Moleskin Joe E-Book

Patrick Macgill

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 361

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Moleskin Joe is one of the most memorable characters to appear in Patrick MacGill's first two books, Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit. This sequel, first published in 1923, recalls the tramps and navvies MacGill encountered during his time on the road in Scotland and the north of England in the early years of the twentieth century. It centres around the adventures of Moleskin Joe, with his philosophy of 'there's a good time comin', although we may never live to see it', who in this book falls in love with a young Irish woman he meets on his travels. Filled with superb characterisation, humour, poignancy and eloquence, Moleskin Joe is a vivid portrayal of the hardships of the immigrant experience, which McGill not only experienced himself, but also successfully exposed to a huge audience through his writing.

Leseprobe

MOLESKIN JOE

This edition first published in 2000 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburgh EH9 1QS

© Patrick MacGill

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

EBOOK ISBN: 9780857907103PRINT ISBN: 9781841580371

Originally published by Herbert Jenkins

Subsequently published by Caliban Books17 South Hill Park GardensLondon, NW31983

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION

1. MOLESKIN JOE

2. OFF TO THE WARS

3. SEARCHING

4. TRIALS

5. NAVVIES

6. THE CAVE

7. THE RETURN

8. CUNNING ISAACS

9. THE OLD GRIND

10. NEW DUDS

11. THE RIDER

12. THE CONCEALED BED

13. VISITORS

14. THE ANCIENT

15. SHEILA CANNON

16. THE PRIEST

17. IN THE NIGHT

18. HUSBAND AND WIFE

19. THE JOURNEY

20. TWO WOMEN

21. THE PARTING

INTRODUCTION

Moleskin Joe is a navvy, an itinerant construction worker.

He is an outcast of society, a children’s bogey, the shunned of civilisation – of which he is the pioneer. It is he who goes out into the deserted ways of the world, who works and dies in combat with Nature, the rude uncultured labourer under whose feet railways, bridges, cities and castles spring into being.

The novel that bears his name is the story of his love for Sheila Cannon. The action of the novel starts in 1915 at the building of a Yorkshire waterworks and ends in the 1920s at a construction camp in the Highlands of Scotland.

It is an unlikely setting for a love story; the world of navvies’ bothies and model lodging houses – a world that the author, Patrick MacGill, knew well from first-hand, youthful experience. It is also an account of the emotions, instincts and way of life of a underclass of society written by an author who understood the navvy, the tramp, the poor and ragged of the earth because he had been one of them.

MacGill was born into poverty on a subsistence farm in Glenties, Donegal, around March 1890. After a rudimentary education at the local school, which ended at the age of ten, he did casual work on local farms before going off, aged twelve, to the hiring fair at Strabane, in County Tyrone. He had a variety of jobs on farms, under good masters and bad, before going, like so many of his fellow countrymen, to Scotland to find work at the potato-picking. The story of MacGill’s early life and hardships is told in his first novel, Children of the Dead End, published in 1914. Patrick MacGill appears in this novel as its central character Dermod Flynn and the autobiographical nature of the novel was freely admitted by the author in his Foreword to the first edition:

Most of my story is autobiographical. Moleskin Joe and Carroty Dan are true to life; they live now, and for all I know to the contrary may be met with on some precarious job, in some evil-smelling lodging-house, or, as suits these gipsies of labour, on the open road.

Dermod Flynn/Patrick MacGill meets Moleskin Joe when Dermod has lost, through gambling, all the money he earned from the season’s potato-picking. He cannot face the shame of returning home to Donegal without any money to support his family and, with the end of the harvest season, has to take to the life of the tramp. Moleskin’s homespun philosophy, ‘There’s a good time comin’, though we may never live to see it’, sustains Dermod, and the two men become friends and share many experiences together, including a spell labouring at the Kinlochleven Hydroelectric construction site in Argyll. The novel Moleskin Joe, published in 1923, takes up the life of its title character a few years after the incidents related in Children of the Dead End, although Moleskin, who was about forty in the first novel set around 1909, is only thirty-three in 1915. However as MacGill was intending to portray a love affair, long frustrated although eventually happily concluded, between Moleskin and Sheila, who is just eighteen at the start of the story, he doubtless wished to reduce the age differential between the two central characters.

