"I don't like that song, because I don't know what it is about," said Moleskin when I had finished. "The one about English Bill is far and away better. When you talk about a man that drops like a spavined mule in the knacker's yard, I know what you mean, but a girl that comes from the dreamy choirs of heaven, wherever they are, is not the kind of wench for a man like you and me, Flynn."
I felt a little disappointed, and made no reply to the criticism of my mate.
"Do you ever think how nice it would be to have a home of your own?" asked Moleskin after a long silence, and a vigorous puffing at the pipe which he held between his teeth. "It would be fine to have a room to sit in and a nice fire to warm your shins at of an evenin'. I often think how roarin' it would be to sit in a parlour and drink tea with a wife, and have a little child to kiss me as you talk about in the song on the death of English Bill."
I did not like to hear my big-boned, reckless mate talk in such a way. Such talk was too delicate and sentimental for a man like him.
"You're a fool, Joe," I said.
"I suppose I am," he answered. "But just you wait till you come near the turn of life like me, and find a sort of stiffness grippin' on your bones, then you'll maybe have thoughts kind of like these. A young fellow, cully, mayn't care a damn if he is on the dead end, but by God! it is a different story when you are as stiff as a frozen poker with one foot in the grave and another in hell, Flynn."
"It was a different story the day you met the ploughman, on our journey from Greenock," I said. "You must have changed your mind, Moleskin?"
"I said things to that ploughman that I didn't exactly believe myself," said my mate. "I would do anything and say anything to get the best of an argument."
Many a strange conversation have I had with Moleskin Joe. One evening when I was seated by the hot-plate engaged in patching my corduroy trousers Joe came up to me with a question which suddenly occurred to him. I was held to be a sort of learned man, and everybody in the place asked me my views upon this and that, and no one took any heed of my opinions. Most of them acknowledged that I was nearly as great a poet as Two-shift Mullholland, now decently married, and gone from the ranks of the navvies.
"Do you believe in God, Flynn?" was Joe's question.
"I believe in a God of a sort," I answered. "I believe in the God who plays with a man, as a man plays with a dog, who allows suffering and misery and pain. The 'Holy-Willy' look on a psalm-singing parson's dial is of no more account to Him than a blister on a beggar's foot."
"I only asked you the question, just as a start-off to tellin' you my own opinion," said Joe. "Sometimes I think one thing about God, and sometimes I think another thing. The song that you wrote about English Bill talks of God takin' care of the soul, and it just came into my head to ask your opinion and tell you my own. As for myself, when I see a man droppin' down like a haltered gin-horse at his work I don't hold much with what parsons say about the goodness of Providence. At other times, when I am tramping about in the lonely night, with the stars out above me and the world kind of holding its breath as if it was afraid of something, I do be thinking that there is a God after all. I'd rather that there is none; for He is sure to have a heavy tally against me if He puts down all the things I've done. But where is heaven if there is such a place?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"If you think of it, there is no end to anything," Moleskin went on. "If you could go up above the stars, there is surely a place above them, and another place in turn above that again. You cannot think of a place where there is nothing, and as far as I can see there is no end to anything. You can't think of the last day as they talk about, for that would mean the end of time. It's funny to think of a man sayin' that there'll be no time after such and such a time. How can time stop?"
I tried to explain to Joe that time and space did not exist, that they were illusions used for practical purposes.
"No man can understand these things," said Joe, as I fumbled through my explanation of the non-existence of time and space. "I have often looked at the little brooks by the roadside and saw the water runnin', runnin', always lookin' the same, and the water different always. When I looked at the little brooks I often felt frightened, because I could not understand them. All these things are the same, and no man can understand them. Why does a brook keep runnin'? Why do the stars come out at night? Is there a God in Heaven? Nobody knows, and a man may puzzle about these things till he's black in the face and grey in the head, but he'll never get any further."
"English Bill may know more about these things than we do," I said.
"How could a dead man know anything?" asked Joe, and when I could not explain the riddle, he borrowed a shilling from me and lost it at the gaming-table.
That was Joe all over. One moment he was looking for God in Nature, and on the next instant he was looking for a shilling to stake on the gaming-table. Once in an argument with me he called the world "God's gamblin' table," and endeavoured to prove that God threw down men, reptiles, nations, and elements like dice to the earth, one full of hatred for the other and each filled with a desire for supremacy, and that God and His angels watched the great struggle down below, and betted on the result of its ultimate issue.
