IV
Titt Street was in turmoil like an anthill that has been rooted up by the ponderous hoof of a cow. Under the scattered street lamps, between the parallel rows of two-storied, redbrick houses, groups of wild-eyed men were talking. The pale light of the lamps showed the drizzling rain falling like steam on their rough, dirty clothes, on their thick-veined necks, on their excited faces, on their gnarled hands that were raised in gesticulation. Their voices filled the hollow darkness of the street with a hushed murmur, that rose and fell turbulently, like the chattering of a torrent coming through rocks. Their voices were nervous, as if they awaited a storm at sea.
Old women with shawls over their heads flitted about like shadows. They darted from doorway to doorway, talking, making threatening gestures at something remote, crossing themselves with their haggard faces turned upwards to the sky. Young women walked arm-in-arm, slowly, up and down the street. They looked at No. 44 as they passed it, in silence, with awe in their open, red lips.
No. 44 was the centre of interest. The horror that had come to it had aroused the whole street. It had aroused the whole quarter. Three streets away, bar attendants stood gaping behind their counters, while some man, with an excited red face and a big mouth, recounted the manner of Frank McPhillip’s death, with oaths and frenzied gesticulations. Everywhere, in the streets, in the public-houses, in the tenement kitchens, where old red-nosed men craned forward their shrivelled necks to hear the dreadful news, one word was whispered with fear and hatred.
It was the word “Informer.”
Gypo heard that word as he reached the junction of Titt Street and Bryan Road—a long wide road, lined with little shops, the sidewalks strewn with papers, little heaps of dirt in the gutters, two tramcar lines rusted by the drizzling rain, groups of loafers at every lamppost, at the public-house doors and on the Canal Bridge, where the road disappeared abruptly over the horizon, as if it had fallen over a precipice into space. He was passing Ryan’s public-house that stood at the corner, half in Titt Street, half in Bryan Road. The word came to him through the open door of the public bar. He had slowed down his pace on reaching the neighbourhood and when he heard the word uttered, he brought his left leg up to the right and instead of thrusting it forward for another pace, he dropped it heavily but noiselessly to the wet pavement of red and white glazed brick diamonds, with which the front of the public-house was decorated.
A squall of wind came around the corner just then and buffeted him about the body. He opened his mouth and nostrils. He distended his eyes. He thrust forward his head and listened.
“There must ’a been information gev, ’cos how else could they—” a tall lean man was saying, as he stood in the middle of the sawdust-covered floor, holding a pint of black frothing porter in his right hand.
Then a burly carter, with a grey sack around his shoulders like a cape, jostled the man who was speaking, in an awkward attempt to cross the floor through the crowd. But the man had said enough. Gypo knew that they were talking about the death of Francis Joseph McPhillip and that they suspected that information had been given.
Again the idea came into his head that he must form a plan without a moment’s delay. But the inside of his head was perfectly empty, with his forehead pressing against it, hot and congested, as if he had been struck a violent blow with a flat stick. The idea floundered about in his head, repeating itself aimlessly, like a child calling for help in an empty house. “No,” he muttered to himself, as he gripped his clasp knife fiercely in his trousers pocket, “I can’t make out anythin’ standin’ here in the rain in front of a pub. Better go ahead.”
He hurled himself around the corner against the squall into Titt Street with almost drunken violence. Then he realized with terror the fate that menaced him if … He saw the groups under the lampposts. He saw the flitting women. He saw the youths, hushed, strained, expectant. He heard the rumble of human sound. The dark, sombre, mean street that had been familiar to him until now, suddenly appeared strange, as if he had never seen it before, as if it had suddenly become inhabited by dread monsters that were intent on devouring him. It appeared to him rather, that he had wandered, through a foolish error of judgment, into a strange and hostile foreign country where he did not know the language.
He glared about him aggressively, as he walked up the Street. He planted his feet on the ground firmly, walking with his legs wide apart, with his shoulders squared, with his head thrust forward into the wind like the jib boom of a ship.
As he was passing an open doorway somebody cried “hist.” He halted like a challenged sentry. He wheeled savagely towards the doorway and called out.
“Who are cryin’ hist after?”