MacGill’s first novel, and its interlinked sequel The Rat-Pit (1915), which tells the story of Dermod Flynn’s doomed love, Norah Ryan, burst on the literary world with remarkable force. There had been nothing quite like this before in its depiction of Irish immigrants struggling to survive in a hostile Scotland, in what one of his characters called ‘the black country with the cold heart’. This was popular literature written with unusual power, driven by a palpable anger at the injustices and inequalities of society, enlivened by passages of memorably vivid description created from hard-won, first hand experience. A silent, despised, and indeed, feared class of society had been for the first time given a voice, and a voice which came authentically from within that class.

As novels of proletarian life MacGill’s early works can be compared with such classics of the genre as Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which was also published in 1914. MacGill’s debt to the novels of Zola, which he discovered while working in Glasgow as a railway labourer, is clear.

I lived with Hugo’s characters, I suffered with them and wept for them in their troubles.

MacGill escaped from the life of the navvy through his self-taught literary skills. While still a worker at the Kinlochleven construction camp he had successfully submitted descriptive sketches to the Daily Express. When the contract at Kinlochleven ended he came south and found employment on the Caledonian Railway, as a permanent-way worker on the line from Greenock to Wemyss Bay. He arranged for an Irish printer to bring out a collection of the poems he had written during his navvying days and sold them as Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook from door to door round Greenock. One house he called on was that of the novelist and journalist, Neil Munro, who wrote generously in his weekly column in the Glasgow Evening News about MacGill:

He has done even better than the majority of modern poets who venture upon the publication of their own works under more favourable circumstances than his, for he has induced a good many people to buy his poetry who never indulged in any such extravagance before, and he is likely to have a modest profit left after meeting with his printer … MacGill is a native of Ulster, as his tongue betrays. ‘The fact that everything has been said about everything does not naturally suggest that everything has been sung about everything,’ he remarks in the Introduction to his booklet. ‘Some day – when I become famous – I will take immense pleasure in reminding the world, like Mr Carnegie, that I started on the lowest run of the ladder, or, as is more correct, in looking for the spot where the ladder was placed.’

MacGill acknowledged in an interview with the Glasgow labour leader Patrick Dollan (later to become Lord Provost of Glasgow) in the Scottish socialist journal Forward in June 1914, that this article of Munro’s was to be instrumental in the development of his career. Munro’s praise was valuable enough, the author of Para Handy and John Splendid was at the time one of Scotland’s most influential critics, but his column was seen by Andrew Lang, then perhaps the pre-eminent British literary critic, who reviewed MacGill’s collection of poetry:

… with the result that orders came to me from all parts of England. Altogether, I sold 8000 copies … in that way. Shortly afterwards I was offered a post as descriptive writer on the Daily Express, which I took for three months, thereafter going to the library at Windsor Castle, where I am now located.

MacGill does not seem to have been entirely happy in Fleet Street but was rescued from it by a job offer from the most unlikely of quarters. Canon John Neale Dalton, who had been tutor to King George V and domestic chaplain to three successive sovereigns, was Treasurer and Steward of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and took the young MacGill off to Windsor to work with him as secretary and librarian. MacGill’s formal education, a few years at a village school in Donegal, was hardly designed to fit him for his duties at Windsor, working on ancient manuscripts with Canon Dalton. However MacGill seems to have been an auto-didact of quite prodigious proportions – his course of reading while navvying on the Caledonian Railway embraced not only Zola but Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Montaigne’s Essays and John Ruskin’s Sesame and the Lilies as well as Marx’s Das Kapital. Neil Munro, in his article, noted that the young MacGill had translated Goethe’s Erl-King and La Fontaine’s Fables – his knowledge of German and French being ‘mainly derived from dictionaries’.

MacGill lived at Windsor until he enlisted in the Army on the outbreak of war, and his Foreword to Children of the Dead End is written from ‘The Garden House, Windsor’ – an address and a world far removed from the navvies’ bothies of the story. Dalton remained a friend and MacGill’s 1917 war novel The Brown Brethren was dedicated to ‘my friend JND’.

Patrick MacGill’s political views were formed during his early years and moulded by his reading. As he told Patrick Dollan:

I suppose I must have been a Socialist always, and I did not require much conversion.

While working on the Caledonian Railway he organised a strike over pay and working conditions. He describes this strike in very similar terms in his interview with Patrick Dollan and in Children of the Dead End and the two accounts are of some interest in providing a degree of cross-checking on the autobiographical nature of the novel. He told Dollan:

We were working in an ashpit which was the nearest approach to hell I have known. Into this pit were emptied the ashes, still hot, from the engines which passed over it. We had to go down into this pit and throw the ashes up into the wagon – a feat by no means easy to perform. Sometimes we would throw the ashes up, only to catch the brim, and back would come the hot ashes, to tumble all over us, burning our clothing and scorching our skin.