"Of course the angels will not back Kinlochleven very heavily," he concluded.
Day after day passed and the autumn was waning. The work went on, shift after shift, and most of the money that I earned was spent on the gambling table or in the whisky store. Now and again I wrote home, and sent a few pounds to my people, but I never sent them my address. I did not want to be upbraided for my negligence in sending them so little. The answers to my letters would always be the same: "Send more money; send more money. You'll never have a day's luck if you do not help your parents!" I did not want answers like that, so I never sent my address.
One night towards the end of October I had lost all my money at the gambling school, although Moleskin had twice given me a stake to retrieve my fallen fortunes. I left the shack, went out into the darkness, a fire in my head and emptiness in my heart. Around me the stark mountain peaks rose raggedly against the pale horns of the anæmic moon. Outside the whisky store a crowd of men stood, dark looks on their faces, and the wild blood of mischief behind. Inside each shack a dozen or more gamblers sat cross-legged in circles on the ground, playing banker or brag, and the clink of money could be heard as it passed from hand to hand. Above them the naphtha lamps hissed and spluttered and smelt, the dim, sickly light showed the unwashed and unshaven faces beneath, and the eager eyes that sparkled brightly, seeing nothing but the movements of the game. Down in the cuttings men were labouring on the night-shift, gutting out the bowels of the mountain places, and forcing their way through the fastness steadily, slowly and surely. I could hear the dynamite exploding and shattering to pieces the rock in which it was lodged. The panting of weary hammermen was loud in the darkness, and the rude songs which enlivened the long hours of the night floated up to me from the trough of the hills.
I took my way over the slope of the mountain, over the pigmies who wrought beneath, fighting the great fight which man has to wage eternally against nature. Down in the cuttings I could see my mates toiling amidst the broken earth, the sharp ledges of hewn rock, and the network of gang-planks and straining derricks that rose all around them. The red glare of a hundred evil-smelling torches flared dismally, and over the sweltering men the dark smoke faded away into the rays of the pallid moon. With the rising smoke was mingled the steam of the men's bent shoulders and steaming loins.
Above and over all, the mystery of the night and the desert places hovered inscrutable and implacable. All around the ancient mountains sat like brooding witches, dreaming on their own story of which they knew neither the beginning nor the end. Naked to the four winds of heaven and all the rains of the world, they had stood there for countless ages in all their sinister strength, undefied and unconquered, until man, with puny hands and little tools of labour, came to break the spirit of their ancient mightiness.
And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were men flogged to the work which we had to do, and hounded from the work which we had accomplished. We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. We were the men sent out to fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its primeval horrors, and batter down the barriers of its world-old defences. Where we were working a new town would spring up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked there, "a man with no fixed address," he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant.
Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged rock fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound of a scream in the distance, and a song died away in the throat of some rude singer. Then out of the pit I saw men, red with the muck of the deep earth and redder still with the blood of a stricken mate, come forth, bearing between them a silent figure. Another of the pioneers of civilisation had given up his life for the sake of society.
I returned to the shack, and, full of the horror of the tragedy, I wrote an account of it on a scrap of tea-paper. I had no design, no purpose in writing, but I felt compelled to scribble down the thoughts which entered my mind. I wrote rapidly, but soon wearied of my work. I was proceeding to tear up the manuscript when my eye fell on a newspaper which had just come into the shack wrapped around a chunk of mouldy beef. A thought came to me there and then. I would send my account of the tragedy to the editor of that paper. It was the Dawn, a London halfpenny daily. I had never heard of it before.
I had no envelope in my possession. I searched through the shack and found one, dirty, torn, and disreputable in appearance. Amongst all those men there was not another to be found. I did not rewrite my story. Scrawled with pencil on dirty paper, and enclosed in a dirtier envelope, I sent it off to Fleet Street and forgot all about it. But, strange to say, in four days' time I received an answer from the editor of the Dawn, asking me to send some more stories of the same kind, and saying that he was prepared to pay me two guineas for each contribution accepted.
The acceptance of my story gave me no great delight; I often went into greater enthusiasm over a fight in the Kinlochleven ring. But outside a fight or a stiff game of cards, there are few things which cause me to become excited. My success as a writer discomfited me a little even. I at first felt that I was committing some sin against my mates. I was working on a shift which they did not understand; and men look with suspicion on things beyond their comprehension. A man may make money at a fight, a gaming table or at a shift, but the man who made money with a dirty pencil and a piece of dirty paper was an individual who had no place in my mates' scheme of things.
