The Rat-Pit
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Title: The Rat-Pit
Author: Patrick MacGill
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RAT-PIT ***
THE RAT-PIT
PATRICK MACGILL
THE
RAT-PIT
BY
PATRICK
MACGILL
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1915,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
INTRODUCTION
In the city of Glasgow there is a lodging-house for women known as “The
Rat-pit.” Here the vagrant can get a nightly bunk for a few pence, and
no female is refused admittance: the unfortunate, the sick, and
work-weary congregate under the same roof, breathe the same fetid air
and forget the troubles of a miserable existence in strong drink, the
solace of the sorrowful, or in heavy stupor, the slumber of the
toilworn. The underworld, of which I have seen and known such a lot, has
always appeared to me as a Greater Rat-pit, where human beings, pinched
and poverty-stricken and ground down with a weight of oppression, are
hemmed up like the plague-stricken in a pest-house.
It is in this larger sense that I have chosen the name for the title of
Norah Ryan’s story. By committing the “great sin” and subsequently by
allowing the dictates of motherhood to triumph over decrees of society,
she became a pariah eternally doomed to the Greater Rat-pit. Whilst my
former book, “Children of the Dead End,” was on the whole accepted as
giving a picture of the life of the navvy, there were some who refused
to believe that scenes such as I strove to depict could exist in a
country like ours. To them I venture the assurance that “The Rat-pit” is
a transcript from life and that most of the characters are real people,
and the scenes only too poignantly true. Some may think that such things
should not be written about; but public opinion, like the light of day,
is a great purifier, and to hide a sore from the surgeon’s eye out of
miscalled delicacy is surely a supreme folly.
A word about “Children of the Dead End.” I am highly gratified by the
success attained by that book in Britain and abroad. Only in Ireland, my
native country, has the book given offence. Reviewers there spoke
angrily about it, and one went so far as to say that I would end my days
by blowing out my brains with a revolver. The reference to a tyrannical
village priest gave great offence to a number of clergy, but on the
other hand several wrote to me speaking very highly of the book, and I
have been told that a Roman Catholic Bishop sat up all night to read it.
In my own place I am looked upon with suspicion, all because I “wrote a
book, a bad one makin’ fun of the priest,” as an old countryman remarked
to me last summer when I was at home. “You don’t like it, then?” I said.
“Like it! I wouldn’t read it for a hundred pounds, money down,” was the
answer.
PATRICK MACGILL.
London Irish,
St. Albans.
_Feb. 5th, 1915._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE TURN OF THE TIDE 11
II. AN UNSUCCESSFUL JOURNEY 29
III. ON DOOEY HEAD 37
IV. RESTLESS YOUTH 48
V. GOOD NEWS FROM A FAR COUNTRY 56
VI. SCHOOL LIFE 64
VII. PLUCKING BOG-BINE 70
VIII. THE TRAGEDY 77
IX. THE WAKE 91
X. COFFIN AND COIN 98
XI. THE TRAIN FROM GREENANORE 108
XII. DERRY 119
XIII. A WILD NIGHT 126
XIV. “BEYOND THE WATER” 137
XV. DRUDGERY 147
XVI. LITTLE LOVES 157
XVII. A GAME OF CARDS 162
XVIII. IN THE LANE 170
XIX. THE END OF THE SEASON 179
XX. ORIGINAL SIN 188
XXI. REGRETS 197
XXII. ON THE ROAD 202
XXIII. COMPLICATIONS 213
XXIV. THE RAT-PIT 222
XXV. SHEILA CARROL 230
XXVI. THE PASSING DAYS 240
XXVII. THE NEW-COMER 246
XXVIII. THE RAG-STORE 251
XXIX. DERMOD FLYNN 262
XXX. GROWN UP 272
XXXI. DESPAIR 286
XXXII. CONFESSION 294
XXXIII. ST. JOHN VIII, I-II 303
XXXIV. LONGINGS 309
XXXV. THE FAREWELL MEETING 315
THE RAT-PIT
CHAPTER I
THE TURN OF THE TIDE
I
“Have you your brogues, Norah?”
“They’re tied round my shoulders with a string, mother.”
“And your brown penny for tea and bread in the town, Norah?”
“It’s in the corner of my weasel-skin purse, mother.”
“The tide is long on the turn, so you’d better be off, Norah.”
“I’m off and away, mother.”
Two voices were speaking inside a cabin on the coast of Donegal. The
season was mid-winter; the time an hour before the dawn of a cheerless
morning. Within the hovel there was neither light nor warmth; the
rushlight had gone out and the turf piled on the hearth refused to burn.
Outside a gale was blowing, the door, flimsy and fractured, creaked
complainingly on its leathern hinges, the panes of the foot-square and
only window were broken, the rags that had taken their places had been
blown in during the night, and the sleet carried by the north-west wind
struck heavily on the earthen floor. In the corner of the hut a woman
coughed violently, expending all the breath in her body, then followed a
struggle for air, for renewed life, and a battle against sickness or
death went on in the darkness. There was silence for a moment, then a
voice, speaking in Gaelic, could be heard again.
“Are you away, Norah?”
“I am just going, mother. I am stopping the window to keep the cold away
from you.”
“God bless you, child,” came the answer. “The men are not coming in yet,
are they?”
“I don’t hear their step. Now the window is all right. Are you warm?”
“Middling, Alannah. Did you take the milk for your breakfast?”
“I left some for you in the jug,” came the reply. “Will you take it
now?”
“That is always the way with you, Norah,” said the woman in a querulous
voice. “You never take your meals, but always leave them for somebody
else. And you are getting thinner on it every day. I don’t want
anything, for I am not hungry these days; and maybe it is God Himself
that put the sickness on me so that I would not take away the food of
them that needs it more than I do. Drink the milk, Norah, it will do you
good.”
There was no answer. A pale-faced little girl lifted the latch of the
door and looked timorously out into the cold and the blackness. The gale
caught her and for a moment she almost choked for breath. It was still
intensely dark, no colour of the day was yet in the sky. The wind
whistled shrilly round the corners of the cabin and a storm-swept bird
dropped to the ground in front of the child. She looked back into the
gloomy interior of the cabin and for a moment thought of returning. She
was very hungry, but remembered her father and brother who would
presently come in from the fishing, probably, as they had come in for
days, with empty boats and empty stomachs. Another fit of coughing
seized the mother, and the girl went out, shutting the door carefully
behind her to stay the wrath of the wind which swept violently across
the floor of the house.
The sea was near. The tide, sweeping sullenly away from the shore,
moaned plaintively near the land and swelled into loud discordant wrath,
far out at the bar. All round the house a tremulous gray haze enveloped
everything, and the child stole into its mysterious bosom and towards
the sea. The sleet shot sharply across her body and at times she turned
round to save her face from its stinging lash. She was so small, so
frail, so tender that she might be swept away at any moment as she moved
like a shadow through the greyness, keeping a keen lookout for the
ghosts that peopled the mists and the lonely places. Of these phantoms
she was assured. To her they were as true as her own mother, as her own
self. They were around and above her. They hid in the mists, walked on
the sea, roved in the fields, and she was afraid of them.
Suddenly she called to mind the story of the Lone Woman of the Mist, the
ghost whom all the old people of the locality had met at some time or
another in their lives. Even as she thought, an apparition took form, a
lone woman stood in front of the little girl, barely ten paces away. The
child crossed herself seven times and walked straight ahead, keeping her
eyes fixed on the figure that barred the path. This was the only thing
to be done; under the steady look of the eyes a ghost is powerless. So
her mother had told her, and the girl, knowing this, never lowered her
gaze; but her bare feet got suddenly warm, her heart leapt as if wanting
to leave her body, and the effort to restrain the tremor of her eyelids
caused her pain. The ghost spoke.
“Who is the girsha[A] that is out so early?” came the question.
“It’s me, Norah Ryan,” answered the child in a glad voice. “I thought
that ye were the Lone Woman of the Mist or maybe a beanshee.”[B]
“I’m not the beanshee, I’m the beansho,”[C] the woman replied in a sharp
voice. “D’ye know what that means?”
“It means that ye are the woman I’m not to have the civil word with
because ye’ve committed a great sin.”
“Who said that? Was it yer mother?”
“Then it was,” said the child, “I often heard her say them words.”
“D’ye know me sin then?” enquired the woman, and without waiting for an
answer she went on: “Ye don’t, of course. This is me sin, girsha; this
is me sin. Look at it!”
The woman loosened the shawl which was drawn tightly around her body and
disclosed a little bullet-headed child lying fast asleep in her arms.
The wind caught the sleeper; one tiny hand quivered in mute protest,
then the infant awoke and roared loudly. The mother kissed the wee thing
hastily, fastened the shawl again and strode forward, taking long steps
like a man, towards the sea. She was bare-footed; her feet made a
rustling sound on the snow and two little furrows lay behind her. Norah
Ryan followed and presently the older woman turned round.
“That’s me sin, girsha, that’s me sin,” she said. “That’s a sin that can
never be undone. Mind that and mind it always.... Ye’ll be goin’ into
the town, I suppose?” “That I am,” said the child. “Is the tide full on
the run now?”
“It’s nearly out. See! the sky is clearin’ a bit; and look it! there’s
some stars.”
“I don’t like the stars, good woman, for they’re always so cold
lookin’.”
“Yes, they’re middlin’ like to goodly people,” said the woman. “There,
we’re near the sea and the greyness is risin’ off it.”
The woman lifted her hand and pointed to the rocky shore that skirted
the bay. At first sight it appeared to be completely deserted; nothing
could be seen but the leaden grey sea and the sharp and jagged rocks
protruding through the snow that covered the shore. The tide was nearly
out; the east was clearing, but the wind still lashed furiously against
the legs and faces of the woman and the girl.
“I suppose there’ll be a lot waitin’ for the tide,” said Norah Ryan.
“And a cold wait it’ll be for them too, on this mornin’ of all
mornin’s.”
“It’s God’s will,” said the woman with the child, “God’s will, the
priest’s will, and the will of the yarn seller.” She spoke sharply and
resentfully and again with long strides hurried forward to the shore.
II
How lifeless the scene looked; the hollows white with snow, the
gale-swept edges of the rocks darkly bare! Norah Ryan stepping timidly,
suddenly shrieked as her foot slipped into a wreath of snow. Under her
tread something moved, the snow rose into the air as if to shake itself,
then fell again with a crackling noise. The girl had stepped upon a
sleeping woman, who, now rudely wakened, was afoot and angry.
“Mercy be on you, child!” roared the female in Gaelic, as she shook the
frozen flakes from the old woollen handkerchief that covered her head.
“Can you not take heed of your feet and where you’re putting them?”
“It’s the child that didn’t see ye,” said the beansho, then added by way
of salutation: “It’s cold to be sleepin’ out this mornin’.”
“It’s Norah Ryan, is it?” asked the woman, still shaking the snow from
her head-dress. “And has she been along with you, of all persons in the
world?”
“Is the tide out yet?” asked a voice from the snow.
A face like that of a sheeted corpse peered up into the greyness, and
Norah Ryan looked at it, her face full of a fright that was not unmixed
with childish curiosity. There in the white snow, some asleep and some
staring vacantly into the darkness, lay a score of women, some young,
some old, and all curled up like sleeping dogs. Nothing could be seen
but the faces, coloured ghastly silver in the dim light of the slow
dawn, faces without bodies staring like dead things from the welter of
snow. An old woman asleep, the bones of her face showing plainly through
the sallow wrinkles of the skin, her only tooth protruding like a fang
and her jaw lowered as if hung by a string, suddenly coughed. Her cough
was wheezy, weak with age, and she awoke. In the midst of the heap of
bodies she stood upright and disturbed the other sleepers. In an instant
the hollow was alive, voluble, noisy. Some of the women knelt down and
said their prayers, others shook the snow from their shawls, one was
humming a love song and making the sign of the cross at the end of every
verse.
“I’ve been travelling all night long,” said an old crone who had just
joined the party, “and I thought that I would not be in time to catch
the tide. It is a long way that I have to come for a bundle of
yarn--sixteen miles, and maybe it is that I won’t get it at the end of
my journey.”
The kneeling women rose from their knees and hurried towards the channel
in the bay, now a thin string of water barely three yards in width. The
wind, piercingly cold, no longer carried its burden of sleet, and the
east, icily clear, waited, almost in suspense, for the first tint of the
sun. The soil, black on the foreshore, cracked underfoot and pained the
women as they walked. None wore their shoes, although three or four
carried brogues tied round their necks. Most had mairteens (double thick
stockings) on their feet, and these, though they retained a certain
amount of body heat, kept out no wet. In front the old woman, all skin
and bones and more bones than skin, whom Norah had wakened, led the way,
her breath steaming out into the air and her feet sinking almost to the
knees at every step. From her dull, lifeless look and the weary eyes
that accepted everything with fatalistic calm it was plain that she had
passed the greater part of her years in suffering.
All the women had difficulty with the wet and shifty sand, which, when
they placed their feet heavily on one particular spot, rose in an
instant to their knees. They floundered across, pulling out one foot and
then another, and grunting whenever they did so. Norah Ryan, the child,
had little difficulty; she glided lightly across, her feet barely
sinking to the ankles.
“Who’d have thought that one’s spags could be so troublesome!” said the
beansho. “It almost seems like as if I had no end of feet.”
“Do you hear that woman speaking?” asked the aged female who led the
way. “It’s ill luck that will keep us company when she’s with us: her
with her back-of-the-byre wean!”
“You shouldn’t fault me for me sin,” said the beansho, who overheard the
remark, for there was no effort made to conceal it. “No, but ye should
be thankful that it’s not yourself that carries it.”
The sun was nearing the horizon, and the women, now on the verge of the
channel (dhan, they called it), stood in silence looking at the water.
It was not at its lowest yet; probably they would have to wait for five
minutes, maybe more. And as they waited they came closer and closer to
one another for warmth.
The beansho stood a little apart from the throng. Although tall and
angular, she showed traces of good looks which if they had been tended
might have made her beautiful. But now her lips were drawn in a thin,
hard line and a set, determined expression showed on her face. She was
bare-footed and did not even wear mairteens, and carried no brogues. Her
sole articles of dress were a shawl, which sufficed also for her child,
a thick petticoat made of sackcloth, a chemise and a blouse. The wind
constantly lifted her petticoat and exposed her bare legs above the
knees. Some of the women sniggered on seeing this, but finally the
beansho tightened her petticoat between her legs and thus held it
firmly.
“That’s the way, woman,” said the old crone who led the party. “Hold
your dress tight, tighter. Keep away from the beansho, Norah Ryan.”
The child looked up at the old woman and smiled as a child sometimes
will when it fails to understand the purport of words that are spoken.
Then her teeth chattered and she looked down at her feet, which were
bleeding, and the blood could be seen welling out through the mairteens.
She shivered constantly from the cold and her face was a little drawn, a
little wistful, and her grey eyes, large and soft, were full of a tender
pity. Perhaps the pity was for her mother who was ill at home, maybe for
the beansho whom everyone disliked, or maybe for herself, the little
girl of twelve, who was by far the youngest member of the party.
III
“It’s time that we were tryin’ to face the water in the name of God,”
said one of the women, who supported herself against a neighbour’s
shoulder whilst she took off her mairteens. “There is low tide now.”
All mairteens were taken off, and raising their petticoats well up and
tying them tightly around their waists they entered the water. The old
woman leading the party walked into the icy sea placidly; the others
faltered a moment, then stepped in recklessly and in a second the water
was well up to their thighs. They hurried across shouting carelessly,
gesticulating violently and laughing loudly. Yet every one of them, with
the possible exception of the woman in front, was on the borderland of
tears. If they had spoken not they would have wept.
Norah Ryan, who was the last to enter the water, tucked up her dress and
cast a frightened glance at those in front. No one observed her. She
lifted the dress higher and entered the icy cold stream which chilled
her to the bone. At each successive step the rising water pained her as
a knife driven into the flesh might pain her. She raised her eyes and
noticed a woman looking back; instantly Norah dropped her clothes and
the hem of her petticoat became saturated with water.
“What are ye doin’, Norah Ryan?” the woman shouted. “Ye’ll be wettin’
the dress that’s takin’ ye to the town.”
The child paid no heed. With her clothes trailing in the stream she
walked across breast deep to the other side. Her garments were soaked
when she landed. The old woman, placid fatalist, was pulling on her
mairteens with skinny, warty hands; another was lacing her brogues; a
third tied a rag round her foot, which had been cut by a shell at the
bottom of the channel.
“Why did ye let yer clothes drop into the dhan?” croaked the old woman.
She asked out of mere curiosity; much suffering had driven all feeling
from her soul.
“Why d’ye ask that, Maire a Crick (Mary of the Hill)?” enquired the
beansho. “It’s the modest girl that she is, and that’s why she let her
clothes down. Poor child! she’ll be wet all day now!”
“Her petticoat is full of water,” said Maire a Crick, tying the second
mairteen. “If many’s a one would be always as modest as Norah Ryan
they’d have no burden in their shawls this day.”
“Ye’re a barefaced old heifer, Maire a Crick,” said the beansho angrily.
“Can ye never hold yer cuttin’ tongue quiet? It’s good that ye have me
to be saying the evil word against. If I wasn’t here ye’d be on to some
other body.”
“I’m hearin’ that Norah Ryan is a fine knitter entirely,” someone
interrupted. “She can make a great penny with her needles. Farley
McKeown says that he never gave yarn to a soncier girl.”
“True for ye, Biddy Wor,” said Maire a Crick grudgingly. “It’s funny
that a slip of a girsha like her can do so much. I work meself from dawn
to dusk, and long before and after, and I cannot make near as much as
Norah Ryan.”
“Neither can any of us,” said several women in one breath.
“She only works about fourteen hours every day, too,” said Biddy Wor.
“How much can ye make a day, Norah Ryan?” asked the beansho.
“Three ha’pence a day and nothing less,” said the girl, and a glow of
pride suffused her face.
“Three ha’pence a day!” the beansho ejaculated, stooping down and
pulling out the gritty sand which had collected between her toes. “Just
think of that, and her only a wee slip of a girl!”
“That’s one pound nineteen shillin’s a year,” said Maire a Crick
reflectively. “She’s as good as old Maire a Glan (Mary of the Glen) of
Greenanore, who didn’t miss a stitch in a stockin’ and her givin’ birth
to twins.”
The party set off, some singing plaintively, one or two talking and the
rest buried in moody silence. It was now day, the sun shot up suddenly
and lighted the other side of the bay where the land spread out, bleak,
black, dreary and dismal. In front of the party rose a range of hills
that threw a dark shadow on the sand, and in this shadow the women
walked. Above them on the rising ground could be seen many cabins and
blue wreaths of smoke rising from the chimneys into the air. A cock
crowed loudly and several others joined in chorus. A dog barked at the
heels of a stubborn cow which a ragged, bare-legged boy was driving into
a wet pasture field ... the snow which lay light on the knolls was
rapidly thawing ... the sea, now dark blue in colour, rose in a long
heaving swell, and the wind, blowing in from the horizon, was bitterly
cold.
“When will the tide be out again?” asked Judy Farrel, a thin,
undersized, consumptive woman who coughed loudly as she walked.
“When the sun’s on Dooey Head,” came the answer.
An old, wrinkled stump of a woman now joined the party. She carried a
bundle of stockings, wrapped in a shawl hung across her shoulders. As
she walked she kept telling her beads.
“We were just talkin’ of ye, Maire a Glan,” said Biddy Wor. “How many
stockin’s have ye in that bundle?”
“---- Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our
death, Amen,” said the woman, speaking in Gaelic and drawing her prayer
to a close; then to Biddy Wor: “A dozen long stockings that I have been
working on for a whole fortnight. The thread was bad, bitter bad, as
the old man said, and I could hardly get the mastery of it. And think of
it, good woman, just think of it! Farley McKeown only gives me thirteen
pence for the dozen, and he gives other knitters one and three. He gave
my good man a job building the big warehouse in Greenanore, and then he
took two pence off me in the dozen of stockings.”
“You don’t say so!”
“True as death,” said Maire a Glan. “And Farley is building a big place,
as the old man said. He has well nigh over forty men on the job.”
“And what would he be paying them?”
“Seven shillings a week, without bit or sup. It is a hard job too, for
my man, himself, leaves here at six of the clock in the morning and he
is not back at our own fire till eight of the clock at night.”
“Get away!”
“But that isn’t all, nor the half of it, as the man said,” Maire a Glan
went on. “Himself has to do all the work at home before dawn and after
dusk, so that he has only four hours to sleep in the turn of the sun.”
“Just think of that,” said Maire a Crick.
“That’s not all, nor half of it, as the old man said,” the woman with
the bundle continued. “My man gets one bag of yellow meal from Farley
every fortnight, for we have eight children and not a pratee, thanks be
to God! Farley charges people like yourselves only sixteen shillings a
bag, but he charges us every penny of a gold sovereign on the bags that
we get. If we do not pay at the end of a month he puts on another
sixpence, and at the end of six months he has three extra shillings on
the bag of yellow meal.”
“God be praised, but he’s a sharp one!” said the beansho.
“Is this you?” asked the woman with the bundle, looking at the speaker.
“Have you some stockings in your shawl too?”
“Sorrow the one,” answered the beansho.
