‘You haven’t been listening,’ his brother-in-law said. Mr. Yearling shifted his gaze from the window. He had been conscious of the voice in the background.
‘You joined the Employers’ Federation several months ago,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing very new in what you’ve been saying.’
‘I feel it my duty to bring you up to date. There were several important meetings of the Board while you were away shooting.’
‘Fishing,’ Yearling corrected.
Bullman, controlling his irritation, said: ‘I beg your pardon—fishing.’
He was well named, Yearling thought. Deep voice, thick neck, heavy shoulders that were beginning to stoop. When he had married into Morgan & Co. he was already a man of influence in other fields, particularly shipping. The indiscipline of the working class of the city, after years of docility, confused and frightened him. The world of industry, so long stable, so entrenched in its authority, was sliding on its foundations.
‘We are going to make a stand against Larkinism,’ he said.
‘You said that several months ago.’
‘A determined stand,’ Bullman insisted. ‘You see, you haven’t been listening. The shipping crisis brought matters to a head.’
‘You were beaten by Larkin in the shipping business,’ Yearling said. ‘You gave everything he asked for. So much for your Federation.’
‘We weren’t ready then.’
‘And are you ready now?’
‘More than ready. We’ve been promised help from the Castle. The police will be used—the military if necessary. We’ve approached employers in England for financial assistance. They’ll help if we call on them.’
Yearling smiled.
‘I see you are learning from Larkin. Each for all and all for each. What will be the first step?’
‘To outlaw Larkinism. The members of his union will be given the option of resigning from it or being sacked. Those who are not members of the union must give an undertaking never to join it.’
Bullman paused. He was coming to the crucial part.
‘Before putting the matter to the Board I made a count of the firms involved. Almost four hundred will take concerted action. The Board was unanimous in giving a solemn pledge.’
‘Who is to be the leader of the gallant four hundred?’ Yearling asked. He was anticipating the answer and made a quick gamble with himself. A further, prolonged week-end in Connemara if he was right—a ten-pound note to Father O’Connor’s fund if he was wrong.
‘William Martin Murphy,’ Bullman answered.
The undubbed knight. His guess had been correct. He would arrange to go the week-end after next.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because as a director you should know what went on while you were away . . . fishing. I also feel under a special obligation. After all, you are my brother-in-law.’
‘Thank you,’ Yearling said.
He smiled. As a brother-in-law he would hardly count. But as a considerable shareholder he could dissent and embarrass the Board’s determination and unanimity.
In the yard below men were working to pile coal into a huge rick. In the houses they fed furnaces with long-handled shovels. How many of them were Larkinites, Yearling wondered. They would resist, of course—that was why police and military must stand by. The telpher glided past the window again, suspended from the arced track. Yearling watched. It would be like being in a balloon—or more accurately, one of those new flying machines. He remembered something Mrs. Bradshaw had mentioned to him a long time before and began to search in his wallet. He found a piece of paper with the name Robert Fitzpatrick written on it. The meeting was obviously at an end, so he rose.
‘We’ve a man of that name on the staff,’ he said, handing it to Bullman. ‘If anything can be done to advance him it has the recommendation of a very dear friend of mine.’
Bullman was surprised, not at the request, but its source. He put the slip of paper under a weight and said, with a cordiality calculated to please:
‘We’ll be shuffling around the key men to get rid of Larkinites. I’ll see that he’s considered.’
They went down the stairs together and parted in the ground-floor office, where clerks on high stools, aware of their presence, wrote figures into ledgers with intense concentration. Yearling, left alone, surveyed the scene for some moments, tapping his stick lightly against his knickerbockers, enjoying the tense and artificial silence. He took a paper bag from his pocket and offered it to a bald stooped clerk whom he judged to be the senior.
‘Have a Kruger’s Soother,’ he invited pleasantly. The man gaped at him. Yearling placed the sweet on his desk, took one from the bag for himself, bowed gravely and began to eat it as he went out.
In the morning, when they called to the hospital, the Italian was dead. They stood awhile beside him in the morgue, where he lay all unknowing, his hands joined on his breast. They crossed themselves and said a prayer.
‘He won’t be playing “Over the Waves” any more,’ Hennessy whispered, when the prayer was finished.
‘Unless they give him a harp with a handle,’ Rashers whispered back.
‘We should have brought the monkey.’
‘What would we do that for?’
‘To see the last of him.’
The sentimental note in Hennessy’s voice made Rashers forget the presence of the dead.
‘And have him screeching and roaring crying,’ he shouted, ‘is that what you want? Monkeys is notoriously highly strung and emotional. If he saw your man stretched out there in a late and lamented condition he’d go berserk.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Hennessy pleaded, ‘remember where you are.’
‘When we get back home,’ Rashers said, once again whispering, ‘don’t breathe a word about this in front of the monkey because if he gets word of it at all he’ll go off his grub and die of a broken heart.’
They put their hats back on their heads.
‘The question is,’ Hennessy said as they closed the door of the morgue behind them, ‘what are we going to do with the poor brute. And how will we dispose of the barrel-organ?’
