Dermod resented the words of consolation and felt like rising and walking away from the girl, if her fair fingers had not been pressing so softly and tenderly against his cheek. He shrugged his shoulders and resigned himself to the ministrations of Norah.
“By God, I wasn’t long with him!” cried Micky’s Jim, kicking idly at Willie the Duck’s fiddle which still lay on the deck. “I just gave him one in the jaw and three on the guts. Ah! that was the way to do it! It takes a Glenmornan kiddie to use his mits in this bloomin’ hole. Glenmornan, and every inch of it, forever! Whoo! There’s no man on this boat could take a rise out of me; not one mother’s son! Fight! I could fight any damned mug aboard this bleedin’ vessel. Look at my fist; smell it! There’s the smell of dead men off it!”
Micky’s Jim, now doubly drunk with liquor and excitement, paced up and down the deck, challenging all aboard to fight, to put up their “fives” to him. Presently the quarrel became general.
All along the deck and down in the steerage cabin a terrible uproar broke forth; men fastened on to one another’s throats, kicking, tearing, and cursing loudly. The darkness had fallen; the buoys, floating past, bobbed up and down in the water, their little bright lights twinkling merrily. The pale ghost of a moon stole into the heavens and a million stars kept it company. But those aboard the Derry boat took little heed of the moon or stars. Over coils of ropes, loose chains, boxes and bundles, sleeping women and crying babies, they staggered, fought and fell, trampling everything with which they came in contact.
A man went headlong down the steerage stair and a second followed, thrown from above. Beside the door a bleeding face, out of which gleamed a pair of lustrous eyes, glowered sinister for a moment, a fist hit sharply against the eyebrows, the eyes closed; a knife shone, glancing brightly against the woodwork, the man with the bloodstained face groaned and fell; a woman crouching at the bottom of the stairs was trampled upon, she shrieked and the shriek changed into a volley of curses, which in turn died away into a low, murmurous plaint of tearful pity. Men sought one another’s faces grunting and gasping, long lean arms stretched out everywhere and fists shot through the smoke-laden atmosphere of the steerage ... splotches of blood showed darkly on the deck ... somewhere from below came the tinkle of glasses and the loud chorus of an Irish folk-song.
The fighters, overcome by their mad exertion, collapsed three or four in a heap and slept where they had fallen. Outside on the open deck Micky’s Jim lay prostrate, his head on the lap of Maire a Glan, who was also asleep, her two remaining upper teeth, tobacco-stained and yellow, showing in the moonlight. All over the deck men and women lay curled up like dogs. Near the rail a woman’s bare arm showed for a moment over a bundle of rags, then twined snakelike round the neck of a sleeping child. On a bench astern Norah Ryan sat, her shawl drawn tightly over her head and her eyes fixed on the moon-silvered sea that stretched out behind. A great loneliness had overcome her; a loneliness which she did not understand. It seemed as if something had snapped within her, as if every fabric of her life had been torn to shreds. The stars overhead looked so cold, everything seemed so desolate. A chill wind swept against her face, and she could hear the water soughing along the vessel’s side and crying wearily. Snores, groans, and sleepy voices came through the open doors and resounded in the passage at the head of the steerage stairs. Human bodies were heaped together in compact masses everywhere. The fighting had come to an end—though now and then, as a flame flickers up for a second over a dying fire, a man would totter from a drunken sleep and challenge everybody on board to fight him. But even when speaking loudest he would drop to the deck with a thud and fall asleep again.
IV
LISTENING to the engine pulsing heavily and the propeller hitting the water with an intermittent buzz Norah Ryan fell asleep. On opening her eyes again she could see the moon further up the sky and the stars twinkling colder than ever. Dermod Flynn, his face swollen horribly, was beside her, looking at her, and she was pleased to see him.
“Sit down beside me, Dermod,” she said. “It will be warmer for two.”
He sat down, his eyes sparkling with pleasure; the girl nestled close to his side in the darkness, and one timid little hand stole softly into his.