The Rat Pit E-Book

Patrick Macgill

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 470

Beschreibung

Set in the Ireland and Scotland of the early 1900s, and based on real events, The Rat-Pit is the tragic story of Norah Ryan, a devout and intelligent Donegal girl who leaves her homeland after the death of her father hoping to find a better life 'across the water'. Unable to escape the cycle of grinding poverty, Norah's fate is further sealed when she becomes pregnant by Alec Morrison, the son of the farmer on whose land she lives and progressive views on social justice, Alec callously abandons her and, too proud to accept his begrudging offer of financial help, she finds herself bitterly ostracised. More than the story of one woman's decline and death, The Rat-Pit is also a grim and unflinchingly realistic portrayal of the Irish immigrant experience in Scotland, as well as a savage critique of a Church and society that did its best to crush those who could scarcely be more vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Leseprobe

This edition first published in 1999 by Birlinn Limited Unit 8 Canongate Venture 5 New Street Edinburgh EH8 8BH

Copyright © The Estate of Patrick MacGill 1915

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 9780857902832 Print ISBN 9781841580043

Originally published in 1915 by Herbert Jenkins

Subsequently published in 1985 by Caliban Books 17 South Hill Park Gardens London, NW3

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 INTRODUCTION

 FOREWORD

1.THE TURN OF THE TIDE

2.AN UNSUCCESSFUL JOURNEY

3.ON DOOEY HEAD

4.RESTLESS YOUTH

5.GOOD NEWS FROM A FAR COUNTRY

6.SCHOOL LIFE

7.PLUCKING BOG-BINE

8.THE TRAGEDY

9.THE WAKE

10.COFFIN AND COIN

11.THE TRAIN FROM GREENANORE

12.DERRY

13.A WILD NIGHT

14.‘BEYOND THE WATER’

15.DRUDGERY

16.LITTLE LOVES

17.A GAME OF CARDS

18.IN THE LANE

19.THE END OF THE SEASON

20.ORIGINAL SIN

21.REGRETS

22.ON THE ROAD

23.COMPLICATIONS

24.THE RAT-PIT

25.SHEILA CARROL

26.THE PASSING DAYS

27.THE NEWCOMER

28.THE RAG-STORE

29.DERMOD FLYNN

30.GROWN UP

31.DESPAIR

32.CONFESSION

33.ST JOHN VIII, I–II

34.LONGINGS

35.THE FAREWELL MEETING

INTRODUCTION

In the early summer of 1914, twenty-four year old Patrick MacGill, navvy poet and author of Children of the Dead End, returned to Glasgow from his post as librarian and secretary at Windsor to research the central chapters of his new novel The Rat-Pit. An interview with the Scottish socialist weekly Forward told the journal’s readers that:

His next book which is to deal largely with farmed outhouses in Glasgow and the exploitation of the poor is sure to strike deep. To gather material for the book, MacGill has been visiting old Glasgow haunts, and he promises us a bitter exposure of the rack-renting indulged in by the owners of farmed-out houses. The heroine of this book-to-be is named ‘Norah Ryan’, an Irish girl who has been forced to adopt the profession of prostitute through poverty and to save her child.

The subscribers to Forward who had read Children of the Dead End, published earlier in 1914, would certainly recognise the name and story of Norah, the tragic childhood sweetheart of the hero of the earlier novel, Dermod Flynn. The Rat-Pit is, however, not so much a sequel to Children of the Dead End as a skilfully interwoven companion piece to it. Children of the Dead End was an openly autobiographical novel and Dermod Flynn’s experiences are, in broad terms, those of MacGill in his years in Ireland and Scotland working on the land and as a tramp, navvy and railway labourer. Both novels share much the same time frame, many of the same characters and even the same scenes, albeit presented from different viewpoints. Children of the Dead End is Dermod’s story while The Rat-Pit is Norah Ryan’s. The second novel may suffer at times from the loss of MacGill’s personal experience, but, to compensate for this, it is even more strongly suffused with the author’s concern for the plight of the poor and his condemnation of the hypocrisy and unconcern of the moneyed classes.

The Rat-Pit starts in an impoverished rural setting in MacGill’s native Donegal with a twelve year-old Norah setting out to get yarn for stocking knitting from the Greenanore warehouse of Farley McKeown, the oppressive moneylender who dominates the life of the Donegal peasantry. Production of hand-knitted stockings is the mainstay of the Ryan household economy, even at the miserable rate of a penny farthing a pair. The Ryans, in common with their neighbours, are equally oppressed by McKeown, the landlord and the priest, all of whom make demands on them and who form an unholy combination which turns life into a perpetual struggle, where want is an everyday experience and poverty lies just around every corner.

A brief spell of easier times comes when her brother Fergus sends money home from England. This allows Norah to resume her education at Glenmornan National School where she sits beside Dermod Flynn. Norah, a bright and devout girl, is intended by her pious parents to become a nun. Indeed Norah’s goodness is painted with a rather heavy hand – in the bad times she neglects herself. Her sickly mother complained:

‘That is always the way with you, Norah. You never take your meals, but always leave them for somebody else.’

When she goes with other village women to Greenanore for yarn and they have to wade a sea loch her modesty is such that rather than hitch up her dress she allows it to become soaked by trailing through the waist-deep water.

Norah’s fisherman father is drowned and to support her mother she leaves home to join a party of potato diggers, the same squad that Dermod joins in Children of the Dead End. Dermod and Norah meet for the first time in two years at Derry harbour and a gentle and tentative romance soon blossoms between the two young people.

However, when the potato squad come to work on a Renfrewshire farm Norah attracts the attention of the farmer’s son – Alec Morrison. Morrison was, as MacGill puts it:

… a thinker, a moralist, earnest and profound in his own estimation.

