Strumpet City by James Plunkett Read Free Book Online Page B

business gossip of the city, being a director himself, told Father O’Connor about it when they met one day along the harbour front. Father O’Connor was reading his office. Yearling, looking spruce and smart in a grey suit with a flower in his buttonhole, tapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘And how are things spiritual, Father?’ he asked.
    Father O’Connor closed his missal, marking the place carefully with a red silk tab. He matched Yearling’s light-hearted humour.
    ‘That is a difficult question to answer. If I say they are satisfactory I may be guilty of presumption, and if I say they are bad I am opening the door to Despair.’ He settled his missal under his armpit. ‘Perhaps my best answer is that we continue to trust in God.’
    Yearling swung his cane and pointed out to sea.
    ‘Before you came along I was watching that small boat. The thought occurred to me that there was something which has changed little in two thousand years. The boat, the fishermen, their nets.’
    Father O’Connor’s eyes followed the pointing stick. The boat moved gently with the motion of the water. Behind it a series of cork floats, spread in a wide semicircle, marked the line of the net. He had not noticed before.
    ‘The humblest of men,’ he said, ‘yet when He called to them, they followed.’
    Yearling’s heavy eyebrows went upwards. He was in an impish mood.
    ‘Not quite, Father. He had to put on a little bit of magic for them. Didn’t He walk on the water?’
    ‘That was later,’ Father O’Connor corrected. Yearling’s scepticism did not disturb him. He was, after all, only a Protestant.
    ‘He did something,’ Yearling insisted. ‘Let me think now.’
    ‘After a night spent catching nothing, He filled their nets with fish.’
    ‘Ah,’ Yearling said. That was his point.
    ‘We must remember who they were. Poor fishermen, ignorant and illiterate. How else was He to win them to Him?’
    ‘Could He not simply inspire them with Faith?’
    ‘He wanted them to know their vocation. Remember what He said to them?’
    ‘What was that?’ Yearling asked, unable to remember.
    ‘Henceforth you shall be fishers of men.’
    Yearling looked sceptical.
    ‘It’s too damned literary to be true,’ he objected. ‘I feel somebody made it up.’
    Father O’Connor pursed his lips and then articulated carefully. ‘The substance of your complaint seems to be that Christ could be graphic and direct. But aren’t these the marks of leadership always?’
    ‘I don’t expect parlour tricks from God. And why fishermen?’ Yearling mused as they went. ‘Why not start at the top?’
    ‘Perhaps because it is easier to get the fisherman to leave his net,’ Father O’Connor said.
    ‘Yes. It takes more than a parlour trick to get a banker to leave his gold.’
    ‘Quite,’ Father O’Connor agreed.
    ‘The poor are generally regarded as being more religious than the rich,’ Yearling continued, ‘but of course that isn’t true. They are simply more impressionable and have less to lose.’
    Father O’Connor considered for a moment and before speaking pitched his voice so that it would sound polite.
    ‘Your Church believes that worldly success is a measure of spiritual worthiness; you believe that material well-being and good fortune are marks of God’s favour and that ill fortune is a manifestation of His disapproval. Do you know the story of Dives and Lazarus?’
    ‘I do,’ Yearling said firmly, ‘and I regard it as the mad creation of some socialist fancy.’
    Then he broke out into a loud peal of laughter which brought both of them to a standstill.
    ‘Forgive me, Father,’ he said contritely, ‘I am presuming too much on our friendship.’
    Father O’Connor said: ‘It is better to explore an idea than to keep a polite silence.’
    ‘You are not offended?’
    ‘Who am I to be offended?’ Father O’Connor asked.
    ‘Well then, you must prove it by having coffee with me,’ Yearling insisted.
    Father O’Connor