Almost immediately a head peered around the corner behind him. The head watched until Gypo turned to the left at the far end past the lamp. Then a man darted around the corner and raced down the street in pursuit. It was Mulholland tracking Gypo.
When Gypo turned to the left past the lamp he came into a narrow street in which there were no houses. On the right-hand side there was a high wall, like a barrack wall. It enclosed a big goods yard belonging to a manufactory, where mineral waters or something of that kind were made. On the other side of the street there was no wall at all. The foundations of houses still remained. Here and there, a doorway, a chimney stack, or the brick framework of a window, stood up in a ghastly fashion. Beyond that there was an open space full of refuse, mounds of earth, bricks, pots, old clothes. The street itself was a network of puddles. In order to avoid wetting himself to the knees, Gypo had to walk along the sloping bank of clay where the houses had crumbled.
It was a dreary sight. It almost shouted its experiences, and if it had shouted, it would have talked in that endless, loud, babbling scream in which maniacs and demented creatures utter their words. It was alive in that peculiar way in which ruins are alive at night, when the earth is covered with darkness and the living sleep.
But Gypo was not sensitive. For him, the street, with its dirt and its squalor, was a savage sauce to whet his appetite for the riotous feast of … He strode rapidly. He jumped from mound to mound, now slipping with a curse, now catching a loose brick in some piece of wall to steady himself. Now and again he heard a “hist” from the opposite wall of the street, where some woman, old and decrepit, sought the darkness so that her ravaged figure might escape the drunken eyes of some passionate fellow seeking a fool’s pleasure. These noises, croaks uttered by damned souls, sounds so tremendously horrid to the innocent mind, made no impression on Gypo. To him they were merely noises, expressions of everyday life.
Once he recognized one of the women who took a pace forward from her position and put a wrinkled hand to her brow to look at him.
“Ho! Blast yer sowl, Maggie Casey,” he muttered, “aren’t ye dead yet?”
He chuckled with laughter as he heard her blasphemous rejoinder.
As he approached the far end of the street the silence lessened. He heard whisperings and murmurs, snatches of distant song, sounds of footfalls, strains of music. These sounds acted on him like battle-cries. He almost broke into a run as he came gradually nearer to the volume of sound. At last he dashed under an old archway and he was in the next street. The medley of sound was all about him. On his left-hand side stretched the long, low streets of brothels, entwined like webwork among the ruins of what was once a resort of the nobility of eighteenth-century Dublin.
He was in a narrow street of two-storied houses, low houses with green Venetian blinds on the windows of some of them, their street doors opened wide, lights in all the front, ground-floor windows. But the street itself was in darkness on account of the drizzling rain. An odd woman flitted along. A few men walked about uncertainly. The street had a gloomy deserted look. But from the houses a medley of joyous sound issued.
Gypo looked on for a moment excitedly. Then he walked down the street slowly, examining each house as he passed. He knew Katie Fox was by now at Biddy Burke’s. He wanted to avoid Biddy Burke’s. Biddy Burke’s house was over on the other side. He didn’t want to go there tonight. It was only a poor place, used by revolutionaries and criminals of the working-class type. The women there were an ugly, ill-dressed, whisky-drinking lot. He was well known there. He knew all the women. There was only Guinness’s stout on sale and even that was so diluted and ghastly that it was like drinking castor oil. The more a man drank of it the thirstier he became. A shilling a drink for poison like that!
Yah! Away with Biddy Burke and Katie Fox and Sligo Cissie and the rest of them! Tonight he wanted to go somewhere where he was not known. He wanted to go among beautiful women. Strange, beautiful women clothed in silk! Mad women! Women with dark, flashing eyes and sharp, white teeth! Huh! He wanted to go mad. It was a mad night. There was fire in his blood. His hands wanted to rip mountains. He would swallow tankards of drink. He would drain this vast reservoir of strength from his body. He must or he would burst. Already he felt a desire to beat his head against walls.
For six months he had been walking about a beggar, cut off from pleasure, subject to Katie Fox’s charity. Phew! She was no longer attractive to him, that bag of bones who thought of nothing but dope.
Suddenly, without thinking, breathing heavily, flushed, excited like a man inhaling chloroform, he staggered through a doorway. He stood in a long, dark hall. He could hear laughter and drunken singing coming from his right, a few yards down the hall, from behind a door through which a glint of light came. He strode to the door. He tried to lift the latch and walk in, but the door was bolted. Almost instantly the sounds ceased. He kicked at the bottom of the door with his boot several times.
“Who’s that?” came a woman’s voice angrily.
“Open the door an’ find out,” answered Gypo in a shout.
“Wait a minute, Betty,” came a husky man’s voice; “lemme out.”
There was shuffling and whispering.
“Keep well behind it,” said somebody else.
Then the bolt was withdrawn. The latch was lifted carefully. The door opened