“It’s only me,” chirped an old lady in a clean white apron, a woman he knew well. “I thought ye were Jim Delaney, the coalheaver. I got to whisper on account o’ me throat. I got a cold a fortnight ago, scrubbin’ floors out at Clontarf, an’ it’s getting worse instead of better. The doctor—”
But Gypo glanced angrily at her bandaged throat and her dim blue eyes and passed on with a grunt without listening to her further. He arrived at No. 44 and entered through the open door without knocking.
No. 44 was the most respectable house in the street. Its redbrick front was cleaner than the other fronts. Its parlour window was unbroken and was decorated with clean curtains of Nottingham lace. Its door was freshly painted black. Its owner Jack McPhillip, the bricklayer, had already begun the ascent from the working class to the middle class. He was a Socialist and chairman of his branch of 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, who had chairs close to the bed. They had pushed in to talk to McPhillip as soon as the politician had left. They were nodding their heads and fidgeting, with that amazing prodigality of emotion, which women of the very lowest rung of the middle class ladder display, when in the presence of members of the working class who are still in puris naturalibus. One was the wife of the Titt Street “small grocer.” The other was the wife of John Kennedy the lorry driver, who had just set up in business “for himself.”
Jack McPhillip sat on the bed, with his right shoulder leaning against the pillow. One foot was almost on the floor. The other foot was on the bed. He held his right hand, palm outwards, in front of his face, as if he were trying to drive away some imaginary idea, as he talked.
“There ye are now,” he was saying; “see what that man has done for himsel’ in life. That’s what every man should aim at doin’, instead of jig actin’ and endin’ up by bringin’ disgrace on his class an’ on his family. Johnny Daly is a member o’ Parliament this day because he spent any money and time he had to spare on his education. He looked after his business and he did his best to educate and better the condition of his fellow-men. That’s what every man should do. But my son … I put him into a good job as an insurance agent an’ if he had minded himself he’d be well on his way now towards a respectable position in life for himself, but instead o’ that—”
Suddenly there was an amazing interruption that caused everybody to start. Gypo had spoken in a deep thunderous voice that filled the whole house.
“I’m sorry for yer trouble, Mrs. McPhillip,” he cried.
The sentence reechoed in the silence that followed it. It had been uttered in a shout. Gypo’s voice had suddenly broken loose from his lungs into a spontaneous expression of the emotion that shook him into a passion of feeling, looking at Mrs. McPhillip. He felt suddenly that he must express that feeling forcibly. Not by a whisper, or a plain restrained statement, but by a savage shout that would brook no contradiction. The shout wandered about in the room long after its sound had vanished. Nobody spoke. Its force was too tremendous. Everybody, for some amazing reason or other, sniffed at the smell of fried sausages that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen. The smell came from the pan still left on the fireplace, containing the sausages that had been cooking for Francis Joseph McPhillip’s supper when the police came. He had been so tired that he told his mother to bring his supper to him in bed. So they still remained there, on the side of the fireplace, forgotten.
Then the initial amazement wore off and everybody looked at Gypo. They saw him sitting on the floor, doubled up, bulky in his blue dungarees that clung about his thighs like a swimming suit, with his little round hat perched on his massive head, still staring at Mrs. McPhillip’s face as if drawn by a magnet, unconscious of the amazement he had caused by his shout.
And alone of all the people in the room, Mrs. McPhillip was not amazed. She had not started. She had not moved her eyes. Her lips still moved in prayer. Her mind was drawn by another magnet to the contemplation of something utterly remote from the people in that room, utterly remote from life, to the contemplation of something that had its roots in the mystic boundaries of eternity.
Then Jack McPhillip jumped to a sitting posture on the bed. He grabbed at the old tweed cap that had fallen off his grizzled grey head.
“Oh, it’s you that’s in it, is it?” he cried. “Ye son o’ damnation!”
He glared at Gypo so ferociously that his face began to twitch. His face was so burned by the sun that it was almost black at a distance. At close quarters it looked a reddish brown. He had a glass eye. The other eye looked straight across the glass one, as if guarding it. He had to look away from a man in order to see him. This distortion in his vision had always filled his wife with terror, so that now she trembled whenever he looked at her. It was so uncanny, his looking at space like that. His body was short and slight. He was fifty years old.
He jumped off the bed and stood on the floor in his grey socks, his blue waistcoat unbuttoned, the little white patch of linen on the abdomen of his grey flannel shirt puffing in and out with his heavy breathing, his throat contorting, his hands gripping and ungripping restlessly.