For all that, the editor's letter created great stir amongst my mates. It passed round the shack and was so dirty on coming back that I couldn't read a word of it. Red Billy said that he could not understand it, and that I must have copied what I had written from some other paper. Moleskin Joe said that I was the smartest man he had ever met, by cripes! I was. He took great pleasure in calling me "that mate of mine" ever afterwards. Old Sandy MacDonald, who had come from the Isle of Skye, and who was wasting slowly away, said that he knew a young lad like me who went from the Highlands to London and made his fortune by writing for the papers.
"He had no other wark but writin', and he made his fortune," Sandy asserted, and everyone except myself laughed at this. It was such a funny thing to hear old Sandy make his first joke, my mates thought. A man to earn his living by writing for the papers! Whoever heard of such a thing?
In all I wrote five articles for the Dawn, then found that I could write no more. I had told five truthful and exciting incidents of my navvying life, and I was not clever enough to tell lies about it. Ten guineas came to me from Fleet Street. Six of these I sent home to my own people, and for the remainder I purchased many an hour's joy in the whisky store and many a night's life-giving excitement at the gaming table.
I sent my address home with the letter, and when my mother replied she was so full of her grievances that she had no time to enquire if I had any of my own. Another child had been born, and the family in all now consisted of thirteen.
The winter was at hand. When the night drew near, a great weariness came over the face of the sun as it sank down behind the hills which had seen a million sunsets. The autumn had been mild and gentle, its breezes soft, its showers light and cool. But now, slowly and surely, the great change was taking place; a strange stillness settled softly on the lonely places. Nature waited breathless on the threshold of some great event, holding her hundred winds suspended in a fragile leash. The heather bells hung motionless on their stems, the torrents dropped silently as smoke from the scarred edges of the desolate ravines, but in this silence there lay a menace; in its supreme poise was the threat of coming danger. The crash of our hammers was an outrage, and the exploding dynamite a sacrilege against tired nature.
A great weariness settled over us; our life lacked colour, we were afraid of the silence, the dulness of the surrounding mountains weighed heavily on our souls. The sound of labour was a comfort, the thunder of our hammers went up as a threat against the vague implacable portent of the wild.
Life to me had now become dull, expressionless, stupid. Only in drink was there contentment, only in a fight was there excitement. I hated the brown earth, the slushy muck and gritty rock, but in the end hatred died out and I was almost left without passion or longing. My life now had no happiness and no great sadness. My soul was proof against sorrow as it was against joy. Happiness and woe were of no account; life was a spread of brown muck, without any relieving splash of lighter or darker colours. For all that, I had no great desire (desire was almost dead even) to go down to the Lowlands and look for a newer job. So I stayed amidst the brown muck and existed.
When I had come up my thoughts for a long while were eternally straying to Norah Ryan, but in the end she became to me little more than a memory, a frail and delightful phantom of a fleeting dream.
The coming of winter was welcome. The first nipping frost was a call to battle, and, though half afraid, most of the men were willing to accept the challenge. A few, it is true, went off to Glasgow, men old and feeble who were afraid of the coming winter.
In the fight to come the chances were against us. Rugged cabins with unplanked floors, leaking roofs, flimsy walls, through the chinks of which the winds cut like knives, meagre blankets, mouldy food, well-worn clothes, and battered bluchers were all that we possessed to aid us in the struggle. On the other hand, the winter marshalled all her forces, the wind, the hail, frost, snow, and rain, and it was against these that we had to fight, and for the coming of the opposing legions we waited tensely and almost eagerly.
But the north played a wearing game, and strove to harry us out with suspense before thundering down upon us with her cold and her storm. The change took place slowly. In a day we could hardly feel it, in a week something intangible and subtle, something which could not be defined, had crept into our lives. We felt the change, but could not localise it. Our spirits sank under the uncertainty of the waiting days, but still the wild held her hand. The bells of the heather hung from their stems languidly and motionless, stripped of all their summer charm, but lacking little of the hue of summer. Even yet the foam-flecked waters dropped over the cliffs silently as figures that move in a dream. When we gathered together and ate our midday meal, we wrapped our coats around our shoulders, whereas before we had sat down without them. When night came on we drew nearer to the hot-plate, and when we turned naked into bed we found that the blankets were colder than usual. Only thus did the change affect us for a while. Then the cold snap came suddenly and wildly.