Alec is a bank clerk in Paisley, in love with a member of his progressive club but finds himself drawn to Norah. MacGill was himself a Socialist, who had been a member of the Greenock branch of the Marxist Social Democratic Party while working as a railwayman there, but displays his contempt for the dilettante middle-class progressivism of Morrison and his little group of fellow intellectuals. The end of the season comes with Norah still evading Morrison’s sexual advances. Dermod, having lost all his money gambling, goes off on the tramp while Norah returns to Donegal.

The next season Norah is back in Scotland, without the stabilising presence of Dermod, and finally succumbs to Morrison’s advances. When she returns in the third year she is pregnant and seeks out Alec but he has become engaged to his progressive thinker and, revealing his essentially shallow nature, attempts to put matters right with Norah by giving her money – an offer she rejects.

The shame of her condition prevents her returning to Donegal and her mother. Norah’s only recourse is to sink into the world of the Glasgow slums where her only support is another Donegal woman, Sheila Carrol, the beansho – literally ‘that woman’ – another ‘fallen woman’ despised and rejected by her own people.

Three of the most powerful chapters of The Rat-Pit describe the horrific conditions of the submerged part of the Glasgow population, the residents in the lodging houses, the made down dwellings, the ticketed houses. The rat-pit, from which the novel takes its name, is a lodging house for women where a bed, in a room of forty beds, can be had for three pence a night.

Sheila Carrol’s last known address proves to be a condemned dwelling from which the city corporation had turned out the inhabitants but Norah finds her nearby, living in a squalid furnished room. Like many of the city’s one room dwellings, or single-ends, this had a ticket affixed to it by the sanitary authorities authorising it as fit for the habitation of two adults. Ticketing was part of the city’s attempt to keep some control on overcrowding and some check on the public health implications of overcrowding. Sheila rents her room from a ‘house-farmer’ who has sparsely furnished the room and, a fine touch this, who provided bedding stamped ‘Stolen from James Moffat’, lest any of his tenants feel tempted to make off with the coarse blankets. It is little wonder that Sheila describes Scotland as ‘the black country with the cold heart’.

Although by 1914 MacGill had moved on from navvying, through a brief spell as a London journalist, to work under the aegis of Canon Dalton of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, as secretary and librarian, his own earlier experience of the model lodging houses and slum dwellings of Glasgow enabled him to provide memorable images unlikely to come from even the most sympathetic middle-class novelist. Norah looks out of Sheila’s room on to the yard behind the tenement and sees:

A four-square block of buildings with outhouses, slaty grey and ugly, scabbed on to the walls, enclosed a paved courtyard, at one corner of which stood a pump, at another a stable with a heap of manure piled high outside the door. Two grey long-bodied rats could be seen running across from the pump to the stable, a ragged tramp who had slept all night on the warm dunghill shuffled up to his feet, rubbed the sleep and dirt from his eyes, then slunk away from the place as if conscious of having done something very wrong.

Equally evocative of the life of the slum dweller is the description of the midnight inspection by the sanitary officers seeking to ensure that the ticketing restrictions were being obeyed.

Just as the women in Donegal had been wage-slaves to Farley McKeown, knitting socks for meagre reward, so Sheila and Norah scrape a living as out-workers for a textile sweatshop. Sheila explains the job of a shirt-finisher:

‘For every shirt there’s two rows of feather-stitchin’, eight buttonholes and seven buttons sewed on, four seams and eight fasteners. It takes me over an hour to do each shirt and the pay is a penny farthing. I can make about fifteen pence a day, but out of that I have to buy my own thread.’

With four shillings a week, almost seven pence a day, going on rent, Sheila’s grasp on even this lowly rung of the economic ladder is an insecure one.

Norah’s tragedy continues, and she eventually is forced into prostitution to support herself and her baby. The baby dies, Norah contracts tuberculosis, but before she dies she is reunited with Dermod through the intervention of a kindly priest.

The Rat-Pit is a love story, a tragedy and a description of the underside of life. It is also an overtly political novel. On Norah’s first morning in Sheila’s squalid little room their neighbour, Meg, points over the roofs of the slums and points out another, very different, building:

‘That’s the Municipal Buildin’s; that’s where the rich folk meet and talk about the best thing to be done with houses like these. It’s easy to talk over yonder; that house cost five hunner and fifty thousand pounds to build.’

Glasgow City Chambers, opened by Queen Victoria in 1888, was a massively self-confident statement of Glasgow’s role as the Second City of the Empire. The Cowcaddens tenement where Meg, Sheila and Norah scratched an existence might only have lain a few hundred yards north of the City Chambers but was light years away from the marble and satinwood extravaganza that was Glasgow’s pride and joy.

When Norah becomes a prostitute the caretaker of the slum property demands half the money she receives from every man that calls on her. Meg, who has heard the conversation between Norah and the caretaker exclaims:

‘A dirty hag she is! … Full of money she is and so is the woman that owns the buildin’. Mrs Crawford they cry her, and she lives oot in Hillhead, the rich people’s place, and goes to church ev’ry Sunday with prayer books under her arm. Strike me dead! if she isn’t a swine, a swine unhung, a swine and a half. Has a motor car too, and is always writin’ to the papers about sanitary arrangements.’

Mrs Crawford may have professed a public concern about sanitary arrangements but in Meg’s view her support for ticketing and other measures to prevent overcrowding was not inspired by a concern for the plight of the poor but by an economic interest in ensuring that the demand for housing remained high:

‘If few people stay in ev’ry room she can let more of them; God put her in the pit, the swine!’

