III
IN the chill, damp air of the early morning the two women tramped to their work, wearing their boots to save the tram fare. The old woman always walked with her head down, humming little tunes through her nose and breaking into a run from time to time. Her long red tongue was always out, slipping backwards and forwards over her upper lip, her hair, grey as a dull spring morning, eternally falling into her eyes, and her arms swinging out in front of her like two dead things as she trotted along.
The rag-store opened out on a narrow, smelling lane; the office where a few collared clerks bent over grimy ledgers and endless rows of figures was on a level with the street; the place where the women sorted the rags was a basement under the office. There were in all thirty human machines working in this cellar, which stretched into the darkness on all sides save one, and there it now and again touched sunshine, the weak sunshine that streamed through a dirty cobwebbed window, green with moisture and framed with iron bars.
All day long two gas-jets flared timidly in the basement, spluttering as if in protest at being condemned to burn in such a cavern. The women, bowed over their work, were for the most part silent; all topics of conversation had been exhausted long ago. Sometimes Monday morning was lively; many came fresh to their work full of accounts of a fight in which half the women of the close joined and which for some ended in the lock-up, for others with battered faces and dishevelled hair. These accounts roused a certain interest which lasted a few hours, then came the obstinate dragging silence again.
All day long they worked together in the murky cavern sorting the rags. The smell of the place was awful, suffocating almost; the damp and mouldy rags gave forth an unhealthy odour; dust rose from those that were drier and filled the place and the throats of the workers. Each woman knew every wrinkle of her neighbour’s face, on all the yellowish white and almost expressionless faces of the spectres of the cellar. And now and again the spectres sang their ghost-songs, which died away in the lone corners of the basement like wind in a churchyard.
It was amongst these women that Norah started work.
“A new start!” exclaimed one, a little sallow-faced thing who looked as if she had been gradually drying up for several years, on seeing the new-comer. “Ye’ll soon get the blush oot o’ yer cheeks here, lass!”
“D’ye know that there are only three people in the worl’ when all is said and done?” another woman called to Norah. “The rag-picker, the scavenger, and the grave-digger are the three folk who count most in the long run.”
Everybody but Norah laughed at this remark, though all, save Norah, had heard it made a thousand times before.
“Ah! lass, ye’ve the red cheek,” said a bow-legged girl of seventeen.