He had not even cleared his brain for a beginning with this devilish work of making a plan when he was interrupted by the arrival of Katie Fox. She had sat down beside him before he knew she was there. He was so immersed in his struggles that she nudged him and spoke before he was aware of her presence.
“How’s things, Gypo?” she cried in her hard thin voice, as she nudged him in the ribs. “Are ye flush enough to give us a wet?”
Gypo jumped to his feet, spilling half his pint. He gazed at her with fright in his eyes and his chest heaved. Then he recognized her and sat down immediately, flurried and confused by his display of excitement.
“Hello, Katie,” he muttered, pretending to be vexed, “ye shouldn’t come in that way on a fellah. I look around me an’ there ye are proddin’ me in the ribs. Why the divil didn’t ye shout same as ye always do?”
She put the backs of her thin, red-veined hands on her hips and stared at him in amazement, partly real, partly born of that love of emphatic gesture and movement and speech which is a peculiar characteristic of the women of the Dublin slums. Katie was a woman of the slums. Her father had been an employee of the Corporation and her mother was a charwoman. As a girl Katie worked in a biscuit factory. Her own beauty of body and the grinding toil in the factory made her discontented. She joined the Revolutionary Organization. That was six years ago. After that, her first plunge from the straight path of the tremendous respectability and conservatism of the slum woman, she was led by excess of feeling into one pitfall after another. Finally she passed out of the ranks of respectability altogether by being expelled from the Revolutionary Organization on a charge of public prostitution. Now she had become an abandoned woman, known as such even among the prostitutes of the brothel quarter, a drug fiend, a slattern, an irresponsible creature. Traces of her young beauty still remained in the deep blue eyes, that were melancholy and tired and twitched at the edges, in her long lean figure now grown emaciated, in her black hair that strayed carelessly about her face from beneath the rim of her ragged red hat. But the mouth, that telltale register of vice, had completely lost the sumptuous but delicate curves of innocent girlhood and blossoming maturity. The lips hung down at the sides. They were swollen in the middle. Their colour had died out and had been renewed with loud vulgarity by cheap paint. The poor tormented soul peered out of the young face, old before the years had time to wrinkle it, sad, hard and stupefied.
She thrust out her little chin and turned her head sideways, turning down the corners of her lips farther at one side of her mouth.
“I thought as much,” she said slowly, contorting her lips and face as she spoke. “That’s why I came in unknownst and sat down beside ye. I saw ye be chance, me fine buck, as I was talkin’ to Biddy Mac over at the corner opposite Kane’s. So I just prowled in to see ye on the quiet. But it’s clear as daylight that ye don’t want to see me. Not while ye got money to fill yersel’ with porter. It was a different story, wasn’t it, this mornin’ when ye begged the price of a cup o’ tay off me, an’ me that didn’t see the colour of a half-crown for three days runnin’. Oh then—”
“Now shut yer gob, will ye,” interrupted Gypo excitedly. “It’s just like ye takin’ a man up wrong that way. Sure I didn’t mane anythin’ like that atall. Only ye just came in on me all of a sudden. What are ye havin’?”
Katie looked at him in high dudgeon, still with her chin thrust out, her head turned sideways, her lips turned downwards and her hands on her hips. She murmured: “Double gin,” without moving her eyes from Gypo’s face. Gypo arose and slouched up to the counter for the drink. Her eyes followed him shrewdly and she kept nodding her head slowly at his immense back.
Her relationship with Gypo was of that irregular kind which is hard to describe by means of one word. She was undoubtedly not his wife and in the same manner she could not be called his mistress. But their relationship partook both of the nature of lawful marriage and of the concubinage that is sanctified by natural love. Katie loved Gypo because he was strong, big, silent, perhaps also because he was stupid and her ready slum “smartness” could always outwit his lumbering brain. Whenever Gypo had any money he spent it with her. Sometimes when he was without any money, she brought him home with her and provided him with his breakfast next morning. On the whole they were good friends. During the past six months after Gypo had
