Dubliners: Grace

These two gentlemen and one of the curates carried him up the stairs and laid him down again on the floor of the bar.

The ring of onlookers distended and closed again elastically.

A dark medal of blood had formed itself near the man’s head on the tessellated floor.

The manager, alarmed by the grey pallor of the man’s face, sent for a policeman.

Then he drew off his glove, produced a small book from his waist, licked the lead of his pencil and made ready to indite.

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.

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.

His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband.

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.

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.

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.

He was not straight-laced, but he could not forget that Mr M’Coy had recently made a crusade in search of valises and portmanteaus to enable Mrs M’Coy to fulfil imaginary engagements in the country.

The narrative made Mr Kernan indignant.

“These yahoos coming up here,” he said, “think they can boss the people. I needn’t tell you, Martin, what kind of men they are.”

He took no part in the conversation for a long while but listened, with an air of calm enmity, while his friends discussed the Jesuits.

“That’s why I have a feeling for them. It’s some of those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious——”

“O, you must know him, Tom,” said Mr Cunningham stoutly.

“Did I ever hear him!” said the invalid, nettled.

He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Road where, he flattered himself, his manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the district.

“Allow me,” said Mr Cunningham positively, “it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux—that is, Cross upon Cross—to show the difference between their two pontificates.”

“There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter,” said Mr Kernan sententiously.

“The old system was the best: plain honest education. None of your modern trumpery....”

“No superfluities,” said Mr Fogarty.

“In the sacred college, you know, of cardinals and archbishops and bishops there were two men who held out against it while the others were all for it. The whole conclave except these two was unanimous. No! They wouldn’t have it!”

“There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from all the ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra. On the very moment John MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing against it, stood up and shouted out with the voice of a lion: ‘Credo!’”

He shook his head with farcical gravity.

“No candles!” repeated Mr Kernan obdurately.

The transept of the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street was almost full; and still at every moment gentlemen entered from the side door and, directed by the lay-brother, walked on tiptoe along the aisles until they found seating accommodation.

The light of the lamps of the church fell upon an assembly of black clothes and white collars, relieved here and there by tweeds, on dark mottled pillars of green marble and on lugubrious canvases.

The light of the lamps of the church fell upon an assembly of black clothes and white collars, relieved here and there by tweeds, on dark mottled pillars of green marble and on lugubrious canvases.

Even he was sensible of the decorous atmosphere and even he began to respond to the religious stimulus.

A powerful-looking figure, the upper part of which was draped with a white surplice, was observed to be struggling into the pulpit.

“For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the mammon of iniquity so that when you die they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.”

Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every cranny of our human nature, understood that all men were not called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world and, to a certain extent, for the world: and in this sentence He designed to give them a word of counsel, setting before them as exemplars in the religious life those very worshippers of Mammon who were of all men the least solicitous in matters religious.