The plaintive sunset waned into a sickly haze one evening, and when the night slipped upwards to the mountain peaks never a star came out into the vastness of the high heavens. Next morning we had to thaw the door of our shack out of the muck into which it was frozen during the night. Outside the snow had fallen heavily on the ground, and the virgin granaries of winter had been emptied on the face of the world.
Unkempt, ragged, and dispirited, we slunk to our toil, the snow falling on our shoulders and forcing its way insistently through our worn and battered bluchers. The cuttings were full of slush to the brim, and we had to grope through them with our hands until we found the jumpers and hammers at the bottom. These we held under our coats until the heat of our bodies warmed them, then we went on with our toil.
At intervals during the day the winds of the mountain put their heads together and swept a whirlstorm of snow down upon us, wetting each man to the pelt. Our tools froze until the hands that gripped them were scarred as if by red-hot spits. We shook uncertain over our toil, our sodden clothes scalding and itching the skin with every movement of the swinging hammers. Near at hand the lean derrick jibs whirled on their pivots like spectres of some ghoulish carnival, and the muck-barrows crunched backwards and forwards, all their dirt and rust hidden in woolly mantles of snow. Hither and thither the little black figures of the workers moved across the waste of whiteness like shadows on a lime-washed wall. Their breath steamed out on the air and disappeared in space like the evanescent and fragile vapour of frying mushrooms.
"On a day like this a man could hardly keep warm on the red-hot hearth of hell!" Moleskin remarked at one time, when the snow whirled around the cutting, causing us to gasp with every fiercely-taken breath.
"Ye'll have a heat on the same hearthstone some day," answered Red Billy, who held a broken lath in one mittened hand, while he whittled away with his eternal clasp-knife.
When night came on we crouched around the hot-plate and told stories of bygone winters, when men dropped frozen stiff in the trenches where they laboured. A few tried to gamble near the door, but the wind that cut through the chinks of the walls chased them to the fire. Moleskin told the story of his first meeting with me on the Paisley toll-road, and suddenly I realised that I was growing old. It was now some years since that meeting took place, and even then I was a man, unaided and alone, fighting the great struggle of existence. I capped Moleskin's story with the account of Mick Deehan's death on the six-foot way. Afterwards the men talked loudly of many adventures. Long lonely shifts were spoken of, nights and days when the sweat turned to ice on the eyelashes, when the cold nipped to the bone and chilled the workers at their labours. One man slipped off the snow-covered gang-plank and fell like a rock forty feet through space.
"Flattened out like a jelly-fish on the groun' he was," said Clancy, who told the story.
Red Billy, who worked on the railway line in his younger days, gave an account of Mick Cassidy's death. Mick was sent out to free the ice-locked facing points, and when they were closed by the signalman, Cassidy's hand got wedged between the blades and the rail.
"Held like a louse was Cassidy, until the train threw him clear," concluded Billy, adding reflectively that "he might have been saved if he had had somethin' in one hand to hack the other hand off with."
Joe told how one Ned Farley got his legs wedged between the planks of a mason's scaffold and hung there head downwards for three hours. When Farley got relieved he was a raving madman, and died two hours afterwards. We all agreed that death was the only way out in a case like that.
Gahey told of a night's doss at the bottom of a coal slip in a railway siding. He slept there with three other people, two men and a woman. As the woman was a bad one it did not matter very much to anyone where she slept. During the night a waggon of coal was suddenly shot down the slip. Gahey got clear, leaving his thumb with the three corpses which remained behind.
"It was a bad endin', even for a woman like that," someone said.
Outside the winds of the night scampered madly, whistling through every crevice of the shack and threatening to smash all its timbers to pieces. We bent closer over the hot-plate, and the many who could not draw near to the heat scrambled into bed and sought warmth under the meagre blankets. Suddenly the lamp went out, and a darkness crept into the corners of the dwelling, causing the figures of my mates to assume fantastic shapes in the gloom. The circle around the hot-plate drew closer, and long lean arms were stretched out towards the flames and the redness. Seldom may a man have the chance to look on hands like those of my mates. Fingers were missing from many, scraggy scars seaming along the wrists or across the palms of others told of accidents which had taken place on many precarious shifts. The faces near me were those of ghouls worn out in some unholy midnight revel. Sunken eyes glared balefully in the dim unearthly light of the fire, and as I looked at them a moment's terror settled on my soul. For a second I lived in an early age, and my mates were the cave-dwellers of an older world than mine. In the darkness, near the door, a pipe glowed brightly for a moment, then the light went suddenly out and the gloom settled again. The reaction came when Two-shift Mullholland's song, The Bold Navvy Man, was sung by Clancy of the Cross. We joined lustily in the chorus, and the roof shook with the thunder of our voices.
