by a warped and infuriated puritanism, and yet they were terribly corrupt. There was nothing warm, rich, or generous about them or their lives: it seemed as if the living roots of nature had grown gnarled and barren among the walls and pavements of the city; it seemed that everything that is wild, sudden, capricious, whimsical, passionate, and mysterious in the spirit of the race had been dried and hardened out of them by their divorce from the magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel and stone and brick had entered their souls. Even their speech had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially—Murphy, his two sons, Feeney, and O’Doul—made constant use of a few arid words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they could say or wished to say. Chief among these words or phrases was “You know?”… or “You know what I mean?”—words which were uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on “You,” a slight and painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply. For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to offer than “Chee!” or “Jeez!” or “Ho-ly Jeez!” or “Christ!” or “Ho-ly Christ!” or occasionally “Ho-ly Mary!” Finally, they made a constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a word “guy”: it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats—the word fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.
At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant spirits, as waiters in European café’s, restaurants, and dining-cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs of British and American tourists—he