“But what have ye there?” asked Maire a Glan; then, as if recollecting,
she exclaimed: “Oh, I know! It is the wean, as the man said.... And is
this yourself, Norah Ryan?”
“It’s myself,” replied the child, and her teeth chattered as she
answered.
“The blush is going from your cheek,” said Maire a Glan. “And your
mother; is she better in health? They’re hard times that are in it now,”
she went on, without waiting for an answer to her question. “There are
only ten creels of potatoes in our townland and these have to be used
for seed. God’s mercy be on us, as the old man said, but it was a bad
year for the crops!”
“It couldn’t have been worse,” said Judy Farrel, clapping her thin hands
to keep them warm. “On our side of the water, old Oiney Dinchy (that’s
the man who has the dog that bit Dermod Flynn) had to dig in the pratee
field for six hours, and at the end of that time he had only
twenty-seven pratees in the basket.”
“If the crows lifted a potato in Glenmornan this minute, all the people
of the Glen would follow the crow for a whole week until they got the
potato back,” said old Maire a Crick. “It’s as bad now as it was in the
year of the famine.”
“Do you mind the famine year?” asked Norah Ryan. The water was streaming
from the girl’s clothes into the roadway, and though she broke into a
run at times in her endeavour to keep pace with the elder women, the
shivering fits did not leave her for an instant. The wind became more
violent and the sleet which had ceased for a while was again falling
from the clouds in white wavy lines.
“I mind the bad times as well as I mind yesterday,” said Maire a Crick.
“My own father, mother, and sister died in one turn of the sun with the
wasting sickness and the hunger. I waked them all alone by myself, for
most of the neighbours had their own sick and their own dead to look
after. But they helped me to carry my people to the grave in the coffin
that had the door with hinges on the bottom. When we came to the grave
the door was opened and the dead were dropped out; then the coffin was
taken back for some other soul.”
“At that time there lived a family named Gorlachs at the foot of Slieve
a Dorras,” said Maire a Glan, taking up the tale; “and they lifted their
child out of the grave on the night after it was buried and ate it in
their own house. Wasn’t that the awful thing, as the old man said?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them, for they were a bad set, the same
Gorlachs,” said Maire a Crick. “But for all that, maybe it is that there
wasn’t a word of truth in the whole story.”
IV
Norah Ryan, who was now lagging in the rear, got suddenly caught by a
heavy gust of wind that blew up from the sea. Her clothes were lifted
over her head; she tried to push them down, and the weasel-skin purse
which she held in her hand dropped on the roadway. The penny jingled
out, the coin which was to procure her bread in Greenanore, and she
clutched at it hurriedly. A sudden dizziness overcame her, her brain
reeled and she fell prostrate to the wet earth. In an instant the
beansho was at her side.
“Norah Ryan, what’s coming over ye?” she cried and knelt down by the
girl. The child’s face was deathly pale, the sleet cut her viciously,
and her hands, lying palm upwards on the mire, were blue and cold. The
beansho tried to raise her but the effort was too much; the child which
the woman carried impeded her movements. Maire a Crick now hurried up
and the rest of the women approached, though in a more leisurely
fashion.
“Mother of God! What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” asked the old woman
anxiously. “What has come over the child atall, atall? She’s starving,”
the old body went on, kneeling on the roadway and pressing her warty
hands on the breast of the young girl. “She’s starving, that’s it. In
her own home she hardly eats one bite at all so that her people may have
the more. So I have heard tell.... Norah Ryan, for God’s sake wake up!”
The girl gave no heed, made no sign. The sleet sang through the air and
the women gathered closer, shielding the little one with their bodies.
“What’s to be done?” asked the beansho. Biddy Wor told how people were
cured of fargortha (hunger) at the time of the famine, but little heed
was paid to her talk. The beansho unloosened her shawl, wrapped her
offspring tightly in it and handed the bundle to one of the women, who
crossed herself as she caught it.
“Now up on my back with the girsha,” said the beansho authoritatively,
stooping on her knees in the roadway and bending her shoulders. “Martin
Eveleen has a house across the rise of the brae and I’ll carry her
there.”
Three of the party lifted Norah and placed her across the beansho’s
shoulders.
“How weighty the girsha is!” one exclaimed; then recollecting said:
“It’s the water in her clothes that’s doing it. Poor girsha! and it’ll
be the hunger that’s causing her the weakness.”
The beansho with her burden on her shoulders hurried forward, her feet
pressing deeply into the mire and the water squirting out between her
toes. The rest of the party following discussed the matter and, being
most of them old cronies, related stories of the hunger that was in it
at the time of the great famine. Again it faired, the sun came out, but
the air was still bitterly cold.
A cabin stood on the crest of the hill and towards this the beansho
hurried. Strong and lank though she was, the burden began to bear
heavily and she panted at every step. At the door of the house she
paused for a moment to collect her strength, then lifted the latch and
pushed the door inwards. A man, shaggy and barefooted, hurried to meet
the woman and stared at her suspiciously.
“What do you want?” he asked in Gaelic.
“It’s Norah Ryan that’s hungry, and she fainted on the road,” explained
the beansho.
“In with her then,” said the man, standing aside. “Maybe the heat of the
fire will take her to. Indeed there’s little else that she can get
here.”
Inside it was warm and a bright fire blazed on the cabin hearth. In a
corner near the door some cows could be heard munching hay, and a dog
came sniffing round the beansho’s legs. A feeling of homeliness pervaded
the place and the smell of the peat was soothing to the nostrils.
“Leave her down here,” said the woman of the house, a pale, sickly
little creature, as she pointed to the dingy bed in the corner of the
room near the fire. Several children dressed in rags who were seated
warming their hands at the blaze rose hurriedly on the entrance of the
strangers and hid behind the cattle near the door.
“Is it the hunger and hardships?” asked the man of the house as he
helped the beansho to place the inert body of the little girl on the
bed.
“The hunger and hardships, that’s it,” said Maire a Crick, who now
entered, followed by the rest of the women.
“Then we’ll try her with this,” said the man, and from behind the
rafters of the roof he drew out a black bottle which he uncorked with
his fingers. “It’s potheen,” he explained, and emptied some of the
contents into a wooden bowl. This he held to the lips of the child who
now, partly from the effects of the heat and partly from the effects of
the shaking she had received on the beansho’s back, awakened and was
staring vacantly around her. The smell of the intoxicant brought her
sharply to her senses.
“What are ye doin’?” she cried. “That’s not right, and me havin’ the
holy pledge against drink!”
The man crossed himself and withdrew the bowl, whereupon the woman of
the house brought some milk from the basin that stood on the dresser,
and this being handed to Norah Ryan, the child drank greedily. The
beansho gave her a piece of bread when the milk was consumed.
“Where is me purse?” asked Norah suddenly. “It’s lyin’ on the road and
the brown penny is in the clabber. Where are we atall?”
“In Martin Eveleen’s house, the house of a decent man,” said the
beansho. “Eat yer bit of bread, child, for ye’re dyin’ of hunger.”
For a moment the child looked earnestly at the bread, then, as if
stifling the impulse to return it, she began to eat almost savagely.
Maire a Crick placed the purse and penny which she had lifted from the
road by the bedside and withdrew to the door, already sorry perhaps for
having wasted so much time on the journey. The beansho found her baby,
kissed a crumb into its mouth, tied it up again in her shawl and, when
Norah had eaten the bread, both went to the door together.
“God be with ye, decent people,” said the child. “Some day I hope to be
able to do a good turn for you.”
“We’re only glad to be of help to a nice girsha,” said the man, taking
down a bottle of holy water from the roof-beam. He made the sign of the
cross, dipped his fingers in the bottle, and shook the holy water over
the visitors.
“God be with yer journey,” he said.
“And God keep guard over your home and everything in it,” Norah and the
beansho made answer in one voice.
CHAPTER II
AN UNSUCCESSFUL JOURNEY
I
The hour was half-past ten in the forenoon. In the village (“town” the
peasantry called it) of Greenanore two rows of houses ran parallel along
a miry street which measured east to west some two hundred yards. At one
end of the street were the police barracks and at the other end the
workhouse. Behind the latter rose the Catholic chapel, and further back
the brown moors stretched to the hills which looked down upon the bay
where the women crossed in the early morning.
The houses in the village were dull, dirty and dilapidated. There were
eight public-houses, a few grocers’ shops, a smithy where the
blacksmith, who mended scythes or shod donkeys, got paid in kind for his
services. The policemen, one to every fifty souls in the village,
paraded idly up and down the street, their heavy batons clanking against
their trousers, and their boots, spotlessly clean, rasping eternally on
the pavement. Their sole occupation seemed to be the kicking of
unoffending dogs that spent their days and nights in a vain search for
some eatable garbage in the gutter. The dogs were skeletons; and when
kicked they would slink quietly out of the way, lacking courage either
to snap or snarl. Even a kick brought no yelp from them, they were
almost insensible to every feeling but that of the heavy hunger which
dulled their natural activity. At night they were silent ghosts
prowling about looking for a morsel to eat. Now and again they howled
mournfully, sitting on their haunches in a circle; and when the people
heard the lonely sound they would say: “There, the dogs are crying
because they have got no souls.”
A little pot-bellied man stepped briskly along the street of the
village, one gloved hand grasping a stout stick, the other, also gloved,
sunk in the capacious pocket of a heavy overcoat. He walked as if he
lacked knee-joints, throwing the legs out from his hips, but, save for
this, there was nothing remarkable about the man except perhaps his
stoutness. The people of Greenanore, battling daily against the terrible
spectre of hunger, had no time to grow fat, yet this man measured forty
inches round the waist. In the midst of extreme poverty he, strange to
say, had grown corpulent and rich. His name was Farley McKeown, now
possessor of £200,000, part of it invested in South American Railways
and part of it in the Donegal Knitting Industry, and nearly all of it
earned in the latter.
Farley McKeown was now seventy years of age and unmarried. At one time,
years before, he had his desires as most young men have, and the sight
of a comely girl going barefooted to Greenanore imparted a fiery and not
unpleasant vigour to his body and caused strange but not unnatural
thoughts to enter into his mind. He was then a young man of twenty,
thoughtful and ambitious. Although his father was poor, the boy,
educated by some hedge schoolmaster, showed promise and evinced a desire
to become a priest. “It is an easy job,” he said to himself, “and a
priest can make plenty of money.” Farley McKeown desired to make money
anyway and anyhow.
When the black potato blight, with the fever and famine that followed
it, spread over Donegal, Farley McKeown saw his chance. By dint of
plausible arguments he persuaded a firm of Londonderry grain merchants
to ship a cargo of Indian meal to Greenanore and promised to pay for the
consignment within two years from the date of its arrival. When the
cargo was landed on Dooey Head the people hailed it as a gift from God
and the priest blessed Farley McKeown from the altar steps. The peasants
built a large warehouse for McKeown, and in return for the work they
were allowed a whole year in which to pay for their meal. Meanwhile the
younger generation went off to America, and money flowed in to Donegal
and Farley McKeown’s pocket. At the end of two years he had paid the
grain merchants, but the peasants found to their astonishment that
_they_ had only paid interest on the cost of their food. They were in
the man’s clutches, always paying for goods received and in some strange
way never clear of debt. This went on for years, and Farley McKeown, a
pillar of the Church and the friend of the holy priest, waxed wealthy on
the proceeds of his business.
Then he started a knitting industry and again was hailed by the priest
as the saviour of the people. From far and near, from the most southerly
to the most northerly point of Donegal the peasant women came to
Greenanore for yarn, crossing arms of the sea, mountains and moors on
their journey, and carrying back bundles of yarn to their homes. The
journey was in many cases thirty miles each way, and these miles were
tramped by women between a sleep and a sleep, often with only one meal
in their stomachs.
The daughters of Donegal are splendid knitters. But how difficult to
make are those wonderful stockings when there is nothing but the peat
fire or the rushlight to show the women the dreary and countless
stitches that go to make the whole marvellous work. How quick those
irons flash in the firelight, how they tinkle, tinkle one against
another as the nimble fingers wind the threads around them, but alas!
how wearying the toil! And the time usually taken to make a pair of
socks was sixteen hours, and the wages paid for sixteen hours’ work was
a penny farthing.
II
Farley McKeown strutted along the street, inflating his stomach with
dignity as he walked and casting careless looks around him. All those
whom he met saluted him, the men raised their hands to their caps, the
women bowed gravely, and the children, when they saw him coming, ran
away. An old sow, black and dirty from her wallow in some near midden,
rushed violently into the street and grunted as she mouthed at the grime
in the gutter. A peasant boy, dressed in trousers and shirt, got hold of
one of the young pigs and the animal squealed loudly. This startled the
mother and she peered round, her little stupid eyes blinking angrily. On
seeing that one of her young was possibly in danger she charged full at
the youth, who, hurriedly dropping the sucker, sought the safety of a
near doorway. A few hens rushed off with long, remarkable strides that
made one wonder how the spider-shanked, ungainly birds saved themselves
from toppling over. A rooster--a defiant Sultan--who did not share in
the trepidacious exit of his wives, crowed loudly and looked valiantly
at the sow, as much as to say: “I, for one, am not the least afraid of
you.” The boy finding himself safe ventured out again into the street,
but coming face to face with Farley McKeown hurried off even more
rapidly than when pursued by the sow. The man noticed the doubtful mark
of respect which the youth showed him, purred approvingly and smiled,
the smile giving him the appearance of an over-fed, serious frog.
McKeown walked along the street towards a spacious three-storied
building containing many large windows and heavy, painted doors. This
was the warehouse in which he stored his yarn. One door was open, and in
front of this a crowd of barefooted women and children were standing,
most of them holding large bundles of stockings which they frequently
changed from one hand to another. They did not dare to rest their
bundles on the street, which was wet with the slabbery sleet of
mid-November.
Farley McKeown came to the door and from there surveyed the women with a
fixed stare. They shuffled uneasily, a few crossed themselves, and one,
a young girl, ventured to say: “It’s a cold morning this, Farley
McKeown, thanks be to God!”
The merchant made no answer. To see those creatures, shrinking before
his gaze, filled him with a comfortable sense of importance. They were
afraid of him, just as he was afraid of God, and he thought that he must
be like God in their eyes. He fixed another withering glance on the
crowd, then turned and hurried upstairs to the top floor, there to enter
a room where two young men were seated over a desk struggling with long
rows of figures in dirty ledgers. A peat fire blazed brightly in one
corner of the room, and the cheerful flame was a red rag to the eyes of
the proprietor. He looked sternly at the fire, then at the clerks, then
at the fire, then back to the clerks again.
“Warm here, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. “Yes, it’s warm, very warm; very
comfortable indeed, isn’t it? It’s nice to have a fire on a cold
morning, very nice indeed. If you were working in your fathers’ fields
you’d have a fire out by your sides, you’d carry a fire about in your
pockets all day, you would indeed. Is it not enough for you to have a
roof over you?” he cried in an angry tone, his voice rising shrilly; “a
roof over your head and four good walls to keep the winds of heaven away
from your bodies? No, it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t atall, atall! I gave
you orders not to put a fire on till I came into the office myself, and
what do I see here now? One would think that it’s not me that owns this
business. Who does own it, I’d like to know! Is it me or is it you?”
Gasping for breath, he flopped down suddenly into a chair, and drawing
off his gloves he stuffed them into the pocket of his coat. Then taking
an account book he stroked out several figures with his pen, while
between every pen stroke he turned round and shouted: “Is it me that
owns this business or is it you? Eh?”
After a while he ceased to speak, probably forgetting his rage in the
midst of the work, and for two hours there was almost total silence save
for the low scratchings of pen on paper and the occasional grunt which
emanated from the throat of Farley McKeown. Suddenly, however, he
stopped in the middle of his work and looked at the skylight above,
through which snow was falling, and some of it skiting off the
window-ledge dropped on the top of his head, which being bald was
extremely sensitive to climatic changes. Then he gave an order slowly
and emphatically:
“Dony McNelis, close the window.”
One of the clerks, a tall lank youth, rose like a rubber ball, bounded
on top of his seat and closed the window with a bang. On stepping down
to resume his work, he noticed the crowd of women, now greatly increased
by the party which had crossed the bay in the morning, standing huddled
together in the street. The sleet was falling thickly--it was now more
snow than sleet--and the clothes of the women were covered with a fleecy
whiteness. The clerk paused in his descent and looked at the women, then
he spoke to the yarn-seller.
“Would it not be better to attend to these women now?” he asked. “Some
of them have been out on the cold street since the dawn.”
Farley McKeown turned round sharply. “Is this my business or is it
yours?” he cried, rising from the chair and stamping his feet on the
floor. “Mine or yours, eh? Have I to run like a dog and attend to these
people, have I? I’ve kept them from death and the workhouse for the last
forty years, have I not? And now you want me to run out and attend on
them, do you? I’ve taken you, Dony McNelis, into my office out of pure
charity, and how much money is it that your mother owes me? Couldn’t I
turn her out of house and home at a moment’s notice? And in face of that
you come here and tell me how to run my own business. Isn’t that what
you’re trying to do? Eh?”
The boy sat down without a word, and catching a piece of waste paper off
the table, he crumpled it angrily in his hand; then rising again he
confronted his master.
“There are women out there from Tweedore and Frosses,” he said. “They
have travelled upwards of thirty miles, hungry, all of them, I’ll go
bail, and maybe not a penny in their pockets. If they don’t catch the
tide when it’s out they’ll have to sleep on the rocks of Dooey all
night, and if they do there’ll be more curses on your head in the
morning than all the masses ever said and all the prayers ever prayed
will be fit to wash away. It’s nearly one of the clock now, and they’ll
have to race and catch the tide afore it’s on the turn, so it would be
the best thing to do to attend to them this minute.”
The youth stood for a moment after he had delivered this speech, the
longest ever made by him in his life, and seemed on the point of saying
something more vehement. All at once, however, he sat down again and
went on with his work as if nothing unusual had happened.
Farley McKeown was a superstitious man. He feared the curse of an angry
woman as much as he feared the curse of a priest of the Catholic Church.
And those women would curse him if they slept all night on Dooey Head.
For a moment he glared angrily at Dony McNelis, then went to the window
facing the street, opened it and looked out on the shivering creatures
assembled in the falling snow.
“Are there many Tweedore and Frosses people here?” he shouted.
“There’s a good lot of us here, and we’re afraid that we’ll be a wee bit
late for the tide if we don’t get away this very minute,” said a voice
from the crowd. Maire a Crick, the fatalist, was speaking.
“Have ye any stockings with ye?”
“Sorrow the one has one that’s not on her feet, save Maire a Glan, and
she doesn’t come from our side of the water,” Maire a Crick answered.
“When we were here the last day we couldn’t get a taste of yarn and we
had to sleep all night on the rocks of Dooey. All night, mind, Farley
McKeown, and the sky glowering like a hangman and the sea rushing like
horses of war up on the strand. God be with us! but it will be a cold
place on a night like this. For the love of Mary, give us some yarn,
Farley McKeown,” said the old woman in a piteous voice. “Twenty-four
hours have passed since I saw bread or that what buys it.”
McKeown turned round to his clerks. “Is there much yarn down below?” he
asked.
“Plenty,” said Dony McNelis, wiping his pen on his coat-sleeve.
“If they had my yarn with them and miss the tide, they’d ruin the
stuff,” thought Farley McKeown; then turning to the women he shouted in
a loud voice: “There’s no yarn for the Tweedore and Frosses women this
day. Maybe if they come to-morrow or the day after they’ll get some.”
Having said these words he shut the window.
CHAPTER III
ON DOOEY HEAD
I
Outside, the women who had taken up their stand at dawn were still
changing their bundles of stockings from one hand to another and
sheltering them under their shawls whenever they changed them. All the
time they kept hitting their feet sharply against the gritty street,
trying to drive the cold and the numbness away. On the other side of the
pavement a policeman stood for a moment and eyed them disdainfully, then
marched on, his baton striking soberly against his leg. One of the
party, a handsome girl, stepped out from the crowd and lifting her dress
well over her ankles wrung the water from her petticoats. A young fellow
passing on a donkey-cart looked shyly at the girl and shouted: “Lift
them a bit higher, girsha; just a little bit!” Whereupon the maiden
blushed, dropped her dress as if it was red-hot and returned hurriedly
to her companions.
The Tweedore and Frosses women had gone away, speaking loudly and
lamenting over their ill-luck. Many of them were eating white bread (a
new importation into Greenanore), but without butter to give it relish
or liquid to wash it down. The bread cost a penny a chunk and one penny
represented a whole day’s wages to most of the women. Norah Ryan walked
with them, but in her lagging gait could be detected great weariness,
and in her eyes there were traces of tears. The poor child of twelve,
who felt her suffering very keenly, offered to share her dry crust with
Maire a Crick, who had no money, and the old woman looked greedily at
the bread for a moment but refused to accept it.
The party hurried clear of the town, their bare feet pattering loudly on
the road. Suddenly they encountered the parish priest, Father Devaney,
an old, grey-haired, sleek-looking fellow, with shiny false teeth and a
pot-belly like McKeown. He pulled his rosary from his pocket and began
to pray when he observed his parishioners.
“Tweedore and Frosses people,” he cried genially, turning his eyes from
the rosary cross to the women, “have ye got no yarn this good day? No.