Mrs. McPhillip had awakened from her reverie as soon as her husband spoke. She had started up and gripped her breast over her heart with a dumb exclamation. Then she rubbed her two eyes hurriedly and looked at him. As soon as she saw him, her eyes grew dim again and her body subsided into the chair from which it had risen slightly.
“Jack,” she cried in an agonized voice, “Jack! Jack, leave him alone. He was Frankie’s friend. He was a friend of me dead boy’s. Let him alone. What’s done is done.”
“Be damned to that for a story,” cried Jack. His voice was weak and jerky, just like the voice of his dead son. “A friend d’ye call him? What kind of friend d’ye call that waster that never did a day’s work in his life? That ex-policeman! He was even driven outa the police. That’s fine company for yer son, Maggie. It’s the likes o’ him that’s brought Frankie to his death an’ destruction. Them an’ their revolutions. It’s in Russia they should be where they could act the cannibal as much as they like, instead of leadin’ good honest Irishmen astray. Why don’t they get out of here and go back to England where they came from, with their rotten gold, gev to them be the Orangemen to turn Ireland into an uproar, so that the Freemasons could step in again and capture it. Ah-h-h-h, I’d like to get me fingers on yer throat, ye—”
He was rushing across the floor at Gypo, but the three men had jumped up and caught him. They held him back. Gypo stared at him, as if in perplexity, without moving. But the muscles of his shoulders stiffened, almost unconsciously. His eyes wandered slowly from the fuming husband to the sobbing wife, who had again turned to the fire.
Then the people from the parlour rushed into the kitchen, attracted by the shouting. They were headed by Mary McPhillip, the daughter of the house. She was a handsome young woman, with a full figure, plump, with red cheeks, a firm jaw, auburn hair cropped in the current fashion, blue eyes that had a “sensible” look in them and a rather large mouth that was opened wide by her excitement. Every bit of her except her mouth belonged to an average Irishwoman of the middle class. The mouth was a product of the slums. Its size and its propensity for disclosing the state of the mind by exaggerated movement, which is the hallmark of the slum girl, belied the neat elegance of the rest of the body and of all the clothes. She was still dressed just as she had arrived from the office, in a smart navy-blue costume which she had made herself. The skirt was rather short, in the current fashion, and she stood with her feet fairly wide apart, in the arrogant posture of a woman of good family. Her well-shaped calves were covered with thin black silk stockings. But she had her hands on her hips, unconsciously, as she stood in front of the indiscriminate crowd that had followed her in from the parlour, to find out what had caused the disturbance in the kitchen.
“What’s the row about, father?” she said.
The accent was good, but a little too good. It was too refined. The pronunciation of the words was too correct. It had not that careless certainty of the born lady. She spoke in an angry tenor voice, in the rich soft tones of the Midlands, her mother’s birthplace. Her voice had the softness of butter, that voice which patriotic Irishmen always associate with kindness and unassailable innocence and virtue, but which is really the natural mask of a stern, resolute character.
“Aren’t we bad enough,” she continued, “without your acting like a drunken tramp? Shut up and don’t disgrace yourself.” She stamped her right foot and cried again: “Shut up.”
The father relaxed immediately. He began to tremble slightly. He was very much afraid of his daughter. In spite of the power of vituperation which he undoubtedly possessed, he had been afraid of both his children. When Francis had become discontented and joined the Revolutionary Organization, the father had poured out threats and abuse for hours, almost every night, for the edification of his wife, but when the son came in he said nothing. He was a weak, nervous character, slightly hysterical, capable of committing any act on the spur of the moment, but incapable of pursuing a logical course of action resolutely. But his children were resolute. The son was resolute in his hatred of existing conditions of society. He was a resolute, determined revolutionary, with his father’s energy. The daughter was resolute in her determination to get out of the slums.
The father slipped out of the hands of the men that were holding him and moved backwards until he reached the bed. He sat down on it without looking at it. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve although it was perfectly dry. But it had a prickly feeling in it, as if scores of needles had thrust themselves out from his brain through it. He always felt like that when he got an attack of nerves, especially since his son became a revolutionary, and it became known that his activities were being watched at police headquarters.