The housing conditions in Glasgow had given cause for concern for years – slum clearance programmes had been started by the City Improvement Trust in the 1870s but, as in all other major urban centres, replacement housing was designed for the better-off section of the working class. The prevailing theory and hope was that they would move out of less desirable accommodation, freeing it for the displaced slum dwellers. This neat plan fell down in the face of increasing urbanisation and, in Glasgow’s case, in the greater rapidity of slum clearance as opposed to house-building. Model lodging-houses were provided by the City Council but these had to be supplemented by common lodging-houses, such as the Rat-Pit, run as commercial ventures.

MacGill’s clear message in The Rat-Pit is that the only friends the poor have are their fellow sufferers. Even the owner of the rag-store where Norah finds unhealthy and distasteful work as a rag-picker proves to be a lecherous exploiter of his more attractive employees:

‘I could raise yer screw, say to ten bob a week,’ said the man, slipping his arms round her waist and trying to kiss her on the lips.

The farmers who ill-housed their potato-pickers, Alec Morrison who indulged himself with ‘advanced ideas’ and wondered why the pickers were housed worse than animals, the slum landlords and their factors, the sweatshop owners and the rag-store master: all exploit and degrade the poor.

Norah finds support, comfort and a sharing of her misery from the poor, from the beansho, Sheila Carrol and from the drunken neighbour Meg, who, when in drink, found a few coins for Norah’s baby:

‘Just for the little thing to play wi’,’ she would explain in an apologetic voice, as if ashamed of being found guilty of a good action.

At the end, Norah meets up again with Gourock Ellen, a Scot from the potato picking team, who ‘bore all the indelible marks of dissolute and careless living’ but brings comfort to Norah both by aiding her in her physical distress and by reading to her the words of Jesus about the woman taken in adultery:

‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her’

In a 1911 poem MacGill wrote:

I sing of them,

The underworld, the great oppressed,

    Befooled of parson, priest, and king,

Who mutely plod earth’s pregnant breast,

    Who weary of their sorrowing

– The Great Unwashed – of them I sing.

MacGill’s identification with ‘the great oppressed’, so evident in Children of the Dead End, is, if anything even more clearly expressed in The Rat-Pit. There is, perhaps, a redeeming rough vitality in the navvy’s huts and the tramping life but the grey, grinding misery of the Rat-Pit and the slum and the whole rat-infested city seems designed to provide evidence to support Sheila Carrol’s remark that:

‘… people can stand a lot one way and another, a terrible lot entirely.’

Norah, the saintly Donegal girl forced into poverty, prostitution and degradation, has indeed to ‘stand a lot one way and another’. As Gourock Ellen says:

‘Ah! it’s sic a pity the way things work out in this life. There seems to be a bad management of things somewhere.’

By the time The Rat-Pit was published war had broken out and MacGill had enlisted as a private soldier. Wounded and invalided home in 1915 he married in November of that year. His bride was an Irish writer working in London, Margaret Gibbons, the grandniece of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore. A report in the Glasgow Herald noted:

The wedding of Rifleman Patrick MacGill of the London Irish Rifles, who is well known as the ‘Navvy Poet’ … The bridegroom prior to enlistment was a librarian at Windsor Castle and amongst the numerous presents was a Georgian silver service from Canon Dalton …

After the honeymoon MacGill rejoined his regiment and also continued his writing career. Six novels inspired by the war were published between 1915 and 1919. Later MacGill moved to the United States, continuing to write for his friend and London publisher Herbert Jenkins until 1937, when his last work, Helen Spenser, appeared. MacGill wrote the screenplay for an almost forgotten 1930 Hollywood war film, Suspense, and acted in the 1932 film of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade. Margaret MacGill also continued her career as a romantic novelist, contributing to D. C. Thomson’s Red Letter Novels series and to Herbert Jenkins’s list. Her last novel, Hollywood Madness, appeared in 1936. Patrick MacGill died in Florida in 1963.

BRIAN D. OSBORNE

May 1999

FOREWORD

In the city of Glasgow there is a lodging-house for women known as ‘The Rat-pit’. Here the vagrant can get a nightly bunk for a few pence, and no female is refused admittance: the unfortunate, the sick, the work-weary congregate under the same roof, breathe the same fetid air and forget the troubles of a miserable existence in strong drink, the solace of the sorrowful, or in heavy stupor, the slumber of the toilworn. The underworld, of which I have seen and known such a lot, has always appeared to me as a Greater Rat-pit, where human beings, pinched and poverty-stricken and ground down with a weight of oppression, are hemmed up like the plague-stricken in a pest-house.

It is in this larger sense that I have chosen the name for the title of Norah Ryan’s story. By committing the ‘great sin’ and subsequently by allowing the dictates of motherhood to triumph over decrees of society, she became a pariah eternally doomed to the Greater Rat-pit. Whilst my former book, Children of the Dead End, was on the whole accepted as giving a picture of the life of the navvy, there were some who refused to believe that scenes such as I strove to depict could exist in a country like ours. To them I venture the assurance that The Rat-Pit is a transcript from life and that most of the characters are real people, and the scenes only too poignantly true. Some may think that such things should not be written about; but public opinion, like the light of day, is a great purifier, and to hide a sore from the surgeon’s eye out of miscalled delicacy is surely a supreme folly.

A word about Children of the Dead End. I am highly gratified by the success attained by that book in Britain and abroad. Only in Ireland, my native country, has the book given offence. Reviewers there spoke angrily about it, and one went so far as to say that I would end my days by blowing out my brains with a revolver. The reference to a tyrannical village priest gave great offence to a number of clergy, but on the other hand several wrote to me speaking very highly of the book, and I have been told that a Roman Catholic Bishop sat up all night to read it. In my own place I am looked upon with suspicion, all because I ‘wrote a book, a bad one makin’ fun of the priest’, as an old countryman remarked to me last summer when I was at home. ‘You don’t like it, then?’ I said. ‘Like it! I wouldn’t read it for a hundred pounds, money down,’ was the answer.