That’s a pity, but believe me when I say that Mr. McKeown is doing his
very best for the whole lot of ye. He’s a good man, a sturdy man, a
reliable man, and there’s not his equal, barrin’ the priests themselves,
in all Ireland. Are you the daughter of James Ryan of Meenalicknalore?”
he asked, turning to Norah Ryan.
“That I am, father,” answered the child.
“Does he forget about the money that I’m wanting for the building of my
new house?” asked the old man in a severe tone of voice. “I want five
pounds from every family in the parish, and I’m not givin’ them one year
or two years, but a whole five years in which to pay it. They’re most of
them payin’ up now like real good Christians and Catholics, for they
want to see their own soggarth’s house a good house, a strong house and
a substantial house. But there is some of my own flock, and James Ryan
is one of them, that won’t give a penny piece to the soggarth who is
goin’ to save their souls for them. Listen, girsha! Tell James Ryan when
you get home that the first pound should be paid at Michaelmas and it’s
now long past Hallowe’en. Tell him that I pray every night for them
that’s not behind in comin’ forward to help the priest at the buildin’
of his house, the soggarth’s house and the house of all his people. Tell
James Ryan that there’s no prayer for him as yet, but if he hurries up
with just one pound----”
The priest suddenly spied the beansho staring at him, and he noticed
that there was a look of unfeigned contempt in her eyes. He observed the
bundle in her shawl, and suddenly recollected that it was the woman’s
child--the talk of the parish barely six months before. The priest
looked at the woman fixedly for a moment, then knowing that all the
party was watching him intently, he raised his hand and made the sign of
the cross on his forehead. This was as much as to say, “God save me from
this woman, for there is nothing good in her.” Old Maire a Crick crossed
herself in imitation of the soggarth and cast a look of withering
contempt at the beansho. Norah Ryan also raised her hand, but suddenly
it was borne to her that the action of Maire a Crick was very unseemly,
and she refrained from making the sign of the cross. Of course the
priest was right in what he had done, she knew; the people were
forbidden to see anything wrong in the ways of the soggarth.
Suddenly the old man turned away. He walked off a short distance, his
head sunk on his breast and his hands clasped behind his back, the
rosary dangling from his fingers. Perhaps he was deep in thought, or
maybe he was saying a prayer for the beansho; the poor woman, buried
beneath her weight of sin and sorrow, had no doubt filled him with
compassion. What would he, the father of the flock, not do to make
lighter the woman’s burden? All at once he paused, turned round and
faced the women who were staring after him.
“Norah Ryan!” he called, and his voice was pregnant with priestly
gravity. “If yer father doesn’t send me the pound before the end of the
next month he’ll have no luck in this world and no happiness in the
next. Tell him that I, meself, the parish priest, said these very
words.”
Having thus spoken, the good man went on his way, telling his beads;
perhaps counting by their aid the number of sovereigns required for the
construction of his mansion.
“That will make some people sit up if they don’t sink into their
brogues,” said Maire a Crick, glancing in turn at Norah Ryan and the
beansho. “Mother of Jesus, to have the priest talking to one like that!
Who ever heard the likes of it?”
“Do you know how much the priest is goin’ to spend on a lav-ha-thury for
his new house?” asked the beansho drily.
“Lav-ha-thury?” said Judy Farrel. “What’s that?”
“Old Oiney Dinchy of Glenmornan said that it is a place for keeping holy
water,” said Maire a Crick.
“Holy water, my eye!” said the beansho. “It’s the place where the priest
washes himself.”
“I’ve heard of them washin’ themselves away in foreign parts all over
and every day,” said a woman. “But they must be far from clean in them
places. They just go into big things full of water just as pigs, God be
good to us! go into a midden. Father McKee, I wish him rest! used to
wash his hands in an old tub, and that’s all the washin’ ever he did,
and wouldn’t ye think that a tub was good enough for this man? But what
am I talking about!” exclaimed the woman, making the sign of the cross.
“Isn’t it the priest that knows what is best to do?”
“He’s goin’ to spend two hundred and fifty pounds on his lav-ha-thury,
anyway,” said the beansho. “Two hundred and fifty pounds on one single
room of his house! Ye’ll not fill yer own bellies and ye’ll give him a
bathroom to wash his!”
“Mercy be on us!” exclaimed Biddy Wor, staring aghast at the beansho.
“Ye’re turnin’ out to be a Prodisan, Sheila Carrol. Talkin’ of the
priest in that way! No wonder, indeed, that he puts the cross on his
forehead when he meets you.”
“No wonder, indeed!” chimed a chorus of voices.
“The sun, God forgive me for callin’ it a sun! will be near Dooey Head
this minute,” Maire a Crick reminded the party, who had forgotten about
the tide in the heat of the discussion. Now they hurried off, breaking
into a run from time to time, Judy Farrel leading, her little pinched
figure doubling up almost into a knot when she coughed. Last in the race
were Norah Ryan and Maire a Crick.
II
The darkness was falling as the women raced down the crooked road that
ran to Dooey foreshore. A few birch bushes, with trembling branches
tossing hither and thither like tangled tresses, bounded the road at
intervals. The sky was overcast with low-hanging, slatey clouds, and in
the intervening distance between foreshore and horizon no separate
object could be distinguished: everything there had blended together in
grey, formless mistiness. There was hardly a word spoken; the pattering
of bare feet, Judy Farrel’s cough and the hard, laboured breathing of
the elder women were all that could be heard.
One of the party, well in advance, barefooted and carrying her shoes
hung round her neck with a piece of string, struck her toe sharply
against a rock.
“The curse of the devil!” she exclaimed; then in a quieter voice: “It’s
God’s blessin’ that I haven’t my brogues on my feet, for they would be
ruined entirely.”
A belated bird cried sharply and its call was carried in from the sea
... somewhere in the distance a cow lowed--the sound was prolonged in a
hundred ravines ... the bar moaned fretfully as if in a troubled sleep
... the snow ceased to fall and some stars glittered bright as diamonds
in the cold heavens.
“Mother of God! It’s on the turn,” Maire a Crick shouted, and hurried as
rapidly as her legs would permit down the hill. At intervals some of the
party following her would stumble, fall, turn head over heels and rise
rapidly again. They came to the strand, raced across it, making little
noise with their feet as they ran and with their bodies as they fell.
Norah Ryan’s head shook fitfully from side to side as she tried to keep
pace with her companions.
They were not aware of the proximity of the dhan until they were in the
water and splashing it all around them. When half-way across Maire a
Crick found the water at her breast; another step and it reached her
chin. Those behind could only see a black head bobbing in the waves.
“Come back, Maire a Crick!” Biddy Wor shouted. “Ye’ll be drownded if ye
go one step at all further.”
The old woman turned, came back slowly and solemnly, without speaking a
word.
On reaching the strand she went down on her knees and raised her eyes to
heaven, looking up through the snowy flakes that were now falling out of
the darkness. Then she spoke, and her voice, rising shrill and terrible,
carried far across the dhan:
“May seven curses from the lips of Jesus Christ fall seven times seven
on the head of Farley McKeown!”
The waves rolled up to her feet, stretching out like black, sinuous
snakes; a long, wailing wind, that put droumy thoughts into the hearts
of those who listened to it, swept in from the sea. Behind on the shore,
large rocks, frightful and shapeless, stood out amidst stunted bushes
that sobbed in dismal unison. The women went back to the rocks, passing
through bent-grass that shook in the breeze like eels. All around the
brambles writhed like long arms clutching at their prey with horrible
claws. A tuft of withered fern flew by in the air as if escaping from
something which followed it, and again the cry of the solitary sea-bird
pierced the darkness.
Between the clefts of a large rock, which in some past age had been
split by lightning, the women, worn out with their day’s journey, sat
down in a circle, their shawls drawn over their heads and their feet
tucked well up under their petticoats. The darkness almost overpowered
Norah Ryan; she shuddered and the shudder chilled her to the heart. It
was not terror that possessed her but something more unendurable than
terror; it was the agony of a soul dwarfed by the immensity of the
infinite. She was lonely, desperately lonely. In the midst of the women
she was far from them. They began to speak and their voices were the
voices of dreams.
Maire a Crick, speaking in Gaelic, was telling a story, while wringing
the water from her clothes, the story of a barrow that came across the
hills of Glenmornan in the year of the famine, and on the barrow, which
rolled along of its own accord, there was a large coffin with a door at
the bottom of it. Then another of the party told of her grandfather’s
wake and the naked man who came to the house in the middle of the night
and took up a seat by the chimney corner. He never spoke a word but
smoked the pipe of tobacco that was handed to him. When the cock crew
with the dawn he got up from his seat and went out and away. Nobody knew
the man and no one ever saw him again.
“We might get shelter in one of the houses up there,” said Norah Ryan,
rousing herself and pointing to the hill above, where the short-lived
rushlights flickered and shone at intervals in the scattered cabins.
“We might,” said Maire a Crick, “we might indeed, but it’s not in me to
go askin’ a night’s shelter under the roof of a Ballybonar man. There
was once, years ago, a black word between the Ballybonar people and the
people of our side of the water. Since then we haven’t darkened one
another’s doorsteps, and we’re not going to do it now.”
“Maybe someone on our side will send a boat across,” said the beansho.
“Maybe they’ll do that if they’re not at the fishin’,” Judy Farrel
answered. “And when are they not at the fishin’? They’re always out on
the diddy of the sea and never catching a fish atall, atall!”
“We’ll walk about; it will keep our feet warm.”
“And maybe fall down between the rocks and break our bits of legs.”
The rushlights on the hill above went out one by one and the darkness
became intense. The Ballybonar people had gone to bed. One of the women
on the rock began to snore loudly, and those who remained awake envied
her because she slept so soundly.
“I suppose Farley McKeown will have a feather bed under him now,” said
Maire a Crick with a broken laugh. It seemed as if she was weeping. The
beansho, who was giving suck to her babe, turned to Norah Ryan who sat
beside her.
“What are you thinking of, Norah?” she asked in Gaelic.
“I’m just wondering if my mother is better,” answered the child.
“I hope she is,” said the beansho. “Are you sleepy? Would you like to
sleep like the earth, like the ground under you?”
“In the grave you mean?”
“No, no, child. But like the world at night; like the ground under you?
It’s asleep now; one can almost hear it breathing, and one would like to
sleep with it. If ever you think that the earth is asleep, Norah, be
careful. Maybe when you grow up some man will say to you: ‘I like you
better than anyone else in the world.’ That will be very nice to listen
to, Norah. Maybe you’ll walk with the man on a lonely moor or on the
strand beside the sea. It will be night, and there will be many stars in
the sky, and you’ll not say they’re cold then as you said this morning,
Norah. All at once you’ll stop and listen. You’ll not know why you
listen for everything will be so quiet. But for a minute it will come to
you that the earth is asleep and that everything is in slumber. That
will be a dangerous hour, child, for then you may commit the mortal sin
of love.”
“Was that your sin, Sheila Carrol?” asked Norah Ryan, calling the woman
by her correct name for the first time.
“That was my sin, Norah.”
“But you said this morning----”
“Never mind what I said this morning,” answered the woman in a tone of
mild reproof. “I’m only saying that the ground under us and around us is
now sleeping.”
“The ground sleeping!” exclaimed Maire a Crick, who overheard the last
words of the conversation. “I never heard such silly talk coming out of
a mouth in all my life before.”
“Neither have I,” said Norah Ryan, but she spoke so low that no one, not
even the beansho, heard her.
Maire a Crick sang a song. It told of a youth who lived in Ireland “when
cows were kine, and pigs were swine and eagles of the air built their
nests in the beards of giants.” When the youth was born his father
planted a tree in honour of the event. The boy grew up, very proud of
this tree, and daily he watered and tended it, and one day the boy was
hung (why the song never stated) from the branches of his own tree.
“There never was a man hung either in Frosses or Tweedore,” said the
woman who had just been snoring. “Never a mother’s son!”
“So I have heard,” Maire a Crick remarked, pulling her feet well up
under her petticoats. “In Frosses and Tweedore there never was a tree
strong enough to bear the weight of a man, and never a man with a body
weighty enough to break his own neck.”
Having said this the old woman, who came from the south of Donegal,
chuckled deep down in her throat, and showed the one remaining tooth
which she possessed in a hideous grin.
III
About the hour of midnight the heavens cleared and the moon, hardly
full, lighted up the coast of Western Donegal. On the bosom of the sea a
few dark specks moved to and fro, and at intervals the splash of oars
could be heard. When the oars were lifted out of the sea the water,
falling from them, looked like molten silver.
“Norah will be warm in bed by now,” said a voice.
“If she caught the tide when it was standing,” a voice clearer and
younger replied.
“If she caught the tide,” repeated the first speaker in a thoughtful
tone; then after a short silence, “Does not the land look black, back
from the sea?”
The youth studied the shore-line attentively, allowing his oar to trail
through the water. “Mother of God! but it looks ugly,” he replied. “I
hate it! I hate it more than I hate anything!”
On shore most of the women were now asleep amongst the rocks, their
shawls drawn tightly over their heads and their feet tucked up under
their petticoats. Maire a Crick, still awake, hummed a tune deep down in
her throat, and Judy Farrel coughed incessantly. One white, youthful
face was turned to the heavens, and the moon, glancing for a moment on
the pale cheeks of the sleeper, caused a tear falling from the closed
eyelids to sparkle like a pearl.
CHAPTER IV
RESTLESS YOUTH
I
James Ryan’s cabin lay within half a mile of the sea, and his croft, a
long strip of rock-bespattered, sapless land, ran down to the very
shore. But this strip of land was so narrow that the house, small though
it was, could not be built across, and instead of the cabin-front, an
end gable faced the water. In Frosses most of the land is divided into
thin strips, for it is the unwritten law that they who have no land
touching the sea may not lift any sea-weed to manure their potato
patches. In Frosses some of the crofts, measuring two miles in length,
are seldom more than eight paces in width at any point.
All over the district gigantic boulders are strewn, huge rocks that
might have been flung about in play by monstrous Giants who forgot, when
their humour was at an end, to gather them up again. Between these rocks
the people till for crops, plots of land which seldom measure more than
four yards square, and every rock conceals either a potato patch or
cornfield. It was said years ago that Frosses had twenty-one blades of
grass to the square foot, but this was contradicted by a sarcastic
peasant, who said that if grass grew so plentifully with them they would
all be wealthy.
Fishing was indulged in, but very little fish was ever landed: Scottish
and English trawlers netted the fish off-shore, and few were picked up
by the peasantry, whose boats and nets were of the most primitive
pattern. The nets were bad, the boats, mere curraghs, were
untrustworthy, and a great deal of the fishermen’s time was usually
spent in baling out water. At best fishing was for them an almost
profitless trade. They had no markets and no carts to send their fish to
town. For the most part the fishers used the fish themselves or traded
them in kind with their neighbours.
On the morning following the women’s visit to Greenanore two men came up
from the sea towards the door of James Ryan’s cabin. One was an old man,
bearded and wrinkled, whose brows were continually contracting as is the
habit with those who live by the sea and look on the wrath of many
winds. He was dressed in a white wrapper, a woollen shirt, open at the
neck, trousers folded up to the knees, and mairteens. The other was a
youth of nineteen, dark-haired, supple of limb and barefooted. In the
two men a family likeness might be detected; they were father and son,
James Ryan and his only boy, Fergus. There were now only four in the
family; death had taken away most of the children before they were a
year old.
Fergus opened the door of the cabin, to be met with the warm and
penetrating breath of the cattle inside. The cows, always curious to see
a new-comer, turned round in their beds of fresh heather and fixed their
big, soft eyes on the youth. Beside the cow nearest the door, a young
calf, spotted black and white, turned round on long, lank, awkward legs
and sniffed suspiciously; then, finding that no danger was going to
befall him, snuggled up against his mother, who commenced to lick her
offspring with a big rough tongue. Suddenly a pig ran in from the
outside, rushed between the youth’s legs and disappeared under the bed.
Its back was bleeding as if a dog had bitten it.
“Is not the pig’s flesh like a human’s?” said Fergus, turning to his
father. “White; almost without hair and it bleeds just like a man’s. I
hate pigs; I wish we could live without keeping them.... Oh! here is
Norah at the fire. Have you just got up?”
The child, shivering from cold, was sitting on the hassock, her hands
spread out to the peat blaze.
“She has only just come in from the other side of the water,” said the
mother, who was sitting up in bed, knitting stockings. “She lay out all
night, poor creature! Twenty-seven women in all were lying out on the
snow. And she got no yarn! Thanks be to God! but it’s a bad time.”
“A bad time, a hard time, a very hard time!” said the old man, sitting
down on an upturned creel and taking off his mairteens. “No yarn! and
there was not a fish in all the seas last night.”
“None but the ones we didn’t catch,” said Fergus. “It is that dirty
potato-basket of a boat that is to blame.... Are you cold, Norah?”
“I am only shivering; but the fire will do me good.”
“She didn’t ate one bit of her breakfast yesterday,” said the mother.
“Left it all for you when you came in from the sea, she did!”
Norah blushed as if she had been caught doing something wrong; then
drank from the bowl of milk which was placed on the floor beside her.
The father looked greedily at the bowl; the mother spoke.
“It is nice and warm, that milk,” said the old woman. “I wish we had
more of it, but at this time of the year the milk runs thin in the cow’s
elldurs. But even if we had got enough bread, never mind milk, it would
not be so bad.... And there is not one bit for you this morning.... Do
you know what the soggarth says, Shemus?”
II
The husband looked at his wife, and an expression of dread appeared on
his face. “What does he say, Mary?”
“He is offering up no prayers for your soul.”
“Mother of God, be good to me!”
“You must pay him that pound at once, he says.”
“But barring what we are saving up for the landlord’s rent, bad scran to
him! we have not one white shilling in the house.”
“That does not matter to the priest, the damned old pig!” exclaimed
Fergus, who had been looking gloomily at the roof since he had spoken to
Norah.
“Fergus!” the three occupants of the house exclaimed in one breath.
“What’s coming over the boy at all?” the mother went on. “It must be the
books that Micky’s Jim takes over from Scotland that are bringing ruin
to the gasair.”
“It is common sense that I am talking,” Fergus hotly replied. “What with
the landlord, Farley McKeown, and the priest, you are all in a nice
pickle!”
“The priest, Fergus!”
“Robbing you because he is a servant of the Lord; that is the priest’s
trick,” the youth exclaimed. “We are feeding here with the cows and the
pigs and we are not one bit better than the animals ourselves. I hate
the place; I hate it and everything about it.”
“Sure you don’t hate your own people?” asked Norah, rising from her seat
and going timidly up to her brother. “Sure you don’t hate me, Fergus?”
“Hate you?” laughed the young man stroking her hair with an awkward
hand. “No one could hate you, because you are a little angel.... Now run
away and sit down at the fire and warm yourself.... They are going to
make you a nun, they say.”
There was a note of scorn in his voice, and he looked defiantly at his
mother as he spoke.
“What better than a nun could she be?” asked the mother.
“I would rather see her a beggar on the rainy roads.”
“What is coming over you atall, Fergus?” asked the old man. “Last night,
too, you were strange in your talk on the top of the sea.”
“How much money have you in the house?” Fergus asked, taking no heed of
his father’s remark. “Ten shillings will be enough to take me out of the
country altogether.”
“Fergus, what are you saying?” asked his mother.
“I am going away from here and I am going to push my fortune.” He looked
out of the window and his eyes followed the twist of the road that ran
like a ribbon away past the door of the house.
“But, Fergus dear--!”
“It does not matter, maghair (mother), what you say,” remarked the
youth, interrupting his mother. “I am going away this very day. I have
had it in my head for a long while. I’ll make you rich in the years to
come. I’ll earn plenty of money.”
“That’s what they all say, child,” the mother interposed, and tears came
into her eyes. “It’s more often a grave than a fortune they find in the
black foreign country.”
“Could any place under the roof-tree of heaven be as black as this,”
asked the youth excitedly. “There is nothing here but rags, poverty, and
dirt; pigs under the bed, cows in the house, the rain coming through the
thatch instead of seeping from the eaves, and the winds of night raving
and roaring through wall and window. Then if by chance you make one gold
guinea, half of it goes to Farley McKeown and the priest, and the other
half of it goes to the landlord.”
“But Farley McKeown doesn’t get any money from us at all,” said the
mother in a tone of reproof. “It is him that gives us money for the
knitting.”
“Knitting!” exclaimed Fergus, rising to his feet and striding up and
down the cabin. “God look sideways on the knitting! How much are you
paid for your work? One shilling and threepence for a dozen pairs of
stockings that takes the two of you more than a whole week to make. You
might as well be slaves; you are slaves, slaves to the very middle of
your bones! How much does Farley McKeown get for the stockings in the
big towns away out of here? Four shillings a pair, I am after hearing.
You get a penny farthing a pair; a penny farthing! If you read some of
the books that comes home with the harvestmen you would not suffer
Farley McKeown for long.”
“That is it,” said the mother, winding the thread round her
knitting-irons. “That is it! It is the books that the harvestmen take
home that puts the boy astray. It is no wonder that the priest condemns
the books.”
“The priest!” said the youth in a tone of contempt. “But what is the
good of talking to the likes of you? How much money have you in the
house?”
“Sure you are not going to leave us?” Norah exclaimed, gazing with large
troubled eyes at her brother.
“I am,” snapped Fergus. “I am going away this evening. I’ll tramp the
road to Derry and take the big boat from there to Scotland or some other
place beyond the water. What are you crying for? Don’t be a baby, Norah!
