CHAPTER XIV PADDING IT
"A nail in the sole of your bluchers jagging your foot like a pin,
And every step of the journey driving it further in;
Then out on the great long roadway, you'll find when you go abroad,
The nearer you go to nature, the further you go from God."
—A Song of the Dead End.
Out on tramp, homeless in a strange country, with twopence in my pocket! The darkness lay around me and the snow was white on the ground. Whenever I took my hands out of my pockets the chill air nipped them like pincers. One knee was out through my trousers, and my boots were leaking. The snow melted as it came through the torn uppers, and I could hear the water gurgling between my toes as I walked. When I passed a lighted house I felt a hunger that was not of the belly kind. I came to the village of Bishopton, and went into a little shop, where I asked for a pennyworth of biscuits. The man weighed them in scales that shone like gold, and broke one in halves to make the exact weight.
"There's nothin' like fair measure, laddie," he said.
"Is there any chance of a man getting a job about this district?" I asked.
"What man?" said the shopkeeper.
"Me," I said.
"Get out, ye scamp!" roared the man. "It would be better for you to go to bed instead of tryin' to take a rise out of yer betters."
"You are an old pig!" I shouted at the man, for I did not like his way of speaking, and disappeared into the darkness. I ate the biscuits, but felt hungrier after my meal than I was before it.
The night was calm and deadly cold. Overhead a very pale moon forged its way through a heaven of stars. On such a night it is a pleasure to sit before a nice warm fire on a well-swept hearth. I had no fire, no home, no friends; nothing but the bleak road and the coldness. I kept walking, walking. I knew that it would be unwise to sit down: perhaps I would fall asleep and die. I did not want to die. It was so much better to walk about on the roads of a strange country in which there was nobody to care what became of me; no one except an old harridan, and she was far away from me now. The love of life was strong within me, for I was very young, and never did I cling closer to life than I did at that moment when it was blackest. My thoughts went to the future and the good things which might lie before me.
"I'll get a job yet," I said to myself. "I'll walk about until I meet somebody who needs me. Then I'll grow up in years and work among men, maybe getting a whole pound a week as my pay. A pound a week is a big wage, and it will amount to a lot in a year. I will pay ten shillings a week for my keep in some lodging-house, as Micky's Jim had done when he worked on Greenock pier, and I will save the other half-sovereign. Ten shillings a week amounts to twenty-six pounds a year. In ten years I shall save two hundred and sixty pounds. Such a big lump-sum of money! Two hundred and sixty pounds!
"It will be hard to keep a wife on a pound a week, but I will always remain single, and send my money home to my own people. If I don't, I'll never have any luck. I will never gamble again. Neither will I marry, for women are no earthly use, anyway. They get old, wrinkled, and fat very quickly. They are all alike, every one of them."
I found my thoughts wandering from one subject to another like those of a person who is falling asleep. Anyhow, I had something to live for, so I kept walking, walking on.
I was in the open country, and I did not know where the road was leading to, but that did not matter. I was as near home in one place as in another.
From one point of the sky, probably the north, I saw the clouds rising, covering up the stars, and at last blotting the moon off the sky as a picture is wiped off a slate. It was more dismal than ever when the moon and stars were gone, for now I was alone with the night and the darkness. I could hear the wind as it passed through the telegraph wires by the roadside. It was a weeping wind, and put me in mind of the breeze calling down the chimney far away at home in Glenmornan.
A low bent man came out of the darkness and shuffled by. "It looks like snow," he said, in passing.
"It does," I replied. I could not see his face, but his voice was kindly. He shuffled along. Perhaps he was going home to a warm supper and bed. I did not know, and I wondered who the man was.
Suddenly the snow from the darkness above drifted down and my clothes were white in an instant. My bare knee became very cold, for the flakes melted on it as they fell. The snow ran down my legs and made me shiver. I took off my muffler and tied it around the hole in my trousers to prevent the snowflakes from getting in. I felt wearied and cold, but after a while I got very angry. I got angry, not with myself, but with the wind, the snow, my leaky boots and ragged clothes. I was angry with the man who carried the devil's prayer book, and also with the man who broke a biscuit in two because he was an honest body and a believer in fair measure. Perhaps I ought to have been angry with myself, for did I not spend all my money at the card school, and was it not my own fault that now I had only one penny in my possession? If I had saved my money like Micky's Jim I would have now eight or nine pounds in my pocket.
Suddenly the snow cleared, and my eyes fell on a farmhouse hardly a stone's-throw away from the road. Thinking that I might get a shed to lie in I went towards it. There was no light showing in the house and it must have been long after midnight. As I approached a dog ran at me yelping. I turned and fled, but the dog caught my trousers and hung on, trying to fasten his teeth in my leg. I twisted round and swung him clear, then lifted my boot and aimed a blow at the animal which took him on the jaw. His teeth snapped together like a trap, and he ran back squealing. I took to my heels and returned to the road. From there I saw a light in the farmhouse, so I ran quicker than ever. I was frightened at what I had done; I had committed a crime in looking for a night's shelter along with the beasts of the byre. I could not get sleeping with men; I was not a man. I could not get sleeping in a shed; I was not even a brute beast. I was merely a little boy who was very hungry, ragged, and tired.
