He was helped to his feet. The manager said something about a hospital and some of
the bystanders gave advice. The battered silk hat was placed on the man's head. The
constable asked:
`Where do you live?'
The man, without answering, began to twirl the ends of his moustache. He made light
of his accident. It was nothing, he said: only a little accident. He spoke very thickly.
`Where do you live?' repeated the constable.
The man said they were to get a cab for him. While the point was being debated a tall
agile gentleman of fair complexion, wearing a long yellow ulster, came from the far
end of the bar. Seeing the spectacle, he called out:
`Hallo, Tom, old man! What's the trouble?'
`Sha, 's nothing,' said the man.
The newcomer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the
constable, saying:
`It's all right, constable. I'll see him home.'
The constable touched his helmet and answered:
`All right, Mr Power!'
`Come now, Tom,' said Mr Power, taking his friend by the arm. `No bones broken:
What? Can you walk?'
The young man in the cycling-suit took the man by the other arm and the crowd
divided.
`How did you get yourself into this mess?' asked Mr Power.
`The gentleman fell down the stairs,' said the young man.
`I' 'ery 'uch o'liged to you, sir,' said the injured man.
`Not at all.'
`'an't we have a little... ?'
`Not now. Not now.'
The three men left the bar and the crowd sifted through the doors into the laneway.
The manager brought the constable to the stairs to inspect the scene of the accident.
They agreed that the gentleman must have missed his footing. The customers returned
to the counter, and a curate set about removing the traces of blood from the floor.
When they came out into Grafton Street, Mr Power whistled for an outsider. The
injured man said again as well as he could:
`I' 'ery 'uch o'liged to you, sir. I hope we'll 'eet again. 'y na'e is Kernan.'
The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.
`Don't mention it,' said the young man.
They shook hands. Mr Kernan was hoisted on to the car and, while Mr Power was
giving directions to the carman, he expressed his gratitude to the young man and
regretted that they could not have a little drink together.
`Another time,' said the young man.
The car drove off towards Westmoreland Street. As it passed the Ballast Office the
clock showed half past nine. A keen east wind hit them, blowing from the mouth of
the river. Mr Kernan was huddled together with cold. His friend asked him to tell how
the accident had happened.
`I 'an't 'an,' he answered, `'y 'ongue is hurt.'
`Show.'
The other leaned over the wheel of the car and peered into Mr Kernan's mouth but he
could not see. He struck a match and, sheltering it in the shell of his hands, peered
again into the mouth which Mr Kernan opened obediently. The swaying movement of
the car brought the match to and from the opened mouth. The lower teeth and gums
were covered with clotted blood and a minute piece of the tongue seemed to have
been bitten off. The match was blown out.
`That's ugly,' said Mr Power.
`Sha, 's nothing,' said Mr Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the collar of his filthy
coat across his neck.
Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity
of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency
and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could
always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite,
whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods
had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street, on the
window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address - London,
EC. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was
drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which
were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He
took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the
grate. Then he paused to judge.
Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary
Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend's
decline, but Mr Kernan's decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends
who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character.
Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his
circle; he was a debonair young man.
The car halted before a small house on the Glasnevin Road and Mr Kernan was
helped into the house. His wife put him to bed, while Mr Power sat downstairs in the
kitchen asking the children where they went to school and what book they were in.
The children - two girls and a boy, conscious of their father's helplessness and of their
mother's absence, began some horseplay with him. He was surprised at their manners
and at their accents, and his brow grew thoughtful. After a while Mrs Kernan entered
the kitchen, exclaiming:
`Such a sight! Oh, he'll do for himself one day and that's the holy alls of it. He's been
drinking since Friday.'
Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had come
on the scene by the merest accident. Mrs Kernan, remembering Mr Power's good
offices during domestic quarrels, as well as many small, but opportune loans, said:
`O, you needn't tell me that, Mr Power. I know you're a friend of his, not like some of
the others he does be with. They're all right so long as he has money in his pocket to
keep him out from his wife and family. Nice friends! Who was he with tonight, I'd
like to know?'
Mr Power shook his head but said nothing.
`I'm so sorry,' she continued, `that I've nothing in the house to offer you. But if you
wait a minute I'll send round to Fogarty's, at the corner.'
Mr Power stood up.
`We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He never seems to think he
has a home at all.'
`O, now, Mrs Kernan,' said Mr Power, `we'll make him turn over a new leaf. I'll talk
to Martin. He's the man. We'll come here one of these nights and talk it over.'
She saw him to the door. The carman was stamping up and down the footpath, and
swinging his arms to warm himself.
`It's very kind of you to bring him home,' she said.
`Not at all,' said Mr Power.
He got up on the car. As it drove off he raised his hat to her gaily.
`We'll make a new man of him,' he said. `Good night, Mrs Kernan.'
Mrs Kernan's puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight. Then she withdrew
them, went into the house and emptied her husband's pockets.