I’ll come back again and make you a lady. I’ll earn big piles of money
and send it home at the end of every month.”
James Ryan looked at his wife, and a similar thought struck both of them
at the same instant. The son had some book learning, and he might get on
well abroad and amass considerable wealth, which he would share with his
own people. The old man drew nearer to the fire and held out his bare
feet, which were blue with cold, to the flames.
“If Fergus sends home money I’ll get a good strong and warm pair of
boots,” he said to himself; then asked: “How much money is there in the
teapot, Mary?”
“Twelve white shillings and sevenpence,” answered the wife. “No, it is
only twelve shillings and sixpence. Norah took a penny with her to the
town yesterday.”
“I have a ha’penny back with me,” said the child, drawing a coin from
her weasel-skin purse. “I only spent half of the money on bread
yesterday because I was not very hungry.”
“God be merciful to us! but the child is starving herself,” said the old
woman, clutching eagerly at the coin which her daughter held towards
her. “You can have half a gold guinea, Fergus, if you are going out to
push your fortune.”
III
In the evening when the moon peeped over the western hills, Fergus Ryan
tied his boots round his neck, placed three bannocks in a woollen
handkerchief and went out from his father’s door. The mother wept not
when he was leaving; she had seen so many of her children go out on a
much longer journey. Norah accompanied Fergus for a short distance and
stopped where the road streaked with very faint lines of light merged
into the darkness. The moon rose clear off the hills ... lights could
be seen glowing in the distance ... a leafless birch waved its arms in
the breeze ... somewhere a cow was lowing and far away, across the
water, a Ballybonar dog howled at the stars.
“I never thought that I could like the place as much as I do now,”
Fergus said in English.
“It’s the way with everyone when they’re going away,” answered his
sister. “And I’m sick at heart that ye are goin’, Fergus. Is Derry far
away?”
“A longish way--”
“Out beyont the moon, is it?” asked the child, pointing at the hills and
the moon above them.
“Maybe,” said the youth; then in a low voice: “D’ye know what they do in
other countries when they are saying ‘Good-bye’?”
“Then I don’t,” answered Norah.
“They do this,” said the young man, and he pressed his lips against his
sister’s cheek.
“But they never do that here,” said the girl, and both blushed as if
they had been discovered doing something very wrong. “I’ll say a long
prayer for you every night, when you are away, Fergus.”
The boy looked at her, rubbed one bare foot on the ground and seemed on
the point of saying something further; then without a word he turned and
walked off along the wet road. Norah kept looking after him till he was
out of sight, then, with her eyes full of tears, she went back to her
home.
CHAPTER V
GOOD NEWS FROM A FAR COUNTRY
I
Towards the end of the following year a great event took place in
Frosses. It was reported that a registered letter addressed to “James
Ryan, Esquire, Meenalicknalore” was lying in Frosses post-office. Norah
heard the news and spoke of it to her father.
“No one but your own self can get the letter,” she said. “That is what
the people at the post-office say. You have to write your name down on
white paper too, before the letter crosses the counter.”
“And is it me, a man who was never at school, that has to put down my
name?” asked James Ryan in a puzzled voice.
“It will be a letter from the boy himself,” said the old woman, who was
sitting up in bed and knitting. Now and again she placed her bright
irons down and coughed with such violence as to shake her whole body.
“And maybe there is money in the same letter. It is not often that we
have a letter coming to us.”
“We had none since the last process for the rent and that was two years
aback,” said the husband. “Maybe I will be going into Frosses and
getting that letter myself now.”
“Maybe you would,” stammered his wife, still battling with her cough.
James Ryan put on his mairteens and left the house. Norah watched him
depart, and her eyes followed him until he turned the corner of the
road; then she went to the bedside and sitting on a low stool commenced
to turn the heel of a long stocking.
“How many days to a day now is it since Fergus took the road to Derry?”
asked the old woman. “I am sure it is near come nine months this very
minute.”
“It is ten months all but sixteen days.”
“Under God the day and the night, and is it that?”
“That it is and every hour of it.”
“He will be across the whole flat world since he left,” said the mother,
looking fixedly at an awkward, ungainly calf which had just blundered
into the house, but seeing far beyond. “He will maybe send five pounds
in gold in the letter.”
“Maybe. But you are not thinking of that, mother?” said Norah.
“And what would _you_ be thinking of, then?” asked the old woman.
“I am wondering if he is in good health and happy.”
“The young are always happy, Norah. Are you not?”
“Sometimes. I am happy when out in the open, listening to the birds
singing, and the wind running on the heather.”
“Who ever heard of a person listening to things like those? Are you not
happy in God’s house on a Sunday?”
“Oh, I am happy there as well,” answered Norah, but there was a hint of
hesitation in the answer.
“Everyone that is good of heart is happy in God’s house,” said the
mother. “Have you turned the heel of the stocking yet?”
“I am nigh finished with the foot, mother.”
“My own two eyes are getting dim, and I cannot hurry like you these
days,” said the woman in the bed. “Run those hens from the house, and
the young sturk too.... I wonder what he is coming in here for now, the
rascal?”
“Maybe he likes to be near the fire,” said the child, looking at the
spotted calf that was nosing at a dish on the dresser. “When Micky’s Jim
built a new byre it was not easy to keep the cattle in it, for they
always wanted to get back into the warm house again.”
With these words she rose and chased the young animal out of doors,
while a few stray hens fluttered wildly about in making their exit. “The
cows like the blaze,” Norah went on as she came back and took up her
seat by the fire. “Every evening they turn round and look at it, and you
can see their big soft eyes shining through the darkness.”
“It is the strange things that you be noticing, alannah, but what you
say is very true,” said the mother. “It will be a letter from Fergus, I
suppose, with five gold guineas in it,” she went on. “Maybe he will be
at the back of America by now.... If he sends five gold guineas we will
make a holy nun of you, Norah, and then you can pray day and night with
no one at all to ask you to do anything but that alone.”
“I might get tired of it, mother.”
“Son of Mary, listen to her! Tired of saying your prayers, you mean?
There is that sturk at the door again. Isn’t he the rascal of the
world?”
II
Darkness had fallen before James Ryan returned from Frosses post-office,
which was over four miles away. He entered the cabin, breathing heavily,
the sweat streaming from his brow and coursing down his blood-threaded
cheeks. He had run most of the way back, and in his hand he carried the
letter, the first which he had received for two whole years.
“Mercy be on us, but you are out of breath!” said his wife, laying down
her knitting irons, a fault of which she was seldom guilty, save when
eating or sleeping. “Put one of the rushlights in the fire, Norah, and
read the letter from foreign parts. Is it from the boy himself?”
“Maybe it is,” answered the man, seating himself as usual on an upturned
creel in the centre of the cabin. “The man at the post-office, Micky
McNelis, first cousin he is to Dony McNelis that works with Farley
McKeown, says that it is from a far part, anyway. ‘You must put down
your own name,’ said Micky to me, in English. ‘I cannot write, for I
never had a pen in my hand,’ said I. ‘You have to make your mark then,’
said he. ‘I don’t know how to do that either,’ said I. ‘I’ll write your
name and you have to put a line down this way and a line down that way
after what I write,’ said he, and, just by way of showing me, he made a
crooked cross with his pen on a piece of paper. Then I made my mark and
a good mark it was too, for Micky himself said as much, and I got the
letter there and then into my own two hands. If it is from the boy there
is not one penny piece in it.”
“Why would you be saying that now?”
“I could not feel anything inside of it,” said the man. “If there were
gold pieces in it I could easily find them through that piece of paper.”
The rushlight was now ready; the father took it in his hand and stood
beside Norah, to whom he gave the letter. The woman leant forward in the
bed; her husband held up the light with a shaky hand; dim shadows danced
on the roof; the young sturk again entered the house and took up his
stand in the corner. Norah having opened the letter proceeded to read:
“DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER AND NORAH,
“I am writing to say that I am well, hoping to find you all at home
in the same state of health. I am far away in the middle of England
now, in a place called Liverpool where I have a job as a dock
labourer--”
“Micky’s Jim had that kind of job the year before last in Glasgow,” said
the mother.
“The work is hard enough, heaven knows, but the pay is good. I came
here from Derry and I have been working for the most part of the
time ever since. I intended to write home sooner but between one
thing and another, time passed by, but now I am sending you home
twelve pounds, and you can get gold in Frosses post-office for the
slip of paper which I enclose----”
“Under God the day and the night!” exclaimed the woman in the bed.
“A pound of this money is for Norah, and she can buy a new dress
for it. See and don’t let her go to Greenanore for yarn any more,
or it will be the death of her, sleeping out at night on the rocks
of Dooey.
“I hope my mother is well and that her cold is getting better. I
spend all my spare time reading books. It is a great, great world
once you are away from Donegal, and here, where I am, as many books
as one would want to carry can be had for a mere song----”
“Getting things for a song!” said the man. “That is like the ballad
singers----”
“It would be nice to hear from you, but as I am going away to
America on the day after to-morrow, I have no fixed address, and it
would be next to useless for you to write to me. I’ll send a letter
soon again, and more money when I can earn it.
“Your loving son
“FERGUS.”
III
“This is the paper which he talks about,” said Norah, handing a money
order to her mother.
“A thing like that worth twelve pounds!” exclaimed the old woman, a look
of perplexity intensifying the wrinkles of her face. “I would hardly
give a white sixpence, no, nor a brown penny for the little thing. Glory
be to God! but maybe it is worth twelve golden sovereigns, for there are
many strange things that come out of foreign parts.”
“Alive and well he is,” said Norah, reading the letter over again.
“Thank God for that, for I was afraid that he might be dead, seeing that
it took him so long to write home. Wouldn’t I like to see him again!”
“It will be worth twelve pounds without a doubt,” said the husband,
referring to the money order, as he threw the rushlight which was
burning his fingers into the fire. “I once heard tell that a man can get
hundreds and hundreds of guineas for a piece of paper no bigger than
that!”
“Mother of God!” exclaimed the old woman, making the sign of the cross
and kissing the money order rapturously.
“Poor Fergus!” said Norah, laying down the letter on the window-sill and
taking up her needles. “It is a pity of him so far away from his own
home!”
“Twelve gold sovereigns!” said the mother. “A big pile that without a
doubt. Hardly a house in Frosses has twelve pounds inside the threshold
of its door. Put out that animal to the fields,” she called to her
husband. “We’ll have to build a new byre and not have the cattle in the
house any longer. A funny thing indeed to have them tied up in a house
along with people who can get twelve pounds in bulk from foreign parts!
No decent body would dream of such a thing as having them tied up here
now! Norah, leave down that stocking. Let me never see you knitting
under this roof again.”
“Why, mother?”
“You are going to be a nun, a holy nun, Norah, and nuns never knit; they
just pray all day long and all night too. You have to set about and go
to school again. You are not to be like other people’s children any
more, knitting stockings in the ashes. You are going to be a nun--and
there never was a nun in Frosses yet!”
“I would like to go to school again,” said the child, clinking her irons
nervously and following with her eyes the blue flames that rose from the
peat fire and disappeared in the chimney. “There is a map of the world
in the school, hanging on the wall, and one can see Liverpool on it and
America as well. I could look at them and think that I am seeing Fergus
away in foreign parts, so far from his own home.”
“And there is a pound due to the priest this minute,” said the old man,
who had just chased the calf out into the darkness. “It would be well to
give the soggarth the money in the morning.”
“And you’ll go to school again to-morrow,” repeated the mother, who was
following up some train of thought, and who, curiously enough, made no
mention of her son since the letter had been read. “You’ll go again
to-morrow and learn well. The master said that you were getting on fine
the last time you were there and that it was a sin to take you away from
the books.”
Having said this, the old woman lay back in her bed with a sigh of
relief, the man closed the door of the house, and drawing near to the
fire he held out his feet to the blaze. Norah, glad to be released from
the labour of the knitting irons, looked into the flames, and many
strange pictures came and went before her eyes. From time to time the
woman in the bed could be heard speaking.
“Twelve pounds for a piece of paper!” she would exclaim. “Mother of God!
But there is strange things in foreign lands!”
Suddenly Norah arose and approached the bed. “Am I a good girl, mother?”
she asked, with a slight catch in her voice.
“What silliness is entering your head?” enquired the old woman. “Who
said that you were not good?”
“You said that good people were happy in God’s house, but I am not
always happy there.”
“Did I say that?” asked the mother, who had forgotten all about the
remark. “Maybe I did say it, maybe indeed. But run away now and don’t
bother me, for I am going to sleep.”
“A little bit of paper to be worth twelve pounds!” she mumbled to
herself, after a short interval of silence. “Mother of God! but there
are many strange things in foreign parts of the world!”
CHAPTER VI
SCHOOL LIFE
I
On the Monday of the week following Norah Ryan went to school again. She
had been there for two years already but left off going when she became
an adept at the needles. Master Diver had control of the school; he was
a fat little man, always panting and perspiring, who frightened the
children and feared the priest. On the way to school he cut hazel rods
by the roadside, and when in a bad mood he used them on the youngsters.
After he had caned three or four children he became good tempered, when
he caned half a dozen he got tired of his task and allowed the remainder
(if any remained) to go scot free. Some of the boys who worked in their
spare time at peat saving and fishing had hands hard as horses’ hooves.
When these did something wrong their trousers were taken down and
awkward chastisement was inflicted with severe simplicity in full view
of a breathless school.
The school consisted of a single apartment, at one end of which, on a
slightly elevated platform near the fire, the master’s desk and chair
were placed. Several maps, two blackboards, a modulator, which no one,
not even the master himself, understood, and a thermometer, long
deprived of its quicksilver, hung on the walls. In one corner were the
pegs on which the boys’ caps were hung; on a large roof-beam which
spanned the width of the room the girls’ shawls were piled in a large
heap. The room boasted of two wide open fireplaces, but only one of
these was ever lighted; the other was used for storing the turf carried
to school daily by the scholars. The room was swept twice weekly; then a
grey dust rose off the floor and the master and children were seized
with prolonged fits of sneezing. Outside and above the door was a large
plate with the inscription,
GLENMORNAN NATIONAL SCHOOL. 1872.
Over the plate and under the eaves of the building a sparrow built its
nest yearly, and it was even reported that a bat took up its daily
residence in the same quarter.
From his seat beside the fire in the schoolroom the master watched his
pupils through half-closed eyes, save when now and again he dropped into
a sound sleep and snored loudly. Asleep he perspired more freely than
when awake. He was very bald, and sometimes a tame robin that had been
in the schoolhouse for many years fluttered down and rested on the
skinny head which shone brilliantly in the firelight. There the robin
preened its feathers. Now and then a mouse nibbled under the boards of
the floor, and the children stopped their noisy chatter for a moment to
listen to the movements of the little animal.
Prayers were said morning and evening. The children went down on their
knees, the master prayed standing like a priest at the altar. The
prayers of the morning were repeated in English, those of the evening in
Gaelic.
Norah Ryan took her place in the third standard. In the class the boys
stood at top, the girls at bottom, and those of each sex were ranged in
order of merit. Norah, an apt pupil, easily took her place at the head
of the girls, and the most ignorant of the boys, a youth named Dermod
Flynn, was placed beside her. Although this lad got caned on an average
three times a day, he never cried when he was beaten; still, Norah Ryan
felt mutely compassionate for him when she heard the sharp hazel rod
strike like a whiplash against his hand. His usual punishment consisted
of four slaps of the rod, but always he held out his hand for a fifth;
this, no doubt, was done to show the master that he did not fear him.
Dermod could not fix his mind on any one subject; there was usually a
far-away look in his eyes, which were continually turning towards the
window and the country outside. On the calf of his left leg a large red
scar showed where he had been bitten by a dog, and it was known that he
would become mad one day. When a man is bitten by an angry dog he is
sure to become mad at some time or another. So they say in Frosses.
The third class was usually ranged for lessons in a semi-circle facing
the map of the world, which, with the exception of the map of Ireland,
was the largest in the school. On the corners of the map were pictures
of various men and animals with titles underneath; which, going the
round of the two hemispheres, could be read as follows: Dromedary; A
Russian Moujik; Wild Boar; A Chinaman; Leopard; An Indian; Lion; A Fiji
Islander; etc., etc.
II
One day the master asked Dermod Flynn if he knew what race of people
lived in Liverpool. As usual Dermod did not know.
“Dockers and Irishmen,” Norah Ryan, whose mind reverted to the letter
which had been received from Fergus, whispered under her breath.
“Rockets and Irishmen,” Dermod blurted out.
No one laughed: a rocket had never been seen in Glenmornan, and it would
have surprised none of the children if Dermod were correct; it would
have surprised none of them if he were wrong. The master reached for the
hazel rod.
“Hold out your hand, Dermod Flynn,” he commanded and delivered four
blows on the boy’s palm. Flynn held out his hand for a fifth slap: the
master took no notice.
“Now, Norah Ryan, hold out your hand,” said the master. “Promptin’ is
worse than tellin’ lies.”
Norah received two slaps, much lighter than those delivered to the boy.
The master knew that she was going to be a nun one day, and he respected
her accordingly, but not to such an extent that he could refrain from
using the rod of correction.
Dermod Flynn turned and stared at Norah. A red blush mantled her cheeks,
and she looked at him shyly for a moment; then her lashes dropped
quickly, for she felt that he was looking into her very soul. He
appeared self-possessed, impervious to the pain of the master’s
chastisement. After a while Norah looked at him again, but he was gazing
vacantly out of the window at a brook tumbling from the rocky hills that
fringed the further side of the playground.
When school was dismissed and the scholars were on their way home,
Dermod spoke to Norah.
“Why did you help me in the class to-day?” he asked.
She did not answer but turned away and stared at the stream falling from
the dark rocks.
“It’s like white smoke against a black cloud,” he said following her
gaze.
“What is?”
“The stream falling from the rocks.”
On the day following Dermod got into trouble again. His class was asked
to write an essay on fire, and Dermod sat biting his pen until the
allotted time was nearly finished. Then he scribbled down a few lines.
“A house without fire is like a man without a stomach; a chimney without
smoke is like a man without breath, for----”
That was all. Dermod pondered over the word “stomach” for a while and
felt that it made the whole sentence an unseemly one. He was stroking
out the word when the master, awakening from his sleep, grabbed the
essay and read it. He read it a second time, then took down a hazel rod
from the nail on which it hung. The ignorance of the boy who wrote such
a sentence was most profound. The master caned Dermod.
Norah Ryan made rapid progress at her work, and when she went home in
the evening she sat down on the hassock and learned her lessons by the
light of the peat fire. She considered old Master Diver to be a very
learned man, but somehow she could not get herself to like him. “Why
does he beat Dermod Flynn so often?” she asked herself time and again,
and whenever she thought of school she thought of Dermod Flynn.
Her mother, who had improved in health, now that there was food to eat,
brought a looking-glass from Greenanore one day. She paid fourpence
halfpenny for it in “McKeown’s Great Emporium,” the new business which
had just been started by the yarn merchant. Norah dressed her hair in
front of this glass, and one day when engaged in the task, she said: “I
wish I could see Dermod Flynn now!” Perhaps she really meant to say: “I
wish Dermod Flynn could see me now!” In any case she got so red in the
face that her mother asked her what was wrong.
Shortly afterwards Dermod Flynn’s school troubles came to an end. His
class was standing as usual, facing the map of the world, and Master
Diver asked Dermod to point out Corsica. The boy did not know where
Corsica was; he stared at the map, holding the idle pointer in his hand.
“Point out Corsica!” the master repeated, and seized the youth by the
ear, which he pulled vigorously. The blood mounted to the boy’s cheeks,
and raising the pointer suddenly he hit the master sharply across the
face.
“You’ve killed him, Dermod Flynn!” Norah Ryan gasped involuntarily. The
old fellow put his hands over his face and sank down limply on the form.
Blood trickled through his fingers ... a fly settled on his bald head
... the scholars stared aghast at their fallen master. Dermod gazed at
the old man for a moment, then seizing his cap he rushed out of the
schoolroom. Most of the boys followed the example, and when the master,
who only suffered from a slight flesh wound, regained his feet and
looked round, the school was almost deserted.
Dermod Flynn did not return again, and after his departure Norah found
that she did not like the school so much as formerly.
CHAPTER VII
PLUCKING BOG-BINE
I
The May of 1903 came round, and on every twelfth day of May the young
boys and girls of Donegal start for the hiring fair of Strabane. The
rumour went that Dermod Flynn was going now, but no one knew for
certain; the Flynns being a close-mouthed people gave no secrets away.
On the evening preceding the twelfth, Norah heard of Dermod’s intended
departure and that night she was long in falling asleep. Her bed was
made on the floor beside the fire; a grey woollen blanket served a
double debt to pay, and was used as a blanket and sheet. But the
sleeping place was not cold; the heat of the fire and the breath of the
kine kept it warm.
The first bird was twittering on the thatch and the first tint of dawn
was tingeing the sky when Norah awoke, sat up in bed and threw part of
the blanket aside. At the further end of the house where it was still
dark cattle were stamping, and bright eyes could be seen glowing like
coals. The child rose, went to the window, pulled up the blind and
looked out on the sea. She stood there for a moment rapt in reverie, her
pure white bosom showing above her low-cut cotton chemise and her long
tresses hanging down loosely over her shoulders. She was now fourteen.