I ran for a long distance, and was sweating all over when I stopped. I stood until I got cool, then continued my walking, walking through the darkness. I was still walking when the day broke cold and cheerless. I met a navvy going to his work and I asked him for a penny. He had no money, but he gave me half of the food which he had brought from home for his daily meal.
On the outskirts of Paisley I went to the door of a mansion to ask for a penny. A man opened the door. He was a fat and comfortable-looking, round-paunched fellow. He told me to get off before the dog was put after me. I hurried off, and forsook the big houses afterwards.
Once in Paisley I sat down on a kerbstone under the Caledonian Railway Bridge in Moss Street. I fell asleep, and slept until a policeman woke me up.
"Go away from here!" he roared at me. I got away.
A gang of men were laying down tramway rails on the street and I went forward and asked the overseer for a job. He laughed at me for a minute, then drew his gang around to examine me.
"He's a fine bit o' a man," said one.
"He's shouthered like a rake," said another.
Discomfited and disgusted I hurried away from the grinning circle of men, and all day long I travelled through the town. I soon got tired of looking for work, and instead I looked for food. I was very unsuccessful, and youth is the time for a healthy appetite. I spent my last penny on a bun, and when it was dark I got a crust from a night watchman who sat in a little hut by the tram-lines. About midnight I left the town and went into the country. The snow was no longer falling, but a hard frost had set in. About two o'clock in the morning I lay down on the cold ground utterly exhausted, and fell asleep. When dawn came I rose, and shivering in every limb I struck out once more on my journey. I looked for work on the farms along the road, but at every place I was turned away.
"Go back to the puirs' house," said every second or third farmer.
I went to one farmhouse when the men were coming out from dinner.
"Are you lookin' for a job?" asked a man, whom I took to be master.
"I am," I answered.
"Then give us a hand in the shed for a while," he said.
I followed the party into a large building where implements were stored, and the men gathered round a broken reaper which had to be taken out into the open.
"Help us out with this," said the farmer to me.
There were six of us altogether, and three went to each side of the machine and caught hold of it.
"Now, lift!" shouted the farmer.
The men at the other side lifted their end, but ours remained on the ground despite all efforts to raise it.
"Damn you, lift!" said my two mates angrily to me.
I put all my energy into the work, but the cold and hunger had taken the half of my strength away. We could not lift the machine clear of the ground. The farmer got angry.
"Get out of my sight, you spineless brat!" he roared to me, and I left the farmyard. When I came to the high-road again there were tears in my eyes. They were tears of shame; I was ashamed of my own weakness.
For a whole week afterwards I tramped through the country, hating all men, despised by everyone, and angry with my own plight. A few gave me food, some cursed me from their doors, and a great number mocked me as I passed. "Auld ragged breeks!" the children of the villages cried after me. "We're sick o' lookin' at the likes o' you!" the fat tubs of women, who stood by their cottage doors, said when I asked them for something to eat. Others would say: "Get out o' our sight, or we'll tell the policeman about you. Then you'll go to the lock-up, where you'll only get bread and water and a bed on a plank."
Such a dreadful thing! It shocked me to think of it, and for a while I always hurried away when women spoke in such a manner. However, in the end, suffering caused me to change my opinions. A man with an empty stomach may well prefer bread and water to water, a bed on a plank to a bed on the snow, and the roof of a prison to the cold sky over him. So it was that I came into Paisley again at the end of the week and asked a policeman to arrest me. I told him that I was hungry and wanted something to eat. The man was highly amused.
"You must break the law before the king feeds you," he said.
"But I have been begging," I persisted.
"If you want me to arrest you, break a window," said the man. "Then I'll take you before a bailie and he'll put you into a reformatory, where they'll give you a jail-bird's education. You'll come out worse than you went in, and it's ten to one in favour of your life ending with a hempen cravat round your neck."
The man put his hand in his pocket and took out a sixpence, which he handed to me.
"Run away now and get something to eat," he shouted in an angry voice, and I hurried away hugging the silver coin in my hand. That night I got twopence more, and fed well for the first time in a whole week.
I met the policeman once again in later years. He was a Socialist, and happened to have the unhealthy job of protecting blacklegs from a crowd of strikers when I met him for the second time. While pretending to keep the strikers back he was urging them to rush by him and set upon the blacklegs—the men who had not the backbone to fight for justice and right. Not being, as a Socialist, a believer in charity, he feigned to be annoyed when I reminded him of his generous action of years before.