James Plunkett - Strumpet City

Harrison, not to be outdone in the matter of inside information, put down his cup with a compelling clatter and said:

‘Of course you know what happened at the Viceregal Lodge. I mean about Vicars and the Crown Jewels?’

‘I’d forgotten Vicars would be there.’

‘When Vicars was presented the King shook him by the hand—most warmly, I believe—and held a cordial and cheerful conversation with him. So what price Birrell now?’

‘A handshake and a smile won’t deflect our friend Birrell,’ Yearling said. ‘By God no!’

The others raised their eyebrows, disapproving of his language in front of the priest. Father O’Connor smiled and waved his hands to convey that he was not put out by full-blooded talk. They went on to discuss the theft, a subject on which each had a theory. When Father O’Connor rose and excused himself they stood politely and bowed him out. Then they resumed more freely.

Father O’Connor went into the church to pray a little before lunch. There was a man in front of him whose ragged coat was tied about the middle with a piece of cord. He had a dirty beard and his remaining teeth stood up like cartridges in his hungry face. Father O’Connor’s mind wandered from his prayers. The face particularly held his attention. A scavenger’s bag swung from his waist. The man left almost immediately. Father O’Connor, alone now in front of the altar, reproached himself for the pride he had felt a little while before. He was not endowed with a talent for bringing Christ’s word to the men of business or for living according to Christ’s wish while among them. He was not clever enough, nor was he strong enough to endure the small temptations to worldliness and conceit without becoming their tool instead of being their master. And it was not only the respect of the prominent which would corrupt him. There was corruption in the submissiveness of the ladies’ committees, in the deference to his superior musical knowledge on the part of the humble organist and the choir, in the assumption of his genteel parishioners that to have good breeding, a clean person and unremitting politeness was to honour Christ as He had commanded.

Father O’Connor left the centre aisle and knelt before the shrine of St. Anthony to continue his novena for the recovery of his mother’s rosary. She had given him the beads when he was a young student, a Galway rosary of amber and silver which had belonged to her mother before her. They were the only memento he had of her, a cherished link with the love he had lost when she died. Perhaps, thought Father O’Connor, their loss was part of God’s plan to chasten him, a trial to take his mind from the vanities of the genteel world around him, so that this grief would be with him to draw his thoughts back to the verities. Their disappearance was mysterious enough. At first he had thought the beads must be in the Bradshaw’s house, because he had first missed them after their musical evening. But they searched thoroughly and found nothing. They were not in his rooms or in the vestry. Father O’Connor prayed fervently and humbly. It remained now with St. Anthony, in whom he placed his last hope.

He rose after a while and left the church, finding it a relief now to close the door of the Parish House and leave the sunshine to those whose moods were a better match for it. His room was high up in the house, a quiet, carpeted retreat with two devotional pictures from which the faces of Christ and the Madonna brooded over the well-bound volumes that lined each wall. A letter lay on the table which had not been there when he left. He picked it up and read it, then he put it down and sat for a long time in thought. The letter promised him the transfer he had asked for. He would be posted to work among the poor in the first months of the New Year. God, he was now certain, was truly intervening to shape his life for him. Father O’Connor, sitting alone in the quiet, sunless room, felt his eyes pricking with tears of gratitude, and his heart being filled to overflowing with love of Christ.

CHAPTER THREE

Father O’Connor’s parishioners marked the change. There was a quietness about him in the weeks that followed, an abstracted dedication which marked his attitude to even the most unrewarding and inconvenient of his parish duties. In private he practised small privations, which included doing without lunch on each Friday. His devotion during his daily mass had the effect of making it unduly long, so that his parish priest had to remind him that those attending it had worldly duties and must not be detained unduly. Only in his sermons did he seem to become aware of the living church arrayed dutifully beneath his pulpit. On the second Sunday in Advent his vehement condemnation of worldly show and snobbery set a number of critical tongues wagging. Mr. Bradshaw was greatly offended.

‘That man O’Connor gave another most extraordinary sermon today,’ he said. I wonder the parish priest doesn’t speak to him.’

‘Whatever for?’ Mrs. Bradshaw asked. ‘Wasn’t he speaking on the day’s gospel? I’m sure he didn’t say anything that wasn’t in it.’

‘It’s not that,’ Mr. Bradshaw said, ‘it’s the construction he puts on things. You’d think it was a crime to wear a coat without a hole in it.’

‘He was only reminding us of our duty,’ Mrs. Bradshaw said, ‘and I’m very glad too, because it’s bound to help our collection for the poor at Christmas.’

She finished the letter she was writing and sealed the envelope.

‘Thank goodness that’s done,’ she said.

‘Who is it for?’

‘Mary’s father. I undertook to tell him of her progress at least twice in the year. He is a strict and good man.’

‘You surprise me. I didn’t know he could read,’ Mr. Bradshaw said, returning to his paper.

Mary met Fitz and they looked at the Christmas displays in the shops. The evening was cold and overcast, the Liffey wrinkled at intervals as the sharp breeze drove down it from the mountains. Gaslight from the busy shops shed a mellow glow on damp pavements. At Westland Row the jarveys in worn caps loitered beside their cabs, waiting for incoming trains and their laden passengers. In the lamplight a white mist hovered above the bodies of their horses, harness clanked at each movement of the patient heads or the stamping of metal-shod feet. They stopped for a moment at a shop window. There were long red and yellow Christmas candles, which reminded Mary of her home, where in childhood they would stand in all the windows on Christmas night. There were iced cakes with sugar robin redbreasts on marzipan logs; there were boxes of candied peel and raisins and nutmeg packets and glasses filled with cloves. Turkeys and geese dangled from a gallows by the legs.

‘This time next year,’ Fitz said, ‘we’ll have Christmas together.’

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Mary said. She would put up paper chains and mottoes saying ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Adeste Fideles’ or ‘Christus Natus Est’ done on glossy paper with coloured letters.

They left the main thoroughfare and found themselves among tall tenements. Children were playing on the streets and on the steps. All the doors stood open. The smells from the hallways were heavy and unpleasant.

‘There he is,’ Mary said suddenly, pointing. A man with a beard was hobbling along on the opposite path. He had half a dozen balloons strung from his left hand.

‘Who?’ Fitz asked.

‘The man I saw being beaten by the policeman.’ She followed him with her eyes. Rashers had an unmistakable gait, a way of stooping his shoulders and pushing his neck forward so that his face and pendulant beard had an aggressive tilt. It took Fitz a little time to recollect what she was referring to. When he did he said:

‘They had little to do.’