Her short reverie came to an end; she crossed herself many times and
proceeded to dress, taking unusual care with her hair, weaving it into
two long plaits, and polishing her boots carefully. These, the second
pair of her life, were studded with nails which she liked to hear
rasping on the ground as she walked. At night she noticed that the nails
were bright and shiny; in the mornings they were always brown with rust.
She recollected, not without a certain amount of satisfaction, that she
was the only girl wearing shoes at Frosses school. But she could well
afford it; Fergus had sent twenty pounds to his parents and three pounds
to herself since he left home.
Her father and mother were asleep in the bed; the former snoring loudly,
the latter coughing drowsily from time to time. The cat, which had been
in the house since Norah could remember, was curled atop of the blanket
and fast asleep.
A movement occurred in the bed as Norah finished her toilet; the cat
stirred itself, stretched its front legs, spreading out its claws,
yawned and fell asleep again.
“Son of Mary! but you are up early, Norah!” exclaimed her mother,
sitting up in bed; then seeing the cat she gave the blankets a vigorous
shake and cried: “Get out, you little devil! You lie in bed as if you
were a person and no less!”
“I am going to pull bog-bine on the hills of Glenmornan for your
sickness, mother.”
“But would it not be time enough for you to go there come noon?”
“It is as well to go now, mother.”
“Then it is, alannah, if you have the liking for it,” said the old
woman. “See and turn the cattle into the holm below the Holy Rocks
before you go away.”
“I will do that, mother.”
“And put the blind up on the window again, for the light is getting into
my eyes.”
Norah untied the cattle from their stakes and opened the door. The old
brindled cow went out first, lazily lashing her legs with her long tail,
and smelt the door-post as she passed soberly into the open. The second
cow, a fawn-grey beast, was followed by a restless, awkward calf that
mischievously nudged the hindquarters of the animal in front with its
nose. The Ryans possessed three cattle only, and the byre which the old
woman had wanted erected was now in process of construction.
When the young calf got into the field he jumped exultantly into the air
and rushed madly off for the distance of a hundred yards; then, planting
his forefeet squarely in the earth, as suddenly stopped and turned round
to look at the two cows. Surprised that they had not followed him, he
scampered back to where they were cropping noisily at the short grass,
and with his head dunted the brindled cow on the belly. The old animal
turned round, her mouth full of grass, and gave a reproving nudge with
her warm, damp nose which sent the calf scampering off again.
The houses of Meenalicknalore were arranged in a row on the top of a
brae that swept down to the sea, shoving its toes into the water. A curl
of smoke rose from some of the houses; others gave no hint of human
activity. “A chimney without smoke is like a man without breath,” quoted
Norah. “I wonder how Dermod Flynn thinks of things like that; and to-day
he is goin’ away all alone by himself across the mountains.”
She came to the Three Rocks; three large masses of limestone, one long
and perpendicular, the other two squat and globular, which the peasantry
supposed to represent the Holy Trinity. Here Norah said her prayers, one
“Our Father” and three “Hail Mary’s” in front of each of the two
smaller stones, and the Apostles’ Creed in front of the large rock in
the centre. When her prayers were finished she drove the cattle into a
holm, put a bush in the gap and resumed her journey.
The sun had just risen ... a wind cool and moist blew in from the bosom
of the sea ... little tufts of thistledown trembled through the air,
dropped to the ground, rose again and vanished in the distance ... wrens
chirped in the juniper ... frogs chuckled in the meadows ... a rabbit
with eyes alert, ears aback and tail acock ran along the roadway and
disappeared under a clump of furze ... clouds floating across the sky
like large, lazy, wingless birds slowly assumed a delicate rosy tint
until they looked like mother-of-pearl inside a giant shell.
Norah, very excited and very happy, stood for a moment to look into a
clear well by the roadside. On her face was the expectant look of a
sweet kitten that waits for the ball to be thrown to it; her two plaits
of hair hung over her shoulders, one delicate strand that had fallen
away fluttering in the breeze. She looked approvingly into the calm
water at the laughing face that smiled up to her.
“How good to be out here, to be alive, to be young,” she seemed to say
to herself. “Everything is so fair, so beautiful, so wonderful!”
II
About six o’clock Norah entered Glenmornan. Here she met three boys and
two girls bound for the rabble market of Strabane. One of the boys was
whistling a tune, the other two chattered noisily; the girls, who were
silent, carried each a pair of hob-nailed boots hung over their
shoulders.
“Good luck to your journey,” said Norah Ryan, by way of salutation.
“And to yours,” they answered.
“Are there lots of ones a-goin’ this mornin’?” she asked in English.
“Lots,” answered one of the girls, making the sign of the cross on her
brow. “Two gasairs of Oiney Dinchy’s, one of Cormac of the Hill’s ones,
seven or more from the townland of Dooran, and more besides.”
“Many goin’ from Glenmornan?”
“Lots,” said the boy who had been whistling.
Norah waited for him to proceed, but finding that he remained silent,
she enquired as to who was going.
“Condy Dan, Hudy Neddy, Columb Kennedy, Unah Roarty and”--the boy paused
for a moment to scratch his head--“and Dermod Flynn, the gasair that
struck Master Diver with the pointer.”
“Well, good luck to yer journey,” said Norah, shaking the hand of each
of them in turn. “May God be with ye all till ye come back!”
“And with yerself for ever.”
The crooked road twisted round copse and knoll, now bordering the river,
now rising well up on the shoulder of the hill, and along this road
Norah hurried, her hands hanging idly by her side and her plaits when
caught by an errant breeze fluttering over her shoulders. Half-way along
the Glenmornan road she met Dermod Flynn.
“Where are ye for this mornin’, Dermod?” she asked. She knew where he
was going, and after speaking felt that she should not have asked him
that question.
“Beyond the mountains,” answered the youth with a smile which showed his
white teeth. In one hand he carried a bundle, in the other an ash-plant
with a heavy knob at the end. The young fellows of Glenmornan had got
into a habit of carrying sticks in imitation of the cattle drovers who
came once every month to the fair of Greenanore.
“Ye’ll not come back for a long while, will ye?” Norah asked.
“I’m never goin’ to come back again,” Dermod answered. At this Norah
laughed, but, strangely enough, she felt ready to cry. All that she
intended to say to him was forgotten; she held out her hand, stammered a
confused good-bye and hurried away.
“His eyes are on me now,” she said several times to herself as she
walked away, and every time she spoke a blush mounted to her cheeks. She
wanted to look back, but did not do so until she came to the first bend
of the road. There she turned round, but Dermod Flynn had gone from
sight and a great loneliness entered the girl’s heart. A steer with
wide, curious eyes watched her from a field beside the road, the water
sang a song, all its own, as it dropped from the hills, and the Glen
River, viewed from the point where Norah stood, looked like a streak of
silver on a cloth of green. But the girl saw and heard none of these
things, her eyes were fixed on the crooked road which ran on through
holt and hollow as far as the village of Greenanore, and miles and miles
beyond.
She stood there for a long time lost in reverie. Dermod Flynn was gone
now, and he would never come back again. So he had told her. Suddenly
she recollected why she had come out on the journey. “To pluck bog-bine
it was,” she murmured. “I am after forgetting that!”
She went across the river by the ford and climbed the hill. From the top
of the knoll she could see the train steam out from the station of
Greenanore. In it were the children bound for the rabble market of
Strabane. Norah stared and stared at the train, which crawled like a
black caterpillar across the brown moor, leaving a trail of white smoke
behind it.
“I’m after forgettin’ that I came out to pluck bog-bine,” she repeated
when the train had disappeared from sight, and taking off her boots, she
picked her way across the soft and spongy moor.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRAGEDY
I
Often a youth leaves Donegal and goes out into the world, does well for
a time, writes frequently home to his own people, sends them a sum of
money in every letter (which shows that he is not a spendthrift), asking
them for a little gift in return, a scapular blessed by the priest, or a
bottle of water from the holy well (which shows that he has not
forgotten the faith in which he was born); but in the end he ceases to
write, drops out of the ken of his people and disappears. The father
mourns the son for a while, regrets that the usual money-order is not
forthcoming, weeps little, for too much sentiment is foreign to the
hardened sensibilities of the poor; the mother tells her beads and does
not fail to say one extra decade for the boy or to give a hard-earned
guinea to the priest for masses for the gasair’s soul. Time rapidly
dries their tears of regret, their sorrow disappears and the more
pressing problems of their lives take up their whole interests again. In
later years they may learn that their boy died of fever in a hospital,
or was killed by a broken derrick-jib, or done to death by a railway
train. “Them foreign parts were always bad,” they may say. “Black luck
be with the big boat, for it’s few it takes back of the many it takes
away!”
A year had passed by since James Ryan last heard from Fergus his son. No
word came of the youth, and none of the Frosses people, great
travellers though the young of Frosses were, had ever come across him in
any corner of the world.
“We are missing the blue pieces of paper,” Mary Ryan said to her husband
one evening in the late autumn, fully three years after Fergus’s
departure. She now spent her days sitting at the fire, and though her
health was not the best it had greatly improved within recent years.
“They were the papers!” she exclaimed. “They could buy meal in the town
of Greenanore and pay the landlord his rent. Maybe the gasair is dead!”
“Maybe he is,” the husband answered. He was a man of few words and fewer
ideas. Life to him, as to the animals of the fields, was naturally
simple. He married, became the father of many children, all unnecessary
to an overcrowded district, and most of them were flicked out by death
before they were a year old. Once every eighteen months James Ryan’s
wife became suddenly irritable and querulous and asked her husband to
leave the house for a while. The cattle were allowed to remain inside,
the husband went out and walked about in the vicinity of his home for
two or three hours. From time to time he would go up to the door and
call out: “Are you all right, Mary?” through the keyhole. “I am all
right, Shemus,” she would answer, and the man would resume his walk.
When the wife allowed him to come in he always found that his family had
increased in number.
One day a child was born to him, and its third breath killed it. It was
the seventh, and the year was a bad one. Potatoes lay rotting in the
fields, and the peat being wet refused to burn. Somehow James Ryan felt
a great relief when the child was buried. Twelve children in all were
born to him, and ten of these died before they reached the age of three.
“The hunger took them, I suppose,” he said, and never wept over any of
his offspring, and even in time forgot the names of most of those who
were dead. The third who came to him was the boy Fergus; Norah was the
youngest of all.
“Maybe, indeed, he is dead,” he repeated to his wife. “I suppose there
is nothing for it but to put out the curragh to the fishing again.”
“And never catch anything,” said his wife, as if blaming him for the
ill-luck. “It is always the way.... If Fergus would send a few gold
guineas now it would be a great help.”
“It would be a great help.”
“We could keep Norah at school for another year.”
“We could.”
“And then send her to the convent like a lady.”
“Just.”
“When are you going to put the curragh out again?”
“Maybe this very night,” answered the husband. “It is now Michaelmas a
week past. There were blue lights seen out beyond the bar last night,
and a sea-gull dropped from the sky and fell dead on the rocks of Dooey.
The same happened ten years ago, and at that time there was a big catch
out by Arranmore.”
“Then you had better go out to-night, for there is not much money in the
tea-pot this minute.”
“The byre cost a big penny,” said James Ryan, and he spoke as if
regretting something.
“It did that, and the house does not look half as well with the cattle
gone from it.” So saying the woman turned over some live turf on the
pile of potatoes that was toasting beside the fire, and rising emptied
part of the contents of a jug of milk into a bowl. “It is a wonder that
Norah is not in,” she remarked. “She should be back from school over an
hour ago.”
II
At that moment Norah entered, placed her cotton satchel and books on the
window sill, and sat down to her meal. She was a winsome girl, neat,
delicate and good-looking. She had grown taller; her tresses were
glossier, her clear grey eyes, out of which the radiance of her pure
soul seemed to shine, were dreamy and thoughtful. She was remarkable for
a pure and exquisite beauty, not alone of body, but of mind. She was
dressed in peasant garb, but her clothes, though patched and shabby,
showed the lines of her well-formed figure to advantage. Her feet were
small, an unusual thing amongst country children who run about
bare-footed, and her dainty little hands matched her feet to perfection.
Her accomplishments were the knowledge of a few Irish songs and country
dances, and her intellectual gifts could be summed up in the words,
simple innocence.
“Are you getting on well with your lessons, Norah?” asked the father.
Every day for the last two years, on her return from school, he asked a
similar question and took no heed of the answer, which was always the
same.
“I am getting on very well, father.”
“He’s going out to the fishing to-night,” said the mother, handing a
bowl of milk to Norah and pointing her finger at her husband.
“Any letter from Fergus?” asked the girl.
“Never a word,” said the mother. “Maybe one will be here to-morrow.”
“To-morrow never comes,” said James Ryan. He had heard somebody use this
phrase years ago and he repeated it almost hourly ever since. “It is off
on the curragh that I am going now.”
He rose and went out. The dusk had fallen and a heaven of brilliant
stars glittered overhead. A light gust of wind surged up angrily for a
moment and swept along the ground, crooning amidst rock and boulder.
Outside James Ryan stood for a moment and looked up at the sky, his
thoughts running on the conversation which had just taken place inside.
“To-morrow never comes,” he repeated and hurried towards the sea.
Mary Ryan lit the paraffin lamp which hung from the great beam that
stretched across the middle of the house. The rushlight was now used no
longer; the oil lamp had taken its place in most of the houses in
Frosses. Norah finished her meal and turned to her books. For a long
while there was silence in the cabin, but outside the wind was rising,
whirling round the corners and sweeping in under the door.
“Tell me a story, mother,” Norah said, putting her books aside and
curling up like a pretty ball on the earthen floor in front of the fire.
“All right, I will tell you a story, silly baby that you are!” said the
old woman, sitting down on the hassock by the hearth. “Will it be about
the wee red-headed man with the flock of goats before him, and the flock
of goats behind him, and the salmon tied to the laces of his brogues for
supper?”
“Not that one, a maghair, I know it myself.”
“Will it be about Kitty the Ashy pet who said ‘Let you be combing there,
mother, and I’ll be combing here,’ and who went up the Bay of Baltic,
carrying the Rock of Cattegat on her shoulders?”
“I know that one, mother.”
“And the Bonnie Bull of Norway you know as well. Then it will be about
the cat that would not dress its whiskers if it wasn’t in front of the
biggest looking-glass in all the world. The biggest looking-glass in
all the wide world is the broad ocean in a calm.”
“Not that one, mother.”
“You are hard to please this very night. I will tell you the story of
the little green-coated boy who wandered on the rainy roads.... There’s
the wind rising. Mercy of God be on your father if the sea is out of
order!”
Mary Ryan began the story which she knew by heart, having heard it so
often from the lips of her own mother. Here, it may be remarked, most of
the folk stories of Donegal are of Norwegian or Danish origin and have
in many cases been so well preserved that the Scandinavian names of
people and places are retained in the stories until the present day.
“Once upon a time when cows were kine and when eagles of the air built
their nests in the beards of Giants, a little green-coated boy with a
stick in his hand and a bundle of bannocks over his shoulder went out on
the rainy roads to push his fortune----”
III
“I’m going to marry a prince when I get very old, mother,” said Norah,
interrupting the story-teller. “Prince Charming, for that’s what the
girl did in the fairy stories when she grew up and got old at twenty or
twenty-one. She was very poor at first and did nothing grand, but
stopped at home, sweeping the floor and washing dishes. Then one night
an old woman came down the chimney and told the girl to go to a dance,
and the girl didn’t leave the dance in time and she lost one of her
slippers and--Oh! it was a great story, mother. I read it in a book that
Fergus had.”
“You were reading those books, too!”
“Just only that one, mother, and Fergus didn’t like it at all. He said
it was very silly!”
“So it was, alannah, when it put thoughts like that into your head.
Marry Prince Charming, and you going to be a holy nun! Nuns never marry
like that.”
“Don’t they? Well, I’ll not marry a Prince Charming. I’ll marry one of
the White Horsemen who are under the mountain of Aileach.”
“But nuns never marry anybody.”
“They don’t?” exclaimed Norah in a puzzled voice. Then with childish
irrelevance: “But tell me the story about the White Horsemen of Aileach,
mother. That’s the best story of all.”
“Long, long ago, when the red-haired strangers came to Ireland, they put
nearly everybody to the sword; the old and young, the fit and feeble,
and mind you, Ireland was in worse than a bad way,” the mother began,
drifting easily into her narrative. “Ireland was a great place in those
days with castles and kings. Kings, Norah! There were five of them; now
there isn’t even one in the four corners of the country. But the
red-haired strangers came like a storm from the sea and there was no
standing before them. Red were their swords, red as their hair, but not
with rust but with the blood of men, women, and children. And the
chieftains of Ireland and the men of Ireland could make no stand against
the enemy atall. ‘What am I to do?’ cried the Ardrigh, the top king of
the whole country, speaking from the door of his own castle. ‘There will
soon be no Ireland belonging to me, it will all go to the red-haired
strangers.’ Then up spoke an old withered stick of a man, that nobody
knew, and who had been listening to the words of the King.
“‘Have you asked the Chieftain of the White Horsemen for help?’
“‘I never met him, decent stranger,’ answered the King. ‘I know him
not.’
“‘Go to the sea when it strikes in storm on the coast of Tir Conail,’
said the old man to the King, ‘and call out to Maanan MacLir for aid and
he’ll send to your help his ten score and ten white horsemen. You’ll see
the white horses far out, rearing on the top of the waves, every steed
pawing the ocean and all mad for the fight before them.’
“Well, to cut a long story short, the King did as he was told and called
to the White Horsemen to come and help him, and they came, ten score of
them and ten, with their shields shining like polished silver and lances
bright as frosty stars. Down from the North they rode, driving the foe
on in front of them, and never was seen such a rout, neither in the days
that went before nor the days that came after. The White Horsemen cut
their way right through mountains in their haste to get to the other
side; for nothing could stand against their lances. Nobody could go as
quickly as them, not even the red-haired strangers who were in such a
hurry to get out of their way.
“And when victory was theirs, the White Horsemen came back here to Tir
Conail again and stood on the verge of the ocean while Maanan MacLir
headed his horse out on the waves. But lo, and behold! the steed could
no longer gallop across the water. The poor animal sank into the sea and
the chieftain was nearly drowned. At that moment a voice, nobody knew
where it came from, called to Maanan MacLir:
“‘Long enough has the sea called for the rest and quiet that was not
given to it by the white horses of MacLir. Never more will the sea bend
under them; now it will break apart and let them through!’
“When they heard these words the White Horsemen turned away from the
sea and went galloping to the foot of the Mountain of Aileach. When they
arrived there the mountain raised itself upon one side just like the lid
of a kettle and Maanan MacLir and his White Horsemen disappeared under
it. Since that day they have never been seen again.”
“But the mountain didn’t close on top of them, did it?” asked Norah.
“Of course it did. Isn’t it closed to this very day?”
“And will it be a true story?”
“True, child!” exclaimed the mother. “Sure the mountain is there to this
very hour. And besides, Saint Columbkille talks about it in his
prophecies.”
“Then the White Horsemen will come out again?”
“They’ll come out when the great war comes,” said the mother. “And that
will be when there are roads round every mountain like the frills round
the cap of an old woman. It will start, the great war, when the nights
lengthen and the year grows brown, between the seasons of scythe and
sickle; murder and slaughter, madder than cattle in the heat of summer,
will run through the land, and the young men will be killed and the
middle-aged men and the old. The very crutches of the cripples will be
taken out to arm the fighters, and the bed-ridden will be turned three
times three in their beds to see if they are fit to go into the field of
battle. Death will take them all, for that is how it is to be; that way
and no other. And when they’re all gone it will be the turn of the White
Horsemen, who have been waiting for the great war ever since they chased
the red-haired strangers from the country. They’ll come out from under
Aileach when the day arrives, ten score and ten of them with silver
shields and spears, bright as stars on a frosty night. They’ll fight the
foe and win and victory will come to Ireland. These are the words of
the great saint, Columbkille.”
“Are the White Horsemen very tall, mother?” asked Norah, her eyes alight
with enthusiastic interest.
“Tall is not the word!”
“High as a hill?”
“Higher!”
“As Sliab a Tuagh?”
“It’s as nothing compared to one of the men of Maanan MacLir.”
“Then I’ll marry one of the White Horsemen,” said Norah, decision in her
clear voice. “I’ll live in a castle, polish his lance and shield,
and--Who will that be at the door?”
IV
Norah paused. Someone was moving outside as if fumbling for the latch;
then a tall, heavily-bearded man pushed the door of the cabin inwards
and entered, bringing with him a terrific gust of wind that almost shook
the house to its foundations. On his face was a scared look, and his
clothes were dripping wet, although it was not raining.
“Was it himself?” cried the old woman, alluding to her husband and
speaking to the man who entered. It was evident from the tone in which
she spoke that she anticipated something terrible.
“It was himself,” said the man in a low, hoarse voice. “He’s coming on
the flat of two oars. God bless us! But it is a black heart that the sea
has.”
With these words the visitor went out again, and the excited voices of
men could be heard floating on the wind.
“It’s your father, Norah,” said the old woman. “He went down with the
curragh, I’m thinking; down through the black water. Mother of God! but
it’s the sea that has the black heart! There they are coming with him.
Open the door wider, Norah!”
