CHAPTER XII THE WOMAN WHO WAS NOT ASHAMED
"'Tell the truth and shame the devil,' they say. Well, to tell you the truth, there are some truths which would indeed shame the devil!"—Moleskin Joe.
The potato merchant met us on Greenock quay next morning, and here Micky's Jim marshalled his squad, which consisted in all of twenty-one persons. Seventeen of these came from Ireland, and the remainder were picked up from the back streets of Greenock and Glasgow. With the exception of two, all the Irish women were very young, none of them being over nineteen years of age, but the two extra women needed for the squad were withered and wrinkled harridans picked from the city slums. These women met us on the quay.
"D'ye see them?" Micky's Jim whispered to me. "They cannot make a livin' on the streets, so they have to come and work with us. What d'ye think of them?"
"I don't like the look of them," I said.
The potato merchant hurried us off to Buteshire the moment we arrived, and we started work on a farm at mid-day. The way we had to work was this. Nine of the older men dug the potatoes from the ground with short three-pronged graips. The women followed behind, crawling on their knees and dragging two baskets a-piece along with them. Into these baskets they lifted the potatoes thrown out by the men. When the baskets were filled I emptied the contents into barrels set in the field for that purpose. These barrels were in turn sent off to the markets and big towns which we had never seen.
The first day was very wet, and the rain fell in torrents, but as the demand for potatoes was urgent we had to work through it all. The job, bad enough for men, was killing for women. All day long, on their hands and knees, they dragged through the slush and rubble of the field. The baskets which they hauled after them were cased in clay to the depth of several inches, and sometimes when emptied of potatoes a basket weighed over two stone. The strain on the women's arms must have been terrible. But they never complained. Pools of water gathered in the hollows of the dress that covered the calves of their legs. Sometimes they rose and shook the water from their clothes, then went down on their knees again. The Glasgow women sang an obscene song, "just by way o' passing the time," one of them explained, and Micky's Jim joined in the chorus. Two little ruts, not at all unlike the furrows left by a coulter of a skidding plough, lay behind the women in the black earth. These were made by their knees.
We left off work at six o'clock in the evening, and turned in to look up our quarters for the night. We had not seen them yet, for we started work in the fields immediately on arriving. A byre was being prepared for our use, and a farm servant was busily engaged in cleaning it out when we came in from the fields. He was shoving the cow-dung through a trap-door into a vault below. The smell of the place was awful. There were ten cattle stalls in the building, five on each side of the raised concrete walk that ran down the middle between two sinks. These stalls were our sleeping quarters.
The byre was built on the shoulder of a hillock and the midden was situated in a grotto hollowed underneath; its floor was on a level with the cart-road outside, and in the corner of this vault we had to build a fire for cooking our food. A large dung-hill blocked the entrance, and we had to cross this to get to the fire which sparkled brightly behind. Around the blaze we dried our sodden clothes, and the steam of the drying garments rose like a mist around us.
One of the strange women was named Gourock Ellen, which goes to show that she had a certain fame in the town of that name. The day's drag had hacked and gashed her knees so that they looked like minced flesh in a butcher's shop window. She showed her bare knees, and was not in the least ashamed. I turned my head away hurriedly, not that the sight of the wounds frightened me, but I felt that I was doing something wrong in gazing at the bare leg of a woman. I looked at Norah Ryan, and the both of us blushed as if we had been guilty of some shameful action. Gourock Ellen saw us, and began to sing a little song aloud:
"When I was a wee thing and lived wi' my granny,
Oh! it's many a caution my granny gi'ed me,
She said: 'Now be wise and beware o' the boys,
And don't let the petticoats over your knee.'"
When she finished her verse she winked knowingly at Micky's Jim, and, strange to say, Jim winked back.
We boiled a pot of potatoes, and poured the contents into a wicker basket which was placed on the floor of the vault. Then all of us sat down together and ate our supper like one large family, and because we were very hungry did not mind the reeking midden behind us.
During our meal an old bent and wrinkled man came hobbling across the dung-heap towards the fire. His clothing was streaming wet and only held together by strings, patches, and threads. He looked greedily towards the fire, and Gourock Ellen handed him three hot potatoes.
"God bless ye," said the man in a thin piping voice. "It's yerself that has the kindly heart, good woman."
He ate hurriedly like a dog, as if afraid somebody would snatch the bread from between his jaws. He must have been very hungry, and I felt sorry for the man. I handed him the can of milk which I had procured at the farmhouse, and he drank the whole lot at one gulp.
"It's yerself that is the dacent youngster, God bless ye!" he said, and there were tears in his eyes. "And isn't this a fine warm place ye are inside of this wet night."
The smell of the midden was heavy in my nostrils, and the smoke of the fire was paining my eyes.
"It's a rotten place," I said.
"Sure and it's not at all," said the man in a pleading voice. "It's better than lyin' out under a wet hedge with the rain spat-spatterin' on yer face."
