoes. Maybe in stockings too. No. Too much like a Monto girl. Or Ida. Maggie’s better than that. Though maybe it’d heighten the effect? I’ll give it some thought. I look at her, demure in black save red shoes and caramel skin, and in my mind’s eye see her on her back, panting desperately, her skin flushed and pink now, the red shoes still on her feet, up behind my ears somewhere, and then she turns into Ida and I can’t shake the image from my mind even as we arrive in Armagh, even as we sit down in the Rainbow Café, even as Maggie pokes at her salmon and I devour my bloody beef.
‘Penny for them,’ she says.
‘More than they’re worth.’
She places a forkful delicately into her mouth and I try to put the vexing thoughts from my head. I’m conscious that I’ve said little.
‘In ten or twenty years there’ll be no more plays and all the theatres will replace their stages with screens. Who wants to watch somebody prancing around a stage when you can watch red Indians or moving trains or whole battlefields on a screen?’ I say.
‘Will we still have books?’
‘People won’t need them when they can go and look at reels of film. You take Birth of a Nation. In three hours you learn more than you would in a dozen books. Of course there’ll still be books in libraries, for academics and historians and such.’
She drops her knife and fork and they clank loudly on the plate. She looks annoyed, emotional even. ‘You were always so zealous about everything,’ she says. ‘I don’t want reels of film to replace books.’
I put my hand on hers and squeeze it. ‘We will always have books.’
The doorman stands before the heavy, iron-clasped Tuppenny Door of the Cosy Corner Picture Palace. He surveys the long queue stretching down Russell Street and glances impatiently at his watch, as if willing the second hand to move more quickly. ‘If you don’t stop pushing and fuck away off from my door, youse aren’t getting in,’ he snaps to some young fellows near the front. Maggie is worried the seats will sell out, since the line is so long, but I wink and crook my arm and we skip past the crowd to the queueless splendour of the Shilling Entrance, enjoying the jealous glances as we go. An elderly doorman with silver hair and gentle eyes touches his cap and opens the varnished mahogany and glass panelled door.
‘Good evening, Madam. Good evening, Sir,’ he says as we step into a marble foyer. Maggie looks like she’s going to laugh. I point her to the glass cabinet of the refreshment stand.
‘But I just ate.’
‘This is what people do at the pictures. They get little treats. Apparently in America they have a confection made of corn, and you can eat it for hours without ever getting full.’
‘I suppose they would have something like that in America.’
She looks up and down at the mint imperials, the chocolate raisins and the Yellowman, and in the flicker of her eyelashes I see the fearless and guileless girl I once knew, for whom experience was the purpose of life. I don’t know anyone else I’d say that about.
‘That’s a florin,’ says the man behind the box-office glass brusquely. His impatience is downright impertinent. It’s not like there’s a mad rush of people queuing behind me, and I don’t look out of place among the well-dressed people here. I drop the coins noisily and take our tickets with a humph. Maggie orders chocolate raisins and two cups of hot chocolate, and I get her a hot water bottle. She says she doesn’t need it, but women always get cold in the picture house, even in the summer. The usher takes us in and points his torch to the cushioned seats inside the red rope. Behind the rope are rows of hard benches filled with Tuppenny Door folk, and it’s strange not to be among them, fighting for elbow space or for standing room at the back. It’s strange to be sitting among the enemy in the cushioned seats, but it strikes me that maybe sitting on this side of the red rope mightn’t necessarily prove you are the class enemy. For every bourgeois seeking distance from the unwashed, there’s probably a working man just trying to impress a girl. Girls are impressed by such things. Maybe if they get the vote they’ll become less trivial. I stretch out my legs. It is nice in here, it must be said.