PATRICK MACGILL

London Irish,

St Albans,

5th Feb. 1915.

CHAPTER 1

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

I

‘Have you your brogues, Norah?’

‘They’re tied round my shoulders with a string, mother.’

‘And your brown penny for tea and bread in the town, Norah?’

‘It’s in the corner of my weasel-skin purse, mother.’

‘The tide is long on the turn, so you’d better be off, Norah.’

‘I’m off and away, mother.’

Two voices were speaking inside a cabin on the coast of Donegal. The season was midwinter; the time an hour before the dawn of a cheerless morning. Within the hovel there was neither light nor warmth; the rushlight had gone out and the turf piled on the hearth refused to burn. Outside a gale was blowing, the door, flimsy and fractured, creaked complainingly on its leathern hinges, the panes of the foot-square and only window were broken, the rags that had taken their places had been blown in during the night, and the sleet carried by the north-west wind struck heavily on the earthen floor. In the corner of the hut a woman coughed violently, expending all the breath in her body, then followed a struggle for air, for renewed life, and a battle against sickness or death went on in the darkness. There was silence for a moment, then a voice, speaking in Gaelic, could be heard again.

‘Are you away, Norah?’

‘I am just going, mother. I am stopping the window to keep the cold away from you.’

‘God bless you, child,’ came the answer. ‘The men are not coming in yet, are they?’

‘I don’t hear their step. Now the window is all right. Are you warm?’

‘Middling, Alannah. Did you take the milk for your breakfast?’

‘I left some for you in the jug,’ came the reply. ‘Will you take it now?’

‘That is always the way with you, Norah,’ said the woman in a querulous voice. ‘You never take your meals, but always leave them for somebody else. And you are getting thinner on it every day. I don’t want anything, for I am not hungry these days; and maybe it is God Himself that put the sickness on me so that I would not take away the food of them that needs it more than I do. Drink the milk, Norah, it will do you good.’

There was no answer. A pale-faced little girl lifted the latch of the door and looked timorously out into the cold and the blackness. The gale caught her and for a moment she almost choked for breath. It was still intensely dark, no colour of the day was yet in the sky. The wind whistled shrilly round the corners of the cabin and a storm-swept bird dropped to the ground in front of the child. She looked back into the gloomy interior of the cabin and for a moment thought of returning. She was very hungry, but remembered her father and brother who would presently come in from the fishing, probably, as they had come in for days, with empty boats and empty stomachs. Another fit of coughing seized the mother, and the girl went out, shutting the door carefully behind her to stay the wrath of the wind which swept violently across the floor of the house.

The sea was near. The tide, sweeping sullenly away from the shore, moaned plaintively near the land and swelled into loud discordant wrath, far out at the bar. All round the house a tremulous grey haze enveloped everything, and the child stole into its mysterious bosom and towards the sea. The sleet shot sharply across her body and at times she turned round to save her face from its stinging lash. She was so small, so frail, so tender that she might be swept away at any moment as she moved like a shadow through the greyness, keeping a keen look-out for the ghosts that peopled the mists and the lonely places. Of these phantoms she was assured. To her they were as true as her own mother, as her own self. They were around and above her. They hid in the mists, walked on the sea, roved in the fields, and she was afraid of them.

Suddenly she called to mind the story of the Lone Woman of the Mist, the ghost whom all the old people of the locality had met at some time or another in their lives. Even as she thought, an apparition took form, a lone woman stood in front of the little girl, barely ten paces away. The child crossed herself seven times and walked straight ahead, keeping her eyes fixed on the figure that barred the path. This was the only thing to be done. Under the steady look of the eyes a ghost is powerless. So her mother had told her, and the girl, knowing this, never lowered her gaze; but her bare feet got suddenly warm, her heart leapt as if wanting to leave her body, and the effort to restrain the tremor of her eyelids caused her pain. The ghost spoke.

‘Who is the girsha1 that is out so early?’ came the question.

‘It’s me, Norah Ryan,’ answered the child in a glad voice. ‘I thought that ye were the Lone Woman of the Mist or maybe a beanshee.’2

‘I’m not the beanshee, I’m the beansho,’3 the woman replied in a sharp voice. ‘D’ye know what that means?’

‘It means that ye are the woman I’m not to have the civil word with because ye’ve committed a great sin.’

‘Who said that? Was it yer mother?’

‘Then it was,’ said the child, ‘I often heard her say them words.’

‘D’ye know me sin then?’ enquired the woman, and without waiting for an answer she went on: ‘Ye don’t, of course. This is me sin, girsha; this is me sin. Look at it!’

The woman loosened the shawl which was drawn tightly around her body and disclosed a little bullet-headed child lying fast asleep in her arms. The wind caught the sleeper; one tiny hand quivered in mute protest, then the infant awoke and roared loudly. The mother kissed the wee thing hastily, fastened the shawl again and strode forward, taking long steps like a man, towards the sea. She was barefooted; her feet made a rustling sound on the snow and two little furrows lay behind her. Norah Ryan followed and presently the older woman turned round.

‘That’s me sin, girsha, that’s me sin,’ she said. ‘That’s a sin that can never be undone. Mind that and mind it always…. Ye’ll be goin’ into the town, I suppose?’

‘That I am,’ said the child. ‘Is the tide full on the run now?’

‘It’s nearly out. See! the sky is clearin’ a bit; and look it! there’s some stars.’

‘I don’t like the stars, good woman, for they’re always so cold lookin’.’

‘Yes, they’re middlin’ like to goodly people,’ said the woman. ‘There, we’re near the sea and the greyness is risin’ off it.’

The woman lifted her hand and pointed to the rocky shore that skirted the bay. At first sight it appeared to be completely deserted; nothing could be seen but the leaden grey sea and the sharp and jagged rocks protruding through the snow that covered the shore. The tide was nearly out; the east was clearing, but the wind still lashed furiously against the legs and faces of the woman and the girl.