The strike having failed, his fictional alter ego Dermod Flynn:

sent a letter to the railway company stating our grievance. No one except myself would sign it, but all the men said that my letter was a real good one. It must have been too good. A few days later a clerk was sent from the head of the house to inform me that I would get sacked if I wrote another letter of the same kind.

That day MacGill left the railway and went off on the tramp with Moleskin Joe. Later, in his pre-literary career, he was a member of the Social Democratic party in Greenock. The Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1881, was Britain’s first Marxist party. MacGill found its members ‘too Marxian in speech – but fine fellows for all that’ and thought that their talk of the ‘Marxian analysis of Capitalism’ was not the best way of recruiting socialists.

MacGill’s socialist politics were not essentially a matter of book learning or theory but rather a human response to the sufferings of his fellow men. Perhaps this is why his reaction to the question of Irish independence was never particularly strong – the form of government was of less concern to him than the relationship between the weak and the powerful, the worker and the master.

His concern for the experiences of the ordinary man carried forward seamlessly into his series of war-time novels – three of them, The Amateur Army, The Red Horizon and The Great Push are every bit as autobiographical as Children of the Dead End or The Rat-Pit. In these books he gave the experiences, thoughts, fears and emotions of the private soldier a lively and authentic voice.

After the war MacGill continued to write but without ever quite recapturing the striking success of his early novels. Moleskin Joe, with its roots in his early formative experiences, is the only one of the later novels which has consistently found a readership. The figure of Joe and setting of the novel in the world of the navvy was seen by a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘the best part of it’ but he clearly found much of the novel, particularly the scenes involving Sheila’s four-year-old son, the curiously named ‘Cunning Isaacs’, to be over-sentimental. Indeed the depiction of the good influence of little Isaacs on the dwellers in the navvies’ shack does perhaps strain credibility and verges on the mawkish.

MacGill married in November 1915, while on home leave recuperating from a wound sustained during the Battle of Loos in October 1915. He and his wife, the novelist Margaret Gibbons, settled in Queen’s Road, Hendon, where they stayed until they emigrated with their three daughters to the United States around 1930.

A play based on a wartime incident in the trenches, Suspense, was produced in London in 1930 and another play, So Said the Woman, was later staged in Hollywood and Broadway. Suspense was filmed in 1930.

MacGill’s move to America, which seems to have been both an attempt to find work in the film industry and a search for a better climate (a wartime gas attack had left him with chest problems), was not a great success. Helen Spenser published in 1937, when he was only forty-seven, proved to be his last work. No novels appeared during the remaining twenty-six years of his life. While ill-health doubtless played a major part in this long silence, there must also be the suspicion that the further MacGill was removed from his early experiences, the vivid sources of inspiration for Children of the Dead End, The Rat-Pit, The Great Push and Moleskin Joe, the less convincing was his work and the thinner the vein of inspiration.

His best work, however, has abundant strength, vitality and energy – like Moleskin Joe himself.

Brian D. Osborne

January 2000

CHAPTER 1

MOLESKIN JOE

Remote from mansion and from mart,

Beyond the outer furrowed fields –

One with the rock he cleaves apart,

One with the weary pick he wields –

Bowed with his weight of discontent,

Beneath the heavens sagging grey –

His steaming shoulders stark and bent

He drags his joyless years away.

– From The Navvy.

Moleskin Joe was in a strange mood on the day that the Hermiston Reservoir burst. But the mood was his not on that day alone, but on several preceding it. Seven in all, perhaps. If counted on his fingers, as he generally counted, he would have found that tally to be correct.

It had all started – the mood had come into being – a week previously. He was on the road from Liverpool, tramping to Hermiston. At Liverpool he was paid off a boat newly in from Australia. At Hermiston, on the Yorkshire moors, his mates of the olden days were building a reservoir. Moleskin wanted to see them and set out on foot, after spending all his money in a seaport boozing den.

The season was summer. Cows grazed nightly in the rich fields, and Moleskin was a good milker. Though a steady walker, he was apt to stumble now and again across farmyard fowls in the darkness, which, as he often vowed, was unlucky – for the fowls. These things, recorded without comment, may explain how a man without a penny may fare well on the highways of England.

One evening, at ten o’clock, Moleskin housed himself in a wayside barn, stretched out his limbs in the straw and was presently half-asleep. The building was a large and roomy apartment, and Moleskin being considerate and thoughtful had shut the door behind him. This was a very wise precaution, as he had found from long experience. The opening of the door always gave time for defence.

