‘What time will the office staff report at?’
‘In about an hour—or even less. They’re being rounded up at the moment.’
‘I’ll be here for them,’ Fitz said.
‘We’ll boil up a can of tea while we’re waiting,’ Carrington suggested. ‘Have a fag.’
‘No,’ Fitz said. ‘I’m going up aloft to look after the reserve water supply. It may be needed and I’ve found nobody else has ever been able to put it in working order.’
He climbed laboriously up steel ladders and felt his way by handrails that were covered with a thick coating of dust. Below him the light from the untended furnaces threw tiny pools of red along the empty floor. He felt his way along the galleries, the handrails guiding him where the gloom was thick, an occasional rooflight easing the strain with a dusty shaft of sunlight. He trod gingerly through the remote and intricate web of steel until he found the water reserve which was located above No. 4 House. He remembered testing it many times before, when the coal-stack went on fire and Mulhall was one of the carters called in to help. He went through the same drill with it now, until the pipes began their agitated dance and the gallery trembled with the sudden outburst of noise. Satisfied that the reserve would work if called on, he followed the catwalk until it led him through a doorway and on to the roof.
He looked about him, grateful for the fresh air. Below him the works yard was empty. There were no carters leading their horses, no labourers piling coal. The telpher, its arcing rail empty, no longer sent blue sparks flying from its trolley. The new loading machine, to which Mulhall had sacrificed his legs and his manhood, was abandoned and untended and bathed in lonely sunlight. Beyond the yard, at a distance of a few intervening streets, was the river. Here and there smoke curled from the funnels of ships. None of the cranes was working. Either it was the hour between tides, or the lock-out had spread to the riverside. He delayed for some time, looking at the empty yard and considered his own position. He had not been issued with a form. Probably they assumed that he had left the union when they made him a foreman. Carrington then, had been decent enough to keep his mouth shut.
When he got back the office staff were assembled already in No. 1 House.
‘You organise this lot,’ Carrington said. ‘I’ll look after No. 2 House. There’s a cup of tea ready for you when you get them working.’
‘Right,’ Fitz said.
He divided them, putting some on the skips and giving shovels to others. Then he explained what was to be done, and at what times. He appointed a senior clerk to direct the rest. He watched them charging the furnaces and showed them how to dress the fires lightly. The heat was to be brought down, he told them, a little at a time and with care. They understood what was at stake and grasped the system quickly. When the initial confusion and awkwardness had been overcome, he left them at it and went to find Carrington.
Carrington’s gang had not yet arrived. He poured tea from a billycan for Fitz and asked:
‘How’s it going?’
‘Smoothly enough,’ Fitz said. ‘They’ll get the heats down without damage.’
‘Fine,’ Carrington said.
Fitz took the tea. It was thick and brown. Carrington made tea in the way of the workers: tea leaves and sugar all in together, with a lacing of condensed milk. It had the taste of the job off it, of coal fumes, of sweat, of furnace-house gossip. Carrington said:
‘You’ll have to keep an eye on them, just the same.’
Fitz drank his tea, thinking his way ahead.
‘They’ll fold up after a while, of course,’ Carrington pursued. ‘Enthusiasm is no substitute for experience.’
He took his tea.
‘Muscles too soft,’ he explained.
‘They’ll manage,’ Fitz said.
‘With a bit of guidance,’ Carrington said, indulgently.
‘Well,’ he added, when Fitz did not seem disposed to talk, ‘better get back on the job I suppose.’
Fitz examined his cup. There was a residue of liquid in it, enough to wash the tea leaves from the sides as he tilted it about and about. He considered carefully and said:
‘I won’t be going back to the job.’ He had the feeling of pushing a bolt on a door firmly home, or making a will. Carrington said nothing for some time. He, too, was feeling his way.
‘You realise what you’re doing?’ he said at last.
‘Perfectly,’ Fitz said.
‘There’s a chance, sooner or later, they’ll show a little mercy to the others. But they’ll never forgive a foreman. If you quit now you’ll walk through that gate for the last time. You’ll never get back.’
‘I know that,’ Fitz said.
‘Then why do you have to be such a fool?’
Why? Personal pride, or the hope that at the end of so much travail, somewhere in the unseeable future, there would be a change in the world. He had seen a man suffer and afterwards he had picked up two dismembered feet and wrapped them in a sack.
‘I couldn’t leave the union now,’ he said. ‘People who were never in it and never intended to be in it are locked out because they won’t sign a bit of paper promising never to join it.’
‘They’ve the prospect of getting back,’ Carrington said. ‘You’ve none.’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we meet it,’ Fitz said. He pushed the cup away from him and stood up.
‘See you sometime,’ he said.
Carrington offered his hand. Fitz shook it.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
He left the house, crossed the empty yard and went through the gateman’s hut into the street. The notice of the lock-out was still posted on the main gates, which were closed.
By the end of the week Bullman had assembled the facts for his Board. The four hundred firms in membership of the Employers’ Federation had stood firm, thirty-two trade unions had joined with the Larkinites in refusing to sign the form. The lock-out was general throughout the city. They must act from now on in consort with the rest of the employers. They would have financial support from employers in England. Gates closed, machinery came to a standstill. The city of Dublin was practically paralysed. It was reckoned that about twenty-four thousand men were involved. In a matter of days the streets filled with the hungry hordes Rashers had feared.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mary, alone with the sleeping children, sat at the window overlooking the street and felt the dusk growing in the room about her. At first she had been occupied by the children playing in scattered groups below, until in twos and threes they were called away and there was nothing left to watch except the changing tones of pavement and housefront as the shadows of late evening began their transformation. It was September and already the dusk came perceptibly earlier. Soon the women, meeting each other, would remark: ‘God bless us, but aren’t the evenings closing in.’ Soon would come the colder weather and the need for fires. With half the city idle, what was to happen then?
The thought remained to trouble and preoccupy her. Fitz’s promotion to foreman had brought not only extra money and a little more comfort but a place in the world that was better and more secure than any of her neighbours. He could have left the union when he was promoted. Foremen, she had thought, were above unions. Yet he had come out with the rest, and in doing so put everything she had and all she hoped for in jeopardy—her children’s future, the possessions she had gathered to make a home with, the small weekly amounts she was beginning to save. It was not in her nature to question his decision, yet the consequences of it distressed her. Hunger and want were again part of her world, twin possibilities that threatened in her moments of solitude and were now calamitous presences in the shadowed corners of the street.