“It’s the soncy girl she looks with the sleep on her.”
Almost imperceptibly Norah opened her eyes. The transition was so quiet that she was hardly aware that she had slept, and those who looked on were hardly aware that she had wakened. It was Maire a Glan who had been speaking. The train now stood at a station and Micky’s Jim was walking up and down the platform, his pipe in his mouth and his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. Facing the window was a bookstall and a white-faced girl handing to some man a newspaper and a book with a red cover, Norah recollected that Fergus often read books with red covers just like the one that was handed over the counter of the bookstall. That it was possible to have a shop containing nothing but books and papers came as a surprise to Norah Ryan. Over the bookstall in white letters was the station’s name—Strabane. Of this town Norah had often heard. It was to the hiring market of Strabane that Dermod Flynn had gone two years ago. Other two trains stood at the station, one on each side, and both full of passengers.
“Where are all those people going, Maire a Glan?” asked Norah.
“Everywhere, as the man said,” answered the old woman, who was telling her rosary and taking no notice of anything but the black beads passing through her fingers.
A boy walked up and down in front of the carriage, selling oranges at fourpence a dozen. Micky’s Jim bought sixpence worth and handed them through the window, telling all inside to eat as many as they liked; he would pay. Maire a Glan left her beads aside until the feast was finished. The engine whistled; Micky’s Jim boarded the moving train and again the fields were running past and the telegraph wires rising and falling.
“ ‘Twon’t be long till we are on the streets of Derry now,” said Micky’s Jim, drawing another half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and digging out the cork with a clasp-knife.
“ ‘Twon’t be very long, no, sure,” said Willie the Duck, edging away from Micky’s Jim.
CHAPTER XII
DERRY
I
THEY stepped on the dry and dusty Derry streets, the whole fifteen of them, with their bundles over their shoulders or dangling from their arms. Norah Ryan, homesickness heavy on her heart, had eyes for everything; and everything on which she looked was so strange and foreign: the car that came along the streets, moving so quickly and never a horse drawing it; the shops where hair was taken off for a few pence and put on again for a few shillings; shops with watches and gold rings in the windows; shops where they sold nothing but books and papers; and the high clocks, facing four ways at once and looking all over the town and the country beyond.