Not more than five minutes after his entry the door opened again, and a man and woman came in. Silhouetted against the night the male showed himself to be dressed in the appointments of a soldier, but in the darkness the faces of both were invisible. Coming in a few yards, they halted and embraced. Moleskin stiffened on the straw and waited. The woman was sobbing.

‘Now, you silly, don’t cry!’ mumbled the man.

‘But, Dick, it’s so awful!’

‘It’s only as how you think of it,’ said the soldier. ‘It’ll all be over ’fore Christmas, and I’ll be back with the brass band playin’ in front –’

‘But I’m afraid, Dick,’ she sobbed in a choking voice that was hardly audible.

‘Afraid, you silly!’ laughed the man with affected carelessness. ‘Now, tell me, what are you afraid of?’

He caught her in his arms and kissed her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘You’ll maybe get killed!’

‘Killed!’ was his answer. ‘Only good folk get killed. Anyway, we’ll never go near the trenches. I heard today that the war will be over in a fortnight. Garrison duty, that’s what we’re going for, Nan.’

‘I don’t believe it, Dick. I don’t believe it!’ sobbed the girl. ‘They’ll kill you, that’s what they’ll do. And if that happens –’

‘ ’Twon’t happen,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ll see to it.’

‘If anything happens to you, I’ll die!’ she said, as if not hearing his remark. She sank on his breast, crying as if her heart would break.

‘Now, you’re not to cry like that, you silly wee dear,’ said the man, kissing her. ‘I cannot stand it! I want you to laugh, just as I am doing.’ His voice was strangely broken, even as he strove to cheer her, and it was evident to Moleskin that the soldier himself was almost on the point of tears.

‘But I’m afraid,’ she responded dejectedly.

‘Tomorrow will see you away and then night and day will be lonely till you come back again. If you ever come back,’ she added, gulping down her tears with an effort.

‘I’ll come back!’ was his lame reassurance. ‘Garrison duty, that’s what they are sending our regiment on.’

For half-an-hour Moleskin lay there listening, at times angry with ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ were, who were responsible for the sad parting, at times on the point of tears, brought on by the helpless, hopeless passion of the young girl, Nan, and deeper than all these emotions and sensations was his own feeling of loneliness, and not being wanted. No woman ever wept when he departed, nor laughed with joy when he returned. For the first time this fact struck against his consciousness, giving him a feeling that was almost awe. He realised that he had no woman friend, that he never had one, that, in fact, he had hardly ever spoken to a woman. And his age was thirty-three!

A giant in build, handsome, and not at all stupid, Moleskin Joe was a superman among his navvy brethren. In a manner he was a noteworthy individual, and his fame as a fighter, a worker and even a drinker, was known to most inmates of shacks and doss-houses up and down the country, and varied incidents of his life were common gossip amongst the migratory peoples of the road. These stories were, of course, distorted and magnified until the narrative spun in a Manchester ‘model’ had little semblance to the actuality which had footing in a Glasgow doss-house.

This, as far as can be ascertained, is the story of Moleskin’s early years.

History had no report of his birth. He had been found in a roadside barn one morning, thirty-three years ago, his layette a threadbare petticoat, and attached to the petticoat was a simple message scrawled on brown paper: ‘Jos his naim don be crule to him His mother.’ The probable age of the child was fourteen days.

Joe was discovered, the matter reported to the police, whereupon the parish in which the human atom was found took the said atom in charge, and it was entered upon the list of resident inmates of the parish workhouse.

Here he remained until he reached the age of eleven, then was transferred into the keeping of a farmer. In this vocation, Joe did various jobs, herded and foddered cattle, gathered potatoes and washed them, shoo’d crows away from the seedfields, and engaged in the many varied operations of farm life.

He got up at five in the morning. (‘Lie-abeds never get anywhere,’ said the farmer.) He was fed sparingly. (‘Full sacks cannot bend to work,’ said the farmer, though the sack, which was Joe, being empty could hardly stand upright.) He was paid no wages. (‘Money would get the like of him into mischief.’) He was given no holidays. (‘Holidays for him, the base-begotten!’)

The rod was applied to him without stint or sparing. (‘I’ll never spoil him by sparing the switch!’ The farmer was a respectable Christian).

