“It’s two turns from here,” he murmured, “first to the left, then to the right. She should be in be now. That must be three or four o’clock.”
Now he moved carefully, listening for sounds and planting his feet lightly, close to the side of the lane. He turned to the left, went down fifty yards and then turned to the right. He entered a kind of circular square, a crescent, with a church standing in the middle. He moved around the crescent until he reached the other side of the church. There, at the corner of a little cul-de-sac, was the house in which Katie Fox had a room, about fifteen yards away from the church.
All the houses in the little square were tenement houses, old, dusty and grey, tattered, sordid, with broken panes in their windows. Nearly all the street doors were ajar. There was nothing to steal within.
Gypo deferentially tipped his hat to the church as he passed it. He entered the doorway of Katie Fox’s house. The hallway was pitch black. He stood for a few moments peering around in the darkness. Then he saw a night-light on the first landing. He recognized it as the light placed there every evening by Mrs. Delaney, who had become a religious maniac since her son was killed in the revolution of 1916. He had been killed while he was running along the streets, wounded, crying out for shelter.
“If he ever comes home at night,” whispered Mrs. Delaney confidentially to everybody, “he’ll see the light burnin’ an’ he’ll know I’m in. God is good to His own people an’ He’ll look after me Johnny.”
Gypo felt comforted at seeing the night-light. He moved noiselessly up the stairs until he reached it. When he was passing it, rounding the angle of the stairs, he paused, with his hand on the wooden banister and looked at it. For some reason or other he tiptoed towards it, leaned out when he was within two feet of it, and blew it out. Then he started and looked about him wildly. It was pitch dark again.
“That’s better,” he said with a little sigh.
He mounted the stairs steadily. They remained good until he reached the third floor. Then he had to move up a narrow, rickety, broken stairs to the top floor, where Katie Fox had a room. He made an awful noise, but it disturbed nobody. He heard a child crying when he got near the top of the stairs. The child belonged to Tim Flanagan, an unemployed man, who occupied the opposite room to Katie Fox on the top landing. He lived there with his wife and three children. The baby had the measles and the other two children were awake. One child was laughing. Gypo could distinguish Flanagan’s weak, timorous voice, trying to soothe the children.
Gypo stood outside the door to the left, Katie Fox’s door. He listened. A shaft of light streamed through the keyhole and through a large, round hole in the bottom of the door. A large piece of the door had been gnawed away by a stray dog that Katie Fox brought home one night. He bit his way out of the room as soon as he got a meal. Gypo listened. Katie Fox was talking within. Gypo knocked.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s only me, Katie. Open the door.”
“Mother o’ Mercy,” she screeched, “it’s his ghost. It’s his ghost, Louisa. Louisa, will ye hide me somewhere, for God’s sake!”
“Ghost yer gran’mother,” came a cracked, old voice. “Get up an’ open the door will ye, till we see what he wants.”
“No, no—” began Katie’s voice again.
Gypo put his shoulder to the door, burst the piece of string that fastened it on the inside to a nail in the wall, and flung the door open wide. He stalked into the room.
At first the whole room appeared to be a blue bank of fog. Then the blue mist dissipated gradually. The room assumed proportions. Things swam out of the mist towards him gracefully, in the order of their importance. First came the lamp. It was placed on the black, wooden mantelpiece over the fireplace. It was an ordinary tin paraffin lamp, painted red. The chimney was three-parts black. Next came the fireplace. There was a huge, open grate, with a turf fire burning in it. The fire was more like the remains of a funeral pyre, because the ashes had accumulated for weeks. The flaming peat sods lay stretched like fallen logs on the top of the great pile of yellow ashes. Next came the bed, with Louisa Cummins lying in one corner of it.
The bed was so huge that it might be mistaken for anything were it not supported by four thick wooden posts and had a canopy over it, at the head, after the fashion of those beds that are called in Irish country places “Archbishops’ Beds.” The bedclothes were indescribable. Everything was pitched on to the bed and everything stayed there. Louisa Cummins lived in the bed most of the day. She had done so for eight years, since she became “bedridden” as the result of “injuries” received from the police, one night she was arrested on a charge of trafficking in immorality. She was quite strong and healthy. She did all her work in bed. The blankets were gathered about her bulky person in the far corner, near the wall. In the other corner, Katie Fox’s corner, there was a couple or so of tattered blankets. The foot of the bed was heaped with junk of all sorts, from a notched mug, out of which the old lady drank her tea, to a statue of Saint Joseph that hung on the bedpost, suspended from a thick nail by a rough, knotted cord. The cord was around the statue’s neck, in a noose. The statue was not suspended there out of crude respect, as might be supposed. It was hung there as a blasphemous