The girl, who had risen from her seat, pulled the door inwards and
placed a stone against the sill to keep it open. She felt as if a
thousand pins were pricking her legs; her head was heavy, her fingers
felt enormous and when they pressed against the door it seemed to Norah
as if they did not belong to her at all. Outside it was very dark, the
heavens held no stars and it looked as if the howling gale had whirled
them away. In the darkness a torch swayed in the wind, and behind the
torch black forms of men and white, pallid faces could be discerned.
Norah’s mind turned to the stories which her mother had been telling
her. She knew it was wrong to think of them at that moment but she felt
an inordinate desire to laugh at something; what she wanted to laugh at
she did not know; why she wanted to laugh she could not fathom.
“Are they coming, Norah?” asked the old woman, rising from her seat and
hobbling with difficulty towards the door. “Mother of Christ! but the
hand of God is heavy on me this night of nights! Children of my own and
man of my own, all, all going away from me! I’ll see the last of them go
down into the grave before me, for with my hard cough and the long
sickness I’ll outlive them all: that is the will of God. Ten sons and
daughters of my body; every one of them gone, and one away in black
foreign parts.... Are they coming, Norah?”
The woman reached the door and leant against the jamb for support. The
torch was flaring outside and very near.
“Watch that you don’t set the thatch on fire!” a voice cried.
Two men entered the house, the water streaming from their clothes and
each holding a burdened oar in his hands. Across the oars a sail was
bound tightly, and cold in death on the sail lay James Ryan, his grey
beard sticking out stiffly, his eyes open, his head shaking from side to
side, his bare feet blue with the cold. The oars, which brushed sharply
against the old woman in passing, were laid on the floor and the dead
man was placed on the bed.
“I’m sweatin’ like a pig!” said one of the bearers, and he rubbed his
wrinkled brow violently with the back of his hand.
“Watch the thatch!” someone outside shouted. The torch was extinguished
and a crowd of men entered the cabin. An old red-haired fisherman lifted
the oars; the sail was rolled into a bundle and carried out again. Pools
of water formed on the floor and tracks of wet feet showed all over it.
The old woman hobbled back to her bed and gazed long and earnestly at
her husband; some of the men took off their hats; one was smoking,
another dressed a bleeding foot and told how he hit it against a sharp
rock when carrying the dead man up from the sea; several of the
neighbouring women were already in the house. Maire a Crick was on her
knees by the bedside.
“I am used to it now,” said the old woman, as she sorted the blankets on
the bed with her withered hands. “Ten sons and daughters, and another
away and maybe never hearing from him again.... Himself said when he was
going out that the morrow never comes.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, ran her fingers over the wet
clothes of her husband, opened his vest, put her hand on his heart,
shook her head sadly and buttoned the coat again.
“Just when he was putting out the wind caught him, and he dropped like a
stone over the side of the curragh,” the red-haired fisherman was
saying. “But the boat was no good anyway. It is one of the Congested
Districts Board’s boats that he should have.”
“Where would he get the money to buy one?” asked Maire a Crick, turning
round from the prayer which she was saying for the dead man.
“The money can be paid in instalments,” answered the red fisherman. He
spoke the Gaelic, as nearly everybody in Frosses did, but the words
“instalments” and “Congested Districts Board” were said in English. “Ten
pounds the new boats cost, and there is five years allowed for paying
the money.”
“The Congested Districts Board is going to be a great help,” someone
remarked.
“Is the curragh safe?” asked Mary Ryan, turning round. She was still
sitting beside the bed, turning over the clothes with lean, shaky
fingers.
“It is at the bottom,” said a neighbour, Eamon Doherty by name. “It was
rotten anyhow, and it hadn’t been in wet water for close on two
years.... Now, I wonder what made Shemus go out on it?”
“Nothing atall, atall left,” said the old woman in a feeble voice. “If I
only had the curragh even.... And himself dead after all the times that
the sea has bent under him! Never to see him again, never! Isn’t it hard
to think that a thing like that could be?”
Whereupon, saying this she began to cry, at first quietly, but
afterwards, as if getting warmed to the task, more loudly, until her
sobs could be heard a hundred yards away from the house.
“If I only had the curragh left!” she repeated time and again.
Norah approached the bed timidly. She had been weeping silently by the
door ever since the corpse had been carried in. Death was here in the
house; it had already taken possession of her father. And it was with
her also. Not to-night nor to-morrow, but at the end of forty years or
of fifty, and was it not all the same? And what was this death? She did
not know; she only thought it cruel and strange. Her own helplessness in
face of such a crisis almost overpowered her. For death there was no
help, from it there was no escape. It was all powerful and terrible.
To-morrow and to-morrow might come and go, but her father would lie
still and unheeding. He would not return, he could not return. This fact
hammered at her mind, and the cruelty of her own thoughts tortured her.
She tried to think of something apart from the tragedy, but ever her
mind reverted to the one and same dreadful subject. Of a great fact she
was certain; one that would never be contradicted. Her father was dead;
thousands of years might pass and one truth would still remain
unquestioned. Her father was dead. “To think of it!” she said in a low
voice. “Dead for ever!”
She went down on her knees by the bedside but could not pray. God was
cruel; He had no mercy. She sobbed no longer, but with wide, tearless
eyes she gazed at the face of her father. It had now become yellow, the
lips blue, the nose was pinched and the eyes sunken. The water from his
clothes was dripping underneath the bed, and she could hear the
drip-drip of it falling on the floor.
Everything in the house had suddenly taken on a different aspect. The
bed appeared strange to her; so did the fire, the low droning voices of
the neighbours, and the play of light and shadow on the walls. The old
cat sitting on top of the dresser, gazing down at her, had a curious
look in its wide-open eyes; the animal seemed to have changed in some
queer way. Outside the wind was beating against the house and wailing
over the chimney. Never in her life before had she heard such a
melancholy sob in the wind.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAKE
I
Several more neighbours, men, women, and children, were now coming in.
With eyes fixed straight ahead they approached the corpse, went down on
their knees on the wet floor by the bedside and said their prayers,
crossing themselves many times. Those who carried the dead body up from
the sea drew near to the fire and dried their sodden garments in the
midst of a cloud of vapour that almost hid them from view. Eamon Doherty
remarked that Ireland would have Home Rule presently, and a loud
discussion mingled with many jokes was soon in progress.
“The Irish will never agree,” said old Oiney Dinchy, a one-eyed ancient
who had just risen from his knees by the bedside. “That is the worst of
the Irish; they never agree. Look at them now in the House of Commons;
one member is always fighting against another member, and it was ever
the same, for contrairiness is in their blood to the very last drop of
it.”
“There is always bound to be two parties,” said Master Diver with
dogmatic assurance. “In England and America there are always two
parties, sometimes more.”
“They’ll never get on, then,” said Eamon Doherty. “There are no two
parties in the holy Church, and that’s why it gets on so well.”
The door opened and Sheila Carrol, the beansho, entered, her child, now
a chubby little boy of three, toddling at her heels. Without looking
round she went down on her knees by the bedside, and a couple of women
who were praying crossed themselves and rose hurriedly. A few of the
younger men winked knowingly and turned their thumbs towards the
new-comer. Old Mary Ryan muttered something under her breath and turned
a look of severe disapproval on the kneeling woman, then on the little
boy who had run forward to the fire, where he was holding out his hands
to the blaze.
“Who’ll be the ones that will go to Greenanore and get tea, bread,
snuff, and tobacco for the wake?” asked Mary Ryan.
“I’ll go if Eamon Doherty comes along with me,” said old Oiney Dinchy,
getting to his feet and putting a live peat to the bowl of his pipe.
“The two of you always get drunk if you go to Greenanore together,” said
the old woman. “I’d as soon send the----” she pointed with her thumb
over her shoulder at the beansho but did not mention her name, “to
Greenanore, as send you two.”
“It is not everyone that would be treated that way if they offered to
help a person,” Eamon Doherty remarked in a loud voice to Oiney Dinchy.
“I’ll go if Willie the Duck comes with me,” said a long, lank, shaggy
youth, rising from one corner of the room and stretching his arms.
“You’re the man for the job, Micky’s Jim,” answered Mary Ryan, coming
from the bedside and tottering through the press of neighbours to the
dresser where the Delft tea-pot stood. She raised the lid, dipped her
hand into the tea-pot and drew out a fistful of money.
“Four shillings for tea,” she began to calculate; “eight-pence for
sugar; five shillings for loaves of bread; four shillings and sixpence
for tobacco, and sixpence for snuff, and--How much potheen did you get
for your father’s wake, Eamon Doherty?”
“Four gallons and no less,” Eamon answered in a surly tone of voice.
“Two gallons of potheen, Micky’s Jim, and get it as cheap as you can,”
said the old woman, turning to the long-limbed youth. “From what I hear
Martin Eveleen sells good potheen. Get it from him, for it was Martin, I
wish him luck! that helped Norah when she took the fargortha on the road
to Greenanore three winters agone.”
The money was handed to Micky’s Jim, and he left the house followed by
Willie the Duck, a small man, dark and swarthy, with a hump on his left
shoulder, and a voice, when he spoke, that reminded one of the quacking
of ducks.
“Thirty-four shillings in all,” mumbled Mary Ryan as she took her way
back to the fireside. “It costs a lot to bury a body, and there will
never be left one at all to bury me, never a one at all. If only the
curragh was left me it would be something.”
Meanwhile Norah had slipped out, and went from house to house borrowing
candlesticks (Meenalicknalore townland consisted of thirty families and
there were only two candlesticks amongst them), baskets of peat, holy
water, a lamp, extra chairs, stools, and many other things required for
the wake.
II
At midnight the cabin was cleared of everybody but the washers of the
dead, Eamon Doherty and Master Diver. Oiney Dinchy was very angry
because Mary Ryan did not ask him to give a hand at the washing of her
husband.
“It wasn’t as if Shemus and me weren’t good friends,” said Oiney. “And
besides, I have washed more dead men in a year of my life than all
washed by Eamon and Master Diver put together.... And to think that I
wasn’t allowed to help at the washin’ to-night!”
The men and women who had left the cabin went down on their knees at the
doorstep and recited the Rosary. The night being very dark the young men
drew near the girls and tickled them on the bare feet while they prayed.
When admittance was again possible the dead man lay in the bed, his body
covered with a white sheet and a large black crucifix resting on his
breast. His clothes were already burned in the fire, it being a common
custom in Frosses to consign the clothes of the dead to the flames on
the first night of the wake.
About two o’clock in the morning provisions came from Greenanore. The
house was now crowded, and several games such as “The Priest of the
Parish,” “Catch the Ten,” and “Put your fingers in the Crow’s Nest” were
in progress. An old man who sat in the corner was telling a story of the
famine, and a few mischievous boys were amusing themselves by throwing
pieces of peat at his hat.
While tea was being made, the rosary was again started. Micky’s Jim, a
trifle the worse for liquor, went down on his knees on a chair and gave
out the prayers. The mischievous boys turned their attentions from the
old man to Jim, who was presently bombarded by a fire of turf. One went
past his ears; one hit him on the back, another on the head, a third on
the brow. Jim got angry.
“Pray away yourselves and be damned to you!” he roared at the kneeling
house and, jumping off the chair, he sat down in a corner from which he
had a view of the whole party. Prayers came to an abrupt conclusion;
the chair was taken by the beansho, who placed her child between its
legs, and the little boy, who had shown a wonderful propensity for
running to the bedside and pulling the corpse by the beard, was held a
fast prisoner. Four or five women moved about hurriedly preparing tea;
whisky was served without skimp or stint, but pipes were found to be
scarce; one had to do for three persons, each pulling at it in turn.
The old man in the corner took up the famine story at a point where the
prayers had interrupted the recital. It told of a corpse that rose from
the bed of death, sat down at the table, lifted a bowl of tea, drank it
and went back to bed again. “And the man was dead all the time,” said
the story-teller.
Willie the Duck, speaking in a quavering voice, began to ask riddles:
“What bears but never blossoms?” he enquired.
“The hangman’s rope,” was the answer.
“What tree never comes to fruit?” he asked.
“The gallows-tree,” was the answer.
“This is the best guess of the night,” said Willie, taking a pinch of
snuff and sneezing violently. “No one will be able to answer it.... In
the morning four legs; at noon two legs; in the evening three legs and
at night four legs; and what would that be?”
“It’s a man,” said Eamon Doherty, looking round with a triumphant
glance. “In his young days a man walks on his hands and knees, when he
grows up he walks on two legs; when he gets older he walks on three
legs, two and a stick; and if he lives long enough he’ll walk on
crutches, God be good to us! and that’s four legs!”
“You’re a man with a head, Eamon,” said Willie the Duck. “And how did
you guess it atall?”
“I heard the same guess often and I knew the answer every time,” Eamon
replied, and a smile of satisfaction lit up his face.
About four o’clock in the morning most of the men and a few of the
ancient females were drunk. Mary Ryan had fallen asleep by the fire, her
head touching the white ashes of her husband’s clothes. Norah placed a
pillow under her mother’s head and took up a seat near her, gazing in
turn at the silent figure which lay in the bed and the blue flames
chasing one another up the black chimney.
Two lamps, one at each end of the house, spluttered dismally; the wind
outside battered loudly against the door and wailed over the chimney.
Oiney Dinchy was asleep and snoring loudly, and two youngsters blackened
his face with soot. The beansho slept, and her child, long since
released from the prison of the chair, was blubbering fitfully. On the
damp earth of the mid-floor a well-made young woman slumbered, the naked
calves of her finely formed legs showing. Micky’s Jim slapped the legs
with his hand; the girl awoke, put down her dress until it covered her
toes, made a face at the tormentor and went to sleep again. Beside
Norah, old Master Diver, now remarkably rotund, was asleep, his bald
head hanging to one side and a spittle slobbering from his lips.
Norah looked round at the sleepers, saw the stiff legs stretched on the
floor, the long, awkward arms hanging loosely over the backs of the
chairs, the bowls and the upturned whisky glasses on the table; heard
the loud snoring, the rustle of petticoats as a woman changed her
position on a stool, the crackle of falling peat on the hearth, the
whimpering of the beansho’s child, and the sound made by the lips of a
sucking babe pulling at its mother’s breast.
The strange fear, that which had taken possession of her three years
before on the rocks of Dooey, seized her again. To her all things seemed
to lack finish as they lacked design. A vague sense of repulsion
overcame the girl as she gazed at the sleepers huddled on form and
floor. She shuddered as if in a fever and approached the bed; there the
awful stillness of the dead fascinated her. She was looking at the dead,
but somehow Death had now lost its terror: it was the living who caused
her fear. She knelt down and prayed.
CHAPTER X
COFFIN AND COIN
I
For two days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside,
drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to
return later and renew the same performance. A coffin and coffin-bearer,
the latter shaped like a ladder, the sides of which were cushioned to
ease the shoulders of the men who carried it, were procured. On the
rungs of the coffin-bearer a number of notches, three hundred and
fifty-two in all, told of the bodies carried on it to the grave. The
bearer had been in service for many years and had been used by most of
the families in Frosses. The man who made it was long dead; number
seventy-seven represented his notch on the rungs.
On the morning of the third day Oiney Dinchy and Micky’s Jim lifted the
dead man from the bed and placed him in the coffin. Before the lid was
screwed down, Mary Ryan knelt over the coffin, gripping the side near
her with thin, long fingers, which showed white at the joints, and
kissing her husband she burst into a loud outcry of grief. Norah, more
reserved in her sorrow, knelt on the floor, said a short prayer and then
kissed the face of the corpse as her mother had done.
The lid was fastened, but here an interruption occurred. The wife wanted
to look at her husband for “just one other minute.” With a gesture of
impatience old Oiney Dinchy, who was discussing the best means of
catching flukes and tying the coffin, lifted the lid again and stood
silently by, his hat drawn down well over his eyes. Mary Ryan gave vent
to another outburst of grief; the coffin was again closed and lifted on
the wooden bearer. An idle child was busily engaged in counting the
notches.
“Seventy-seven; that’s for the man who made it,” someone was saying.
“Listen, Micky’s Jim,” whispered Mary Ryan as the youth passed her,
going towards the door with a basket of pipes and tobacco.
“Well, Mary, what is it?” Jim asked.
“Was this a good year beyond the water?”
Jim went yearly to the potato-digging in Scotland, taking with him a
squad of men and women from his own country, and over these he was
master while they were at work.
“It was not so very bad,” said Jim cautiously. He was afraid that the
old woman might ask the loan of money from him.
“Next year I have a mind to send Norah.”
“And not to make a nun of her, after all?”
Norah was piling peat on the fire, lifting them from the floor and
dropping them into the flames. As she bent down Jim noticed every
movement of her body and paid very little attention to the words of the
old woman. Norah, having finished her task, stood upright; Jim waited
eagerly for a repetition of her former movement, but seeing that she was
weeping he turned his attention to the task of getting the coffin
through the doorway.
Norah would be a light girl for heavy work on the Scottish farms, Jim
thought, as he stooped down and lifted a rung of the bearer. Could he
take her with him? That was a ticklish question. She was clever with
the needles, he knew, but she had not done any heavy manual work for
the last two years. Learning lessons was to Jim an idle task. But the
movement of her body, and especially of her legs when bending over the
fire, appealed to Jim. The grace of her carriage, the poise of her head,
the soft hair that fell over her shoulders, all these found favour in
the eyes of the healthy young man.
“My cripes, I’ll take her with me next year!” he said under his breath.
He spoke in English and had learned many strange oaths abroad.
II
Outside a large crowd of people were waiting; the women dressed in red
flannel petticoats and woollen shawls, the men in white wrappers and
corduroy trousers. The coffin bearer was raised on high; four men placed
their shoulders under it; a bottle of holy water was sprinkled over
bearers and burden indiscriminately; the men and women crossed
themselves many times, and the mournful procession started.
Mary Ryan stood at the door and watched it wending its way across the
dreary, uneven fields, past the Three Rocks, now getting lost in some
hollow, again rising to the shoulders of a hillock, the coffin swaying
unevenly on the shoulders of the bearers, the red petticoats of the
women in the rear shaking in the breeze. The widow, almost too weak to
move, was with difficulty restrained from going to the churchyard.
Norah, having arranged the hassock in the corner for her mother, had
followed the procession, and now the old woman thought that she could
detect her child a quarter of a mile away, following in the rear of the
party. Micky’s Jim, who had not gone away yet, was engaged in sorting a
rope on the thatch which had been blown askew by the wind of the
previous nights.
“I’ll overtake the funeral, Mary,” he said when he completed the work.
“I was just making the thatch strong against the breeze and I have tied
a broken rope.”
“Mother of God be good to you, Jim, but it is yourself that has the
kindly heart!” said Mary in a tremulous whisper. “Could you take Norah
with you beyond the water next year?”
Jim called to mind the movements of the girl’s body when she stooped to
lift peat for the fire, and the remembrance filled him with pleasure.
“When next summer comes round, I’ll see, Mary Ryan,” he answered. “If
there is a place to spare in the squad I’ll let you know and your Norah
will have the very first chance of it.”
“Mother of God bless you, Jim, for the kindness is in you!” said the old
woman. “It is me that is the lone body this very minute, with never a
penny in my house and not even the old curragh left to me to make a
penny by.”
“Well, I’m off, Mary,” said Jim. “The coffin is going out of sight and
they’ll be needing new blood under it.” He hurried across the fields,
his long legs covering an enormous spread of earth at every stride. Over
the brae he hurried, and at the turn of the road halted for a moment and
looked back at Mary Ryan’s cabin. The woman still stood at the door, one
hand shading her eyes, looking towards the Frosses churchyard, which lay
more than three miles away. “Thinkin’ that she could get anything for an
old curragh!” he muttered contemptuously, as he resumed his stride.
“She’s an old fool; but Norah! Ah! she’s a soncy lass, and she was good
to look at when making that fire!”
III
The graveyard, surrounded by a stone wall, broken down in several
places, served as a grazing plot for bullocks, donkeys, and sheep, as
well as for the burial place of the dead. A long walk, lined with
stunted hazel bushes, ran half-way through the yard, and at the end a
low stone vault, hardly higher than a man’s head, stood under the shadow
of an overhanging sycamore.
The funeral procession was delayed on the journey, and Father Devaney,
round-faced and red-cheeked, stamped up and down while waiting its
arrival. He had come all the way from Greenanore and was in a hurry to
get back again. The morning was cold and caused him to shiver a little,
and when he shivered he clapped his hands vigorously, the palm of one
against the back of the other.
His large mansion, complete now and habitable, had not been fully paid
for yet, and most of his parishioners were a pound or two in arrears;
when this money came to hand matters would be much better. Old Devaney
had developed a particularly fine taste in wine and cigars and found
these very expensive; and at present he called to mind how James Ryan
was two pounds in arrears with the mansion tax. The old priest knew that
this money would never come to hand; the widow was ill, no word had been
heard of Fergus for years, and Norah Ryan was a light slip of a girl who
would probably never earn a penny. Devaney knew all the affairs of his
flock, and he stamped up and down the graveyard, a little angry with the
dead man who, being so long in coming to his last home, had kept him
waiting for thirty minutes.