Joe went to bed early, as soon as he had finished his day’s work. Ten o’clock was the hour. The rule of the house was strict on this matter. Staying up late might lead the youngster into mischief. But Joe, humble and docile, never showed any particular bent towards mischief, though on several occasions it was discovered that he went to bed and really fell asleep without taking off his clothes. Possibly, with base-begotten impertinence, Joe was too weary to remove his raiment.

This not being exactly Christian, the farmer, when he discovered it, was constrained to waken the sleeper, make him remove his clothes and chastise him with vigour.

But despite the farmer’s care, Joe was guilty of a serious transgression when he reached the age of fourteen, and might have really been useful as a servant. He went away. Where he had gone to was unknown, but six years later a man dressed in the garb of a sailor came to the farmhouse and asked if the farmer were about.

‘I’m the farmer,’ said the man to whom he addressed the question.

‘And where’s him that was here six years ago?’ asked the sailor.

‘Dead,’ was the answer.

‘Chancin’ my arm on a loser,’ said the sailor, sorrowfully.

‘You look upset,’ said the farmer. ‘What did you want him for?’

‘To make him die violent,’ was the sailor’s admission. The sailor was Moleskin Joe, who had just returned from a long sea-voyage in which he had been ‘an A.B. before the mast,’ which modernly understood, meant that he had been a coal-trimmer in a stokehole.

But the life of the open sea did not attract Moleskin; the open road was more to his liking. He fell in with the fraternity of the roving casual workers, the buck-navvies.

The buck-navvy is a type of workman in whom are the qualities (or lack of them) of the hobo, sundowner, vagrant and tramp. He is an outcast of society, a children’s bogey, the shunned of civilisation – of which he is the pioneer. It is he who goes out into the deserted ways of the world, who works and dies in combat with Nature, the rude uncultured labourer under whose feet railways, bridges, cities and castles spring into being.

Joe was his name and the soubriquet ‘Moleskin’ was acquired, the why and when of this acquirement being untabulated in the recollection of the possessor.

His career from the age of twenty, though varied, had in it many recurrent episodes. When working he wrought hard, never at so much the hour, but so much the task. ‘Not by the time, but by the piece,’ was his motto. Change was the breath of life to the man and all transitions in space were performed on Shank’s Mare. Today he worked on a new railway in the South of England, next week he blasted slag in the Scottish Highlands. He slept easily out of doors in the summer, the lee of a hedge his shelter, a stone his pillow, the moon his lamp.

In winter when work was scarce and storm-swept hedgerows were poor sanctuary, Moleskin went on holiday. His manner of obtaining a holiday was very novel and quite effective. In some crowded thoroughfare he would walk up to a plate-glass window, shove his foot or fist through it and wait until the ubiquitous policeman appeared. Then, under another name, he would become a guest of His Majesty the King and have his winter residence in a hostel where food and clothing were supplied free.

Although his history made sorry reading Moleskin Joe was a man of kindly attributes. If strength and courage are cardinal virtues Joe had both, ‘but not worth a tinker’s damn, either of them,’ as he indirectly remarked in after years when he tried to raise the price of a ‘wet’ on two medals, Distinguished Conduct and Military, which he had won in France.

His life was one without scope or aim. His immediate needs were his constant reckoning. A thirty-six-hour shift never came amiss to him. There was money to burst at the end. But a year’s labour of ten-hour days, labour continuous and cohesive, never entered into his scheme of things. For him, as for so many others, there was no objective, no end which was worth attainment.

Moleskin was fundamentally a courteous individual. He was civil, even in argument, which was not a property of his mates, who mostly mistook civility for servility. This sometimes gave a false impression to those who knew him but slightly. In the most heated moment, impulse with him did not always lead to immediate action. Although he knew that the opinions of a man who argues with his fists are always respected, he would continue arguing the point even when fists were uplifted.

Moleskin was never, as he often vowed when the fair sex was a subject for discussion, much of a hand with the wenches. He saw further than the courtship, he saw the marriage. The whole story of love and matrimony was to him a month of slop and a lifetime of saltpetre. ‘Wenches are always nice, but the nicest are them you’re not buckled to!’ was his pet aphorism.

But life is a series of constant changes, fresh angles of observation, and new sense of values. Such a change had come to Moleskin Joe now in the late summer of 1915, and a conversation overheard in a wayside barn was responsible. He had just returned from a voyage to the Antipodes. How he had started on that voyage was a mystery to himself. All that he remembered was a visit to a pal, a coal-trimmer in an outgoing vessel, which stood in the Mersey.

