The girl was now walking alone to the village of Greenanore. There she would meet all the members of the party, and every step of the journey brought a thousand bygone memories vividly to her mind. Fergus she thought of, his good-bye at the cross-roads, the dog whining in Ballybonar, the lowing cow, the soft song of the sea. Would she ever see Fergus again? Where had he been all these years? Looking into the distance she could see the mountains that hemmed Glenmornan, and light clouds, white and fleecy as Candlemas sheep, resting on the tops of them. Further down, on the foothills, the smoke of peat-fires rose into the air, telling of the turf-savers who laboured on the brown bogs at the stacks and rikkles. Norah thought of Dermod Flynn; indeed she called him to mind daily when gazing towards the hills of Glenmornan, recollecting with a certain feeling of pride the boy’s demeanour at school and his utter indifference towards personal chastisement. The dreamy eyes of Dermod and his manner of looking through the school window at nothing in particular fascinated her; and the very remembrance of the youth standing beside her facing the map of the world always caused a pleasant thrill to run through her body. Now, as she looked at the hills of Glenmornan, the incidents of the morning on which she went to pull bog-bine there came back to her mind, and she wondered if Dermod Flynn thought the hills so much changed on the day when he was setting out for the rabble of Strabane.
A large iron bridge, lately built by the Congested Districts Board, spanned the bay between Frosses and Dooey. Norah crossed over this to the other side, where the black rocks, sharp and pointed, spread over the white sand. It was here that the women slept out on the mid-winter night many years ago; and now Norah had only a very dim remembrance of the event.
Up to the rise of the hill she hurried, and from the townland of Ballybonar looked back at Frosses: at the little strips of land running down to the sea, at the white lime-washed cabins dotted all over the parish, at Frosses graveyard and the lone sycamore tree that grew there, showing like a black stain against the sky. Seeing it, she thought of her father and said an “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” for the repose of his soul. Then her eye roved over Frosses again.
“Maybe after this I’ll never set my two eyes on the place,” she said, then added, “just like Fergus!”
The thought that she might never see the place again filled her with a certain feeling of importance which up to now had been altogether foreign to her.
II
AT the station she met the other members of the potato squad, fifteen in all. Some were sitting on their boxes, others on the bundles bound in cotton handkerchiefs which contained all their clothes and toilet requisites. The latter consisted of combs and hand-mirrors possessed by the women, and razors, the property of the men. Micky’s Jim was pacing up and down the platform, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets and a heavy-bowled wooden pipe in his mouth. From time to time he pulled the pipe from between his teeth, accompanying the action with a knowing shrug of his shoulders, and spat into the four-foot way.
“Is this yerself, Norah?” he exclaimed, casting a patronising glance at the girl as she entered the railway station. “Ye are almost late for the train. Did ye walk the whole way?... Ah! here she comes!”
The train came in sight, puffing round the curve; the women rose from their seats, clutched hastily at their bundles and formed into a row on the verge of the platform; the men, most of whom were smoking, took their pipes from their mouths, hit the bowls sharply against their palms, thus emptying them of white ash; then, with a feigned look of unconcern on their faces, they picked up their belongings with a leisure which implied that they were men well used to such happenings. They were posing a little; knowing that those who came to see them off would tell for days in Frosses how indifferently Mick or Ned took the train leading to the land beyond the water. “Just went on the train with no more concern on their faces than if they were going to a neighbour’s wake!” the Frosses people would say.
The train puffed into the station, the driver descended from his post, yawned, stretched his arms, and surveyed the crowd with a look of superior disdain. The fireman, with an oil-can in his hands, raced along the footplate and disappeared behind the engine, only to come back almost immediately, puffing and wiping the sweat from his face with a piece of torn and dirty rag.