The funeral came in sight, creeping up over the brow of the hill that
rose near at hand, the bearers straining under their burden as they
hurried across the uneven ground, with the coffin rising and falling on
their shoulders like a bark in a storm at sea. The gate of the graveyard
was already open; the procession filed through, Father Devaney stepping
out in front, his surplice streaming in the wind. The good man thought
of the warm dinner waiting for him at home, and being in a hurry to get
done with the burial service he walked so quickly that the bearers could
hardly keep up with him. On the floor of the little vault in the centre
of the graveyard the coffin was set down and the basket of snuff, pipes,
and tobacco was handed round. All the men took pipes, filled them with
rank plug and lit them; the older women lit pipes also, and everybody,
with the exception of the priest and Norah Ryan, took snuff.
“Hurry up!” said Father Devaney. “Ye can smoke after ye do yer duty. It
would be well if ye were puttin’ yer hands in yer pockets now and
gettin’ yer offerin’s ready.”
Immediately a stream of silver descended on the coffin. All the mourners
paid rapidly, but in turn, and the priest called out their names as they
paid. A sum of ten pounds seventeen shillings was collected, and this
the priest carefully wrapped up in a woollen muffler and put into his
pocket.
“Now hurry up, boys, and get a move on ye; and open the grave!” he
shouted, making no effort to hide his impatience now that the money was
safely in his keeping. He felt full of the importance of a man who knows
that everybody around him trembles under his eyes. Three or four young
fellows were digging the grave and joking loudly as they worked; a crowd
of men stood round them, puffing white clouds of smoke up into the air.
Many of the women were kneeling beside graves that held all that
remained of one or another near and dear to them. Norah Ryan stood
alone with the priest, her dark shawl drawn over her white forehead, and
a few stray tresses, that had fallen over her face, shaking in the
breeze.
“It is a black day this for you, Norah, a black day,” said the priest,
speaking in Gaelic. Two tears coursed down the girl’s cheeks, and she
fixed a pair of sorrowful grey eyes on the man when he spoke.
“Don’t cry, girsha beag (little girl),” said the priest. “It is all for
the best, all for the best, because it is the will of God.”
He looked sharply at the girl, who, feeling uncomfortable in his
presence, longed to be away from the man’s side. She wondered why she
had not gone off to the other end of the graveyard with Sheila Carrol,
whom she could now see kneeling before a black wooden cross that was
fast falling into decay. But it would be wrong to go away from the side
of her father’s coffin, she thought.
“Any word from Fergus of late?” the priest was asking.
“No; not the smallest word.”
That Mary Ryan owed him two pounds, and that there was very little
possibility of ever receiving the money, forcibly occurred to the priest
at that moment. “Ye’ll not be in a good way at home now?” he said aloud.
“There’s hardly a white shilling in the house,” answered the girl.
“Is that the way of it?” exclaimed the priest, then seemed on the point
of giving expression to something more forcible, but with an effort he
restrained himself. “Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose, but there are
two pounds owing for the building of my new house.”
IV
“The grave is ready,” said Micky’s Jim, approaching the priest and
saluting. The youth was perspiring profusely; his shirt open at the neck
exposed his hairy chest, on which beads of sweat were glistening
brightly.
“In with the coffin then,” said the priest, taking a book from his
pocket and approaching the open grave. A pile of red earth, out of which
several white bones protruded, lay on the brink, and long earthworms
crawled across it. The coffin was lowered into the grave with a rope.
Norah wept loudly; old Oiney Dinchy remarked that the bones belonged to
her grandparents whom she did not remember.
“Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” the
priest chanted in a loud, droning voice. Norah, kneeling on the wet
ground, her head bent down over her bosom, so that her hair hung over
her shoulders, saw nothing but the black coffin which was speedily
disappearing under the red clay, and heard nothing but the thud of the
earth as it struck the coffin.
The priest took his departure; the grave was filled up and the crowd
began to disperse.
“Come away home now,” said Sheila Carrol to Norah, who was still
kneeling on the wet ground. The girl rose without a word, brushed her
dress with a woollen handkerchief and accompanied the beansho from the
churchyard.
“Don’t cry, Norah,” said Sheila, observing that tears were still falling
down the cheeks of her companion. “Everyone must die and go away just
the same as if they had never been at all, for that is the will of God.
How is yer mother this morning?”
“Much the same as she was always,” said Norah. “She cannot get rid of
her cough, and she has shiverin’ fits of late.... Hasn’t the sea the
black heart?”
“Black enough, indeed, my child,” said the beansho. “Your mother will
feel it a big lot?”
“Not so much,” said the girl. “She’ll soon be with him, she’s thinkin’.”
“At the wake I heard her say that she would be the last of the family to
die. What put that into her head?”
“I don’t know what put it into her head, but if I were to die on the wet
road this very minute I wouldn’t care one haet.” On Norah’s face there
was a look of infinite sadness, and the pathos of her words cut Sheila
to the heart.
“Don’t speak like that, Norah Ryan,” she exclaimed. “Death is black and
bitter, but there are things much worse than death, things far, far
worse.”
They had now reached a stile, and far in front the soft caishin (path)
wound on by rock and rath across the broad expanse of moor. Several
people, walking one after another, were in front; the soft ooze was
squirting under their feet and splashing against their ankles. In the
midst of the heather a young bullock lay chewing the cud, and looked
upon the passers-by with that stupid, involved look peculiar to the ox;
a moor-cock, agitated and voluble, rose into the air and chattered as it
swept across the brown of the moor.
“I’m goin’ to leave Ireland come Candlemas,” said the beansho, pulling
her feet wearily out of the mire.
“And where would ye be goin’ to then, Sheila Carrol?”
“Beyont the water.”
“Mercy be on us, and are ye goin’ surely?”
“True as death, I’m goin’,” said Sheila Carrol with rising voice. “I’m
sick of this place--not the place itself but the people that’s in it,
them with their bitin’ tongues and cuttin’ talk, them that won’t let
those that do them no harm a-be. Nothin’ bad enough that they wouldn’t
put past me, the same Frosses people. For me it’s always the hard word
that they have; even the priest himself when he meets me on the high
road crosses himself as if he met the red-hot devil out of hell. But did
he refuse my shillin’ to-day?... Even at the wakes the very people point
their thumbs at me when I go down on my own two knees to say a prayer
for the dead.... But what am I talkin’ about! Why should I be tellin’ my
own sorrows to one that has heavy troubles of her own to bear.... I’m
goin’ beyont the water come next Candlemas, anyway, Norah Ryan!”
CHAPTER XI
THE TRAIN FROM GREENANORE
I
When one is leaving home every familiar object seems to take on a
different aspect and becomes almost strange and foreign. The streets,
houses, and landscape which you have gazed on for years become in some
way very remote, like objects seen in a dream, but under this guise
every familiar landmark becomes dearer than ever it has been before. So
Norah Ryan felt as she was leaving home in the June of 1905 bound for
the potato fields of Scotland.
“Is this the road to Greenanore, the road that our feet took when goin’
to the town for the stockin’ yarn?” she asked herself several times. “It
is changed somehow; it doesn’t seem to be the same place, but for all
that I like it better than ever. Why this is I do not know; I seem to be
in a dream of some kind.”
Her thoughts were confused and her mind ran on several things at the
same time; her mother’s words at leave-taking, the prayer that the child
might do well, the quick words of tearless farewell spoken at the
doorstep; and as she thought of these things she wondered why her mother
did not weep when her only child was leaving her.
The girl was now walking alone to the village of Greenanore. There she
would meet all the members of the party, and every step of the journey
brought a thousand bygone memories vividly to her mind. Fergus she
thought of, his good-bye at the cross-roads, the dog whining in
Ballybonar, the lowing cow, the soft song of the sea. Would she ever see
Fergus again? Where had he been all these years? Looking into the
distance she could see the mountains that hemmed Glenmornan, and light
clouds, white and fleecy as Candlemas sheep, resting on the tops of
them. Further down, on the foothills, the smoke of peat-fires rose into
the air, telling of the turf-savers who laboured on the brown bogs at
the stacks and rikkles. Norah thought of Dermod Flynn; indeed she called
him to mind daily when gazing towards the hills of Glenmornan,
recollecting with a certain feeling of pride the boy’s demeanour at
school and his utter indifference towards personal chastisement. The
dreamy eyes of Dermod and his manner of looking through the school
window at nothing in particular fascinated her; and the very remembrance
of the youth standing beside her facing the map of the world always
caused a pleasant thrill to run through her body. Now, as she looked at
the hills of Glenmornan, the incidents of the morning on which she went
to pull bog-bine there came back to her mind, and she wondered if Dermod
Flynn thought the hills so much changed on the day when he was setting
out for the rabble of Strabane.
A large iron bridge, lately built by the Congested Districts Board,
spanned the bay between Frosses and Dooey. Norah crossed over this to
the other side, where the black rocks, sharp and pointed, spread over
the white sand. It was here that the women slept out on the mid-winter
night many years ago; and now Norah had only a very dim remembrance of
the event.
Up to the rise of the hill she hurried, and from the townland of
Ballybonar looked back at Frosses: at the little strips of land running
down to the sea, at the white lime-washed cabins dotted all over the
parish, at Frosses graveyard and the lone sycamore tree that grew there,
showing like a black stain against the sky. Seeing it, she thought of
her father and said an “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” for the repose of
his soul. Then her eye roved over Frosses again.
“Maybe after this I’ll never set my two eyes on the place,” she said,
then added, “just like Fergus!”
The thought that she might never see the place again filled her with a
certain feeling of importance which up to now had been altogether
foreign to her.
II
At the station she met the other members of the potato squad, fifteen in
all. Some were sitting on their boxes, others on the bundles bound in
cotton handkerchiefs which contained all their clothes and toilet
requisites. The latter consisted of combs and hand-mirrors possessed by
the women, and razors, the property of the men. Micky’s Jim was pacing
up and down the platform, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets and a
heavy-bowled wooden pipe in his mouth. From time to time he pulled the
pipe from between his teeth, accompanying the action with a knowing
shrug of his shoulders, and spat into the four-foot way.
“Is this yerself, Norah?” he exclaimed, casting a patronising glance at
the girl as she entered the railway station. “Ye are almost late for the
train. Did ye walk the whole way?... Ah! here she comes!”
The train came in sight, puffing round the curve; the women rose from
their seats, clutched hastily at their bundles and formed into a row on
the verge of the platform; the men, most of whom were smoking, took
their pipes from their mouths, hit the bowls sharply against their
palms, thus emptying them of white ash; then, with a feigned look of
unconcern on their faces, they picked up their belongings with a leisure
which implied that they were men well used to such happenings. They were
posing a little; knowing that those who came to see them off would tell
for days in Frosses how indifferently Mick or Ned took the train leading
to the land beyond the water. “Just went on the train with no more
concern on their faces than if they were going to a neighbour’s wake!”
the Frosses people would say.
The train puffed into the station, the driver descended from his post,
yawned, stretched his arms, and surveyed the crowd with a look of
superior disdain. The fireman, with an oil-can in his hands, raced along
the footplate and disappeared behind the engine, only to come back
almost immediately, puffing and wiping the sweat from his face with a
piece of torn and dirty rag.
“All aboard!” Micky’s Jim shouted in an excited voice, forgetting pose
for a moment. “Hurry up now or the train will be away, leavin’ the
biggest half of ye standin’ here. A train isn’t like Oiney Dinchy’s
cuddy cart; it hasn’t to stop seven times in order to get right started.
Hurry up! Go in sideways, Willie the Duck; ye cannot go through a door
frontways carrying a bundle under yer oxter. Yer stupid ways would drive
a sensible man to pot! Hurry up and come on now! Get a move on ye, every
one of the whole lot of ye!”
Presently all, with the exception of the speaker, were in their
compartments and looking for seats. Micky’s Jim remained on the
platform, waiting for the train to start, when he could show by boarding
it as it steamed out of the station that he had learned a thing or two
beyond the water in his time; a thing or two not known to all the
Frosses people.
A ticket collector examined the tickets, chatting heartily as he did so.
When he found that Norah had not procured hers he ran off and came back
with one, smiling happily as if glad to be of assistance to the girl. A
lady and gentleman, tourists no doubt, paced up and down the platform,
eyeing everybody with the tourists’ rude look of enquiry; a stray dog
sniffed at Micky’s Jim’s trousers and got kicked for its curiosity; the
engine driver yawned again, made the sign of the cross on his open mouth
and mounted to his place; the whistle sounded, and with Micky’s Jim
standing on the foot-board the train steamed out of the station.
Norah, who had never been on a train before, took up her seat near the
window, and rubbed the pane with her shawl in order to get a better view
of the country, which seemed to be flying past with remarkable speed.
The telegraph wires were sinking and rising; the poles like big hands
gripped them up, dropped them, but only to lift them up again as threads
are lifted on the fingers of a knitter.
There were eleven people in the compartment, four women and seven men.
One of the latter, Eamon Doherty, was eating a piece of dry bread made
from Indian meal; the rest of the men were smoking black clay pipes, so
short of shank that the bowls almost touched the noses of the smokers.
But Jim’s pipe was different from any of these; it was a wooden one,
“real briar root” he said, and was awfully proud of it. It had cost
three shillings and sixpence in a town beyond the water, he now told the
party, not indeed for the first time; but none of the listeners believed
him. Two of the women said their prayers; one wept because she was
leaving Ireland, and Norah Ryan spent her time looking out of the
window.
III
“Who’ll take a drink?” asked Micky’s Jim, pulling a half-bottle of
whisky from his pocket and drawing out the cork with his fingers. “Good
stuff this is, and I’m as dry as the rafters of hell.... Will ye have a
wee drop, Willie the Duck?”
“No, sure,” answered Willie, who was sitting beside the weeping woman,
his one leg across the other, and his hands clasped over his stomach. “I
would take it if I hadn’t the pledge against drink, indeed I would. Aye,
sure!”
“Aye sure, be hanged!” Jim blurted out. “Ye’ve got to take it, for it’s
die-dog-or-eat-the-gallows this time. Are ye goin’ to take it?”
“No, sure----”
“Why d’ye always say ‘Aye, sure’ and ‘No, sure’ when talking to a
person?” asked Jim, replacing the cork in the bottle, which he now tried
to balance on the point of his finger. “Is it a habit that ye’ve got
into, Willie the Duck?”
“Aye, sure,” answered Willie, edging away from Micky’s Jim, who was
balancing the bottle successfully within an inch of the roof. “Ye’ll let
that bottle fall on me head.”
“Aye, sure,” shouted Micky’s Jim and shook the bottle with perilous
carelessness, holding out the free hand in case it should fall. “It
wouldn’t crack a wooden head anyhow.”
“That’s Brockagh station that we’re comin’ into now, as the man said,”
remarked one of the women who had been praying. The woman was Maire a
Glan, who had been going beyond the water to work for the last four or
five years. Things were not going well at home; her husband lay ill
with paralysis, the children from a monetary point of view were useless
as yet--the oldest boy, thin and weakly, a cripple from birth, went
about on crutches, the younger ones were eternally crying for bread.
Maire a Glan placed the rosary round her neck and took a piece of oaten
bread from the bundle at her feet.
“Will ye have a wee bit to eat, Norah Ryan?” she asked.
“My thanks to ye, Maire a Glan, but I’m not hungry,” answered Norah,
rubbing the window where her breath had dimmed it.
“I thought that ye might be, seeing that yer eye is not wet on leavin’
home,” said the woman, breaking bread and putting a bit of it in her
mouth. “There, the train is stopping!” she went on, “and I have two
sisters married within the stretch of a mile from this place.”
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck with his usual quack. “I know both,
and once I had a notion of one of them, meself.”
“Lookin’ for one of God’s stars to light yer pipe with, as the man
said,” remarked the woman contemptuously, fixing her eyes on the poor
fellow’s hump. “Ye have a burden enough on yer shoulders and not to be
thinkin’ at all of a wife.”
“Them that carries the burden should be the first to complain of it,”
said Willie the Duck, edging still further away from Micky’s Jim, who
was now standing up and balancing the whisky bottle on the point of his
nose. The women tittered, the men drew their pipes from their mouths and
gave vent to loud guffaws. The train started out from Brockagh station,
a porter ran after it, shut a door, and again Norah Ryan watched the
fields run past and the telegraph wires rise and fall.
“I’ll bet that not one of ye knows who’s comin’ to join us at Derry,”
said Micky’s Jim, tiring of his play and putting the bottle back in his
pocket, after having taken a sup of its contents.
“Who?” asked several voices.
“Dermod Flynn from Glenmornan.”
“I haven’t seen that gasair for the last two years or more,” said
Murtagh Gallagher, a young man of twenty-five, who came from the
townland of Meenahalla in the parish of Frosses. “If I mind right, he
was sort of soft in the head.”
A faint blush rose to Norah Ryan’s cheek, and though she still looked
out of the window she now failed to see the objects flying past. The
conversation had suddenly become very interesting for her.
“He has been working with a farmer beyont the mountains this long
while,” said Micky’s Jim. “But I’m keepin’ a place for him in the squad,
and ye’ll see him on the Glasgow boat this very night. Ye have said that
he was soft in his head, Murtagh Gallagher. Well, that remark applies to
me.”
Jim spat on his hands, rose to his feet, shoved his fist under Murtagh’s
nose and cried: “Smell that! There’s the smell of dead men off that
fist! Dermod Flynn soft in the head, indeed! I’ll soft ye, ye--ye
flat-nosed flea-catcher ye!”
“I was only making fun,” said Murtagh.
“Make it to his face then!”
“D’ye mind how Dermod Flynn knocked Master Diver down with his fist in
the very school?” asked Judy Farrel, who was also one of the party.
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck. “But it wasn’t with his fist but with
a stick that he struck Master Diver, and mind ye he made the blood to
flow!”
“_I’ll_ soon make blood to flow!” said Micky’s Jim, still holding his
fist under Murtagh Gallagher’s nose.
“I was only in fun,” Gallagher repeated. “Ye’re as hasty as a briar,
Jim, for one cannot open his lips but ye want to blacken his eyes.”
“Now sit down, Micky’s Jim,” said Maire a Glan. “It’s not nice to see
two people, both of them from Donegal, fighting when they’re away from
home.”
“Fightin’!” exclaimed Jim, dropping into his seat and pulling out his
pipe. “I see no fightin’.... I wish to God that someone would fight....
Sort of soft in the head, indeed!... I never could stand a man from
Meenahalla, anyway.”
IV
The train sped on. House, field, and roadway whirled by, and Norah,
almost bewildered, ceased to wonder where this road ran to, who lived in
that house, what was the name of this village and whether that large
building with the spire on top of it was a church (Bad luck to it!) or
chapel (God bless it!).
“I’ll see him again,” she thought, her mind reverting to Dermod Flynn.
“I wonder how he’ll look now; if his hair is still as curly as when he
was at Frosses school.... Two years away from his own home and the home
of all his people! Such a long while, and now he’ll know everything
about the whole world.” Mixed with these lip-spoken words was the
remembrance of her mother all alone in the old cabin at Frosses, and a
vague feeling of regret filled her mind.
“Are you getting homesick, Norah?” Maire a Glan enquired, speaking in
Gaelic, which came more easily than English to her tongue. “It’s not the
dry eye that always tells of the lightest heart, I know myself.”
“Old Oiney Dinchy has a fine daughter,” Eamon Doherty was saying.
“She’s as stuck-up as Dooey Head,” piped Judy Farrel in a weak, thin
voice.
“Micky’s Jim has a notion of her, I hear,” remarked Willie the Duck.
“But what girl hasn’t Jim a notion of?”
Jim cleaned out the bowl of his pipe with a rusty nail and fell asleep
while engaged on the task. The conversation went on.
“Old Farley McKeown is goin’ to get married to an English lady.”
“A young soncy wench she is, they say!”
“Think of that, for old Farley! A wrinkled old stick of seventy! Ah! the
shameless old thing!”
“It’ll be a cold bed for the girl that is alongside of him. She’ll need
a lot of blankets, as the man said.”
“Aye, sure, and she will that.”
“But he’s the man that has the money to pay for them.”
Norah, deep in a dreamy mood, listened idly to snatches of song, the
laughter, and the voices that seemed to be speaking at a very remote
distance; but after a while, sinking into the quiet isolation of her own
thoughts, the outside world became non-existent to the young girl. She
was thinking of Dermod; why he persisted in coming up before her mind’s
eye she could not explain, but the dream of meeting with him on the
streets of Derry exerted a restful influence over her and she fell into
a light slumber.
“It’s the soncy girl she looks with the sleep on her.”
Almost imperceptibly Norah opened her eyes. The transition was so quiet
that she was hardly aware that she had slept, and those who looked on
were hardly aware that she had wakened. It was Maire a Glan who had been
speaking. The train now stood at a station and Micky’s Jim was walking
up and down the platform, his pipe in his mouth and his hands deep in
his trousers’ pockets. Facing the window was a bookstall and a
white-faced girl handing to some man a newspaper and a book with a red
cover, Norah recollected that Fergus often read books with red covers
just like the one that was handed over the counter of the bookstall.
That it was possible to have a shop containing nothing but books and
papers came as a surprise to Norah Ryan. Over the bookstall in white
letters was the station’s name--STRABANE. Of this town Norah had often
heard. It was to the hiring market of Strabane that Dermod Flynn had
gone two years ago. Other two trains stood at the station, one on each
side, and both full of passengers.
“Where are all those people going, Maire a Glan?” asked Norah.
“Everywhere, as the man said,” answered the old woman, who was telling
her rosary and taking no notice of anything but the black beads passing
through her fingers.