Moleskin had a drink in the fo’c’sle and a smoke of some queer Eastern mixture which might have been opium. He fell asleep and on the noon of the following day he awoke to find the vessel out at sea. A coal-trimmer who should have reported had not turned up and Moleskin, being versed in the art of trimming, got the job.

He was still in the barn. The lovers had long since taken their departure, one to prepare for war, the other to weep for the soldier who was to leave her. When Moleskin fell asleep he dreamt of Nan, a beautiful supplicating Nan who asked him not to go away, not to get killed. He awoke from the dream feeling mystified and very unhappy. It seemed to him that in one night he had suddenly changed, or had been forced to change, his angle of vision, that life opened out a wider prospect, showing an objective worth striving for. The objective as yet lay beyond the field of his experience, but it existed. In it was a woman, a woman’s sympathy, a woman’s caresses. But what did he want with a woman? he argued. He never cared much for them, and now he was too hard in the horn to have any truck with the sex.

‘Me, tied to a petticoat!’ he snorted, as he took to the road again.

In the late afternoon of the next day he arrived at Hermiston, a lonely stretch of Yorkshire moor where a large reservoir, on which the navvies had been working for two years, was almost completed. The process of clearing up the place was now in progress, derricks were being dismantled, light railways broken, rails unscrewed, sleepers stacked, and tool-sheds crammed with implements of labour.

But Joe took no notice of these things. His mind was heavy with the mood born in the wayside barn, that vague sensation of loneliness, sterility, incompleteness, which had never been his before. Life was passing by, its days thrown off one by one like the decade beads of a rosary. And for it there was nothing to show, nothing of those little things that pin man’s mortal existence within limits, a home, wife and children, a seat by the fireside at night, a lighted lamp and, perhaps, a gramophone.

He was passing by a huddle of discarded wood, empty barrels, tins, wire and rusty iron, when he met Sheila Cannon.

‘Here you are again, Moleskin Joe?’ was her exclamation when she met him. He looked at her in surprise. He remembered seeing her two years before, while she was yet a child, little more than sixteen, a rather shy creature, endowed with that grace which betokens the delicate transition of girlhood into womanhood. Now the transition had taken place. The child was no more and Moleskin found himself looking at a young woman, who in face and figure was ravishingly beautiful.

Her eyes of deep blue, curtained with heavy lashes, gazed on the man with a look of welcome. Her chin, charmingly chiselled, was held at a piquant angle, unconscious and unstudied. The delicate profile, the firm and supple neck, the lithe body which the bright sunshine lighted in a hundred subtle gleams of colour, brought forth in a mysterious way that borrowed nothing from pose or artificiality, the hidden curves of her body, the style and harmony which is youth’s and woman’s.

‘Sheila Cannon!’ Moleskin stammered in confusion, feeling for some reason pleased and uncomfortable at the same moment. ‘If I met you in the street I wouldn’t know you!’

‘And why wouldn’t you?’ she inquired.

‘Because you’ve changed so much!’

‘Not for the worse, I hope?’ she asked with a blush.

‘No,’ Moleskin stammered. ‘You are good-looking. I mean, you are very good-looking. I mean, I never saw –’ He came to an abrupt clumsy stop and gazed helplessly at the girl. ‘And your dad, where is he now?’ he asked desperately, treading safer ground.

‘He’s got a job here as night watchman,’ Sheila remarked. ‘He was in bad health for a while and had two months’ holiday at the sea. Now he’s here and much better. Where have you come from now, Joe?’

‘Australia,’ was his answer.

‘I suppose you will be going for a soldier now?’ she inquired. ‘Just the same wild Moleskin always!’

‘Who said I was wild?’ he inquired.

‘Everyone says it,’ the girl confessed, looking at him. ‘But I’d rather have a wild Moleskin than a tame one. And I would be sorry if you went away and got killed.’

‘Do you mean that?’ he asked, a startled look showing on his face.

‘Well, who does want anybody to get killed?’ was her inquiry. ‘Now I must go and get my father his dinner. Goodbye, Joe.’

Moleskin made his way to the huddle of shacks occupied by the navvies. Three times on his journey he looked back at the girl. On the first occasion she did not see him; on the second occasion she glanced sideways at Joe, then turned her head quickly away as if caught in an action of which she was ashamed. The third time she waved her hand to him, to which action Joe responded. But he was too late for her to see. She had already disappeared within the hut where she and her father dwelt.