"THE BOLD NAVVY MAN.
"Let her go, boys; let her go now!" roared Clancy, rising to his feet, kicking a stray frying-pan and causing it to clatter across the shack. "All together, boys; damn you, all together!
Even old Sandy MacDonald joined in the chorus with his weak and querulous voice. The winter was touching him sharply, and he was worse off than any of us. Along with the cold he had his wasting disease to battle against, and God alone knew how he managed to work along with his strong and lusty mates on the hammer squad at Kinlochleven. Sandy was not an old man, but what with the dry cough that was in his throat and the shivers of cold that came over him after a long sweaty shift, it was easily seen that he had not many months to live in this world. He looked like a parcel of bones covered with brown withered parchment and set in the form of a man. How life could remain fretting within such a frame as his was a mystery which I could not solve. Almost beyond the effects of heat or cold, the cold sweat came out of his skin on the sweltering warm days, and when the winter came along, the chilly weather hardly made him colder than he was by nature. His cough never kept silent; sometimes it was like the bark of a dog, at other times it seemed as if it would carry the very entrails out of the man. In the summer he spat blood with it, but usually it was drier than the east wind.
At one period of his life Sandy had had a home and a wife away down in Greenock; but in those days he was a strong lusty fellow, fit to pull through a ten-hour shift without turning a hair. One winter's morning he came out from the sugar refinery, in which he worked, steaming hot from the long night's labour, and then the cold settled on him. Being a sober, steady-going man, he tried to work as long as he could lift his arms, but in the end he had to give up the job which meant life and home to him. One by one his little bits of things went to the pawnshop; but all the time he struggled along bravely, trying to keep the roof-tree over his head and his door shut against the lean spectre of hunger. Between the four bare walls of the house Sandy's wife died one day; and this caused the man to break up his home.
He came to Kinlochleven at the heel of the summer, and because he mastered his cough for a moment when asking for a job, Red Billy Davis started him on the jumper squad. The old ganger, despite his swearing habits and bluntness of discourse, was at heart a very good-natured fellow. Sandy stopped with us for a long while and it was pitiful to see him labouring there, his old bones creaking with every move of his emaciated body, and the cold sweat running off him all day. He ate very little; the tame robin which flitted round our shack nearly picked as much from off the floor. He had a bunk to himself at the corner of the shack, and there he coughed out the long sleepless hours of the night, bereft of all hope, lacking sympathy from any soul sib to himself, and praying for the grave which would end all his troubles. For days at a stretch he lay supine in his bed, unable to move hand or foot, then, when a moment's relief came to him, he rose and started on his shift again, crawling out with his mates like a wounded animal.
Winter came along and Sandy got no better; he could hardly grow worse and remain alive. Life burned in him like a dying candle in a ruined house, and he waited for the end of the great martyrdom patiently. Still, when he could, he kept working day in and day out, through cold and wet and storm. Heaven knows that it was not work which he needed, but care, rest, and sympathy. All of us expressed pity for the man, and helped him in little ways, trying to make life easier for him. Moleskin usually made gruel for him, while I read the Oban Times to the old fellow whenever that paper came into the shack. One evening as I read something concerning the Isle of Skye Sandy burst into tears, like a homesick child.
"Man! I would like tae dee there awa' in the Isle of Skye," he said to me in a yearning voice.
"Die, you damned old fool, you?" exclaimed Joe, who happened to come around with a pot of gruel just at that moment and overheard Sandy's remark. "You'll not die for years yet. I never saw you lookin' so well in all your life."
"It's all over with me, Moleskin," said poor Sandy. "It's a great wonder that I've stood it so long, but just now the thocht came to me that I'd like tae dee awa' back in my own place in the Isle of Skye. If I could just save as muckle siller as would take me there, I'd be content enough."
"Some people are content with hellish little!" said Joe angrily. "You've got to buck up, man, for there's a good time comin', though you'll never—I mean that ev'rything will come right in the end. We'll see that you get home all right, you fool, you!"
Joe was ashamed to find himself guilty of any kind impulse, and he endeavoured to hide his good intentions behind rough words. When he called Sandy an old fool Sandy's eyes sparkled, and he got into such good humour that he joined in the chorus of the Bold Navvy Man when Clancy, who is now known as Clancy of the Cross, gave bellow to Mullholland's magnum opus.
