One day a man, a new arrival, came to me and proposed a certain plan whereby he and I could make a fortune at the gambling school. It was a kind of swindle, and I do not believe in robbing workers, being neither a thief nor a capitalist. I lifted the man up in my arms and took him into the shack, where I disclosed his little plan to the inmates. A shack some distance off was owned by a Belfast man named Ramsay, and several Orangemen dwelt in this shack. Moleskin proposed that we should strip the swindler to the pelt, paint him green, and send him to Ramsay's shack. Despite the man's entreaties, we painted him a glorious green, and when the night came on we took him under cover of the darkness to Ramsay's shack, and tied him to the door. In the morning we found him, painted orange, outside of ours, and almost dead with cold. We gave him his clothes and a few kicks, and chased him from the place.
I intended, when I came to Kinlochleven, to earn money and send it home to my own people, and the intention was nursed in good earnest until I lifted my first day's pay. Then Moleskin requested the loan of my spare cash, and I could not refuse him, a pal who shared his very last crumb of bread with me time and again. On the second evening the gamble followed the fight as a matter of course; and on the third evening and every evening after I played—because I was a gambler by nature. My luck was not the best; I lost most of my wages at the card-table, and the rest went on drink. I know not whether drink and gambling are evils. I only know that they cheered many hours of my life, and caused me to forget the miseries of being. If drunkenness was a vice, I humoured it as a man might humour sickness or any other evil. But drink might have killed me, one will say. And sickness might have killed me, I answer. When a man is dead he knows neither hunger nor cold; he suffers neither from the cold of the night nor the craving of the belly. The philosophy is crude, but comforting, and it was mine. To gamble and drink was part of my nature, and for nature I offer no excuses. She knows what is best.
I could not save money, I hated to carry it about; it burned a hole in my pocket and slipped out. I was no slave to it; I detested it. How different now were my thoughts from those which buoyed up my spirit on first entering Kinlochleven! those illusions, like previous others, had been dispelled before the hard wind of reality. I looked on life nakedly, and henceforth I determined to shape my own future in such a way that neither I, nor wife, nor child, should repent of it. Although passion ran riot in my blood, as it does in the blood of youth, I resolved never to marry and bring children into the world to beg and starve and steal as I myself had done. I saw life as it was, saw it clearly, standing out stark from its covering of illusions. I looked on love cynically, unblinded by the fumes off the midden-heap of lust, and my life lacked the phantom happiness of men who see things as they are not.
The great proportion of the navvies live very pure lives, and women play little or no part in their existence. The women of the street seldom come near a model, even when the navvies come in from some completed job with money enough and to spare. The purity of their lives is remarkable when it is considered that they seldom marry. "We cannot bring children into the world to suffer like ourselves," most of them say. That is one reason why they remain single. Therefore the navvy is seldom the son of a navvy; it is the impoverished and the passionate who breed men like us, and throw us adrift upon the world to wear out our miserable lives.
CHAPTER XXVII DE PROFUNDIS
"I've got kitchen for my grub out of the mustard-pot of sorrow."
—Moleskin Joe.
At that time there were thousands of navvies working at Kinlochleven waterworks. We spoke of waterworks, but only the contractors knew what the work was intended for. We did not know, and we did not care. We never asked questions concerning the ultimate issue of our labours, and we were not supposed to ask questions. If a man throws red muck over a wall to-day and throws it back again to-morrow, what the devil is it to him if he keeps throwing that same muck over the wall for the rest of his life, knowing not why nor wherefore, provided he gets paid sixpence an hour for his labour? There were so many tons of earth to be lifted and thrown somewhere else; we lifted them and threw them somewhere else: so many cubic yards of iron-hard rocks to be blasted and carried away; we blasted and carried them away, but never asked questions and never knew what results we were labouring to bring about. We turned the Highlands into a cinder-heap, and were as wise at the beginning as at the end of the task. Only when we completed the job, and returned to the town, did we learn from the newspapers that we had been employed on the construction of the biggest aluminium factory in the kingdom. All that we knew was that we had gutted whole mountains and hills in the operations.