‘I suppose there’ll be a lot waitin’ for the tide,’ said Norah Ryan. ‘And a cold wait it’ll be for them too, on this mornin’ of all mornin’s.’

‘It’s God’s will,’ said the woman with the child, ‘God’s will, the priest’s will, and the will of the yarn seller.’ She spoke sharply and resentfully and again with long strides hurried forward to the shore.

II

How lifeless the scene looked; the hollows white with snow, the gale-swept edges of the rocks darkly bare! Norah Ryan stepping timidly, suddenly shrieked as her foot slipped into a wreath of snow. Under her tread something moved, the snow rose into the air as if to shake itself, then fell again with a crackling noise. The girl had stepped upon a sleeping woman, who, now rudely wakened, was afoot and angry.

‘Mercy be on you, child!’ roared the female in Gaelic, as she shook the frozen flakes from the old woollen handkerchief that covered her head. ‘Can you not take heed of your feet and where you’re putting them?’

‘It’s the child that didn’t see ye,’ said the beansho, then added by way of salutation: ‘It’s cold to be sleepin’ out this mornin’.’

‘It’s Norah Ryan, is it?’ asked the woman, still shaking the snow from her head-dress. ‘And has she been along with you, of all persons in the world?’

‘Is the tide out yet?’ asked a voice from the snow.

A face like that of a sheeted corpse peered up into the greyness, and Norah Ryan looked at it, her face full of a fright that was not unmixed with childish curiosity. There in the white snow, some asleep and some staring vacantly into the darkness, lay a score of women, some young, some old, and all curled up like sleeping dogs. Nothing could be seen but the faces, coloured ghastly silver in the dim light of the slow dawn, faces without bodies staring like dead things from the welter of snow. An old woman asleep, the bones of her face showing plainly through the sallow wrinkles of the skin, her only tooth protruding like a fang and her jaw lowered as if hung by a string, suddenly coughed. Her cough was wheezy, weak with age, and she awoke. In the midst of the heap of bodies she stood upright and disturbed the other sleepers. In an instant the hollow was alive, voluble, noisy. Some of the women knelt down and said their prayers, others shook the snow from their shawls, one was humming a love song and making the sign of the cross at the end of every verse.

‘I’ve been travelling all night long,’ said an old crone who had just joined the party, ‘and I thought that I would not be in time to catch the tide. It is a long way that I have to come for a bundle of yarn – sixteen miles, and maybe it is that I won’t get it at the end of my journey.’

The kneeling women rose from their knees and hurried towards the channel in the bay, now a thin string of water barely three yards in width. The wind, piercingly cold, no longer carried its burden of sleet, and the east, icily clear, waited, almost in suspense, for the first tint of the sun. The soil, black on the foreshore, cracked underfoot and pained the women as they walked. None wore their shoes, although three or four carried brogues tied round their necks. Most had mairteens (double thick stockings) on their feet, and these, though they retained a certain amount of body heat, kept out no wet. In front the old woman, all skin and bones and more bones than skin, whom Norah had wakened, led the way, her breath steaming out into the air and her feet sinking almost to the knees at every step. From her dull, lifeless look and the weary eyes that accepted everything with fatalistic calm it was plain that she had passed the greater part of her years in suffering.

All the women had difficulty with the wet and shifty sand, which, when they placed their feet heavily on one particular spot, rose in an instant to their knees. They floundered across, pulling out one foot and then another, and grunting whenever they did so. Norah Ryan, the child, had little difficulty; she glided lightly across, her feet barely sinking to the ankles.

‘Who’d have thought that one’s spags could be so troublesome!’ said the beansho. ‘It almost seems like as if I had no end of feet.’

‘Do you hear that woman speaking?’ asked the aged female who led the way. ‘It’s ill luck that will keep us company when she’s with us: her with her back-of-the-byre wean!’

The sun was nearing the horizon, and the women, now on the verge of the channel (dhan, they called it), stood in silence looking at the water. It was not at its lowest yet; probably they would have to wait for five minutes, maybe more. And as they waited they came closer and closer to one another for warmth.

The beansho stood a little apart from the throng. Although tall and angular, she showed traces of good looks which if they had been tended might have made her beautiful. But now her lips were drawn in a thin, hard line and a set, determined expression showed on her face. She was barefooted and did not even wear mairteens, and carried no brogues. Her sole articles of dress were a shawl, which sufficed also for her child, a thick petticoat made of sackcloth, a chemise and a blouse. The wind constantly lifted her petticoat and exposed her bare legs above the knees. Some of the women sniggered on seeing this, but finally the beansho tightened her petticoat between her legs and thus held it firmly.

‘That’s the way, woman,’ said the old crone who led the party. ‘Hold your dress tight, tighter. Keep away from the beansho, Norah Ryan.’

The child looked up at the old woman and smiled as a child sometimes will when it fails to understand the purport of words that are spoken. Then her teeth chattered and she looked down at her feet, which were bleeding, and the blood could be seen welling out through the mairteens. She shivered constantly from the cold and her face was a little drawn, a little wistful, and her grey eyes, large and soft, were full of a tender pity. Perhaps the pity was for her mother who was ill at home, maybe for the beansho whom everyone disliked, or maybe for herself, the little girl of twelve, who was by far the youngest member of the party.

III

‘It’s time that we were tryin’ to face the water in the name of God,’ said one of the women, who supported herself against a neighbour’s shoulder whilst she took off her mairteens. ‘There is low tide now.’

