“The curse of—” began a cracked, shivering voice.
Gypo was gone, with a clatter of boots, over the cobblestones of the archway. He debouched into a wide street of new, redbrick houses. He gripped a wall and peered around him, panting for breath, wild with the excitement of his escape.
It was then that he noticed the wind, the lifting clouds, and the faraway sky. He smelt the wind as he breathed in great gasps through his nostrils, to ease the pressure on his heart and lungs. Then suddenly, he longed for the mountains and the wide undulating plains and the rocky passes and the swift-flowing rivers, away to the south in his own country. Freedom and solitude and quiet, with only the wind coming through the bog heather! Hiding in some rocky fastness of the mountains, listening to the wind! Away, away, where nobody could catch him! To the mountains! To the mountains! Dark blue mountains with bulging sides and little sheep roaming over them, that he could catch and kill!
A wild ferocity of joy overcame him. He stared with dilated nostrils ahead into the rim of the sky above the houses, towards the south. He gazed, as if he were measuring the distance between him and the mountains, so as to take a giant leap, that would carry him at once into the heart of their solitude.
Then he bent down, looking ahead intently. He spat on his hands. He put his hand to his head to settle his hat. But his hat was not there. His skull was bare and damp. He felt all over it and found a patch of clotted blood at the rear base, where it had been kicked during the struggle in the inquiry room. He took no notice of the blood, but kept feeling all over the skull, with a dazed look in his eyes, muttering:
“What am I to do without a hat? I had it this two years.”
In the same dazed way he felt all over his body. He uttered a little shout. He had found it in his trousers pocket, where he had stuffed it, during the inquiry, when he heard that ominous ring in Gallagher’s voice. He clapped it on to his skull, all wrinkled and tattered and tiny. He beat it with his palms, as if it were a mattress. Then, with a gentle sigh, he darted away, headed due south for the mountains.
He ran recklessly, without thinking of the way, or taking any precautions. It was the slum district which he knew so well, the district that enclosed Titt Street, the brothels, the Bogey Hole, tenement houses, churches, pawnshops, public-houses, ruins, filth, crime, beautiful women, resplendent idealism in damp cellars, saints starving in garrets, the most lurid examples of debauchery and vice, all living thigh to thigh, breast to breast, in that foetid morass on the north bank of the Liffey. He ran through narrow streets and great, wide, yawning streets, lanes and archways, streets patched and buttressed, with banks of earth from fallen houses almost damming them in places, pavements strewn with offal, soddened by the rain.
He never made a mistake. He was headed for the mountains. The smell of the mountains was in his nostrils, flooding his lungs, making his heart pant with longing.
At last he entered Beresford Place and saw the river. Instinctively he paused, leaning against a wall, to examine the Bridge. He gasped and trembled.
Two men were standing at the near side of the Butt Bridge. They had already forestalled him. He listened. He toyed with a last hope. He moved cautiously across the open space, to reach the shelter of the ruins of the Custom House. He reached it. He peered closer at the men. They were still indistinct. After all, they might be robbers, workmen, homeless fellows trying to pass the night, students coming from the brothels and having a last drunken argument on their way home. He crawled nearer. Then his little eyes blinked and narrowed.
One of the men crouched against the biting wind. Gypo recognized the crouching figure silhouetted against the sky. It was Mulholland. And the other man, standing stiff, with his hands in his pockets, was Peter Hackett.
Gypo’s head became hot and stuffy. His eyes closed, as a sudden pain struck him in the forehead. He had an impulse to rush forward at the two men and strangle them. But he did not move. He was not afraid of the two of them, in spite of their being armed. He did not fear their guns. But they were part of the Organization. The Organization was at the Bridge. It had got there before him. He could not pass. Gallagher’s cold, glassy eyes were on the Bridge. He could not pass.
The smell of the mountains left his lungs and his nostrils. The wind still blew about his crouching body. But it had lost its odour. Now it was only sharp and biting, an enemy that drove him backwards, skulking and dumbfounded. Where was it driving him? Where was it driving him?
He crouched away before it, without taking counsel with himself, with his head hanging limply on his breast. He crouched across the open space and entered a roadway that led northwards. There was nothing within him with which he could take counsel. Within him he was blank and dark, like a bottomless abyss filled with thick fog. His hulking figure was driven by the wind to some boundless region where there was no shelter. He was driven by the