Early on the morning of the next day, which was pay-day, Moleskin was busy at work sounding the feelings of the party towards a great scheme which he had in mind; and while waiting at the pay-office when the day's work was completed, Joe made the following speech to Red Billy's gang, all of whom, with the exception of Sandy MacDonald, were present.
"Boys, Sandy MacDonald wants to go home and die in his own place," said Joe, weltering into his subject at once. "He'll kick the bucket soon, for he has the look of the grave in his eyes. He only wants as much tin as will take him home, and that is not much for any man to ask, is it? So what do you say, boys, to a collection for him, a shillin' a man, or whatever you can spare? Maybe some day, when you turn respectable, one of you can say to yourself, 'I once kept myself from gettin' drunk, by givin' some of my money to a man who needed it more than myself.' Now, just look at him comin' across there."
We looked in the direction of Joe's outstretched finger and saw Sandy coming towards us, his rags fluttering around him like the duds of a Michaelmas scarecrow.
"Isn't he a pitiful sight!" Moleskin went on. "He looks like the Angel of Death out on the prowl! It's a God's charity to help a man like Sandy and make him happy as we are ourselves. We are at home here; he is not. So it is up to us to help him out of the place. Boys, listen to me!" Moleskin's voice sank into an intense whisper. "If every damned man of you don't pay a shillin' into this collection I'll look for the man that doesn't, and I'll knuckle his ribs until he pays for booze for ev'ry man in Billy's shack, by God! I will."
Everyone paid up decently, and on behalf of the gang I was asked to present the sum of three pounds fifteen shillings to Sandy MacDonald. Sandy began to cry like a baby when he got the money into his hands, and every man in the job called out involuntarily: "Oh! you old fool, you!"
Pay-day was on Saturday. On Monday morning Sandy intended starting out on his journey home. All Saturday night he coughed out the long hours of the darkness, but in the morning he looked fit and well.
"You'll come through it, you fool!" said Moleskin. "I'll be dead myself afore you."
On the next night he went to bed early, and as we sat around the gaming table we did not hear the racking cough which had torn at the man's chest for months.
"He's getting better," we all said.
"Feeling all right, Sandy?" I asked, as I turned into bed.
"Mon! I'm feelin' fine now," he answered. "I'm goin' to sleep well to-night, and I'll be fit for the journey in the morn."
That night Sandy left us for good. When the morning came we found the poor wasted fellow lying dead in his bunk, his eyes wide open, his hands closed tightly, and the long finger-nails cutting into the flesh of the palm. The money which we gave to the man was bound up in a little leathern purse tied round his neck with a piece of string.
The man was very light and it was an easy job to carry him in the little black box and place him in his home below the red earth of Kinlochleven. The question as to what should be done with the money arose later. I suggested that it should be used in buying a little cross for Sandy's grave.
"If the dead man wants a cross he can have one," said Moleskin Joe. And because of what he said and because it was more to our liking, we put the money up as a stake on the gaming table. Clancy won the pile, because his luck was good on the night of the game.
That is our reason for calling him Clancy of the Cross ever since.
The winter rioted on its way. Snow, rain, and wind whirled around us in the cutting, and wet us to the bone. It was a difficult feat to close our hands tightly over the hammers with which we took uncertain aim at the drill heads and jumper ends. The drill holder cowered on his seat and feared for the moment when an erring hammer might fly clear and finish his labours for ever. Hourly our tempers grew worse, each movement of the body caused annoyance and discomfort, and we quarrelled over the most trivial matters. Red Billy cursed every man in turn and all in general, until big Jim Maloney lost his temper completely and struck the ganger on the jaw with his fist, knocking him senseless into a snowdrift.
That night Maloney was handed his lying time and told to slide. He padded from Kinlochleven in the darkness, and I have never seen him since then. He must have died on the journey. No man could cross those mountains in the darkness of mid-winter and in the teeth of a snowstorm.
Some time afterwards the copy of a Glasgow newspaper, either the Evening Times or News (I now forget which), came into our shack wrapped around some provisions, and in the paper I read a paragraph concerning the discovery of a dead body on the mountains of Argyllshire. While looking after sheep a shepherd came on the corpse of a man that lay rotting in a thawing snowdrift. Around the remains a large number of half-burnt matches were picked up, and it was supposed that the poor fellow had tried to keep himself warm by their feeble flames in the last dreadful hours. Nobody identified him, but the paper stated that he was presumably a navvy who lost his way on a journey to or from the big waterworks of Kinlochleven.
