CHAPTER XXVIII A LITTLE TRAGEDY
"The sweat was wet on his steaming loins and shoulders bent and scarred,
And he dropped to earth like a spavined mule that's struck in the knacker's yard.
Bury him deep in the red, red muck, and pile the clay on his breast,
For all that he needs for his years of toil are years of unbroken rest."
—From the song that follows.
Talking of thieving puts me in mind of the tragedy of English Bill. Bill was a noted thief. He would have robbed his mother's corpse, it was said. There were three sayings in Kinlochleven, and they were as follows:
Moleskin Joe would gamble on his father's tombstone.
English Bill would rob his mother of her winding-sheet.
Flynn would fight his own shadow and get the best of it.
The three of us were mates, and we were engaged on a special job, blasting a rock facing, in the corner of a secluded cutting. There was very little room for movement, and we had to do the job all by ourselves. One evening we set seven charges of dynamite in the holes which we had drilled during the day, put the fuses alight, and hurried off to a place of safety, and there waited until the explosion was over. While the thunder of the riven earth was still in our ears the ganger blew his whistle, the signal to cease work and return to our shacks.
Next morning Bill reappeared wearing a strong heavily-soled pair of new bluchers which he had purchased on the evening previously.
"They're a good pair of understandings, Bill," I said, as I examined my mate's boots with a feeling of envy.
"A damned good pair!" said Moleskin ruefully, looking at his own bare toes peeping through the ragged leather of his emaciated uppers.
Bill's face glowed with pride as he lifted his pick and proceeded to clean out the refuse from the rock face. Bill was always in a hurry to start work, and Joe often prophesied that the man would come to a bad end. On this morning Joe was in a bad temper, for he had drunk too well the night before.
"Stow it, you fool," he growled at Bill. "You're a damned hasher, and no ganger within miles of you!"
Bill made no reply, but lifted his pick and drove it into the rock which we had blasted on the day before. As he struck the ground there was a deadly roar; the pick whirled round, sprung upwards, twirled in the air like a wind-swept straw, and entered Bill's throat just a finger's breadth below the Adam's apple. One of the dynamite charges had failed to explode on the previous day, and Bill had struck it with the point of the pick, and with this tool which had earned him his livelihood for many years sticking in his throat he stood for a moment swaying unsteadily. He laughed awkwardly as if ashamed of what had happened, then dropped silently to the ground. The pick slipped out, a red foam bubbled on the man's lips for a second, and that was all.
The sight unnerved us for a moment, but we quickly recovered. We had looked on death many times, and our virgin terror was now almost lost.
"He's no good here now," said Moleskin sadly. "We'll look for a muck-barrow and wheel him down to the hut. Didn't I always say that he would come to a bad end, him with his hurry and flurry and his frothy get-about way?"
"He saved us by his hurry, anyhow," I remarked.
We turned the man over and straightened his limbs, then hurried off for a muck-barrow. On coming back we discovered that some person had stolen the man's boots.
"They should have been taken by us before we left him," I said.
"You're damned right," assented Joe.
Several of the men gathered around, and together we wheeled poor Bill down to the hut along the rickety barrow road. His face was white under the coating of beard, and his poor naked feet looked very blue and cold. All the workmen took off their caps and stood bareheaded until we passed out of sight. No one knew whose turn would come next. When Bill was buried I wrote, at the request of Moleskin Joe, a song on the tragedy. I called the song "A Little Tragedy," and I read it to my mate as we sat together in a quiet corner of the hut.
"A LITTLE TRAGEDY.
"The sweat was wet on his steaming loins and shoulders bent and scarred,
And he dropped to earth like a spavined mule that's struck in the knacker's yard.
Bury him deep in the red, red muck, and pile the clay on his breast,
For all that he needs for his years of toil are years of unbroken rest.
"And who has mothered this kinless one? Why should we want to know
As we hide his face from the eyes of men and his flesh from the hooded crow?