All mairteens were taken off, and raising their petticoats well up and tying them tightly around their waists they entered the water. The old woman leading the party walked into the icy sea placidly; the others faltered a moment, then stepped in recklessly and in a second the water was well up to their thighs. They hurried across shouting carelessly, gesticulating violently and laughing loudly. Yet every one of them, with the possible exception of the woman in front, was on the borderland of tears. If they had spoken not they would have wept.

Norah Ryan, who was the last to enter the water, tucked up her dress and cast a frightened glance at those in front. No one observed her. She lifted the dress higher and entered the icy cold stream which chilled her to the bone. At each successive step the rising water pained her as a knife driven into the flesh might pain her. She raised her eyes and noticed a woman looking back; instantly Norah dropped her clothes and the hem of her petticoat became saturated with water.

‘What are ye doin’, Norah Ryan?’ the woman shouted. ‘Ye’ll be wettin’ the dress that’s takin’ ye to the town.’

The child paid no heed. With her clothes trailing in the stream she walked across breast deep to the other side. Her garments were soaked when she landed. The old woman, placid fatalist, was pulling on her mairteens with skinny, warty hands; another was lacing her brogues; a third tied a rag round her foot, which had been cut by a shell at the bottom of the channel.

‘Why did ye let yer clothes drop into the dhan?’ croaked the old woman. She asked out of mere curiosity; much suffering had driven all feeling from her soul.

‘Why d’ye ask that, Maire a Crick (Mary of the Hill)?’ enquired the beansho. ‘It’s the modest girl that she is, and that’s why she let her clothes down. Poor child! she’ll be wet all day now!’

‘Her petticoat is full of water,’ said Maire a Crick, tying the second mairteen. ‘If many’s a one would be always as modest as Norah Ryan they’d have no burden in their shawls this day.’

‘Ye’re a barefaced old heifer, Maire a Crick,’ said the beansho angrily. ‘Can ye never hold yer cuttin’ tongue quiet? It’s good that ye have me to be saying the evil word against. If I wasn’t here ye’d be on to some other body.’

‘I’m hearin’ that Norah Ryan is a fine knitter entirely,’ someone interrupted. ‘She can make a great penny with her needles. Farley McKeown says that he never gave yarn to a soncier girl.’

‘True for ye, Biddy Wor,’ said Maire a Crick grudgingly. ‘It’s funny that a slip of a girsha like her can do so much. I work meself from dawn to dusk, and long before and after, and I cannot make near as much as Norah Ryan.’

‘Neither can any of us,’ said several women in one breath.

‘She only works about fourteen hours every day, too,’ said Biddy Wor.

‘How much can ye make a day, Norah Ryan?’ asked the beansho.

‘Three ha’pence a day and nothing less,’ said the girl, and a glow of pride suffused her face.

‘Three ha’pence a day!’ the beansho ejaculated, stooping down and pulling out the gritty sand which had collected between her toes. ‘Just think of that, and her only a wee slip of a girl!’

‘That’s one pound nineteen shillin’s a year,’ said Maire a Crick reflectively. ‘She’s as good as old Maire a Glan (Mary of the Glen) of Greenanore, who didn’t miss a stitch in a stockin’ and her givin’ birth to twins.’

The party set off, some singing plaintively, one or two talking and the rest buried in moody silence. It was now day, the sun shot up suddenly and lighted the other side of the bay where the land spread out, bleak, black, dreary and dismal. In front of the party rose a range of hills that threw a dark shadow on the sand, and in this shadow the women walked. Above them on the rising ground could be seen many cabins and blue wreaths of smoke rising from the chimneys into the air. A cock crowed loudly and several others joined in chorus. A dog barked at the heels of a stubborn cow which a ragged, bare-legged boy was driving into a wet pasture field … the snow which lay light on the knolls was rapidly thawing … the sea, now dark blue in colour, rose in a long heaving swell, and the wind, blowing in from the horizon, was bitterly cold.

‘When will the tide be out again?’ asked Judy Farrel, a thin, undersized, consumptive woman who coughed loudly as she walked.

‘When the sun’s on Dooey Head,’ came the answer.

An old, wrinkled stump of a woman now joined the party. She carried a bundle of stockings, wrapped in a shawl hung across her shoulders. As she walked she kept telling her beads.

‘We were just talkin’ of ye, Maire a Glan,’ said Biddy Wor. ‘How many stockin’s have ye in that bundle?’

‘– Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen,’ said the woman, speaking in Gaelic and drawing her prayer to a close; then to Biddy Wor: ‘A dozen long stockings that I have been working on for a whole fortnight. The thread was bad, bitter bad, as the old man said, and I could hardly get the mastery of it. And think of it, good woman, just think of it! Farley McKeown only gives me thirteen pence for the dozen, and he gives other knitters one and three. He gave my good man a job building the big warehouse in Greenanore, and then he took two pence off me in the dozen of stockings.’

‘You don’t say so!’

‘True as death,’ said Maire a Glan. ‘And Farley is building a big place, as the old man said. He has well nigh over forty men on the job.’

‘And what would he be paying them?’

‘Seven shillings a week, without bit or sup. It is a hard job too, for my man, himself, leaves here at six of the clock in the morning and he is not back at our own fire till eight of the clock at night.’

‘Get away!’

‘But that isn’t all, nor the half of it, as the man said,’ Maire a Glan went on. ‘Himself has to do all the work at home before dawn and after dusk, so that he has only four hours to sleep in the turn of the sun.’

‘Just think of that,’ said Maire a Crick.

‘That’s not all, nor half of it, as the old man said,’ the woman with the bundle continued. ‘My man gets one bag of yellow meal from Farley every fortnight, for we have eight children and not a pratee, thanks be to God! Farley charges people like yourselves only sixteen shillings a bag, but he charges us every penny of a gold sovereign on the bags that we get. If we do not pay at the end of a month he puts on another sixpence, and at the end of six months he has three extra shillings on the bag of yellow meal.’

