"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?"