CHAPTER XX BOOKS
"For me has Homer sung of wars,
Æschylus wrote and Plato thought,
Has Dante loved and Darwin wrought,
And Galileo watched the stars."
—From The Navvy's Scrap Book.
Up till this period of my life I had no taste for literature. I had seldom even glanced at the daily papers, having no interest in the world in which I played so small a part. One day when the gang was waiting for a delayed ballast train, and when my thoughts were turning to Norah Ryan, I picked up a piece of paper, a leaf from an exercise book, and written on it in a girl's or woman's handwriting were these little verses:
"No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love,—
I claim you still, for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few—
Much is to learn and much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.
"I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times.
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope
What is the issue? let us see!"
While hardly understanding their import, the words went to my heart. They expressed thoughts of my own, thoughts lying so deeply that I was not able to explain or express them. The writer of the verse I did not know, but I thought that he, whoever he was, had looked deep into my soul and knew my feelings better than myself. All day long I repeated the words to myself over and over again, and from them I got much comfort and strength, that stood me in good stead in the long hours of searching on the streets of Glasgow for my luckless love. Under the glaring lamps that lit the larger streets, through the dark guttery alleys and sordid slums I prowled about nightly, looking at every young maiden's face and seeing in each the hard stare of indifference and the cold look of the stranger. Round the next corner perhaps she was waiting; a figure approaching reminded me of her, and I hurried forward eagerly only to find that I was mistaken. Oh! how many illusions kept me company in my search! how many disappointments! and how many hopes. For I wanted Norah; for her I longed with a great longing, and a dim vague hope of meeting her buoyed up my soul.
"And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!"
Such comforting words, and the world of books might be full of them! A new and unexplored world lay open before me, and for years I had not seen it, or seeing, never heeded. I had once more the hope that winged me along the leading road to Strabane when leaving for a new country. Alas! the country that raised such anticipations was not what my hopes fashioned, but this newer world, just as enticing, was worthy of more trust and greater confidence. I began to read eagerly, ravenously. I read Victor Hugo in G—— Tunnel. One day a falling rail broke the top joint of the middle finger of my left hand. Being unable for some time to take part in the usual work of the squad I was placed on the look-out when my gang worked on the night-shift in the tunnel at G——. When the way was not clear ahead I had to signal the trains in the darkness, but as three trains seldom passed in the hour the work was light and easy. When not engaged I sat on the rail beside the naphtha lamp and read aloud to myself. I lived with Hugo's characters, I suffered with them and wept for them in their troubles. One night when reading Les Miserables I cried over the story of Jean Valjean and little Cosette. Horse Roche at that moment came through the darkness (in the tunnel it is night from dawn to dawn) and paused to ask me how I was getting along.
"Your eyes are running water, Flynn," he said. "You sit too close to the lamp smoke."
I remember many funny things which happened in those days. I read the chapter on Natural Supernaturalism, from Sartor Resartus, while seated on the footboard of a flying ballast train. Once, when Roche had left his work to take a drink in a near public-house, I read several pages from Sesame and Lilies, under shelter of a coal waggon, which had been shunted into an adjacent siding. I read Montaigne's Essays during my meal hours, while my mates gambled and swore around me.
I procured a ticket for the Carnegie Library, but bought some books, when I had cash to spare, from a second-hand bookseller on the south side of Glasgow. Every pay-day I spent a few shillings there, and went home to my lodgings with a bundle of books under my arm. The bookseller would not let me handle the books until I bought them, because my hands were so greasy and oily with the muck of my day's labour. I seldom read in my lodgings. I spent most of my evenings in the streets engaged on my unsuccessful search. I read in the spare moments snatched from my daily work. Soon my books were covered with iron-rust, sleeper-tar and waggon grease, where my dirty hands had touched them, and when I had a book in my possession for a month I could hardly decipher a word on the pages. There is some difficulty in reading thus.
I started to write verses of a kind, and one poem written by me was called The Lady of the Line. I personified the spirit that watched over the lives of railway men from behind the network of point-rods and hooded signals. The red danger lamp was her sign of power, and I wrote of her as queen of all the running lines in the world.
I read the poem to my mates. Most of them liked it very much and a few learned it by heart. When Horse Roche heard of it he said: "You'll end your days in the madhouse, or"—with cynical repetition—"in the House of Parliament."
