Dubliners | Page 6

up the hill. All the branches of the tall
trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and
the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of
the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my
hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.
When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony's
grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up
beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the
catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some
improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had
brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the
birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old
Bunser. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was
no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:
"Come along. I knew Fatty'd funk it."
"And his sixpence...?" I said.
"That's forfeit," said Mahony. "And so much the better for us--a bob
and a tanner instead of a bob."

We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol
Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony
began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He
chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and,
when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he
proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too
small and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us:
"Swaddlers! Swaddlers!" thinking that we were Protestants because
Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a
cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we
arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least
three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he
was and guessing how many he would get at three o'clock from Mr.
Ryan.
We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the
noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of
cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the
drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and
as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two
big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside
the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin's
commerce--the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly
smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white
sailingvessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.
Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those
big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the
geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually
taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede
from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.
We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported
in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. We were
serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our
eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we watched the discharging
of the graceful threemaster which we had observed from the other quay.
Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the

stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I
came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them
green eyes for I had some confused notion.... The sailors' eyes were
blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have
been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by
calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell:
"All right! All right!"
When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend.
The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops
musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate
which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets
where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so
we went into a huckster's shop and bought a bottle of raspberry
lemonade each. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane,
but the cat escaped into a wide