After a while Moleskin found himself in a shack owned by the ganger, Billy Davis. Billy was a time-bitten worthy, who had been a works’ foreman since the very beginning of things. But something of greater import was filling the old man’s life at that moment. A son of his had been gazetted an officer in the army.

Many whom Moleskin knew off and on for years were in the shack: Ganger Macready, Digger Marley, Carroty Sclatter-guff, Horse Roche, Tom the Moocher and Sid the Slogger, and most of these, good fellows all, either in a fight or a drinking bout, were on the point of joining the army to have a whack at the Germans.

Tom the Moocher, to whom pugilism and pyorrhoea had scarcely left a tooth, was going, not from any sense of patriotism it must be confessed, but because there was a man, a mate of his own, who made a fortune in the South African War ‘by pickin’ up things.’

Sid the Slogger was also joining up. He had been in the army before, in the Holmshire Regiment, and was drummed out for some misdemeanour. A sergeant was responsible for this happening, and Sid was joining the old regiment to get even with the sergeant.

‘When there’s a scrap on, it’s easy pluggin’ a bloke unbeknowin’!’ he said. ‘Simple as winkin’!’

‘And what are you goin’ to do, Moleskin?’ asked Ganger Macready, a six-foot giant who was on the point of donning khaki, because he felt that there might be a chance of becoming a quartermaster-sergeant, a post with possibilities.

‘Lyin’ doggo,’ was Moleskin’s answer. ‘I don’t want to get killed.’

‘Afraid?’ asked Macready in a voice half-taunting and half-timorous. ‘Cold steel’s not to your likin’, eh?’

Moleskin pulled up a sleeve, showing a red scar on his forearm, pulled his shirt neck apart and disclosed a somewhat similar scar across his shoulder.

‘Met with an accident?’ asked Macready.

‘Knifed,’ was Moleskin’s rejoinder. ‘I have three like these on the thick o’ my leg, a Lascar’s doin’s at Port Said. That’s only one leg! You should see the other! If I’d a pound for every stab of cold steel on my carcass, I wouldn’t fight in this damned war. I’d run it! So, shurrup, Macready; I’m not goin’.’

Moleskin was not going! He was not particularly averse to fighting. In fact, his history, if mere physical events were recorded, would have shown a certain tendency towards that type of self-expression. He did not fear hardships. His life was an annal of hardships.

But to salute an unlicked cub, because that cub had pips on his shoulder straps, was something that Moleskin could not do. Therefore he was not going to join up!

The catchword: ‘Come and Lick the Germans’, had no effect on the man. He had seen Germans, some good, some bad, and so entirely like any other race, that the desire to lick them was no sufficient urge to Moleskin.

Come and Fight for Your Country! That stared at him from every hoarding, but was not sufficient to allure a man whose country consisted of all that was under his fingernails.

And then there was Sheila Cannon.

His thoughts were filled with Sheila Cannon. Her eyes, her soft neck and white arms twinkled across the tablet of his mind, rushing into shape, glimmering, dissolving. A great unreasoned happiness had taken possession of the man. Even the dark hut seemed very light, comfortable and filled with hope. The inmates looked very strange, more brotherly in some way, of different nature from the men he had known before. More homely. That was it. And somehow he felt sorry for them and sorry for himself.

That evening he was absent from the shack for a long time. None knew where he had gone and on his return he would give no explanation to anyone. He simply had a stroll round the moors, and a navvy who strolls round is unknown. It meant doing something without purpose. Strolling round a farmhouse in the darkness, or round a public house, could be explained. The first would mean a stolen fowl for the next meal, the latter a free drink. But simply strolling round! Moleskin, who did the strolling, could hardly explain the phenomenon. But, of course, there was Sheila!

Moleskin had taken a sudden interest in the shack which held her. It was a place of beauty as shacks go. There were a few roses attached to the walls, a pot of geraniums in the window, a lamp with a pink shade, a dainty dresser and a clock. Not much else, but in outward show and inward comfort it far surpassed the other habitations of the encampment. There were in all three women in the shack, Susan Saunders, Sally Jaup, and Sheila. They did washing for the men, darned, sewed, and sold tea and cocoa to the workers. Susan and Sally were old and withered, but were, despite their years, members of the most ancient profession in the world.

Though Moleskin went as far as the door of the shack he did not enter. In fact, when he neared the door he edged off at an oblique angle, walked for some fifty yards, then lay down in the heather and fixed his eyes on the window. When Sheila came out in the starlit night bearing a little basket which contained her father’s supper, Moleskin did not alter his position in space, or if altered, it was done so slightly that a mere twist of the neck was sufficient for the change. This movement was sufficient for the time being, and the man could see Sheila passing and his eyes could follow her down into the pocket where the earthen breastworks held the water in place, and where her father occupied his post as watchman.

