Joe read over the minutes to Pat, who listened with half an ear. He was thinking of Lily. He had met her a few times since their walk in the Park, but although she was friends with him once again it was always hard to persuade her to come out with him. When she did it was never into the city. She was afraid to meet people she had once known.
‘I think the cupboard will stretch to a cup of tea for the supper,’ Joe suggested. He had laboured hard in the literary field. It was up to Pat to look after the menu. Pat left down his paper and began to prepare the tea without enthusiasm.
‘I wish it was as easy to make a pot of porter,’ he said, when the water had boiled at long last and he began to pour it over the two spoons of tea that lay on the bottom of the blackened can.
Doggett met Yearling at a special employers’ meeting. It was a large meeting, representative of most of the industrial and manufacturing firms in the city. The objective was to form a combination to fight the continuous strikes and threats of strikes. One of the speakers described it as an effort to form an Association of Employers to present a united front to Larkinism. The speeches bored Yearling but Doggett gave them his shrewd attention. On a number of occasions over the past three years he had succeeded in keeping his coal-carting concern open when others were closed down. It had paid off well in increased profit, but it had cost him much in goodwill. In the case of Morgan & Co. it had almost cost him an important contract. It became clear from the tone of the meeting that his technique of settling demands and then sweeping the market while the other coal concerns remained stubbornly closed would not work much longer. The leaders were appealing for consultation and concerted action. When the proposition was put ‘that a Company, to be called the Dublin Employers’ Federation Limited, be formed, with the object of affording mutual protection to and indemnity of all employers and employees’, Doggett raised a reluctant hand in favour of its adoption. He felt it only politic to do so and wondered when the man beside him kept his arms folded.
After the meeting Doggett went out alone into the summer evening. The red glow of sunset was in the sky and the odour of evening flowers accompanied him as he passed the railings of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a little bit early as yet to take a cab home; on the other hand the clubs and hotels in the area were almost certain to be occupied by groups of employers, some of whom he had no great desire to meet. Doggett turned down Grafton Street and then left into the snug of a public house. It was a place he knew well, with pictures of royalty and racing prints on the wall.
‘A baby Power,’ Doggett ordered, when the shutter in the partition opened.
‘I’ll have the same,’ a voice behind him said. He turned to find himself in the company of Yearling. Yearling smiled at him and said: ‘Interesting meeting.’
‘Very,’ Doggett answered.
‘The name is Yearling.’
‘Mine is Doggett.’
‘How do you do.’
‘How do.’
The curate brought the drinks.
‘Allow me,’ Yearling said, and paid for both.
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re Doggett & Company?’
‘That’s right,’ Doggett said. ‘And you?’
‘Morgan & Company—on the Board.’
‘Oh,’ Doggett said. This was the very thing he had tried to avoid. He still held his contract with the foundry, but his conscience was not altogether clear. He remembered that Yearling had not voted for the proposition. Yet the chairman of Morgan & Co. had been on the platform.
‘I’ve two minds about this combination business,’ Yearling confessed.
Mr. Doggett agreed, but waited a while for the other to give reasons. He was not quite sure where he stood. When Yearling failed to say anything further he decided to chance a sentiment that had been expressed at the meeting.
‘In a way,’ Doggett said, ‘I suppose if the rabble of the city can combine there’s nothing wrong in principle if we employers do the same thing.’
‘Nothing at all—if you want industrial warfare,’ Yearling said grimly.
‘We seem to have that already.’
‘We’ll have more of it.’
‘It may make Larkin draw in his horns.’
Yearling grunted in disbelief.
‘He’s more likely to paralyse the whole country,’ he pronounced. That was Doggett’s own assessment.
‘Personally,’ he confessed, ‘I’ve had to decide between Mr. Larkin’s threats and the threats of my own colleagues. That’s why I voted for the resolution. I wonder who’s behind all this.’
‘Can’t you guess?’
‘I’ve thought it might be Sibthorpe or Jacob. It’s hard to know.’
‘A certain gentleman who refused to be knighted?’ Yearling hinted.
Doggett thought for a moment until the name and the association joined somewhere in his shrewd skull.
‘William Martin Murphy.’
‘I may be wrong.’ Yearling conceded, but only out of politeness.
Doggett nodded.
‘He’s certainly the strongest,’ he said.
In the morning he sent for the yard superintendent.
‘We could do with an extra carter,’ he said. ‘Send for Bernard Mulhall and tell him he can start in the morning.’
Doggett was prepared, under pressure of self-interest, to combine, but he was damned if he was going to be the first in the firing line.
Joe Somerville had the pleasure of reporting to a meeting of carters that Bernard Mulhall had been reinstated unconditionally. For Doggett it meant only temporary respite. He read with sinking heart of the general rail strike in England, of riots and bloodshed and the interruption of Irish supplies. Then the Irish rail workers brought the trouble to his doorstep by walking out in sympathy. Doggett saw this with his own eyes. They marched past him in the street, singing ‘Fall in and Follow Me’, a ditty which, being a music-hall fan, he recognised as George Lashwood’s. That evening the police patrolled the city in unprecedented numbers. They guarded railway stations, they stood in strong formations at the entrances to principal streets. Their presence filled the city with uneasiness. Yet beyond the rallies and the speeches nothing much happened. Three days later a general settlement in England put an end to the dispute. The trains began to run again.
Yearling, travelling from Kingstown to the Imperial Hotel, was glad. He liked travelling by train, especially on the Kingstown line. He liked the yachts with coloured sails in the harbour, the blue shape of Howth Hill across the waters of the bay, the bathers and the children digging sandcastles. These were pleasant to look at in the last hours of an August evening. Yearling loved his city, her soft salt-like air, the peace of her evenings, the easy conversation of her people. He liked the quiet crossings at Sydney Parade and the Lansdowne Road, simply because he had swung on them as a schoolboy. The gasometers near Westland Row were friends of his. He could remember passing them many a time as a young man making amorous expeditions to the city. When he looked at these things they in some way kept the presence of loved people who were now dead or in exile; his father and his mother, a favourite aunt whose eccentricities once delighted him; a sister long married and settled in the colonies, a brother killed in childhood. These were melancholy thoughts, but for him melancholy had a rare flavour. It united him with his childhood and his youth. It gave him a reason for continuing to explore life with interest. It was like repeating the part of a story one had already read, in order to savour the more the part that was about to happen.
‘It makes it easier to abide the end,’ he explained to Father O’Connor, with his large eyebrows lifting upwards a little in self-mockery.