“Why wouldn’t I be as tall as you are?” Norah replied, although Dermod had unknowingly squeezed her hand in a hard, tense grip. “Am I not a year and a half older?”
When her hand was released her skin showed white where Dermod’s fingers had gripped her, but she did not feel angry. On the contrary the girl was glad because he was so strong.
“Come over here!” cried Maire a Glan, who was sitting on her bundle beside the rail, smoking a black clay pipe and spitting on the deck.
The noise was deafening; the rowting of the cattle in the pens became louder; a man on the deck gave a sharp order; the gangway was pulled off with a resounding clash, the funnel began to rise and fall; Norah saw the pier move; a few women were weeping; some of the passengers waved handkerchiefs (none of them too clean) to the people on the quay; rails were bound together, hatches battened down; sailors hurried to and fro; a loud hoot could be heard overhead near the top of the funnel and the big vessel shuffled out to the open sea.
II
THE boat was crowded with harvestmen from Frosses, potato-diggers from Glenmornan and Tweedore; cattle drovers from Coleraine and Londonderry, second-hand clothes-dealers, bricklayers’ labourers, farm hands, young men and old, women and children; all sorts and conditions of people.
“There are lots of folk gathered together on this piece of floatin’ wood,” said Maire a Glan, crossing herself, a habit of hers, when speaking of anything out of the ordinary. “The big boat is a wonderful thing; beds with warm blankets and white sheets to sleep in, tables to sit down at and have tea in real cups and saucers, just the same as Father Devaney has at Greenanore, and him not out at all in the middle of the ocean on a piece of floatin’ wood!”
“And will we get a bed to sleep in?” asked Norah Ryan.
“Why should we be gettin’ a grand bed? We’re only the poor people, and the poor people have no right to these things on a big boat like this one,” said the old woman, putting her black clay pipe into the pocket of her apron. “There are no grand beds for people like us; they’re only for the gentry.”
“Wouldn’t a bed look nice on a Frosses curragh?” said Micky’s Jim, sitting down on the bundle belonging to Willie the Duck and pulling the cork from a bottle of whisky which he had procured in Derry. “Will ye have a drop, Maire a Glan?” he asked.