When the girl’s figure was a mere blurred outline in the night mists, Moleskin rose and followed her for a distance, then lay down again and waited for her return. She passed, he followed her back to the shack and lay on the ground outside until the pink-shaded oil-lamp was turned down. Afterwards he went back to his sleeping quarters.

For some nights his movements were the same. He settled himself on the same part of the moor at the same time, waited until Sheila came out, followed her to the breastworks and followed her back again, but careful not to let her know of his proximity.

Something strange had crept into his life, something that was almost ridiculous, but uncommonly sweet and radiant. Never in his life had he felt anything like it, never had he known the fairy-like power of enchantment such as the girl possessed. The other men were unaffected, they spoke casually to the girl, and did not seem to feel her magical influence.

When Moleskin met her by daylight, she spoke to him, always shyly, half in a whisper as if afraid. He stammered his replies, wishing two things at the same moment, one that he had not met her, the other that she should not leave him. And always deeper than any other feeling was the desire that she should be his, not for a passing moment, but for years, forever.

Never had Moleskin felt like this before; never had the man’s being surged to such an excess of emotion. Prior to this he had shunned the company of women. They had been as nothing to the man. And now his previous ideas and prejudices had all vanished. A woman had entered his life and he desired her above anything that he had known or dreamed of. The man’s heart was in a turmoil, he found himself living in an atmosphere of pain, jealousy, fear. She was to him the apple of Tantalus, within sight and out of grip. Her presence quieted him, but did not make him happy.

The fourth night saw him follow the girl when she was bringing supper to her father. He came to the point where the moor dipped sharply to a dene across which was built the breastworks that dammed a river fresh from the gathering grounds of the moor. The water lay a sheet of sullen darkness in its confinement, borrowing light neither from the stars overhead, nor from the frail moon that sat on the far horizon.

But Moleskin had no eyes for the sombre beauty of the night. His soul was filled with thoughts of the girl who was with her father. Below him lay the little valley, its thalweg steeped in a grey mistiness, out of which the watchman’s hut showed like a black rock.

Presently Sheila could be discerned making her way up the incline, her little basket in her hand. Moleskin stretched himself out, becoming one with his hiding-place, and waited. ‘I am going to speak to her tonight,’ was his thought.

At that moment he heard something creak like a steel girder being strained. Then came a sound as if a giant boulder were being drawn along the masonry, followed by a dull rumble as of hollow thunder. Moleskin sprang to his feet, realising and terribly afraid. A moment’s silence followed and from the other end of the valley came a voice, no louder than the squeak of a harried rabbit. ‘Run, Sheila. It’s goin’! Run!’

The tone of the night changed and was filled with portent.

Movement for a moment stood still, suspended as if the gods waited the signal to destroy the world. A faint gurgle reached Moleskin’s ears, something that seemed a sluggish intake of breath. His body and soul parted company for the moment, clamped together again and he found himself striding gigantically down the hill, in the direction of the girl who was now running towards him. At that moment the breastworks broke, withered, and the water bulked out solidly and swept through the channel beneath, firm and substantial as a frozen, cocoa-coloured river. Moleskin had a vague impression of a dumb animal crawling in silence.

A white face looked up at him. He reached for a hand, found it, drew the owner of the face towards him, and pulled her free, lost foothold, tried to regain it, and suddenly felt himself swept along at a nightmare speed, spinning dizzily. His mouth filled with water, he swallowed, choked and swept on into an illimitable eternity.

He had a sudden vision of a woman, Nan, Nan’s face and figure bending over him, tenderly, radiantly, looking into his eyes, saying something, whispering something sweet and comforting that he could not understand. He was going to bed, to a bed, soft and warm, with a pink-shaded lamp, a chair, a gramophone, and a fire. And it was not Nan! It was Sheila. He fell asleep.

He awoke drenched, cold and shivering. Something painful, a red-hot iron, was stuck down in his throat. His head had swollen, was on the point of bursting, something moved round on the drum of his ear, something sharp and pointed. It came to a stop, was shoved in, pulled out again and restarted on its circular crawl, going round and round. He got to his feet on hard ground, looked blindly into space, tottered a few steps, then sank to the earth again. The pointed thing, whatever it was, still crawled on the drum of his ear, going round and round with slow disciplined speed.