An Encounter Page #2

								

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
sailing-vessel 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.
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