He looked at his daughter, at first in a cowed fashion. He was afraid of her, because she had become what he had urged her from her infancy to become, “a lady.” He was afraid of her because she was so well educated, because she had such “swell” friends, because she dressed so well, because she washed herself several times a day, because she spoke properly. But then he became irritated with all this and remembered that he himself was a Socialist, the chairman of his branch of the trade union, a political leader in the district, that all men were free and equal and … all the pet phrases with which respectable Socialists delude themselves into the belief that they are philosophers and men of principle. He spoke with a ring of indignation and of warning in his voice.
“Am I to be called a tramp by me own daughter in me own house,” he cried, “when I tell this ruffian his true character? Yes, an’ every other ruffian that’s the curse o’ the workin’-class movement with their talk of violence an’ murder an’ revolution. All me life I have stood straight for the cause of me fellow-workers. I was one o’ the first men to stand up for Connolly an’ the cause o’ Socialism, but I always said that the greatest enemies o’ the workin’ class were those o’ their own kind that advocated violence. I …”
“I told you to shut up,” said Mary in a calm, low voice, as she walked over to the bed, with her hands still on her hips. “It’s just like you,” she almost hissed, putting her doubled fists into the little pockets of her jacket. “It’s just like you to go back on your own son.”
She did not know why she was saying this, but she felt some force driving her on in opposition to her father, in defence of her dead brother. Perhaps it was the audience she had behind her. Because, strangely enough, she herself hated Frankie for belonging to the Revolutionary Organization, since she got a position two years before as clerk in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan. Before that she had been a revolutionary herself, but not a member of any organization. She used to attend meetings and cheer and get into arguments with irritated old gentlemen, etc. But during the past two years her outlook on life had undergone a subtle change, gradual but definite. At first she began to get “disillusioned,” as she used to tell Francis, with the blasé air of a young girl of nineteen. Then she used to lecture him on the desirability of keeping better company. This was at the time when she made the acquaintance of Joseph Augustine Short, a young gentleman who was serving his apprenticeship with Gogarty and Hogan and wore plus fours and left Harcourt Street Station every Sunday morning, to play golf down the country somewhere. Finally, she became opposed violently “to the whole theory of revolution,” as being degenerating and “subversive of all moral ideas.” She became religious and got the idea into her head that she could convert Commandant Dan Gallagher, the leader of the revolutionary movement. All this later development had been quite recent, however, and had not matured fully in her character. It was yet merely plastic. It had not become a fixed habit of thought, surrounded by deep and bitter prejudices, that form themselves into “firm convictions.”
For that reason she had responded suddenly to that strange exaltation, born of hatred for the law, which is traditional and hereditary in the slums. The one glorious romance of the slums is the feeling of intense hatred against the oppressive hand of the law, which sometimes stretches out to strike someone, during a street row, during an industrial dispute, during a Nationalist uprising. It is a clarion call to all the spiritual emotion that finds no other means of expression in that sordid environment, neither in art, nor in industry, nor in commercial undertakings, nor in the more reasonable searchings for a religious understanding of the universal creation.
“I stand by what Frankie has done,” she cried, turning to the people. “I don’t agree with him in politics, but every man has a right to his opinions and every man should fight for his rights according to …” she got confused and stammered a little. Then she raised her hand suddenly with an enthusiastic gesture and cried in a loud voice: “He was my brother anyway and I’m going to stand up for him.”
Then she suddenly put her handkerchief to her nose and blew it fiercely. There was a loud murmur of applause. The father made a halfhearted attempt to say something, but he subsided. Mrs. McPhillip was heard to mumble something, but nobody paid any attention to her. Nobody noticed her except Gypo, who still sat on the floor staring at her, fondling the memory of her past goodness to him, like a sumptuous luxury that he must soon relinquish. Although he had been the cause of all the excitement, he was now forgotten in the still greater excitement, caused by the argument between the father and daughter of the dead revolutionary.
Then Mary turned to Gypo and addressed him.
“If you were a friend of my brother,” she said, “you are quite welcome here. Come into the parlour a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Gypo started and looked at Mary with his tufted eyebrows twitching ominously like snouts. But he said nothing. She was embarrassed by the uncouth stare and flushed slightly. She coughed in her throat and put her fingers to her lips. She began to talk rapidly, as if apologizing to the uncouth giant for having had the temerity to address him a request.