As for myself, I am quite certain that it was that of big Jim Maloney. No man could survive a blizzard on the houseless hills, and big Jim Maloney never appeared in model or shack afterwards.
'Twas towards the close of a fine day on the following summer that we were at work in the dead end of a cutting, Moleskin and I, when I, who had been musing on the quickly passing years, turned to Moleskin and quoted a line from the Bible.
"Our years pass like a tale that is told," I said.
"Like a tale that is told damned bad," answered my mate, picking stray crumbs of tobacco from his waistcoat pocket and stuffing them into the heel of his pipe. "It's a strange world, Flynn. Here to-day, gone to-morrow; always waitin' for a good time comin' and knowin' that it will never come. We work with one mate this evenin', we beg for crumbs with another on the mornin' after. It's a bad life ours, and a poor one, when I come to think of it, Flynn."
"It is all that," I assented heartily.
"Look at me!" said Joe, clenching his fists and squaring his shoulders. "I must be close on forty years, maybe on the graveyard side of it, for all I know. I've horsed it since ever I can mind; I've worked like a mule for years, and what have I to show for it all to-day, matey? Not the price of an ounce of tobacco! A midsummer scarecrow wouldn't wear the duds that I've to wrap around my hide! A cockle-picker that has no property only when the tide is out is as rich as I am. Not the price of an ounce of tobacco! There is something wrong with men like us, surely, when we're treated like swine in a sty for all the years of our life. It's not so bad here, but it's in the big towns that a man can feel it most. No person cares for the likes of us, Flynn. I've worked nearly ev'rywhere; I've helped to build bridges, dams, houses, ay, and towns! When they were finished, what happened? Was it for us—the men who did the buildin'—to live in the homes that we built, or walk through the streets that we laid down? No earthly chance of that! It was always, 'Slide! we don't need you any more,' and then a man like me, as helped to build a thousand houses big as castles, was hellish glad to get the shelter of a ten-acre field and a shut gate between me and the winds of night. I've spent all my money, have I? It's bloomin' easy to spend all that fellows like us can earn. When I was in London I saw a lady spend as much on fur to decorate her carcase with as would keep me in beer and tobacco for all the rest of my life. And that same lady would decorate a dog in ribbons and fol-the-dols, and she wouldn't give me the smell of a crust when I asked her for a mouthful of bread. What could you expect from a woman who wears the furry hide of some animal round her neck, anyhow? We are not thought as much of as dogs, Flynn. By God! them rich buckos do eat an awful lot. Many a time I crept up to a window just to see them gorgin' themselves."
"I have often done the same kind of thing," I said.
"Most men do," answered Joe. "You've heard of old Moses goin' up the hill to have a bit peep at the Promist Land. He was just like me and you, Flynn, wantin' to have a peep at the things which he'd never lay his claws on."
"Those women who sit half-naked at the table have big appetites," I said.
"They're all gab and guts, like young crows," said Moleskin. "And they think more of their dogs than they do of men like me and you. I'm an Antichrist!"
"A what?"
"One of them sort of fellows as throws bombs at kings."
"You mean an Anarchist."
"Well, whatever they are, I'm one. What is the good of kings, of fine-feathered ladies, of churches, of anything in the country, to men like me and you? One time, 'twas when I started trampin' about, I met an old man on the road and we mucked about, the two of us as mates, for months afterwards. One night in the winter time, as we were sleepin' under a hedge, the old fellow got sick, and he began to turn over and over on his beddin' of frost and his blankets of snow, which was not the best place to put a sick man, as you know yourself. As the night wore on, he got worse and worse. I tried to do the best I could for the old fellow, gave him my muffler and my coat, but the pains in his guts was so much that I couldn't hardly prevent him from rollin' along the ground on his stomach. He would do anythin' just to take his mind away from the pain that he was sufferin'. At last I got him to rise and walk, and we trudged along till we came to a house by the roadside. 'Twas nearly midnight and there was a light in one of the windows, so I thought that I would call at the door and ask for a bit of help. My mate, who bucked up somewhat when we were walkin', got suddenly worse again, and fell against the gatepost near beside the road, and stuck there as if glued on to the thing. I left him by himself and went up to the door and knocked. A man drew the bolts and looked out at me. He had his collar on back to front, so I knew that he was a clergyman.
