The woman in front had forgotten his presence, if she had ever been aware of it. Her prayers had stopped. He listened carefully and knew she was weeping. Her grief was soft and controlled, her sobbing barely audible. He raised himself with the help of his stick and went to her. He felt steady again. His mind was clear, untroubled, reasonable. He touched her shoulder.
‘For whom do you weep, my poor woman?’ he asked. His voice too, he was glad to discover, was entirely under his control again. He felt extremely well.
‘For my poor husband, Father.’
‘Has he died?’
‘He died on me two days ago.’
‘And have you buried him?’
‘He’ll be buried tomorrow after the ten o’clock mass.’
‘Then his body is in the mortuary chapel?’
‘It is, Father, we brought him here this evening.’
‘Then dry your tears and follow me.’
She rose obediently. They went into the mortuary chapel where the coffin rested on trestles between four tall candles. Beads of holy water still besprinkled the lid. Father Giffley turned to her and said gently:
‘I’ll raise him up for you.’
He smiled as he did so. It was a terrible smile. The woman backed away from him. He raised his voice to its pulpit pitch and shouted:
‘Lazarus—come forth.’
The woman began to scream. Her terror echoed through the whole church.
‘Jesus,’ she screamed, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .’
He lifted his voice once more, so that their shouting intermingled in a nightmare of noise.
‘Lazarus—come forth.’
Then he stretched out both hands and pushed the coffin from its trestles. It fell thunderously on the stone floor. The lid burst open. The corpse tumbled out and lay in a grotesque bundle on the ground. The woman’s screams became wilder.
‘Jesus, oh Jesus,’ she kept calling, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .’
Father O’Connor and Father O’Sullivan arrived together. It took them a long time to quieten her and then to persuade her to go into the house with the clerk to rest and recover. When she left they looked for Father Giffley. They found him eventually at the foot of the high altar. He was lying prostrate, his face downwards and his arms spread wide in formal veneration. He was either heavily asleep—or unconscious.
On Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock Rashers knocked on the basement door and asked the housekeeper if he might speak with Father Giffley.
‘Father Giffley is not here,’ she said.
‘That’s all right,’ Rashers told her, ‘he said I was to wait for him.’
She looked at him peculiarly.
‘But Father Giffley isn’t here at all, at all. He’s gone away.’
‘Gone away?’ Rashers repeated. The housekeeper nodded. He hardly dared to ask the next question. He waited for some time, but the housekeeper volunteered nothing further. He said, fearful of the answer:
‘And when do you expect him back?’
‘He’s very sick, the poor man,’ the housekeeper said. ‘God alone knows when we might hope to have him back with us.’
Rashers absorbed the information slowly. The pain in his heart made it difficult to speak. She closed the door.
He went back again towards Chandlers Court. The streets were warm with unseasonable sunshine. It did not comfort him. A parade passed him but he paid no attention whatever to it. There was the usual band and the usual whirl of banners.
‘Larkin gaoled by Lloyd George’
‘British Comrades
No Larkin
No Lloyd George’
The court had sentenced Larkin to seven months’ imprisonment. The news meant nothing to Rashers. He had no further interest in anything. Nothing mattered.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In December defeat became a certainty. It afflicted the streets and peered through the windows of tenements with a cold, grey eye. The grates were often without fire, the rooms without furniture. Hope flickered for a moment when the Archbishop of Dublin, moved by their hunger and distress and the nearness of Christmas, succeeded in assembling a Peace Conference. It failed almost as soon as it began. In London the British Trade Union Council met to consider a plea for sympathetic strike action. It was refused. They promised instead to increase the subsidies so that Dublin’s strike pay could be improved. The opposite happened. The subscription lists in the Labour papers grew shorter, the central strike fund dwindled almost to nothing.
Mr. Doggett, fixing his new calendar for 1914 to the wall of the office overlooking the idle marshalling yard, looked beyond it and noted that the ships at the quayside were working normally. Free labourers now glutted the port. The police were there to guard them, of course, but he took heart. It could not possibly be long now. In January also Fitz attended a closed meeting in Liberty Hall at which the members were advised to go back to work if they could do so without signing the document that had started the whole thing. Joe, who was standing beside Fitz, looked around at him. They were beaten. For the present anyway. No one had said so, but everybody knew it. They would have to get back to work now as best they could.
‘That’s that,’ Fitz said. They stood at the river wall to talk awhile. The food kitchens in the basement were already closed. There were no longer queues with jamjars and cans.
‘What are the chances?’ Joe wondered.
‘None for me,’ Fitz said.
‘Still—no harm trying.’
‘No harm in the world,’ Fitz said.
Mary said the same thing. She had never criticised or complained, but she had grown thin and looked unwell. The police had wrecked what little remained in the room which once had been her source of comfort and pride. It had only the broken table now and, incongruously, the clock that had been Pat’s wedding present to them. The police had overlooked it. Or perhaps Father Giffley’s unexpected entry had saved it. She said he should try his luck. Maybe they would remember that he had always been a good workman.
He went down to the foundry with the rest. They were presented with a form which was not quite the same as the original. It demanded an undertaking that they would not take part in sympathetic strikes but it made no mention of relinquishing membership of their Union. They discussed it and decided to sign.
‘There’ll be another day,’ Fitz told them when they consulted him. He himself was called aside by Carrington. They walked in silence down the yard to an empty storeroom. At the door Carrington took a whistle from his pocket and stopped to blow two blasts. A boy appeared from one of the houses.
‘Get my sandwiches from the locker,’ Carrington told him, ‘and bring a can of tea.’
‘Yes, Mr. Carrington,’ the boy said.
They went inside. There was a stove lighting in one corner and from the window they had a view of the wintry yard. It looked desolate enough. Exposed machinery had gathered rust, grass had rooted in the spaces between the cobbles, the paint on doors and woodwork had faded and peeled.
‘We’ll have a cup of tea when the nipper comes,’ Carrington said.
‘I’m not here to drink their tea,’ Fitz told him.
‘The tea is mine. Don’t be so bloody shirty.’ His tone was friendly. But he was embarrassed.
‘I’d like to know what the news is,’ Fitz said. Carrington opened the shutter of the stove and stirred the coals until they flamed.
‘We might as well be warm,’ he said.
He offered Fitz a stool to sit on and gave him a cigarette. It was so long since Fitz had smoked that the first pull of it made him dizzy. For a while Carrington’s face became a blurred disc.
‘The news isn’t good,’ Carrington said at last.
‘I thought it wouldn’t be,’ Fitz told him.
‘I told you they wouldn’t re-employ a foreman who went out with the rank and file, and that’s the instruction they’ve sent down. You’re not to be taken on.’