And then, the strange perversity. Before my wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of the bridge. She pulled back for a moment, giving me a look, then came along.
As we went away along the bank of the Liffey, he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:
“I’ll be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man,
Be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man.
Be glad when you’re dead,
Flowers over your head,
And then I’ll marry the journeyman. . . .”
It is only later, looking back, that you see that while you were doing all the other things in your life, working on an article concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and those who served themselves who only stood to wait.
The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand? Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records, and yourself, caught between, ignores the rare service these two halves of a bright sense are up to.
So I did and did not concern myself with beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but did not hear, considered but did not consider:
“There’s only a few of us left!”
One day I was sure the stone gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. And the next his head to me was a cup of darkness.
One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another cap, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap which I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.
“Sir,” said the clerk. “That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.”
“This will fit me. This will fit me.” I stuffed the cap into my pocket.
“Let me get you a sack, sir—”
“No!” Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.
There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over—
In the middle of the bridge, my singing man was not there.
In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy which racheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and stone, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.
I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged and thumped.
“Be damned to ya!” the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red-hot in the rain. “Pay us! Listen! But we’ll give you no tune! Make up your own!” their mute lips said.
And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought, Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a tune, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box, I answered. But you’re not. And it’s obvious they hate the begging job, who’d blame them, and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.
How different from my capless friend.
My friend?
I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.
“Beg pardon. The man with the concertina . . .”
The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.
“Ah?”
“The man with no cap in the rain.”
“Ah, him!” snapped the woman.
“He’s not here today?”
“Do you see him?” cried the woman.
She started cranking the infernal device.
I put a penny in the tin cup.
She peered at me as if I’d spit in the cup.
I put in another penny. She stopped.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No!”
“Do you know his name?”
“Now, who would know that!”
I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.
The two old people were watching me uneasily.
I put a last shilling in the cup.
“He’ll be all right,” I said, not to them, but to someone, hopefully, myself.
The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.
“The tune,” I said, numbly. “What is it?”
“You’re deaf!” snapped the woman. “It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?”
I showed her the new cap in my hand.
She glared up. “Your cap, man, your cap!”
“Oh!” Flushing, I seized the old cap from my head.
Now I had a cap in each hand.
The woman cranked. The “music” played. The rain hit my brow, my eyelids, my mouth.
On the far side of the bridge I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to try on my drenched skull?
During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.
On the last day of our visit, my wife started to pack the new tweed cap away with my others, in the suitcase.
“Thanks, no.” I took it from her. “Let’s keep it out, on the mantel, please. There.”
That night the hotel manager brought a farewell bottle to our room. The talk was long and good, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in the glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past our high windows.
The manager, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, “‘There’s only a few of us left.’”
I glanced at my wife, and she at me.
The manager caught us.
“Do you know him, then? Has he said it to you?”
“Yes. But what does the phrase mean?”
The manager watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his drink.
“Once I thought he meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the I.R.A. left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that also. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many ‘human beings’ left who look, see what they look at, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running here, jumping there, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.”
He half turned from the window.
“So you know There’s Only a Few of Us Left, do you?”
My wife and I nodded.
“Then do you know the woman with the baby?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the one with the cancer?”
“Yes,” said my wife.
“And the man who needs train fare to Cork?”
“Belfast,” said I.
“Galway,” said my wife.
The manager smiled sadly and turned back to the window.
“What about the couple with the piano that plays no tune?”
“Has it ever?” I asked.
“Not since I was a boy.”
The manager’s face was shadowed now.
“Do you know the beggar on O’Connell Bridge?”
“Which one?” I said.
But I knew which one, for I was looking at the cap there on the mantel.
“Did you see the paper today?” asked the manager.
“No.”
“There’s just the item, bottom half of page five, Irish Times. It seems he just got tired. And he threw his concertina over into the River Liffey. And he jumped after it.”
He was back, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t pass by!
“The poor bastard.” The manager laughed with a hollow exhalation. “What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina—I hate them, don’t you?—wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.”
“Oh, God!” I cried, getting up. “Oh, damn!”
The manager watched me carefully now, surprised at my concern. “You couldn’t help it.”
“I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! Did you?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
“But you’re worse than I am!” I protested. “I’ve seen you around town, shoveling out pennies hand over fist. Why, why not to him?”
“I guess I thought he was overdoing it.”
“Hell, yes!” I was at the window now, too, staring down through the falling snow. “I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. Damn, after a while you think everything’s a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them?
So instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter, not a beggar ever before, so you hock your clothes to feed a
