CHAPTER XXVI
THE PASSING DAYS
I
THEY came and went, days monotonously slow, each bearing with it its burden of sorrows and regrets, of fear and unhappiness. The life of the two women was ever the same: out of bed at five in the morning, a salutation exchanged with old Meg as she went to her work; breakfast—a crust of bread and a cup of tea; the light, weak and sickly, peeping through the narrow, murky window, the eternal scissors and needles, the white heaps of shirts, the feather-stitching and finishing. In the morning the cripple next door clattered downstairs on crutches, the card with the rude inscription, PARALYSED FOR LIFE, shaking to and fro as he moved. All day long he lay on the cold flagged pavement begging his daily bread. Tommy Macara, the lad with the rickets, came out singing to the landing on his way to the industrial school. He stuck his head through the door and shouted: “Ye twa women, warkin’ hard.” Both loved little Tommy, his cheery laugh, his childish carelessness, his poor body twisted out of shape by the humours of early disease. His legs would twitch as he stood at the door, making an effort to control the tremors; sometimes he would laugh awkwardly at this and hurry away. Thus the morning.
Noon.—A quarrel at No. 8. The two loose women who lived there argued about the spoils taken from a drunken sailor the night before, and came to blows. One was dressed, the other, just out of bed, had only time to wrap the blanket round her body. Both came out on the landing tearing at each other’s hair and swearing. All the doors in the place opened; women ragged to the point of nudity, men dirty and unshaven, hurried out to watch the fight, which was long and severe. The women bit and scratched, and the younger—Bessie was her name—a plump girl wearing the blanket on which the words STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT could be read at a distance—was deprived of her only article of apparel, and she scurried rapidly indoors. The onlookers laughed loudly and clapped their hands; the elder, a light-limbed lassie with very white teeth, returned to her room closing the door behind her. Now and again a shriek could be heard from the apartment, then a hoarse gurgle, as if somebody was getting strangled, afterwards silence. The watchers retired indoors, and peace settled on the stairhead. Only the two women, Sheila and Norah, never ceased work; the needles and scissors still sparkled over and through the white shirts.
Evening.—Meg returned half-tipsy and singing a chorus, half the words of which she had forgotten. The day’s work had been a very trying one, the dust rising from the rags did not agree with her asthma. On entering she looked fixedly at Sheila, shook her head sadly, ran her fingers over Norah’s hair and began the chorus again, but stopped in the middle of it and started to weep. After a while she reeled into her own room, closed the door behind her, and sank to sleep on the floor beside the dead fire.
Little Tom Macara came up the stair, looked in, the eternal smile on his pinched face, and cried out in a thin voice: “Ah! the women are warkin’ awa’ yet. They never have a meenit to spare!”
“Never a minute, Tom,” Sheila answered, and the boy went off, whistling a music-hall tune. Tom’s mother was consumptive, his father epileptic; he had two brothers and three sisters all older than himself. After Tom, the man with the crutches came upstairs. From the street to the top of the landing was a weary climb, but often he got helped on the journey; sometimes the two whores escorted him up, sometimes Sheila gave him an arm, and everybody on the stairs liked the man. He was always in good humour and could sing a capital song.
Later in the evening, those who indulged in intoxicants became drunk; an ex-soldier, with one sleeve of his coat hanging loosely from his shoulder, who lived with two women, kicked one unmercifully and got dragged off to prison; the two harlots netted two men, one of them a well-dressed fellow with a gold tie-pin and a ring on his finger, and took them to their room; the paralytic could be heard singing and his voice seemed to be ever so far away. Sheila and Norah were still busy with the shirts, sewing their lives into every stitch of their work.
“And them two women at No. 8, there’s not the least bit of harm in them at bottom,” Sheila would exclaim. “They help the old cripple up every time they meet him on the stairs. And to think of it! there’s seventeen thousand women like them in Glasgow!”
“God be good to us!”