"Why do you lie under a hedge?" I asked.
"Sure, no one wants me at all, at all, because of the pain in me back that won't let me stoop over me work," said the man. "In the farms they say to me, 'Go away, we don't want ye'; in the village they say, 'Go away, we're sick of lookin' at ye,' and what am I to do? Away in me own country, that is Mayo, it's always the welcome hand and a bit and sup when a man is hungry, but here it's the scowling face and the ill word that is always afore an old man like me."
One by one the women went away from the fire, for they were tired from their day's work and wanted to turn into bed as early as possible. The old man sat by the fire looking into the flames without taking any heed of those around him. Jim and I were the last two to leave the fire, and my friend shook the old man by the shoulder before he went out.
"What are ye goin' to do now?" asked Jim.
"Maybe ye'd let me sleep beside the fire till the morra mornin'," said the man.
"Ye must go out of here," said Jim.
"Let him stay," I said, for I felt sorry for the poor old chap.
Jim thought for a minute. "Well, I'll let him stay, cute old cadger though he is," he said, and the both of us went into the byre leaving the old man staring dreamily into the flames.
One blanket apiece was supplied to us by the potato merchant, and by sleeping two in a bed the extra blanket was made to serve the purpose of a sheet. We managed to make ourselves comfortable by sewing bags together in the form of a coverlet and placing the make-shift quilts over our bodies.
"Where is Norah Ryan?" asked Micky's Jim, as he finished using his pack-needle on the quilts which he was preparing for our use. Jim and I were to sleep in the one stall.
Norah Ryan was not to be seen, and I went out to the fire to find if she was there. From across the black midden I looked into the vault which was still dimly lighted up by the dying flames, and there I saw Norah speaking to the old man. She was on the point of leaving the place, and I saw some money pass from her hand to that of the stranger.
"God be good to ye, decent girl," I heard the man say, as Norah took her way out. I hid in the darkness and allowed her to pass without seeing me. Afterwards I went in and gave a coin to the old man. He still held the one given by Norah between his fingers, and it was a two-shilling piece. Probably she had not another in her possession. What surprised me most was the furtive way in which she did a kindness. For myself, when doing a good action, I like everybody to notice it.
In the byre there was no screen between the women and the men. The modesty of the young girls, when the hour for retiring came around, was unable to bear this. The strange women did not care in the least.
The Irish girls sat by their bedsides and made no sign of undressing. I slid into bed quietly with my trousers still on; most of the men stripped with evident unconcern, nakedly and shamelessly.
"The darkness is a good curtain if the women want to take off their clothes," said Micky's Jim, as he extinguished the only candle in the place. He re-lit a match the next moment, and there was a hurried scampering under the blankets in the stalls on the other side of the passage.
"That's a mortal sin, Micky's Jim, that ye're doin'," said Norah Ryan, and the two strange women laughed loudly as if very much amused at persons who were more modest than themselves.
"Who are ye lyin' with, Norah Ryan? Is it Gourock Ellen?" asked my bedmate.
"It is," came the answer.
"D'ye hear that, Dermod—a nun and a harridan in one bed?" said Jim under his breath to me.
Outside the raindrops were sounding on the roof like whip-lashes. Jim spoke again in a drowsy voice.
"We're keepin' some poor cows from their warm beds to-night," he said.
I kept awake for a long while, turning thoughts over in my mind. The scenes on the 'Derry boat, and my recent experience in the soggy fields, had taken the edge off the joy that winged me along the leading road to Strabane. I was now far out into the heart of the world, and life loomed darkly before me. The wet day went to crush my dreams and the ardour of my spirits. Hitherto I had great belief in women, their purity, virtue, and gentleness. But now my grand dreams of pure womanhood had collapsed. The foul words, the loose jokes and obscene songs of the two women who were strangers, the hard, black, bleeding and scabby knees that Gourock Ellen showed to us at the fire had turned my young visions into nightmares. The sight of the girls ploughing through the mucky clay, and the wolfish stare of the old man who envied those who fed beside a dungheap were repellent to me. I looked on life in all its primordial brutishness and found it loathsome to my soul.
Only that morning coming up the Clyde, when Norah and I looked across the water to a country new to both of us, my mind was full of dreams of the future. But the rosy-tinted boyish dreams of morning were shattered before the fall of night. Maybe the old man who lay by the dung-heap came to Scotland full of dreams like mine. Now the spirit was crushed out of him; he was broken on the wheel of life, and he had neither courage to rob, sin, nor die. He could only beg his bit and apologise for begging. The first day in Scotland disgusted me, made me sick of life, and if it were not that Norah Ryan was in the squad I would go back to Jim MaCrossan's farm again.
