‘Do you think Larkin will move?’
‘Certainly Larkin will move,’ Mulhall said, ‘he never drew back yet.’ Mulhall’s belief was unshakable.
‘I knew Jim,’ he said, ‘when we had nothing. We started the union in a back room in Townsend Street and two candles stuck in bottles was all the light we could afford. We were fighting the employers and we had to fight Sexton and the National Union of Dockers at the same time. Jim won’t draw back.’
‘You fought hard,’ Fitz said, ‘all your life.’
‘While I could,’ Mulhall agreed. ‘Now I’ll fight no more.’
‘You did your bit—and more than it.’
‘Never any more,’ Mulhall repeated.
He did not want comfort and his tone rejected Fitz’s offer of it. As they sat in silence and the dusk deepened he stared straight in front of him. The room became even smaller. It had a closed-in air. Even when he was not smoking it smelled of tobacco, of successive pipes lit and smoked and laid aside on days that looked at him with expressionless eyes. No gaoler was necessary now. He was its prisoner for ever.
CHAPTER TWO
The bustle was familiar—and yet there was something odd about it, something that made it seem not quite the same as in previous years. It puzzled Yearling, this strange difference in an annual event he had looked at year after year since his childhood days. The ingredients were the same; the stream of hackneys and motor cars on their way to the grounds of the Royal Dublin Society, the foreign visitors, the military, the strings of horses, the riders in black caps and scarlet coats and tightly cut breeches. The ladies as usual engaged his special interest. Most of them were at their best; fashionable and feminine and agreeably pretty. A hefty and horselike few displeased him. That was as usual too. He had once described the ladies of the Dublin Horse Show as a mixture of Sweeties and Tweedies. The remark came back to him from his remote student days. Perhaps youth was the missing ingredient. He was getting old. He sighed and consulted his pocket watch again. Father O’Connor was now half an hour late. It was uncharacteristic and puzzling.
His interest in the traffic flagged. Yearling returned his watch to his pocket and walked as far as the bridge, in the hope that the name on the parapet would restore his good spirits:
‘Balls Bridge
Erected 1791
Rebuilt 1835
Widened and improved
1904’
Henry Grattan, he remembered, had fought a duel here when Ireland still had a parliament of her own. Self-government had been sold in return for place and pension. Pitt’s fear then had been a French invasion. Now England’s anxiety was that the same old Home Rule question would cause a civil war between the Redmondites and the Carsonites with weapons supplied to both sides by courtesy of the Kaiser. A distressful country. Napper Tandy was right.
It was an August morning of bright sunshine. When he lifted his eyes to the water and then upstream towards Herbert Park its beauty filled him with pleasure. The trees crowding over the river from either bank broke the sunshine into gleaming shafts; the water was a living floor of black and gold in a tunnel of green. At a point where the bank sloped gently into the water a little girl was washing a handkerchief. The sight put him in mind of a street rhyme which he was trying hard to recall when Bradshaw tapped him on the shoulder and said urgently:
‘Where on earth is Father O’Connor. Hasn’t he arrived?’
‘I can’t understand it,’ Yearling said.
‘But you were to meet him on the corner. What are you doing on the bridge?’
‘Trying to remember a street rhyme,’ Yearling admitted.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve missed him.’
‘I missed something,’ Yearling confessed, ‘but not Father O’Connor. Youth, probably.’
Bradshaw stared at him.
‘Yearling,’ he said seriously, ‘you are becoming distinctly odd. Florence and I sometimes worry about you. Do you realise that you’re talking a lot of incomprehensible nonsense?’
‘Is it incomprehensible that a man should mourn over his youth?’
Bradshaw fumbled impatiently for his watch.
‘It’s half past eleven,’ Yearling informed him, ‘I’ve just looked at mine.’
Bradshaw pushed his watch back again.
‘I am anxious about Father O’Connor. And you take it all so lightly.’
‘I can see the corner perfectly well from here. Besides, I like the name of this bridge. It amuses me.’
Bradshaw hesitated, saw what he meant and said:
‘I am not entertained by undergraduate bawdiness.’
‘I remember now that you never were.’
‘Some day,’ Bradshaw added, ‘it will land you in trouble. It comes out sometimes in the wrong company.’ Yearling turned again to the parapet, sorry to have roused the other to ill temper. It was an easy thing to do. Bradshaw did not mean it. Blood pressure was responsible. Or some abiding anxiety about society and the world.
The child was still gravely at play.
‘Look at the little girl.’
‘What’s she up to?’ Bradshaw asked, peering.
‘She’s washing her handkerchief.’
‘That’s an odd thing.’
‘She’s playing at being a mother, I imagine. The instinct comes out, even at that age. Don’t you find it moving?’
Bradshaw peered more intently.
‘She’ll fall in,’ he decided.
‘Now I’ve remembered the street rhyme,’ Yearling said, ‘it goes like this.’
He closed his eyes, digging deep into his memory for the words.
‘Down by the river where the green grass grows
Where Mary Murphy washes her clothes
She sang and she sang and she sang so sweet
And she called for her sweetheart down the street
Sweetheart, sweetheart will you marry me?
Yes love, yes love at half past three
Half past three is very very late
So we’ll have our party at half past eight.’
With guarded politeness Bradshaw asked:
‘Where do you hear these things?’
‘From the children of the back streets when I’m on my way to the foundry. They play these singing games. I find them fascinating.’
‘I’m sure.’ Bradshaw was fidgeting again.
‘It’s nice to have seen Mary Murphy,’ Yearling said. ‘I wonder will I ever meet her sweetheart?’
Bradshaw turned suddenly away from him and waved.
‘There he is.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Father O’Connor, dammit, he’s crossing the street.’
Yearling turned from the river too and saw the priest, with quick glances to left and right, hurrying through the traffic. When he joined them his face was red with exertion. He tried to shake hands with both of them at once.
‘I’m so sorry to have kept you.’
‘Something happened, Father,’ Bradshaw said, ‘I know by your manner.’
‘Something dreadful,’ Father O’Connor said.
‘Rest for a moment,’ Yearling advised.
Father O’Connor leaned against the parapet.
‘I had to walk,’ he said, ‘there were no hackneys available. Everything hirable has been snapped up.’
‘But . . . the trams?’ Bradshaw asked.
The truth flashed suddenly into Yearling’s mind. Of course something had been missing, something so large and obvious that he had not thought of it until now.
‘The trams have stopped working,’ Father O’Connor said. ‘Mr. Larkin stopped them at ten o’clock.’