A boy walked up and down in front of the carriage, selling oranges at
fourpence a dozen. Micky’s Jim bought sixpence worth and handed them
through the window, telling all inside to eat as many as they liked; he
would pay. Maire a Glan left her beads aside until the feast was
finished. The engine whistled; Micky’s Jim boarded the moving train and
again the fields were running past and the telegraph wires rising and
falling.
“‘Twon’t be long till we are on the streets of Derry now,” said Micky’s
Jim, drawing another half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and digging
out the cork with a clasp-knife.
“‘Twon’t be very long, no, sure,” said Willie the Duck, edging away from
Micky’s Jim.
CHAPTER XII
DERRY
I
They stepped on the dry and dusty Derry streets, the whole fifteen of
them, with their bundles over their shoulders or dangling from their
arms. Norah Ryan, homesickness heavy on her heart, had eyes for
everything; and everything on which she looked was so strange and
foreign: the car that came along the streets, moving so quickly and
never a horse drawing it; the shops where hair was taken off for a few
pence and put on again for a few shillings; shops with watches and gold
rings in the windows; shops where they sold nothing but books and
papers; and the high clocks, facing four ways at once and looking all
over the town and the country beyond.
The long streets, without end almost, the houses without number, the
large mills at the water-side, where row after row of windows rose one
above another, until it made the eye dim and the head dizzy to look up
at them, the noise, the babble of voices, the hurrying of men, the
women, their dresses, filled Norah with a weary longing for her own
fireside so far away by the shores of the sea that washed round Donegal.
A bell tolled; Micky’s Jim turned round and looked at Norah, who
immediately blessed herself and commenced to say the Angelus. “That’s
not the bell above the chapel of Greenanore, that’s the town clock,”
laughed one of the women.
“There’s no God in this town,” said Micky’s Jim.
“No God!” Norah exclaimed, stopping in the midst of her prayer and half
inclined to believe what Micky’s Jim was saying.
“None at all,” said Micky’s Jim. “God’s choice about the company He
keeps and never comes near Derry.”
The party went to the Donegal House, a cheap little restaurant near the
quay. The place was crowded. In addition to the potato squad there were
several harvestmen from various districts in Donegal, and these were
going over to Scotland now, intending to earn a few pounds at the
turnip-thinning and haymaking before the real harvest came on. Most of
the harvesters were intoxicated and raised a terrible hubbub in the
restaurant while taking their food.
Micky’s Jim, who was very drunk, sat on one chair in the dingy
dining-room, placed his feet on another chair, and with his back pressed
against the limewashed wall sank into a deep slumber. The rest of the
party sat round a rude table, much hacked with knives, and had tea,
bread, and rancid butter for their meal. A slatternly servant, a native
of Donegal, served all customers; the mistress of the house, a tall,
thin woman, with a long nose sharp as a knife and eyes cruel enough to
match the nose, cooked the food. The tea was made in a large pot,
continually on the boil. When a bowl of tea (there were no cups) was
lifted out a similar amount of water was put in to replace it and a
three fingerful of tea was added. The man of the house, a stout little
fellow with a red nose, took up his position behind the bar and sold
whisky with lightning rapidity. Now and again he gave a glass of whisky
free of cost to some of the harvesters who weren’t drinking very
heavily. Those who got free drinks usually bought several glasses of
liquor afterwards and became the most drunken men in the house.
After a long sleep Micky’s Jim awoke and called for a bowl of tea.
Followed all the way by the shrill voice of her mistress, who was always
scolding somebody, the servant girl carried the tea to Jim, and the
youth drank a mouthful of it while rubbing one hand vigorously across
his eyes in order to drive the sleep away from them.
“This tay is as long drawn as the face of yer mistress,” grumbled Jim,
and the servant giggled. “I’m forgettin’ all about Dermod Flynn too,”
Jim continued, turning to Norah Ryan, who sat on the chair next him. “I
must go out and look for him. He was to meet me at the quay, and I’m
sure that he’ll be on the wait for me there now.”
“Poor Dermod!” said Norah in answer to Jim. “Maybe he’ll get lost out on
the lone streets, seein’ that he is all be himself.”
“Him to get lost!” exclaimed Jim. “Catch Dermod Flynn doin’ anything as
foolish as that! He’s the cute rogue is Dermod!”
The tables and chairs in the eating-room were now cleared away and
someone suggested getting up a dance. The harvestmen ceased swearing and
began thumping their hobnailed boots on the floor; Willie the Duck
played on a fiddle, which he had procured years before for a few
shillings in a Glasgow rag-market, and in the space of a minute all the
women, including old Maire a Glan, who looked sixty if a day, ranged on
the floor preparatory to dancing a six-hand reel. On seeing this, the
red-nosed landlord jumped over the counter and commenced to swear at the
musician.
“The curse of Moses be on ye!” he roared. “There’ll be no dancin’ here.
Thumpin’ on the floor, ye gallivantin’ fools! If ye want dancin’ go out
to the quay and dance. Dance into the Foyle or into hell if ye like,
but don’t dance here! Come now, stop it at once!”
“It’s such a roarin’ tune,” said Maire a Glan, interrupting him.
“It is that,” answered the man, “but it needs a lighter foot than yours
to do it justice, decent woman. There was a time when me meself could
caper to that; aye, indeed.... But what am I talkin’ about? There’ll be
no dancin’ here.”
“Just one wee short one?” said a girl. Willie the Duck played with
redoubled enthusiasm.
“No, nor half a one,” said the proprietor, tapping absently on the floor
with his foot. “God’s curse on ye all! D’ye want to bring down the house
over me head?... ‘The Movin’ Bogs of Allen’ that’s playin’, isn’t it? A
good tune it, surely. But stop it! stop it!” roared the red-nosed man,
cutting a caper, half a step and half a kick in front of the fiddler. “I
don’t want your damned dancin’, I can’t stand it. God have mercy on me!
Sure I’m wantin’ to foot it meself!”
II
But the dancing was in full swing now, despite the vehemence of the
proprietor. He looked round helplessly, and finding that his wife was
already dancing with old Eamon Doherty he seized hold of the servant
girl and whirled her into the midst of the party with a loud whoop that
surprised himself even as much as it surprised the Donegal dancers.
Micky’s Jim was dancing with Norah Ryan and pressing her tightly to his
body. The youth’s breath smelt of whisky and his movements were violent
and irregular.
“Ye’re hurtin’ me, Jim,” said the girl, and he lifted her in his arms
and carried her to a seat.
“Now are ye better?” he asked, not at all unkindly. “Will I get ye a
glass of cordial?”
“Don’t bother about cordial,” said the girl; “but go out and look for
Dermod Flynn. Ye said that ye’d go out a good while ago.”
“Why are ye so anxious about him, girsha?” asked Jim. “One would think
that he was a brother of yours. Maybe indeed----”
He paused, looked round, then without another word he rose, went out
into the street’ and took his way to the wharf, and there, when he could
not find Dermod Flynn after a few minutes’ search, he sat down on a
capstan, lit his pipe and puffed huge clouds of smoke up into the air.
“Now I wonder why that Norah Ryan is so anxious about Dermod Flynn?” he
muttered. “Man! it’s hard to know, for these women are all alike.... By
Cripes, she’s a fine built bit of a lassie. So is old Oiney Dinchy’s
daughter ... Frosses and Glenmornan for women and fighters!... And the
best fighters don’t always get the best women. Now, that Norah Ryan will
have nothin’ at all to do with me as far as I can see; it’s Dermod Flynn
that she wants.... I’ll have to look round for another wench, and girsha
Oiney Dinchy (Oiney Dinchy’s daughter) is a soncy slip of a cutty.”
When Dermod Flynn came along Jim had to look at him very closely before
realising that this was the youth whom he had known in Glenmornan two
summers before. Dermod stood sturdily on his legs; his shoulders were
broad, his back straight, and his well-formed chest betokened great
strength even now at the age of fourteen. A bundle dangled on his arm;
one knee was out through his trousers, and he carried a hazel stick in
his hand.
“Patrick’s Dermod!” exclaimed Jim, a glance of glad recognition coming
into his eyes when he had stared for a moment at Flynn. “By Cripes!
ye’ve grown to be a big healthy bucko since last I saw ye.”
Dermod flushed with pleasure. Jim began to ply him with questions about
his work in Tyrone, his masters, whether they were good or bad,
and--above all--if he had ever had a fight since he left home.
Dermod assured him that he had had many a hard, gruelling fight; knocked
down a man twice his size with one blow of his fist and blackened the
eyes of a youth who was head and shoulders taller than himself.
“And who have ye with ye, Jim?” he asked. “Any of the Glenmornan
people?”
“Lots,” answered Jim. “Willie the Duck, Eamon Doherty, Judy Farrel,
Maire a Glan, Norah Ryan--but she’s not from Glenmornan, she’s a Frosses
girsha.”
He looked sharply at Dermod as he spoke.
“She was at Glenmornan school with me,” said Flynn. “Where is she now?”
“There’s a dance goin’ on in the Donegal House; that’s where we had our
bit and sup, and she’s shaking her feet on the floor there.”
“Can we go there and see the dancers?”
“There’s not much time now,” said Jim. “And there’s the boat, that big
one nearest us, that we’re goin’ on this very night. She’s a rotten tub
and we’ll be very sick goin’ round the Mulls of Cantyre.”
“Will we?”
“What I mean is that ye and all the rest of the men and women will be
sick. I was never sea-sick in my life.”
“When is it going away?”
“In about half an hour from now.”
“How long will it take us to get across?” asked Dermod. “Ten hours?”
“God look on yer wit!” exclaimed Jim. “If there’s a fog on the Clyde it
will maybe take three days--maybe more. Ye can never know what a boat’s
goin’ to do. Ye can no more trust it than ye can trust a woman.”
CHAPTER XIII
A WILD NIGHT
I
The dance came to an end, and, worn out with their exertions, the women
picked up their shawls and wrapped them round their shoulders. Then
getting their bundles they went towards the wharf, Willie the Duck
leading, his fiddle under his arm and his bundle tied over his shoulders
with a string. Coming to the quay they passed through a gloomy
grain-shed, where heating bags of wheat sent a steam out into the air.
Suddenly, gazing through the rising vapour, Norah saw horses up in the
sky and she could hear them neighing loudly. For a moment she paused in
terror and wondered how such a thing could be, then recollected that in
a town, where there was no God, anything might be possible. Once out in
the open Maire a Glan pointed to the fall-and-tackle, hardly
distinguishable at a distance, which was lifting the animals off the
pier and lowering them down to the main deck of the boat. The horses
were turning round awkwardly and snorting wildly, terrified by the sound
of the sea.
Bags of grain were being lifted on long chains; dark derricks shoved out
lean arms that waved to and fro as if inviting somebody to come near;
cattle lowing and slipping were being hammered by the drovers’
blackthorns into the hold; a tall man with face fierce and swarthy,
eyes bright as fire, and mouth like a raw, red scar, was roaring out
orders in a shrill voice, and suddenly in the midst of all this Norah
saw Micky’s Jim leaning against the funnel of the boat, his hands deep
in his trousers’ pockets and the eternal pipe in his mouth, apparently
heedless of all that was going on around him.
Beside Jim stood one whom Norah knew, but one who had changed a great
deal since she had seen him last. As she went up the gang-plank,
stepping timidly, cowering under the great derrick that wheeled above,
she felt that a pair of eyes were fixed upon her, piercing into her very
soul. She turned her gaze towards the deck and found Dermod Flynn
looking straight at her as she made her way aboard. In an instant her
eye had taken the whole picture of the youth, his clothes, the coat,
much the worse for wear, his trousers, thin at knee and frilly at the
shoe-mouth, his cap torn at rim and crown, the stray locks of hair
straggling down his forehead, the bundle lying at his feet, and the
hazel stick which he held in his hand, probably even yet in imitation of
the cattle drovers who went along Glenmornan road on the way to the fair
of Greenanore. These things Norah noticed with a girl’s quick intuitive
perception, but what struck her most forcibly was Dermod’s look of
expectation as he watched her come up the gang-plank towards him.
“Dermod Flynn, I hardly knew ye at all,” she said, putting out her hand
and smiling slightly. “Ye’ve got very big these last two years.”
“So did you, Norah,” Dermod answered, looking curiously at the small
white hand which he gripped in his own. “You are almost as tall as I am
myself.”
“Why wouldn’t I be as tall as you are?” Norah replied, although Dermod
had unknowingly squeezed her hand in a hard, tense grip. “Am I not a
year and a half older?”
When her hand was released her skin showed white where Dermod’s fingers
had gripped her, but she did not feel angry. On the contrary the girl
was glad because he was so strong.
“Come over here!” cried Maire a Glan, who was sitting on her bundle
beside the rail, smoking a black clay pipe and spitting on the deck.
The noise was deafening; the rowting of the cattle in the pens became
louder; a man on the deck gave a sharp order; the gangway was pulled off
with a resounding clash, the funnel began to rise and fall; Norah saw
the pier move; a few women were weeping; some of the passengers waved
handkerchiefs (none of them too clean) to the people on the quay; rails
were bound together, hatches battened down; sailors hurried to and fro;
a loud hoot could be heard overhead near the top of the funnel and the
big vessel shuffled out to the open sea.
II
The boat was crowded with harvestmen from Frosses, potato-diggers from
Glenmornan and Tweedore; cattle drovers from Coleraine and Londonderry,
second-hand clothes-dealers, bricklayers’ labourers, farm hands, young
men and old, women and children; all sorts and conditions of people.
“There are lots of folk gathered together on this piece of floatin’
wood,” said Maire a Glan, crossing herself, a habit of hers, when
speaking of anything out of the ordinary. “The big boat is a wonderful
thing; beds with warm blankets and white sheets to sleep in, tables to
sit down at and have tea in real cups and saucers, just the same as
Father Devaney has at Greenanore, and him not out at all in the middle
of the ocean on a piece of floatin’ wood!”
“And will _we_ get a bed to sleep in?” asked Norah Ryan.
“Why should _we_ be gettin’ a grand bed? We’re only the poor people, and
the poor people have no right to these things on a big boat like this
one,” said the old woman, putting her black clay pipe into the pocket of
her apron. “There are no grand beds for people like us; they’re only for
the gentry.”
“Wouldn’t a bed look nice on a Frosses curragh?” said Micky’s Jim,
sitting down on the bundle belonging to Willie the Duck and pulling the
cork from a bottle of whisky which he had procured in Derry. “Will ye
have a drop, Maire a Glan?” he asked.
“I’ll not be havin’ any,” said the old woman, who nevertheless put out
her hand, caught the bottle and raised it to her lips. “It’s a nice drop
this,” she said, when she had swallowed several mouthfuls, “but I’m not
goin’ to drink any of it. I’m only just tastin’ it.”
“If it was my bottle I’d be content if ye only just smelt it,” said
Eamon Doherty, with a dry laugh.
“Dermod Flynn had one great fight in Tyrone,” said Micky’s Jim after
draining some of the liquor. “Gave his master one in the guts and
knocked him as sick as a dog.”
“Get away!”
“So he was sayin’. Dermod Flynn, come here and give an account of
yerself.”
The young fellow, who was watching the waves slide past the side of the
vessel, came forward when Micky’s Jim called him.
“Give an account of yerself, Dermod Flynn,” Jim cried. “Did ye not knock
down yer boss with one in the guts? That was the thing to do; that’s
what a Glenmornan man should do. I mind once when I was coal humpin’ on
the Greenock Docks----”
And without waiting for an answer to his question, Jim narrated the
story of a fight which had once taken place between himself and a
Glasgow sailor.
The sun, red as a live coal, was sinking towards the west, the murmur,
powerful and gentle, of a trembling wind could be heard overhead; a
white, ghostly mist stole down from the shore on either side and spread
far out over the waters. The waves lapped against the side of the vessel
with short, sudden splashes, and the sound of the labouring screw could
be heard pulsing loudly through the air. A black trail of smoke spread
out behind; a flight of following gulls, making little apparent effort,
easily kept pace with the vessel.
“They will follow us to Scotland,” said Maire a Glan, pointing at the
birds with a long claw-like finger.
Most of the men were drunk; a few lying stretched on the deck were
already asleep, and the rest were singing and quarrelling. Micky’s Jim
stopped in the middle of an interesting story, a new one, but also about
a fight, and joined in a song; old Maire a Glan helped him with the
chorus.
III
A man, full of drink and fight, paraded along the deck, his stride
uncertain and unsteady, a look born of the dark blood of mischief
showing in his eyes. He had already been fighting; in his hand he
carried an open clasp-knife; one eyebrow had been gashed and the strip
of torn flesh hung down even as far as his high cheekbones. He was
dressed in a dirty pea-jacket and moleskin trousers; a brown leather
belt with a huge, shiny buckle was tied round his waist, and the neck of
a half-empty whisky bottle could be seen peeping over the rim of his
coat pocket. His shoulders were broad and massive, his neck short and
wrinkled and the torn shirt showed his deep chest, alive with muscles
and terribly hairy, more like an animal’s than a man’s. His hands, which
seemed to have never been washed, were knotted and gnarled like the
branches of an old and stunted bush.
“This is young O’Donnel from the County Donegal, and young O’Donnel
doesn’t give a damn for any man on this boat!” he roared, speaking of
himself in the third person, and brandishing the knife carelessly around
him. “I can fight like a two year old bullock, and a blow from young
O’Donnel is like a kick from a young colt that’s new to the grass. I’m a
Rosses man and I don’t care a damn for any soul on this bloody boat--not
one damn! So there ye are!”
Suddenly observing Dermod Flynn staring at him, he slouched forward and
struck the boy heavily across the face with a full swing of his left
fist. Dermod dropped quietly to the deck; Micky’s Jim, who was
suggesting to Willie the Duck that the fiddle should be flung into the
sea, threw down the instrument which he held and, jumping on the top of
O’Donnel, with a sudden movement of his hand sent the knife flying into
the sea.
“Ye long drink of water, I’ll do for ye!” shouted Jim, and with feet and
fists he hammered O’Donnel into insensibility.
Dermod Flynn regained his feet with a swollen cheek and a long red gash
stretching along his face from ear to chin. He was helped to a seat by
one of the party; Norah Ryan procured some water and bathed his face,
rubbing her fingers tenderly over the sore.
“It was a shame to hit ye, Dermod,” she said. “One would think that a
big man like that wouldn’t hit a small boy like yourself!”
Dermod flushed and his eyes lit up as if he was going to say something
cutting, but Norah checked the words by pressing her hand across his
brow and looking at him with eyes of womanly understanding.
“I know what ye are goin’ to say, Dermod,” she said. “Ye’re goin’ to
tell me that ye are a man: and no one can deny that. Ye were a man when
ye were at school and hit the master. Sure I know meself what ye had in
yer head to say.”
Dermod resented the words of consolation and felt like rising and
walking away from the girl, if her fair fingers had not been pressing so
softly and tenderly against his cheek. He shrugged his shoulders and
resigned himself to the ministrations of Norah.
“By God, I wasn’t long with him!” cried Micky’s Jim, kicking idly at
Willie the Duck’s fiddle which still lay on the deck. “I just gave him
one in the jaw and three on the guts. Ah! that was the way to do it! It
takes a Glenmornan kiddie to use his mits in this bloomin’ hole.
Glenmornan, and every inch of it, forever! Whoo! There’s no man on this
boat could take a rise out of me; not one mother’s son! Fight! I could
fight any damned mug aboard this bleedin’ vessel. Look at my fist; smell
it! There’s the smell of dead men off it!”
Micky’s Jim, now doubly drunk with liquor and excitement, paced up and
down the deck, challenging all aboard to fight, to put up their “fives”
to him. Presently the quarrel became general.
All along the deck and down in the steerage cabin a terrible uproar
broke forth; men fastened on to one another’s throats, kicking, tearing,
and cursing loudly. The darkness had fallen; the buoys, floating past,
bobbed up and down in the water, their little bright lights twinkling
merrily. The pale ghost of a moon stole into the heavens and a million
stars kept it company. But those aboard the Derry boat took little heed
of the moon or stars. Over coils of ropes, loose chains, boxes and
bundles, sleeping women and crying babies, they staggered, fought and
fell, trampling everything with which they came in contact.
A man went headlong down the steerage stair and a second followed,
thrown from above. Beside the door a bleeding face, out of which gleamed
a pair of lustrous eyes, glowered sinister for a moment, a fist hit
sharply against the eyebrows, the eyes closed; a knife shone, glancing
brightly against the woodwork, the man with the bloodstained face
groaned and fell; a woman crouching at the bottom of the stairs was
trampled upon, she shrieked and the shriek changed into a volley of
curses, which in turn died away into a low, murmurous plaint of tearful
pity. Men sought one another’s faces grunting and gasping, long lean
arms stretched out everywhere and fists shot through the smoke-laden
atmosphere of the steerage ... splotches of blood showed darkly on the
deck ... somewhere from below came the tinkle of glasses and the loud
chorus of an Irish folk-song.
The fighters, overcome by their mad exertion, collapsed three or four in
a heap and slept where they had fallen. Outside on the open deck Micky’s
Jim lay prostrate, his head on the lap of Maire a Glan, who was also
asleep, her two remaining upper teeth, tobacco-stained and yellow,
showing in the moonlight. All over the deck men and wo
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