Had he a sweetheart to wait for him, with a kiss for his toil-worn face?
It doesn't matter, for here or there another can fill his place.
"Is there a prayer to be prayed for him? Or is there a bell to toll?
We'll do the best for the body that's dead, and God can deal with the soul.
We'll bury him decently out of sight, and he who can may pray.
For maybe our turn will come to-morrow though his has come to-day.
"And maybe Bill had hopes of his own and a sort of vague desire
For a pure woman to share his home and sit beside his fire;
Joys like these he has maybe desired, but living and dying wild,
He has never known of a maiden's love nor felt the kiss of a child.
"In life he was worth some shillings a day when there was work to do,
In death he is worth a share of the clay which in life he laboured through;
Wipe the spume from his pallid lips, and quietly cross his hands,
And leave him alone with the Mother Earth and the Master who understands."
My mate seemed very much impressed by the poem, and remained silent for a long while after I had finished reading it from the dirty scrap of tea-paper on which it was written.
"Have you ever cared a lot for some one girl, Flynn?" he asked suddenly.
"No," I answered, for I had never disclosed my little love affair to any man.
"Have you ever cared a lot for one girl, Flynn?" repeated Joe.
"I have cared—once," I replied, and, obeying the impulse of the moment, I told Joe the story. He looked grave when I had finished.
"They're all the same," he said; "all the same. I cared for a wench myself one time and I intended to marry her."
I looked at my mate's unshaven face, his dirty clothes, and I laughed outright.
"I'm nothin' great in the beauty line," went on Moleskin as if divining my thoughts; "but when I washed myself years ago I was pretty passable. She was a fine girl, mine, and I thought that she was decent and aboveboard. It cost me money and time to find out what she was, and in the end I found that she was the mother of two kids, and the lawful wife of no man. It was a great slap in the face for me, Flynn."
"It must have been," was all that I could say.
"By God! it was," Moleskin replied. "I tried to drink my regret away, but I never could manage it. Have you ever wrote a love song?"
"I've written one," I said.
"Will you say it to me?" asked Joe.
I had written a love song long before, and knew it by heart, for it was a song which I liked very much. I recited it to my mate, speaking in half-whispers so that the gamblers at the far end of the shack could not hear me.
"A LOVE SONG
"Greater by far than all that men know, or all that men see is this—
The lingering clasp of a maiden's hand and the warmth of her virgin kiss,
The tresses that cover the pure white brow in many a clustering curl,
And the deep look of honest love in the grey eyes of a girl.
"Because of that I am stronger than death and life is barren no more,
For otherwise wrongs that I hardly feel would sink to the heart's deep core,
For otherwise hope were utterly lost in the endless paths of wrong—
But only to look in her soft grey eyes—I am strong, I am strong!
"Does she love as I love? I do not know, but all that I know is this—
'Tis enough to stay for an hour at her side and dream awhile of her kiss,
'Tis enough to clasp the hands of her, and 'neath the shade of her hair
To press my lips on her lily brow and leave my kisses there.
"In the dreary days on the vagrant ways whereon my feet have trod
She came as a star to cheer my way, a guiding star from God,
She came from the dreamy choirs of heaven, lovely and wondrous wise,
And I follow the path that is lighted up by her eyes, her eyes."
"I don't like that song, because I don't know what it is about," said Moleskin when I had finished. "The one about English Bill is far and away better. When you talk about a man that drops like a spavined mule in the knacker's yard, I know what you mean, but a girl that comes from the dreamy choirs of heaven, wherever they are, is not the kind of wench for a man like you and me, Flynn."
I felt a little disappointed, and made no reply to the criticism of my mate.
"Do you ever think how nice it would be to have a home of your own?" asked Moleskin after a long silence, and a vigorous puffing at the pipe which he held between his teeth. "It would be fine to have a room to sit in and a nice fire to warm your shins at of an evenin'. I often think how roarin' it would be to sit in a parlour and drink tea with a wife, and have a little child to kiss me as you talk about in the song on the death of English Bill."
