The Informer

the trade union, but a thoroughly respectable, conservative Socialist, utterly fanatical in his hatred of the status of a working man. The whole house was in keeping with his views on life. The door opened on a little narrow hall, with the stairway rising midway in it. The stairway was spotlessly clean, with brightly polished brass rods holding down the well-washed linoleum carpet that struggled upwards rigidly to the top of it. From the door, in daytime, the backyard could be seen. In the backyard there were outhouses and stables, for Jack McPhillip kept a yellow she-goat, three pigs, a flock of white hens and a little pony and trap, in which he was in the habit of driving out into the country on Sundays, in summer, with his wife, to visit his wife’s relatives at Talmuc. To the right of the hall there were two doors. The first door opened into the parlour. In the parlour there was a piano, eight chairs of all sizes and sorts, innumerable photographs, “ornaments,” and absolutely no room for anybody to move about without touching something or other. The second door opened into the kitchen, a large clean room with a cement floor, an open grate and a narrow bed in the corner farthest from the door. The bed belonged to old Ned Lawless, the epileptic relative of Mrs. McPhillip. He lived in the house and received his meals and half a crown per week, in exchange for his labours in looking after the backyard. He was never clean, the only dirty thing in the house. On the second floor there were three rooms. One was used by the old couple. The second by the only daughter Mary, a girl of twenty-one who worked in the city as a clerk, in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. The third room, opening on the backyard, had been closed for six months. It had been Francis’s bedroom. That evening he had just entered it to go to bed when the police arrived.

When Gypo entered, the house was crowded with neighbours who had come in to sympathize. Some were even standing in the hallway. Gypo walked through the hallway and pushed his way into the kitchen. Nobody noticed him. He sat down on the floor to the left of the door, with his back to the wall and his right hand grasping his left wrist in front of his drawn-up knees. He sat in silence for almost a minute waiting for an opportunity to speak to Mrs. McPhillip. He could see her through the people in the room, sitting on a chair to the right of the fire. She had black wooden rosary beads wound round and round her fingers. There were tears in her pale blue eyes and streaming down her great white fat cheeks. Her corpulent body flowed over the chair on all sides like a load of hay on a cart. Her long check apron hid her feet. She was looking dimly at the fire, murmuring prayers silently with her lips. She nodded her head now and again in answer to something that was said to her.

She held Gypo’s attention like a powerful magnet. Even when somebody came between his eyes and her body, he stared through the intervening body as if it were transparent. His eyes were centred on her forehead and on her grey-white hair, that had a yellowish sheen at the top of the skull where the parting was. He was thinking how good she had been to him. She had often fed him. More precious still, she always had a word of sympathy for him, a kind look, a tender, soft, smooth touch of the hand on his shoulder! These were the things his strange soul remembered and treasured. There were no others who were soft and gentle to him like she was. Often when he and Francis came into the house at dawn, after having done some revolutionary “stunt,” she used to get up, in her bare fat feet, with a skirt drawn over her nightdress. She used to move about silently with quivering lips, cooking breakfast. It was a huge meal from her hands, an indiscriminate lavish Irish meal, sausages, eggs, bacon, all together on one plate.

And she would often press half a crown into Gypo’s hand when nobody was looking, whispering: “May the Virgin protect ye an’ won’t ye look after Frankie an’ see that he comes to no harm.”

“She is a good woman,” thought Gypo, impersonally, looking at her.

Then the kitchen emptied suddenly in the rear of a fat short man with a pompous appearance, who wore a dark raincoat and a black bowler hat. Everyone made way for him going out the door and there were whispers. Some scowled at him angrily, but it was obvious that everybody had a great respect for him and envied him, even those that scowled at him. He was an important Labour politician, the parliamentary representative of the constituency that comprised Titt Street and the surrounding slums. This important politician had been a bricklayer with Jack McPhillip in his youth and Jack McPhillip was still his main supporter.

When the politician had disappeared there were only five people left in the room, other than Jack McPhillip and his wife. Three men in the corner by the window, to the left of Gypo, had their heads close together, whispering with that sudden intimacy that is born of the presence of a calamity, or of something that has a common interest. Gypo knew two of them. Two of them were members of the Revolutionary Organization.

“That skunk Bartly Mulholland is here,” muttered Gypo to himself, “an’ that’s Tommy Connor with him. Mulholland is lookin’ for Frankie McPhillip’s job on the Intelligence Department, I believe; an’ I suppose that big stiff Connor is trainin’ to be his butty. Huh.”

Jack McPhillip sat on the narrow bed in the other corner, almost opposite Gypo. He was talking to two women,