That night, as for many nights before, I turned into bed without saying my prayers, and I determined to pray no more. I had been brought up a Catholic, and to believe in a just God, and the eternal fire of torments, but daily newer and stranger thoughts were coming into my mind. Even when working with MaCrossan in the meadowlands my mind reverted to the little book in which I read the story of the heavens. God behind His million worlds had no time to pay any particular attention to me. This thought I tried to drive away, for the Church had still a strong hold on me, and anything out of keeping with my childish creed entered my mind like a nail driven into the flesh. The new thoughts, however, persisted, they took form and became part of my being. The change was gradual, for I tried desperately to reject the new idea of the universe and God. But the sight of the women in the fields, the story of the old man with the pain in his back who slept under a wet hedge was to me conclusive proof that God took no interest in the personal welfare of men. And when I gripped the new idea as incontestable truth it did not destroy my belief in God. Only the God of my early days, the God who took a personal interest in my welfare, was gone.
Sometimes the rest of the Catholic members of the squad went to chapel, when the farm on which we wrought was near a suitable place of worship, but I never went. Their visits were few and far between, for we were distant from the big towns most of the time.
We seldom stopped longer than one fortnight at a time on any farm. We shifted about here and there, digging twenty acres for one farmer, ten for another, living in byres, pig-stys and barns, and taking life as we found it. Daily we laboured together, the men bent almost double over their graips, throwing out the potatoes to the girls who followed after, dragging their bodies through the mire and muck like wounded animals, and I lifted the baskets of potatoes and filled the barrels for market. Still, for all the disadvantages, life was happy enough to me, because Norah Ryan was near me working in the fields.
But the life was brutal, and almost unfit for animals. One night when we were asleep in a barn the rain came through the roof and flooded the earthen floor to a depth of several inches. Our beds being wet through, we had to rise and stand for the remainder of the night knee-deep in the cold water.
When morning came we went out to work in the wet fields.
Once when living in a pig-sty we were bothered by rats. When we were at work they entered our habitation, ransacked the packets of food, gnawed our clothes, and upset everything in the place. They could only get in by one entrance, a hole in the wall above my bed, and by that same way they had to go out. After a little while the rats became bolder and came in by night when we were asleep. One night I awoke to find them jumping down from the aperture, landing on my body in their descent. Then they scampered away and commenced prowling around for food. I counted twenty thuds on my breast, then stuck my trousers in the throat of the opening above my bed and wakened Jim, who snored like a hog through it all. We got up and lit a candle. When the rats saw the light they hurried back to their hole, but we were ready and waiting for them, Micky's Jim with a shovel shaft, and I with a graip shank. We killed them as they came, all except one, which ran under the bed-clothes of Norah Ryan's bed. There was great noise of screaming for a while, but somehow or another Gourock Ellen got hold of the animal and squeezed it to death under the blankets. I left my trousers in the aperture all night, and they were nibbled almost to pieces in the morning. They were the only ones in my possession, and I had to borrow a pair from Jim for the next day.
The farmer gave us a halfpenny for every rat's tail handed in, as he wanted to get rid of the pests, and from that time forward Jim and I killed several, and during the remainder of the season we earned three pounds between us by hunting and killing rats. Gourock Ellen sometimes joined in the hunt, by way of amusement, but her principal relaxation was getting drunk on every pay-day.
The other woman, whose name was Annie, usually accompanied her on Saturday to the nearest village, and the two of them got full together. They also shared their food in common, but often quarrelled among themselves over one thing and another. They fought like cats and swore awfully, using the most vile language, but the next moment they were the best of friends again. One Saturday night they returned from a neighbouring village with two tramp men. Micky's Jim chased the two men away from the byre in which we were living at the time.
"I'll have no whorin' about this place," he said.
"You're a damned religious beast to be livin' in a cowshed," said one of the tramps.
One day Gourock Ellen asked me who did my washing, though I believe that she knew I washed my own clothes with my own hands.
"Myself," I said in reply to Ellen's inquiry.
"Will yer own country girls not do it for you?"
"I can do it myself," I replied.
When I looked for my soiled under-garments a week later I could not find them. I made inquiries and found that Gourock Ellen had washed them for me.
"It's a woman's work," she said, when I talked to her, and she washed my clothes to the end of the season and would not accept payment for the work.
Nearly everyone in the squad looked upon the two women with contempt and disgust, and I must confess that I shared in the general feeling. In my sight they were loathsome and unclean. They were repulsive in appearance, loose in language, and seemingly devoid of any moral restraint or female decency. It was hard to believe that they were young children once, and that there was still unlimited goodness in their natures. Why had Gourock Ellen handed the potatoes to the old Mayo man who was hungry, and why had she undertaken to do my washing without asking for payment? I could not explain these impulses of the woman, and sometimes, indeed, I cannot explain my own. I cannot explain why I then disliked Gourock Ellen, despite what she had done for me, and to-day I regret that ignorance of youth which caused me to despise a human being who was (as after events proved) infinitely better than myself.