The lights dim and the piano player tinkles his first notes of accompaniment. The whirr of the projector replaces the hubbub of the crowd. Charlie Chaplin appears on the screen, and people in the crowd who’ve seen one of his pictures before whisper that’s him to those who haven’t. Maggie picks at her raisins. The pianist tries to keep up with the action on the screen as the little tramp with a funny walk spills a bottle of milk on himself while he’s holding a baby. The tuppenny-seat people roar, the better-dressed folk smile. The tramp passes a police station and, in a fit of good-living zeal, goes in and volunteers to clean up Easy Street, the nastiest place imaginable. The pianist plays a snatch of something from HMS Pinafore and Maggie sits forward in her seat. She’s wasting the arms and cushions I’ve paid a shilling for but I don
’t mind. When we were children preparing for Confirmation the priest told us how a Catholic child needed the gift of ‘wonder and awe in the presence of God’, and the concept had escaped me but as I look at Maggie in the flickering silver light of the screen, watching with eyes round as saucers, I think I get it. Inside twenty minutes the tramp-turned-constable has turned Easy Street into a God-fearing neighbourhood. The monstrous villain becomes a respectable bourgeois who takes the outside of the pavement in deference to his wife, herself transformed from a sluttish harpy, as they walk to church. Chaplin and his good-living girl walk arm-in-arm after them. It’s reactionary nonsense, but to me, Maggie is the real show. She giggles girlishly and squeezes my hand as the screen goes black. I nod to Maggie to tell her that means the film is over. Mad applause explodes. They show two more Chaplin reels before the intermission, Maggie enjoys each one more than the last. She asks if I can explain the contraption in the third film, the moving staircase that goes up and down, and I tell her it’s called an escalator.
‘There’s a shop in Dublin where they have one. In America they have them in their houses.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t want one of those in my house. They’d be very dangerous. But it was so funny, the way he would fall down the stairs and then the stairs would carry him back up to the top, and he’d try to walk down, but the stairs would be rising up against him, and …’
After the intermission they show a romance with Florence La Badie. I tell Maggie she looks like Florence. She tuts dismissively but she loves it. The film is quite salacious. When Florence’s parents get divorced you can spot the Catholics in the audience fidgeting uncomfortably. The audience fidgeting becomes general when Florence ditches her irreproachable fiancé, a doctor type, and takes up with an obvious scoundrel who is later revealed as a free-loving type. Maggie is riveted with revulsion. I’m almost painfully aroused. The audience is mollified when, upon learning of her new suitor’s proclivities, Florence brains him with a statuette, and goes back to the doctor type as the film ends.
Afterwards we walk down Russell Street towards the vast, open common of the Mall. They say it’s exactly a mile around its perimeter; we walk the ash-canopied cinder path twice, and I take care to allow my lady the inside. We meet an RIC man on his rounds and he tips his helmet. Maggie stifles a giggle. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a policeman again and not see Charlie Chaplin,’ she says. ‘I can see why you like him. Look at how the rich people are presented in his films. They’re all vain and greedy and violent.’
‘What other way is there to present them?’
Maggie chats excitedly and unguardedly about the films and I cherish each step we take, arm-in-arm, in the flickering, gas-lit prettiness. The Mall is ringed with churches and Georgian terraces, courthouse and bank, gaol, museums and war memorials, but once, horses raced here by day and whores whored by night. This was the centrepiece of some long-dead archbishop’s resurrection of Armagh, Patrick’s gone-to-seed citadel. I ask Maggie if she knows cock-fighting and knuckle-fighting and gambling and carousing and all sorts went on here, once upon a time.
‘If you’re going to reform a place, you start in the most rotten part,’ she says.
We walk the path bisecting the middle of the Mall and sit down on the bench by the Crimean cannon. She says her favourite bit was when Florence gave the scoundrel his comeuppance with the statuette. My favourite bit was when Charlie boots the policeman up the arse at Ellis Island.
‘I’m not surprised you liked that bit. That big statue of the woman holding the torch; was that the Statue of Liberty?’
‘Did you never see the Statue of Liberty before?’
‘Of course. I mean, I think so. I think maybe I saw an etching. It’s beautiful.’
‘You’re beautiful.’
She frowns. ‘I’ve had a lot of fellows knocking on my door,’ she says proudly. ‘Yes indeed. Some were quite ardent.’
‘And did you entertain any of them?’
‘It would have been queer if I hadn’t entertained any.’ Her brow furrows. She looks so melancholy. ‘A couple of them I tried very hard to love.’ She pauses. ‘There are fewer interested parties lately,’ she says, just as matter-of-fact as that. ‘Twenty-eight and still a virgin. I think men are suspicious of that.’ She snatches her hand back and doesn’t dare look me in the eye. ‘I have a proposal of marriage. From Charlie. He asked me a few days ago. I told him I’d consider it.’
I laugh, but only for a second.
We get into the trap and head for home. It’s true that Maggie’s most marriageable age is a few years behind her, and it’s not good for a woman to have her first-born when she’s looking at thirty; the window is closing and she knows it. But Maggie has the beauty, the brains and the breeding to make up for it. We stop outside Madden, looking down the gentle incline into the village. The skeletal frame of the People’s Hall, partially robed in tin walls, is vaguely discernible in the dimness. We’ll reach the eaves and make a start on the roof tomorrow, and with a bit of luck we’ll have the whole thing finished by Friday night. I take Maggie’s hand and she lets me hold it for a moment.