‘God be praised, but he’s a sharp one!’ said the beansho.

‘Is this you?’ asked the woman with the bundle, looking at the speaker. ‘Have you some stockings in your shaw too?’

‘Sorrow the one,’ answered the beansho.

‘But what have ye there?’ asked Maire a Glan; then, as if recollecting, she exclaimed: ‘Oh, I know! It is the wean, as the man said…. And is this yourself, Norah Ryan?’

‘It’s myself,’ replied the child, and her teeth chattered as she answered.

‘The blush is going from your cheek,’ said Maire a Glan. ‘And your mother; is she better in health? They’re hard times that are in it now,’ she went on, without waiting for an answer to her question. ‘There are only ten creels of potatoes in our townland and these have to be used for seed. God’s mercy be on us, as the old man said, but it was a bad year for the crops!’

‘It couldn’t have been worse,’ said Judy Farrel, clapping her thin hands to keep them warm. ‘On our side of the water, old Oiney Dinchy (that’s the man who has the dog that bit Dermod Flynn) had to dig in the pratee field for six hours, and at the end of that time he had only twenty-seven pratees in the basket.’

‘If the crows lifted a potato in Glenmornan this minute, all the people of the Glen would follow the crow for a whole week until they got the potato back,’ said old Maire a Crick. ‘It’s as bad now as it was in the year of the famine.’

‘Do you mind the famine year?’ asked Norah Ryan. The water was streaming from the girl’s clothes into the roadway, and though she broke into a run at times in her endeavour to keep pace with the elder women, the shivering fits did not leave her for an instant. The wind became more violent and the sleet which had ceased for a while was again falling from the clouds in white wavy lines.

‘I mind the bad times as well as I mind yesterday,’ said Maire a Crick. ‘My own father, mother, and sister died in one turn of the sun with the wasting sickness and the hunger. I waked them all alone by myself, for most of the neighbours had their own sick and their own dead to look after. But they helped me to carry my people to the grave in the coffin that had the door with hinges on the bottom. When we came to the grave the door was opened and the dead were dropped out; then the coffin was taken back for some other soul.’

‘At that time there lived a family named Gorlachs at the foot of Slieve a Dorras,’ said Maire a Glan, taking up the tale; ‘and they lifted their child out of the grave on the night after it was buried and ate it in their own house. Wasn’t that the awful thing, as the old man said?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past them, for they were a bad set, the same Gorlachs,’ said Maire a Crick. ‘But for all that, maybe it is that there wasn’t a word of truth in the whole story.’

IV

Norah Ryan, who was now lagging in the rear, got suddenly caught by a heavy gust of wind that blew up from the sea. Her clothes were lifted over her head; she tried to push them down, and the weasel-skin purse which she held in her hand dropped on the roadway. The penny jingled out, the coin which was to procure her bread in Greenanore, and she clutched at it hurriedly. A sudden dizziness overcame her, her brain reeled and she fell prostrate to the wet earth. In an instant the beansho was at her side.

‘Norah Ryan, what’s coming over ye?’ she cried and knelt down by the girl. The child’s face was deathly pale, the sleet cut her viciously, and her hands, lying palm upwards on the mire, were blue and cold. The beansho tried to raise her but the effort was too much; the child which the woman carried impeded her movements. Maire a Crick now hurried up and the rest of the women approached, though in more leisurely fashion.

‘Mother of God! What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ asked the old woman anxiously. ‘What has come over the child atall, atall? She’s starving,’ the old body went on, kneeling on the roadway and pressing her warty hands on the breast of the young girl. ‘She’s starving, that’s it. In her own home she hardly eats one bite at all so that her people may have the more. So I have heard tell…. Norah Ryan, for God’s sake wake up!’

The girl gave no heed, made no sign. The sleet sang through the air and the women gathered closer, shielding the little one with their bodies.

‘What’s to be done?’ asked the beansho. Biddy Wor told how people were cured of fargortha (hunger) at the time of the famine, but little heed was paid to her talk. The beansho unloosened her shawl, wrapped her offspring tightly in it and handed the bundle to one of the women, who crossed herself as she caught it.

‘Now up on my back with the girsha,’ said the beansho authoritatively, stooping on her knees in the roadway and bending her shoulders. ‘Martin Eveleen has a house across the rise of the brae and I’ll carry her there.’

Three of the party lifted Norah and placed her across the beansho’s shoulders.

‘How weighty the girsha is!’ one exclaimed; then recollecting said: ‘It’s the water in her clothes that’s doing it. Poor girsha! and it’ll be the hunger that’s causing her the weakness.’

The beansho with her burden on her shoulders hurried forward, her feet pressing deeply into the mire and the water squirting out between her toes. The rest of the party following discussed the matter and, being most of them old cronies, related stories of the hunger that was in it at the time of the great famine. Again it faired, the sun came out, but the air was still bitterly cold.

A cabin stood on the crest of the hill and towards this the beansho hurried. Strong and lank though she was, the burden began to bear heavily and she panted at every step. At the door of the house she paused for a moment to collect her strength, then lifted the latch and pushed the door inwards. A man, shaggy and barefooted, hurried to meet the woman and stared at her suspiciously.

‘What do you want?’ he asked in Gaelic.

‘It’s Norah Ryan that’s hungry, and she fainted on the road,’ explained the beansho.

‘In with her then,’ said the man, standing aside. ‘Maybe the heat of the fire will take her to. Indeed there’s little else that she can get here.’

Inside it was warm and a bright fire blazed on the cabin hearth. In a corner near the door some cows could be heard munching hay, and a dog came sniffing round the beansho’s legs. A feeling of homeliness pervaded the place and the smell of the peat was soothing to the nostrils.