It was a problem which occupied them during their journey home. At first Rashers was in favour of keeping both. Providence, with an unusual show of favour, had placed at their disposal an easily mastered instrument and a well-trained animal. It would be a means of livelihood, a self-contained business. He proposed a partnership, in which Hennessy’s only responsibility would be to push the barrel-organ—the rest he would attend to personally.
‘It’s very tempting,’ Hennessy admitted.
‘We’ll be set up for life,’ Rashers urged.
‘Yes—until the police catch up with us.’
That was the difficulty. The Italian may have said something to the hospital staff. If there was an inquest something might come out. Or the relatives might have the police searching high and low already for the barrel-organ and the monkey.
‘It’s too much of a risk,’ Hennessy decided.
Rashers was forced to agree. There was hardly any way at all of earning an honest penny. The door opened and when you stepped forward with hope—bang—it slammed to again. Now and then, as when he was boilerman, it stayed open for a little while. But never for long. And the older you got, the less often it opened. Soon he would become too old to cope with poverty. What would he do then?
‘We’ll give it up to the police,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’ll be a reward.’
They brought the monkey and the organ to College Street Station. Rashers recognised the sergeant who had once given him a shilling, Sergeant Muldoon. Often since then he had met him on patrol, and they would stop for a joke and a friendly exchange. Usually he came away a few pence the richer.
‘Can you play it?’ the sergeant asked, indicating the barrel-organ.
‘I never tried,’ Rashers evaded. It might not be legal to have borrowed it for a whole day.
‘I’d imagine now,’ the s
ergeant said, with a great air of ingenuousness, ‘a man of your musical gifts would have little difficulty in mastering the likes of that. I’d nearly be able to knock a tune out of it myself. Hasn’t it a handle—like the gramophone?’
Rashers pretended to examine the instrument for the first time.
‘It has wheels on it too,’ he said finally, like the motor car. But that doesn’t mean you could drive it to mass of a Sunday.’
Hennessy withdrew a little. The movement caught the sergeant’s attention.
‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked suddenly.
Hennessy froze and said: ‘Hennessy, Sergeant—Aloysius Hennessy.’
‘Better known to his friends and well-wishers as the Toucher,’ Rashers provided. He was at ease with the sergeant in any matter that was on the right side of the law.
‘I see,’ the sergeant acknowledged. His face, Rashers observed, had a grey colour and his body, suspended from once burly shoulders, was thinning. That was unusual in a sergeant. Usually they grew fat and had big, well-nourished bellies. The sergeant was showing age. Policemen, when they could work no longer, were given pensions. That was the great difference.
The sergeant, having thought about it, decided to put the monkey in one of the cells. They accompanied him.
‘Would there be a reward, do you think?’ Rashers asked.
‘There might,’ the sergeant said, ‘and then again there might not. It depends on the relatives.’
He turned the key in the lock.
‘I’m wondering now will I have trouble with habeus corpus.’
‘Is that one of his Italian relatives?’ Hennessy asked.
‘It’s a conundrum of the law,’ the sergeant told him, ‘which I never, in all my years, understood properly myself.’
They walked back down the corridor with him and stopped once again beside the barrel-organ. It looked incomplete without the monkey. The sergeant leaned against it.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said to Rashers, ‘but a young policeman the name of Gallagher, that you may or may not know, reported yesterday evening that he saw yourself playing a yoke like this at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk. You were in company, he said, with a man unknown to him.’
‘That’s very strange,’ Rashers said, for want of something better.
‘It was probably someone like you,’ the sergeant agreed, ‘but not you at all.’ He brought them to the door.
‘Now—off you go—and good luck,’ he said.
He stood to watch their passage down the street. The gait of Rashers reminded him—as always—of the little boy dying of meningitis. After a while he went in, turning away not from the street only but from young eyes fixed on him and his own helplessness, from love unable to intervene. Everything in life was alone; his child dying whom he could not help, the brute dog lying with bloodied nose and lolling tongue on the pavement that he had been called on in the course of his duty the day before to shoot. He went inside again and hung the keys on their familiar hook.
‘He knew I was using the barrel-organ,’ Rashers confided.
‘I thought the same,’ Hennessy agreed.
‘In a way,’ Rashers said, ‘we have as much right to it as this relative—bloody habeus corpus.’
Hennessy shrugged. Blood, he felt, was thicker than water and had legitimate claims. As they turned at last into Chandlers Court, Rashers stopped and said:
‘That was my cell he put the monkey in.’
Then he began to tell him, not for the first time, of his day in prison that marked the visit of Edward VII.
The blinding rain of a bad Sunday evening kept the three of them housebound. Father O’Sullivan, armed with pen and ink and writing material, entered the sitting room about eight o’clock and found Father Giffley there—a rare occurrence. Father O’Connor, arriving later, was equally surprised at Father Giffley’s presence. Knowing an immediate withdrawal would betray uneasiness, he sat down.
‘What terrible rain,’ he remarked as he did so.
‘I’ve been expecting it all day,’ Father O’Sullivan said. He was now writing at the table, but left down his pen to raise his right arm and make a grimace which conveyed pain.
‘Rheumatism?’