‘Will you stay?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I’d like to, but there’s a fight I’m supposed to be in.’
She laughs bitterly. ‘Of course, the big socialist!’ She takes back her hand. ‘Ask people around here about socialism and if they’ve heard of it at all, they’ll say it means the government is going to take their land off them again.’
‘I have forty or fifty of those people you’re talking about working with me, standing up to Benedict,’ I say.
‘Only because Father Daly says it’s all right.’
I’m nonplussed.
‘Father Daly is a Sinn Féiner,’ she says. She can see I didn’t know. Usually the dog-collars clamp down hard against any kind of boat-rocking, especially among their own. ‘Everyone thinks you’re Sinn Féin too,’ she says.
‘Sinn Féin are a bunch of bollixes.’
‘You fought in the Sinn Féin rebellion so you’re a Sinn Féiner. There’s only one question people care about, and you and Father Daly are on the same side of that question.’ She puts her hand to my face, strokes my cheek gently. There’s tremendous sadness in her eyes. ‘The girl you knew had to grow up. But my Victor never grew up, did he? He’ll never change. Always full of spiels and knows nothing about himself. Purest gombeen, born and raised, and everybody knows it. So why is he playing the socialist?’ she says softly.
When she puts it like that, and gives me the look she’s giving me, I honest to God don’t know what to say.
Hunger is worse in winter. You have burned all the furniture for fuel, and food is scarce. First the strike pay dropped from ten shillings to five, and now it has stopped altogether. The supply ships from England have been fewer. There has always been a population of youngsters living on Dublin’s streets but their numbers seem to have multiplied as the lockout has gone on. Packs of dirt-caked gurriers scavenge like jackals around the north side. The Monto girls aren’t on strike. Murphy’s four hundred thieves keep coming to Monto for entertainment every night, even as they wreak famine on the working families of the area by day. But some of the Monto girls donate food or money at the Liberty Hall. You have to sneak them in the back door – if your workers or their wives knew where their meal had come from, the food would turn to ash in their mouths. Every now and then, Peggy O’Hara makes you liver and onions, and by God, you’re grateful for it.
Connolly arrives from Belfast with a plan to evacuate the children to sympathetic families in Liverpool for the duration. They can eat and live like human beings there, leaving their parents free to win their emancipation. But Cardinal Logue denounces the plan. Better that the children should starve in Catholic Ireland than be corrupted in heathen England, he says. His priests board the ship and seize the children, taking them back to the land that starves them. Their parents, the same people who have struggled like lions against the boss
es, let them. The starving armies of Dublin’s socialists start drifting back to work soon after. They accept whatever terms they are slapped with, no matter how degrading.
You have failed.
After this, you must never again mistake capitalists and imperialists and clerics for equally human beings. They are heels treading on the face of humanity. You should have remembered your Thucydides: the strong do as they wish, the weak endure what they must. Justice exists only between equals in power, and the strong know it. After the lockout, you know it too. You know what you have to do.
FOUR
By the time the light fails on Thursday, no more than a quarter of the structure of the People’s Hall remains to be done. Counting myself, twenty-eight men down tools at the end of the day and the consensus is that only a few hours’ work will be needed tomorrow to finish the job. I stand up on the wall of the Poor Ground to address my men.
‘Comrades, it has been another fine day’s work. Our great task is almost completed and it will stand for many years to come as a testament to the energy, the productiveness and the solidarity of the Madden proletariat.’
Sean Moriarty patrols the perimeter of the crowd. He slaps John McGrath hard on the back and says: ‘Go on there, Comrade, sing up that song Victor taught you.’ John looks uncomfortable and makes no noise until Turlough starts to sing: ‘Arise you workers from your slumbers.’ I sing up, ‘Arise you prisoners of want’, and by the end a good few others chime in to make a halfway decent chorus. Afterwards I dismiss them and tell them I’ll see them all tomorrow morning at nine, but Aidan Cavanagh says they can’t come at nine. They’ll all be at mass. It’s a Holy Day of Obligation, he says. I bite my tongue. They still feel the need for their opiate, so I’ll let them have it for now. Better to acquiesce in the short term. Their revolutionary consciousness is developing whether they know it or not. They filter away, leaving only Sean and Turlough with me.
After the Lockout Page 15