“It’s because Frankie told us that he met you in the Dunboy Lodging House before he came here. You are the only one he met in town before he came in here, so I thought maybe that … you might be able …”
She stopped in confusion, amazed at the startling change that had come over Gypo. He had become seized by some violent emotion as she spoke until his face contorted as if he were gazing at some awe-inspiring horror. Then she stopped. His face stood still gaping at her. Then for some reason or other he jumped to his feet, shouting as he did so at the top of his voice: “All right.”
As he bent his head and the upper part of his body to jump to his feet, his right trousers pocket was turned mouth to the ground. Four silver coins fell to the cement floor with a rattling noise. These coins were the change he had received in the public-house.
He was petrified. Every muscle in his body stiffened. His head stood still. His jaws set like the teeth of a bear trap that has been sprung fruitlessly. Behind his eyes he felt the delicious cold and congealed sensation of being about to fight a desperate and bloody battle. For he was certain that the four white silver coins lying nakedly, ever so nakedly, on the floor, were as indicative of his betrayal of his comrade as a confession uttered aloud in a crowded marketplace.
Somebody stooped to pick up the coins.
“Let them alone,” shouted Gypo.
He swooped down to the floor and his right palm, spread flat, covered the coins with the dull sound of a heavy dead fish falling on an iron deck.
“I only wanted to hand them to ye, Gypo,” panted the weazened flour-mill worker who had stooped to pick them up. He had been knocked to his knees by Gypo’s swoop.
Gypo took no notice of the explanation. As he collected the coins in his left fist and rose again, leaning on his right hand, he was listening, waiting for the attack.
But there was no attack. Everybody was amazed, mesmerized by the curious movements of the irritated giant. They stared with open mouths, all except Bartly Mulholland and Tommy Connor, who stood in the background, looking curiously at one another with narrowed eyes. Darting his eyes around the room Gypo caught sight of the two of them. Spurred by some sudden impulse he held up his right hand over his head, he stamped his right foot, he threw back his head and shouted, looking straight upwards:
“I swear before Almighty God that I warned him to keep away from the house.”
There was a dead silence for three seconds. Then a perceptible shudder ran through the room. Everybody remembered with horror that there was a suspicion abroad, a suspicion that an informer had betrayed Francis Joseph McPhillip. Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an Irish mind. For an awful moment each one present suspected himself or herself. Then each looked at his or her neighbour. Gradually rage took the place of fear. But it had no direction. Even the most daring gasped when their minds suggested, that possibly the great fierce giant might have had … Impossible!
“There’s no man suspects ye, Gypo. Ye needn’t be afraid of that,” cried Tommy Connor, the huge red-faced docker with immense jaws like a bullock, who had been whispering to Bartly Mulholland.
He had spoken spontaneously with a queer note of anger in his voice.
“Nobody suspects ye. Good God, man! …”
There was a chorus of agreement. Everybody was eager to assent to the statement that Connor had made. Somebody put his hand on Gypo’s shoulder and began to say: “Sure it’s well known that …”
But Gypo elbowed the man away fiercely and set out hurriedly across the floor towards Mrs. McPhillip. He elbowed the people out of his way without looking at them. He stood in front of Mrs. McPhillip. He stared at her impassively for a few moments. Then he put his hand slowly to his head and took off his hat. He felt moved by an incontrollable impulse. All his actions had completed themselves before his mind was aware of them. His mind was struggling along aimlessly in pursuit of his actions, impotently deprecating them and whispering warnings. But it was powerless.
This impulse that had possession of him now was of the same origin as the one that controlled him when he was looking into the shop window thinking of his youth.
He was beyond himself. His lips quivered. His throat got stuffed. He swallowed his breath with an articulate sound, resembling a cry of pain. He held out his left hand towards Mrs. McPhillip. He opened the hand slowly. The four white silver coins lay there.
“Take it,” he muttered. “Ye were good to me an’ I’m sorry for yer trouble.”
He felt a mad desire to pull out the roll of notes and give them to her also, but the very thought of such a mad action made him shiver. Instead he dropped the four coins into Mrs. McPhillip’s lap.
Mrs. McPhillip glanced at the money and then burst into loud sobs. The sound maddened Gypo. He turned about and rushed towards the door. He stubbed his foot against the doorjamb and hurtled into the hall. He rushed along the passage, cursing and striking furiously at everybody that came in his way. He stood outside the street door and breathed deeply.
Two men rushed out after him. They were Bartly Mulholland and Tommy Connor, the docker.