She was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated
her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him
to Mr Power's accompaniment. In her days of courtship, Mr Kernan had seemed to
her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding
was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had
passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a
jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers
and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she
had found a wife's life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it
unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no
insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her
husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper's shop in Glasgow
and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote
regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.
Mr Kernan sent a letter to his office next day and remained in bed. She made beef-tea
for him and scolded him roundly. She accepted his frequent intemperance as part of
the climate, healed him dutifully whenever he was sick and always tried to make him
eat a breakfast. There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys
had grown up, and she knew that he would walk to the end of Thomas Street and back
again to book even a small order.
Two nights after, his friends came to see him. She brought them up to his bedroom,
the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at the
fire. Mr Kernan's tongue, the occasional stinging pain of which had made him
somewhat irritable during the day, became more polite. He sat propped up in the bed
by pillows and the little colour in his puffy cheeks made them resemble warm cinders.
He apologized to his guests for the disorder of the room, but at the same time looked
at them a little proudly, with a veteran's pride.
He was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot which his friends, Mr
Cunningham, Mr M'Coy, and Mr Power had disclosed to Mrs Kernan in the parlour.
The idea had been Mr Power's, but its development was entrusted to Mr Cunningham.
Mr Kernan came of Protestant stock, and, though he had been converted to the
Catholic faith at the time of his marriage, he had not been in the pale of the Church
for twenty years. He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism.
Mr Cunningham was the very man for such a case. He was an elder colleague of Mr
Power. His own domestic life was not very happy. People had great sympathy with
him, for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an
incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had
pawned the furniture on him.
Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. He was a thoroughly sensible
man, influential and intelligent. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness
particularized by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered
by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy. He was well informed. His
friends bowed to his opinions and considered that his face was like Shakespeare's.
When the plot had been disclosed to her, Mrs Kernan had said:
`I leave it all in your hands, Mr Cunningham.'
After a quarter of a century of married life, she had very few illusions left. Religion
for her was a habit, and she suspected that a man of her husband's age would not
change greatly before death. She was tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his
accident and, but that she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, she would have told
the gentlemen that Mr Kernan's tongue would not suffer by being shortened.
However, Mr Cunningham was a capable man; and religion was religion. The scheme
might do good and, at least, it could do no harm. Her beliefs were not extravagant.
She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic
devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen, but,
if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.
The gentlemen began to talk of the accident. Mr Cunningham said that he had once
known a similar case. A man of seventy had bitten off a piece of his tongue during an
epileptic fit and the tongue had filled in again, so that no one could see a trace of the
bite.
`Well, I'm not seventy,' said the invalid.
`God forbid,' said Mr Cunningham.
`It doesn't pain you now?' asked Mr M'Coy.
Mr M'Coy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a
soprano, still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. His line of life had
not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been
driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for
advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman's Journal, a town traveller
for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-
Sheriff, and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office
made him professionally interested in Mr Kernan's case.
`Pain? Not much,' answered Mr Kernan. `But it's so sickening. I feel as if I wanted to
retch off.'
`That's the booze,' said Mr Cunningham firmly.
`No,' said Mr Kernan. `I think I caught cold on the car. There's something keeps
coming into my throat, phlegm or--'
`Mucus,' said Mr M'Coy.
`It keeps coming like from down in my throat; sickening thing.'
`Yes, yes,' said Mr M'Coy, `that's the thorax.'
He looked at Mr Cunningham and Mr Power at the same time with an air of
challenge. Mr Cunningham nodded his head rapidly and Mr Power said:
`Ah well, all's well that ends well.'
`I'm very much obliged to you, old man,' said the invalid.
Mr Power waved his hand.
`Those other two fellows I was with--'
`Who were you with?' asked Mr Cunningham.
`A chap. I don't know his name. Damn it now, what's his name? Little chap with
sandy hair... '
`And who else?'
`Harford.'
`Hm,' said Mr Cunningham.
When Mr Cunningham made that remark, people were silent. It was known that the
speaker had secret sources of information. In this case the monosyllable had a moral
intention. Mr Harford sometimes formed one of a little detachment which left the city
shortly after noon on Sunday with the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at some
public-house on the outskirts of the city where its members duly qualified themselves
as bona-fide travellers. But his fellow-travellers had never consented to overlook his
origin. He had begun life as an obscure financier by lending small sums of money to
workmen at usurious interest. Later on he had become the partner of a very fat, short
gentleman, Mr Goldberg, in the Liffey Loan Bank. Though he had never embraced
more than the Jewish ethical code, his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted
in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an
illiterate, and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of
his idiot son. At other times they remembered his good points.
`I wonder where did he go to,' said Mr Kernan.
He wished the details of the incident to remain vague. He wished his friends to think
there had been some mistake, that Mr Harford and he had missed each other. His
friends, who knew quite well Mr Harford's manners in drinking, were silent. Mr
Power said again:
`All's well that ends well.'
