“The first job I got was the finishin’ of dongaree jackets, sewin’ buttons on them, and things like that! I was up in the mornin’ at six and went to bed the next mornin’ at one, and hard at it all the time I wasn’t sleepin’. Sunday was the same as any other day; always work, always the needle. I used to make seven shillin’s a week; half of that went in rent and the other half kept meself and my boy. Talk about teeth growin’ long with hunger at times when the work was none too plentiful! Sometimes, Norah——”
Sheila paused. Norah was listening intently, her lips a little apart, like a child’s.
“Sometimes, Norah, I went out beggin’ on the streets—me, a Frosses woman too,” Sheila resumed with a sigh. “Then one night when I asked a gentleman for a few pence to buy bread he handed me over to the police. Said I was accostin’ him. I didn’t even know what it meant at the time; now—But I hope ye never know what it means.... Anyway I was sent to jail for three weeks.”
“To jail, Sheila!” Norah exclaimed.
“True as God, child, and my boy left alone in that dirty attic. There was I not knowin’ what was happenin’ to him, and when I came out of prison I heard that the police had caught him wanderin’ out in the streets and put him in a home. But I didn’t see him; I was slapped into jail again.”
“What for, Sheila?”
“Child neglect, girsha,” said the woman, lifting her scissors and cutting fiercely at a strip of cloth as she spoke. “I don’t know how they made it out again’ me, but the law is far beyond simple people like us. I was put in for three months that time and when I came out——”
A tear dropped from Sheila’s eyes and fell on the cloth which lay on her lap.
“The little fellow, God rest his soul! was dead,” said the woman. “Then I hadn’t much to live for and I was like to die. But people can stand a lot one way and another, a terrible lot entirely. After that I thought of making shirts and I got a sewin’ machine from a big firm on the instalment system. A shillin’ a week I had to pay for the machine. I could have done well at the shirt-makin’, but things seemed somehow to be again’ me. On the sixth week I couldn’t pay the shillin’. It was due on a Friday and Saturday was my own pay day. I prayed to the traveller to wait for the morrow, but he wouldn’t, and took the machine away. ’Twas the big firm of —— too, that did that. Think of it! them with their mills and their riches and me only a poor woman. Nor it wasn’t as if I wasn’t wantin’ to pay neither. But that’s the way of the world, girsha; the bad, black world, cold as the rocks on Dooey Strand it is, aye, and colder.
“Sometimes after the sewin’ machine went I used to go out on the streets and sing songs, and at that sort of work, not at all becomin’ for a Frosses woman, I could always make the price of a bunk in the Rat-pit, the place where ye were last night, Norah. Ah! how often have I had my night’s sleep there! Then again I would come back to 47 and start some decent work that wasn’t half as easy or half as well paid as the singin’ of songs. So I went from one thing to another and here I am at this very minute.”