“But this isn’t the 1st of next month,” he said.
“It is not,” said the driver. “It’s no more than the 15th of this month. But the way I’m placed at present, it wouldn’t be near so convenient to me to be striking next month as it is to be striking now. There’s talk of moving me off this line and putting me on to the engine that does be running into Athlone with the night mail; and it’s to-morrow the change is to be made. Now I needn’t tell you that Athlone’s a mighty long way from where we are this minute.”
He paused and looked at Sir James with an intelligent smile.
“My wife lives in the little house beyond there,” he said pointing out of the window to the cottage. “And what I said to myself was this: If I am to be striking—which I’ve no great wish to do—but if it must be—and seemingly it must—I may as well do it in the convenientest place I can; for as long as a man strikes the way he’s told, there can’t be a word said to him; and anyway the 1st of next month or the 15th of this month, what’s the differ? Isn’t one day as good as another?”
He evidently felt that his explanation was sufficient and satisfactory. He rose to his feet and opened the door of the compartment. “I’m sorry now,” he said, “if I’m causing any inconvenience to a gentleman like yourself. But what can I do? I offered to leave you behind at Finnabeg, but you wouldn’t stay. Anyway the night’s warm and if you stretch yourself on the seat there you won’t know it till morning, and then I’ll bring you over another cup of tea so as you won’t be hungry. It’s a twenty-four hour strike, so it is; and I won’t be moving on out of this before two o’clock or may be half past. But what odds? The kind of place Dunadea is, a day or two doesn’t matter one way or another, and if it was the day after to-morrow in place of to-morrow you got there it would be the same thing in the latter end.”
He climbed out of the compartment as he spoke and stumped back through the rain to his cottage. Sir James was left wondering how the people of Dunadea managed to conduct the business of life when one day was the same to them as another and the loss of a day now and then did not matter. He was quite certain that the loss of a day mattered a great deal to him, his position being what it was. He wondered what Miss Molly Dennison would think when he failed to appear at her father’s house that evening for dinner; what she would think—the speculation nearly drove him mad—when he did not appear in the church next day. He put on an overcoat, took an umbrella and set off for the engine driver’s cottage. He had to climb down a steep embankment and then cross a wire fence. He found it impossible to keep his umbrella up, which distressed him, for he was totally unaccustomed to getting wet.
He found the driver, who seemed to be a good and domesticated man, sitting at his fireside with a baby on his knee. His wife was washing clothes in a corner of the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” said Sir James, “but my business in Dunadea is very important. There will be serious trouble if——”
“There’s no use asking me to go on with the train,” said the driver, “for I can’t do it. I’d never hear the last of it if I was to be a blackleg.”
The woman at the washtub looked up.