‘Do you consider the removal of the Saxon yoke possible?’
‘Everything is possible,’ Mathews said.
‘Desirable, then?’
‘Carson doesn’t think so, but then he doesn’t regard it as a yoke.’
‘The Gaelic League?’
‘A confused body. They had a clash the other day over whether the Portarlington Branch should have mixed classes.’
Yearling stopped, relished it as a titbit. Then he pursued:
‘Arthur Griffith?’
‘A formidable man—in the tradition of Swift. Burn everything English except their coal. Have you read his Resurrection of Hungary?’
‘No. But I’ve heard his Sinn Feiners referred to as the Green Hungarian Band.’
‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Mathews said. ‘Their policy is national self-sufficiency. And there are young men with him who will keep vigil on the mountains. Dangerous young men, from the Saxon point of view. That suit you’re wearing—where was it made?’
‘In London.’
‘And your shoes and your shirt?’
‘English.’
‘And your new motor car?’
‘You could call it a Saxon yoke,’ Yearling admitted.
‘If you spend all that abroad,’ Mathews said, ‘what hope can there be for Irish workmen.’
‘Are you a Sinn Feiner?’
‘No,’ Mathews said. ‘I’m a follower of Jim Larkin.’
Yearling, examining the elegant figure beside him, smiled. Larkinism was the fashion now among the writers and the intellectuals. Moran in the Leader had suggested that Liberty Hall ought to form a Poet’s Branch. Russell had written a moving letter in the Irish Times on the strikers’ behalf. Shaw had championed them at a meeting in London.
‘You should write them a marching song,’ he suggested, ‘something bloodthirsty, in dactylic pentameters.’
‘I’ve done a little more than that,’ Mathews said, ‘I’ve helped in Liberty Hall.’
Yearling stopped smiling. Mathews, he realised, despite the light manner, was in earnest. With delicacy he asked: ‘I am interested to know in what way a man of letters can help?’
‘There are several ways. By canvassing editors to publish articles for instance. By sending testimony about conditions here to writers in England and asking them to speak and write about it. It all helps.’
‘Do you know Larkin personally?’
‘I’ve conspired to hide him when there were warrants for his arrest. I’ve done the same for others among the leaders too. I’ve even gone out at night with buckets of paste and pasted notices of meetings.’
‘I see. Are you not afraid I might have you’—Yearling searched for the expression—‘turned-in?’
‘Not at all. The police know already. They won’t arrest a gentleman. The Castle, I imagine, has told them not to. It creates the wrong kind of reaction.’
Yearling stopped again.
‘Mathews,’ he asked, ‘do you intend to renounce riches?’
‘Never,’ Mathews said, ‘Riches and I will remain inseparable.’
‘Good,’ Yearling said. ‘Now I know I am in the company of a true poet. You must take me down to Liberty Hall sometime. I’d like to see it at work.’
‘It will be a pleasure,’ Mathews assured him.
They reached the end of the lakeside path and stood again to remark the quietness. They could see the Round Tower, now far away to their right, a finger of stone that men had built a thousand years before. It rose now above their bones and the rubble of their dwelling places. There was no stir on the lake nor among the reeds at its edge. White clouds hung without movement in a blue sky. The sun was warm. It drew an Autumn smell from the bracken. There had been a day like this forty years before and there had been days like this when men were putting stone upon stone to raise their tower; there would be days like this in years to come when he himself would have joined the dreamers under the monument and the nettle.
He shouldered his walking stick and remembered the barometer in the hall. It had never been so wrong. As he walked back he said to Mathews:
‘Do you know the expression—wet and windy, like the barber’s cat?’
‘I know it well,’ Mathews confessed.
‘Why the barber’s cat, I wonder?’
‘A consequence of frugality,’ the poet explained. ‘Its staple diet is hair and soapsuds.’
The explanation was unexpected but, on reflection, curiously satisfactory.
‘I see,’ Yearling said.
The day which filled Yearling with nostalgia for the lost world of boyhood found Mr. Silverwater in a contrary mood. He was not a lover of sunshine. At the best of times it hurt his eyes. When unseasonable its unexpected warmth was uncomfortable. He was a man who regulated the weight of his underwear in accordance with the calendar on a rigid basis calculated over a lifetime. It was his misfortune to have a constitution intolerant of cold and an occupation which obliged him to work in what he was convinced was the draughtiest shop in Dublin. The unseasonable day caught him in two sets of vests and underpants, in addition to the usual jacket, waistcoat and woollen cardigan. The result was a feeling of prickly suffocation. He endured it. The alternative of taking something off would expose his health to the mercy of more seasonable temperatures likely (at the drop of a hat) to return. But the discomfiture preyed on his spirit. He snapped at his customers and drove ruinous bargains. He was not sure that he wanted custom. His shelves and his storerooms were choked with paraphernalia which, if the lock-out went on very much longer, would never be redeemed. On an already glutted market their present value was negligible. At lunchtime he discussed it with his senior clerk. They went through the storerooms together. There was too much in goods and too little in capital.
‘From Monday, Mr. Johnston,’ he decided as they were both opening the doors for the afternoon trade, ‘from Monday, business with regular customers only.’
Mr. Johnston approved by nodding his head until it was in danger of flying off.
The sound of Rashers’ bell in the distance held them listening for a moment in the shop door.
‘That’s another thing, Mr. Johnston,’ Silverwater said, but did not finish his thought.
‘Of course,’ Mr. Johnston answered, as though there could be no possible doubt about whatever it was.
Rashers, who had no underwear at all, praised God for the heat of the sun. It would do him good; his cough, the creaking in his bones. He rang his bell at gatherings of men and women, at dogs that barked back in fury at him, at terrified cats that arched their backs and then shot away from him. He rang it for the amusement of the children. They no longer leered at him. His sandwich boards and his bell had transformed him into a person of consequence, someone they wanted to be when they grew up. Their admiration filled him with pleasure.
At lunchtime he went to the waste lot where the man in the striped pyjamas still smiled from his perch on the unsinkable bovril bottle. The religious text had been changed. It now read: Take up your Cross, and follow Me.
Rashers took off the sandwich boards and made a seat of an upturned bucket. He began his lunch. He had bread and dripping and a bottle of water. It was quiet and sunny. Three birds were dozing on a nearby chimney. They were silhouetted against the sun. He failed to determine whether they were gulls or crows. The grass at his feet and the warmth of the sun set him thinking of race meetings he had attended long ago, when he was active enough to walk long distances to play his tin whistle for the crowds and hardy enough to sleep at nightfall in the shelter of a ditch. Officers and their ladies, gentlemen with tall hats and binoculars, three-card-trick men, tipsters and fruit vendors. He had often bought himself an orange from one of their trays. If he had one now he’d eat it skin and all. A ditch was well enough in summer if you remembered to bring plenty of newspaper. One of these days, when the summer came, he’d buy himself an orange. To hell with the money.