‘Since early morning,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘it’s an infallible sign.’
Father Giffley lowered his paper to stare at him.
‘A little Kruschen salts, John,’ he said, ‘as much as will fit on a sixpence. Take it regularly each morning and you’ll have no further worries of that kind.’
‘You advised me about that before, but the pain goes away after a day or two and I never remember,’ Father O’Sullivan confessed.
‘Take the Kruschen,’ Father Giffley admonished, ‘or continue as you are—a walking weathercock.’
Father O’Sullivan smiled, picked up his pen and returned to his work.
After that the atmosphere was easier. The three settled down, great wind gusts sent the rain rattling against the window and made a dull roar in the chimney. But the fire burned brightly and the oil lamps—so disposed that reading or writing did not overtax the eyes—cast a soothing light.
It was a brown room, with heavy upright chairs in black about the great centre table, and heavy, comfortable armchairs, also in black, in an arc about the fire. Father O’Sullivan’s biretta for some reason crowned the pile of magazines that stood near the end of the table on his left. The enormous painting of the Crucifixion which hung on one wall was beyond the effective range of the lamps, so that only the white zigzag of a lightning streak above the cross stood out and an oval of grey countenance sagged under its thorny crown. In daylight there was a cobweb interlaced with the crown, Father O’Connor remembered—a real one—too high for the servant’s brush. Black letters on a brass plaque beneath said: Consummatum Est. On either side in daylight, but not now seen, were the Blessed Mother in a blue mantle, head bowed in grief, arms folded on her bosom; and the disciple beloved of Jesus. Son, behold thy mother—mother, behold thy son. John—same name as O’Sullivan.
The Kruschen worried Father O’Connor. Surely it was intended for the bowels. A little brandy, Giffley had once advised him, but he had refused. A wonder he had not recommended peppermints—his own unvarying physic.
Both prescribed for and prescriber were now lost in concentration, the one writing laboriously, the other reading. Father O’Connor searched his pocket and found Yearling’s letter. He began to read it again.
As a result of a wager with myself, which I had the good fortune to win, I am back here in Connemara. My intention was to fish, but in making the arrangement I overlooked a simple fact—that the fishing season had already closed. So, although I am determined to uphold my undertaking to myself by staying here for the promised duration, my rods are lying unpacked in the bedroom and there is no one left in the hotel to share the turf fire here in the lounge with me except the cat, an animal so overfed in the season on the left-overs of the best salmon and trout that he (perhaps she—cats always baffle me) is a phlegmatic egocentric who sleeps most of the time. What night life is there for a cat in Connemara, especially outside the holiday season? What Can It Do? Being one of the lower animals, not yet advanced sufficiently along Mr. Darwin’s evolutionary path, its accomplishments are limited. In centuries to come, I have no doubt, its descendants will vie with each other in the compilation of histories and the elaboration of philosophies, like Anatole France’s penguins. Meanwhile it yawns and waits.
Have you read Sketches of the Irish Highlands by Rev. H. McManus? Do you know of him? I think he may have been a friend of my father’s but I am not sure. He was the first missionary of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to learn the Irish language in order to spread his particular brand of enlightenment among the Connemara peasantry. I am reading him at present from a mildewed copy which I found in the bookcase here on a wet afternoon some few days ago. How he ever hoped his parsimonious bore of a God could succeed with these naturally gentl
emanly and generous people I cannot imagine. I am entirely behind them in their rejection of a Deity disinclined to gaudy images, incantations, Holy Water and plenty of drink.
Autumn is not so noticeable here in Connemara as elsewhere, I think because there are so few trees (a stone wall is a stone wall, winter or summer). Yet I feel the melancholy of the season just as keenly. The glow of the fire, the smell of the turf smoke, the quality of the light which is now beginning to fail outside the window, all speak as certainly as any scurry of brown and yellow leaves of the turning of the year. Soon they will light the lamps and call me to my meal. Mutton. No possibility whatever of a surprise. In Connemara it is always either salmon or mutton.
Have you seen Bradshaw lately? He and I are not firm friends. When I dared some time ago to suggest that he ought to do something about repairing those tenement houses of his by the railway line, he concluded that I had become an honorary emissary of Mr. Larkin. You should speak to him if you get the opportunity. Some day they’ll collapse on the unfortunate tenantry. I know your main concern will not be whether they are killed but whether being killed, they are all in a fit state of saving grace to ascend straight to heaven to fill the vacant places left by Lucifer and his fallen angels, which, as you once so picturesquely explained to me, is the reason why your God creates his populous conglomeration of verminous and under-privileged slum-dwellers. Why can’t He make more angels on the spot, instead of taking such a roundabout means of filling the vacant celestial mansions. Look at the trouble and expense he puts good-living and well-to-do Christians to (including our friend Bradshaw) bribing the City and Borough Councillors to stop them serving an order on them to have their wretched hovels made habitable. And look at all the failures, whom he sends to hell to swell the enemy ranks and make Lucifer feel the revolt was well worth it. I was about to ask if you had read Anatole France but I seem to recollect that he is on the Index—Omnia Opera, lock stock and barrel.
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