On Sunday afternoons, when not at work, I went to hear the socialist speakers who preached the true Christian Gospel to the people at the street corners. The workers seldom stopped to listen; they thought that the socialists spoke a lot of nonsense. The general impression was that socialists, like clergymen, were paid speakers; that they endeavoured to save men's bodies from disease and poverty as curates save souls from sin for a certain number of shillings a day. From the first I looked upon socialist speakers as men who had an earnest desire for justice, and men who toiled bravely in the struggle for the regeneration of humanity. I always revolted against injustice, and hated all manner of oppression. My heart went out to the men, women, and children who toil in the dungeons and ditches of labour, grinding out their souls and bodies for meagre pittances. All around me were social injustices, affecting the very old and the very young as they affected the supple and strong. Social suffering begins at any age, and death is often its only remedy. That remedy is only for the individual; the general remedy is to be found in Socialism. Industry, that new Inquisition, has thousands on the rack of profit; Progress, to millions, means slavery and starvation; Progress and Profit mean sweated labour to railway men, and it meant death to many of them, as to Mick Deehan, whose place I had filled. I had suffered a lot myself: a brother of mine had died when he might have been saved by the rent which was paid to the landlord, and I had seen suffering all around me wherever I went; suffering due to injustice and tyranny of the wealthy class. When I heard the words spoken by the socialists at the street corner a fire of enthusiasm seized me, and I knew that the world was moving and that the men and women of the country were waking from the torpor of poverty, full of faith for a new cause. I joined the socialist party.
For a while I kept in the background; the discussions which took place in their hall in G—— Street made me conscious of my own lack of knowledge on almost any subject. The members of the party discussed Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Karl Marx, Ricardo, and Smith, men of whom I had never even heard, and inwardly I chafed at my own absolute ignorance and want of the education necessary for promoting the cause which I advocated. Hours upon hours did I spend wading through Marx's Capital, and Henry George's Progress and Poverty. The former, the more logical, appealed to me least.
I had only been two months in the socialist party when I organised a strike among the railway men, the thirty members of the Flying Squad on which I worked.
We were loading ash waggons at C—— engine shed, and shovelling ashes is one of the worst jobs on the railway. Some men whom I have met consider work behind prison walls a pleasure when compared with it. As these men spoke from experience I did not doubt their words. The ash-pit at C—— was a miniature volcano. The red-hot cinders and burning ashes were piled together in a deep pit, the mouth of which barely reached the level of the railway track. The Flying Squad under Horse Roche cleared out the pit once every month. The ashes were shovelled into waggons placed on the rails alongside for that purpose. The men stripped to the trousers and shirt in the early morning, and braces were loosened to give the shoulders the ease in movement required for the long day's swinging of the shovel. Three men were placed at each waggon and ten waggons were filled by the squad at each spell of work. Every three wrought as hard as they were able, so that their particular waggon might be filled before the others. The men who lagged behind went down in the black book of the ganger.
On the day of the strike the pit was a boiling hell. Chunks of coal half-burned and half-ablaze, lumps of molten slag, red-hot bricks and fiery ashes were muddled together in suffocating profusion. From the bottom of the pit a fierce impetus was required to land the contents of the shovel in the waggon overhead. Sometimes a brick would strike on the rim of the waggon and rebound back on the head of the man who threw it upwards. "Cripes! we'll have to fill it ourselves now," his two mates would say as they bundled their bleeding fellow out of the reeking heat. A shower of fine ashes were continuously falling downwards and resting upon our necks and shoulders, and the ash-particles burned the flesh like thin red-hot wires. It was even worse when they went further down our backs, for then every move of the underclothing and every swing of the shoulders caused us intense agony. Under the run of the shirt the ashes scarred the flesh like sand-paper. All around a thick smoke rested and hid us from the world without, and within we suffered in a pit of blasting fire. I've seen men dropping at the job like rats in a furnace. These were usually carried out, and a bucket of water was emptied on their face. When they recovered they entered into the pit again.
Horse Roche stood on the coupling chains of the two middle waggons, timing the work with his watch and hastening it on with his curses. He was not a bad fellow at heart, but he could do nothing without flying into a fuming passion, which often was no deeper than his lips. Below him the smoke was so thick that he could hardly see his own labourers from the stand on the coupling chain. All he could see was the shovels of red ashes and shovels of black ashes rising up and over the haze that enveloped the pit beneath. But we could hear Roche where we wrought. Louder than the grinding of the ballast engine was the voice of the Horse cursing and swearing. His swearing was a gift, remarkable and irrepressible; it was natural to the man; it was the man.