I did not like to hear my big-boned, reckless mate talk in such a way. Such talk was too delicate and sentimental for a man like him.
"You're a fool, Joe," I said.
"I suppose I am," he answered. "But just you wait till you come near the turn of life like me, and find a sort of stiffness grippin' on your bones, then you'll maybe have thoughts kind of like these. A young fellow, cully, mayn't care a damn if he is on the dead end, but by God! it is a different story when you are as stiff as a frozen poker with one foot in the grave and another in hell, Flynn."
"It was a different story the day you met the ploughman, on our journey from Greenock," I said. "You must have changed your mind, Moleskin?"
"I said things to that ploughman that I didn't exactly believe myself," said my mate. "I would do anything and say anything to get the best of an argument."
Many a strange conversation have I had with Moleskin Joe. One evening when I was seated by the hot-plate engaged in patching my corduroy trousers Joe came up to me with a question which suddenly occurred to him. I was held to be a sort of learned man, and everybody in the place asked me my views upon this and that, and no one took any heed of my opinions. Most of them acknowledged that I was nearly as great a poet as Two-shift Mullholland, now decently married, and gone from the ranks of the navvies.
"Do you believe in God, Flynn?" was Joe's question.
"I believe in a God of a sort," I answered. "I believe in the God who plays with a man, as a man plays with a dog, who allows suffering and misery and pain. The 'Holy-Willy' look on a psalm-singing parson's dial is of no more account to Him than a blister on a beggar's foot."
"I only asked you the question, just as a start-off to tellin' you my own opinion," said Joe. "Sometimes I think one thing about God, and sometimes I think another thing. The song that you wrote about English Bill talks of God takin' care of the soul, and it just came into my head to ask your opinion and tell you my own. As for myself, when I see a man droppin' down like a haltered gin-horse at his work I don't hold much with what parsons say about the goodness of Providence. At other times, when I am tramping about in the lonely night, with the stars out above me and the world kind of holding its breath as if it was afraid of something, I do be thinking that there is a God after all. I'd rather that there is none; for He is sure to have a heavy tally against me if He puts down all the things I've done. But where is heaven if there is such a place?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"If you think of it, there is no end to anything," Moleskin went on. "If you could go up above the stars, there is surely a place above them, and another place in turn above that again. You cannot think of a place where there is nothing, and as far as I can see there is no end to anything. You can't think of the last day as they talk about, for that would mean the end of time. It's funny to think of a man sayin' that there'll be no time after such and such a time. How can time stop?"
I tried to explain to Joe that time and space did not exist, that they were illusions used for practical purposes.
"No man can understand these things," said Joe, as I fumbled through my explanation of the non-existence of time and space. "I have often looked at the little brooks by the roadside and saw the water runnin', runnin', always lookin' the same, and the water different always. When I looked at the little brooks I often felt frightened, because I could not understand them. All these things are the same, and no man can understand them. Why does a brook keep runnin'? Why do the stars come out at night? Is there a God in Heaven? Nobody knows, and a man may puzzle about these things till he's black in the face and grey in the head, but he'll never get any further."
"English Bill may know more about these things than we do," I said.
"How could a dead man know anything?" asked Joe, and when I could not explain the riddle, he borrowed a shilling from me and lost it at the gaming-table.
That was Joe all over. One moment he was looking for God in Nature, and on the next instant he was looking for a shilling to stake on the gaming-table. Once in an argument with me he called the world "God's gamblin' table," and endeavoured to prove that God threw down men, reptiles, nations, and elements like dice to the earth, one full of hatred for the other and each filled with a desire for supremacy, and that God and His angels watched the great struggle down below, and betted on the result of its ultimate issue.
"Of course the angels will not back Kinlochleven very heavily," he concluded.