‘Leave her down here,’ said the woman of the house, a pale, sickly little creature, as she pointed to the dingy bed in the corner of the room near the fire. Several children dressed in rags who were seated warming their hands at the blaze rose hurriedly on the entrance of the strangers and hid behind the cattle near the door.

‘Is it the hunger and hardships?’ asked the man of the house as he helped the beansho to place the inert body of the little girl on the bed.

‘The hunger and hardships, that’s it,’ said Maire a Crick, who now entered, followed by the rest of the women.

‘Then we’ll try her with this,’ said the man, and from behind the rafters of the roof he drew out a black bottle which he uncorked with his fingers. ‘It’s potheen,’ he explained, and emptied some of the contents into a wooden bowl. This he held to the lips of the child who now, partly from the effects of the heat and partly from the effects of the shaking she had received on the beansho’s back, awakened and was staring vacantly around her. The smell of the intoxicant brought her sharply to her senses.

‘What are ye doin’?’ she cried. ‘That’s not right, and me havin’ the holy pledge against drink!’

The man crossed himself and withdrew the bowl, whereupon the woman of the house brought some milk from the basin that stood on the dresser, and this being handed to Norah Ryan, the child drank greedily. The beansho gave her a piece of bread when the milk was consumed.

‘Where is me purse?’ asked Norah suddenly. ‘It’s lyin’ on the road and the brown penny is in the clabber. Where are we atall?’

‘In Martin Eveleen’s house, the house of a decent man,’ said the beansho. ‘Eat yer bit of bread, child, for ye’re dyin’ of hunger.’

For a moment the child looked earnestly at the bread, then, as if stifling the impulse to return it, she began to eat almost savagely. Maire a Crick placed the purse and penny which she had lifted from the road by the bedside and withdrew to the door, already sorry perhaps for having wasted so much time on the journey. The beansho found her baby, kissed a crumb into its mouth, tied it up again in her shawl and, when Norah had eaten the bread, both went to the door together.

‘God be with ye, decent people,’ said the child. ‘Some day I hope to be able to do a good turn for you.’

‘We’re only glad to be of help to a nice girsha,’ said the man, taking down a bottle of holy water from the roof-beam. He made the sign of the cross, dipped his fingers in the bottle, and shook the holy water over the visitors.

‘God be with yer journey,’ he said.

‘And God keep guard over your home and everything in it,’ Norah and the beansho made answer in one voice.

1 Girsha, girl.

2 Beanshee, a fairy woman. (Bean, a woman; shee, a fairy.)

3 Beansho, ‘That woman’. (A term of reproach.)

CHAPTER 2

AN UNSUCCESSFUL JOURNEY

I

The hour was half-past ten in the forenoon. In the village (‘town’ the peasantry called it) of Greenanore two rows of houses ran parallel along a miry street which measured east to west some two hundred yards. At one end of the street were the police barracks and at the other end the workhouse. Behind the latter rose the Catholic chapel, and further back the brown moors stretched to the hills which looked down upon the bay where the women crossed in the early morning.

The houses in the village were dull, dirty and dilapidated. There were eight public-houses, a few grocers’ shops, a smithy where the blacksmith, who mended scythes or shod donkeys, got paid in kind for his services. The policemen, one to every fifty souls in the village, paraded idly up and down the street, their heavy batons clanking against their trousers, and their boots, spotlessly clean, rasping eternally on the pavement. Their sole occupation seemed to be the kicking of unoffending dogs that spent their days and nights in a vain search for some eatable garbage in the gutter. The dogs were skeletons; and when kicked they would slink quietly out of the way, lacking courage either to snap or snarl. Even a kick brought no yelp from them, they were almost insensible to every feeling but that of the heavy hunger which dulled their natural activity. At night they were silent ghosts prowling about looking for a morsel to eat. Now and again they howled mournfully, sitting on their haunches in a circle; and when the people heard the lonely sound they would say: ‘There, the dogs are crying because they have got no souls.’

A little pot-bellied man stepped briskly along the street of the village, one gloved hand grasping a stout stick, the other, also gloved, sunk in the capacious pocket of a heavy overcoat. He walked as if he lacked knee-joints, throwing the legs out from his hips, but, save for this, there was nothing remarkable about the man except perhaps his stoutness. The people of Greenanore, battling daily against the terrible spectre of hunger, had no time to grow fat, yet this man measured forty inches round the waist. In the midst of extreme poverty he, strange to say, had grown corpulent and rich. His name was Farley McKeown, now possessor of £200,000, part of it invested in South American Railways and part of it in the Donegal Knitting Industry, and nearly all of it earned in the latter.

Farley McKeown was now seventy years of age and unmarried. At one time, years before, he had his desires as most young men have, and the sight of a comely girl going barefooted to Greenanore imparted a fiery and not unpleasant vigour to his body and caused strange but not unnatural thoughts to enter into his mind. He was then a young man of twenty, thoughtful and ambitious. Although his father was poor, the boy, educated by some hedge schoolmaster, showed promise and evinced a desire to become a priest. ‘It is an easy job,’ he said to himself, ‘and a priest can make plenty of money.’ Farley McKeown desired to make money anyway and anyhow.

When the black potato blight, with the fever and famine that followed it, spread over Donegal, Farley McKeown saw his chance. By dint of plausible arguments he persuaded a firm of Londonderry grain merchants to ship a cargo of Indian meal to Greenanore and promised to pay for the consignment within two years from the date of its arrival. When the cargo was landed on Dooey Head the people hailed it as a gift from God and the priest blessed Farley McKeown from the altar steps. The peasants built a large warehouse for McKeown, and in return for the work they were allowed a whole year in which to pay for their meal. Meanwhile the younger generation went off to America, and money flowed in to Donegal and Farley McKeown’s pocket. At the end of two years he had paid the grain merchants, but the peasants found to their astonishment that they