"God's curse on you, Dan Devine, I don't see your shovel at work at all!" he roared. "Where the hell are you, Muck MaCrossan? Your waggon isn't nearly water-level yet, and that young whelp, Flynn, has his nearly full! If your chest was as broad as your belly, MacQueen, you'd be a danged sight better man on the ash-pile! It's not but that you are well enough used to the ashes, for I never yet saw a Heelin man who didn't spend the best part of his life before a fire or before grub! Come now, you men on the offside; you are slacking it like hell! If you haven't your waggon up over the lip, I'll sack every God-damned man of you on the next pay day! Has a brick fallen on Feeley's head? Well, shove the idiot out of the pit and get on with your work! His head is too big, anyhow, it's always in the road!"
This was the manner in which Horse Roche carried on, and most of the men were afraid of him. I felt frightened of the man, for I anticipated the gruelling which he would give me if I fell foul of him. But if we had come to blows he would not, I am certain, have much to boast about at the conclusion of the affair. However, I never quarrelled with Roche.
On the day of the strike, about three o'clock in the afternoon, when fully forespent at our work, the ballast engine brought in a rake of sixteen-ton waggons. Usually the waggons were small, just large enough to hold eight tons of ashes. The ones brought in now were very high, and it required the utmost strength of any one of us to throw a shovelful of ashes over the rim of the waggon. Not alone were the waggons higher, but the pile in the pit had decreased, and we had to work from a lower level. And those waggons could hold so much! They were like the grave, never satisfied, but ever wanting more, more. I suggested that we should stop work. Discontent was boiling hot, and the men scrambled out of the pit, telling Roche to go to hell, and get men to fill his waggons. Outside of the pit the men's anger cooled. They looked at one another for a while, feeling that they had done something that was sinful and wrong. To talk of stopping work in such a manner was blasphemy to most of them. Ronald MacQueen had a wife and a gathering of young children, and work was slack. Dan Devine was old, and had been in the service of the company for twenty years. If he left now he might not get another job. He rubbed the fine ashes out of his eyes, and looked at MacQueen. Both men had similar thoughts, and before the sweat was dry on their faces they turned back to the pit together. One by one the men followed them, until I was left alone on the outside. Horse Roche had never shifted his position on the coupling chains. "It'll not pain my feet much, if I stand till you come back!" he cried when we went out. He watched the men return with a look of cynical amusement.
"Come back, Flynn," he cried, when he saw me standing alone. "You're a fool, and the rest of the men are cowards; their spines are like the spines of earth worms."
I picked up my shovel angrily, and returned to my waggon. I was disgusted and disappointed and ashamed. I had lost in the fight, and I felt the futility of rising in opposition against the powers that crushed us down. That night I sent a letter to the railway company stating our grievance. No one except myself would sign it, but all the men said that my letter was a real good one. It must have been too good. A few days later a clerk was sent from the head of the house to inform me that I would get sacked if I wrote another letter of the same kind.
Then I realised that in the grip of the great industrial machine I was powerless; I was a mere spoke in the wheel of the car of progress, and would be taken out if I did not perform my functions there. The human spoke is useful as long as it behaves like a wooden one in the socket into which it is wedged. So long will the Industrial Carriage keep moving forward under the guidance of heavy-stomached Indolence and inflated Pride. There is no scarcity of spokes, human and wooden. What does it matter if Devine and MacQueen were thrown away? A million seeds are dropping in the forest, and all women are not divinely chaste. The young children are growing. Blessings be upon you, workmen, you have made spokes that will shove you from the sockets into which your feet are wedged, but God grant that the next spokes are not as wooden as yourselves!
Again the road was calling to me. My search in Glasgow had been quite unsuccessful, and the dull slavery of the six-foot way began to pall on me. The clerk who was sent by the company to teach me manners was a most annoying little fellow, and full of the importance of his mission. I told him quietly to go to the devil, an advice which he did not relish, but which he forbore to censure. That evening I left the employ of the —— Railway Company.
Just two hours before I lifted my lying time, the Horse was testing packed sleepers with his pick some distance away from the gang, when a rabbit ran across the railway. Horse dropped his pick, aimed a lump of slag at the animal and broke its leg. It limped off; we saw the Horse follow, and about a hundred paces from the point where he had first observed it Roche caught the rabbit, and proceeded to kill it outright by battering its head against the flange of the rail. At that moment a train passed us, travelling on the down line. Roche was on the up line, but as the train passed him we saw a glint of something bright flashing between the engine and the man, and at the same moment Roche fell to his face on the four-foot way. We hurried towards him, and found our ganger vainly striving to rise with both arms caught in his entrails. The pick which he had left lying on the line got caught in the engine wheels and was carried forward, and violently hurled out when the engine came level with the ganger. It ripped his belly open, and he died about three minutes after we came to his assistance. The rabbit, although badly wounded, escaped to its hole. That night I was on the road again.