The Irish girls sat by their bedsides and made no sign of undressing. I slid into bed quietly with my trousers still on; most of the men stripped with evident unconcern, nakedly and shamelessly.
"The darkness is a good curtain if the women want to take off their clothes," said Micky's Jim, as he extinguished the only candle in the place. He re-lit a match the next moment, and there was a hurried scampering under the blankets in the stalls on the other side of the passage.
"That's a mortal sin, Micky's Jim, that ye're doin'," said Norah Ryan, and the two strange women laughed loudly as if very much amused at persons who were more modest than themselves.
"Who are ye lyin' with, Norah Ryan? Is it Gourock Ellen?" asked my bedmate.
"It is," came the answer.
"D'ye hear that, Dermod—a nun and a harridan in one bed?" said Jim under his breath to me.
Outside the raindrops were sounding on the roof like whip-lashes. Jim spoke again in a drowsy voice.
"We're keepin' some poor cows from their warm beds to-night," he said.
I kept awake for a long while, turning thoughts over in my mind. The scenes on the 'Derry boat, and my recent experience in the soggy fields, had taken the edge off the joy that winged me along the leading road to Strabane. I was now far out into the heart of the world, and life loomed darkly before me. The wet day went to crush my dreams and the ardour of my spirits. Hitherto I had great belief in women, their purity, virtue, and gentleness. But now my grand dreams of pure womanhood had collapsed. The foul words, the loose jokes and obscene songs of the two women who were strangers, the hard, black, bleeding and scabby knees that Gourock Ellen showed to us at the fire had turned my young visions into nightmares. The sight of the girls ploughing through the mucky clay, and the wolfish stare of the old man who envied those who fed beside a dungheap were repellent to me. I looked on life in all its primordial brutishness and found it loathsome to my soul.
Only that morning coming up the Clyde, when Norah and I looked across the water to a country new to both of us, my mind was full of dreams of the future. But the rosy-tinted boyish dreams of morning were shattered before the fall of night. Maybe the old man who lay by the dung-heap came to Scotland full of dreams like mine. Now the spirit was crushed out of him; he was broken on the wheel of life, and he had neither courage to rob, sin, nor die. He could only beg his bit and apologise for begging. The first day in Scotland disgusted me, made me sick of life, and if it were not that Norah Ryan was in the squad I would go back to Jim MaCrossan's farm again.