"'What do you want?' he asked.
"'My mate's dyin' on your gatepost,' I said.
"'Then you'd better take him away from here,' said the parson.
"'But he wants help,' I said. 'He can't go a step further, and if you could give me a drop of brandy——'
"I didn't get any further with my story. The fellow whistled for his dog, and a big black animal came boundin' through the passage and started snarlin' when it saw me standin' there in the doorway.
"'Now, you get away from here,' said the clergyman to me.
"'My mate's dyin',' I said.
"'Seize him,' said the man to the dog."
"What a scoundrel that man must have been," I said, interrupting Moleskin in the midst of his story.
"He was only a human being, and that's about as bad as a man can be," said Joe. "Anyway, he put the dog on me and the animal bounded straight at the thick of my leg, but that animal didn't know that it was up against Moleskin Joe. I caught hold of the dog by the throat and twisted its throttle until it snapped like a dry stick. Then I lifted the dead thing up in my arms and threw it right into the face of the man who was standin' in the hallway.
"'Take that an' be thankful that the worst dog of the two of you is not dead,' I shouted. 'And when it comes to a time that sees you hangin' on the lower cross-bars of the gates of heaven, waitin' till you get in, may you be kept there till I give the word for you to pass through.'
"My mate was still hangin' on the gatepost when I came back, and he was as dead as a maggot. I could do nothin' for a dead man, so I went on my own, leavin' him hangin' there like a dead crow in a turnip field. Next mornin' a cop lifted me and I was charged with assaultin' a minister and killin' his dog. I got three months hard, and it was hard to tell whether for hittin' the man or killin' the dog. Anyway, the fellow got free, although he allowed a man to die at his own doorstep. I never liked clergy before, and I hate them ever since; but I know, as you know, that it's not for the likes of you and me that they work for."
"Time to stop lookin' at your work, boys!" interrupted Red Billy, as he approached us, carrying his watch and eternal clasp-knife in his hands. "Be damned to you, you could look at your work all day, you love it so much. But when you go to the pay-office to-night, you'll hear a word or two that will do you good, you will!"
On arriving at the pay-office, every man in turn was handed his lying time and told that his services were no longer required. Red Billy passed the money out through the window of the shack which served as money-box. Moleskin came after me, and he carefully counted the money handed to him.
"Half-a-crown wrong in your tally, old cock," he said to Red Billy. "Fork out the extra two-and-a-tanner, you unsanctified, chicken-chested cheat. I didn't think that it was in your carcase to cheat a man of his lyin' time."
"No cheatin'," said Billy.
"Well, what the hell——!"
"No cheatin'," interrupted Billy.
"I'm two-and-a-tanner short——"
"No cheatin'," piped Billy maliciously.
"I'll burst your nut, you parrot-faced, gawky son of a Pontius Pilate, if you don't fork out my full lyin' time!" roared Moleskin.
"I always charge two-and-six for a pair of boots and the same for a clasp-knife," said the ganger.
Billy had a long memory, and Joe was cornered and crestfallen. I, myself, had almost forgotten about the knife which Joe had lifted from Red Billy on the morning of our arrival in Kinlochleven, and Joe had almost lost memory of it as well.
"I had the best of that bargain," Red Billy went on sweetly. "The knife was on its last legs and I just intended to buy a new one. A half-crown was a good penny for a man like me to spend, so I thought that if Moleskin paid for it, kind of quiet like, it would be a very nice thing for me—a—very—nice—thing—for—me."
"I grant that you have the best of me this time," said Moleskin, and a smile passed over his face. "But my turn will come next, you know. I wouldn't like to do you any serious harm, Billy, but I must get my own back. I have only to look for that old woman of yours and send her after you. I can get her address easy enough, and I have plenty of time to look for it. You don't care much for your old wife, Billy, do you?"
Billy made no answer. It was rumoured that his wife was a woman with a tongue and a temper, and that Billy feared her and spent part of his time in endeavouring to get out of her way. Joe was working upon this rumour now, and the ganger began to look uncomfortable.
"Of course, if I get my half-crown and another to boot, I'll not trouble to look for the woman," said Joe. "It won't be hard to find her. She'll have gone back to her own people, and it is well known that they belong to Paisley. Her brothers are all fightin' men, and ready to maul the man that didn't play fairly with their own blood relations. By God! they'll give you a maulin', Billy, when I send them after you. They'll come up here, and further until they find you out. You'll have to shank it when they come, run like hell, in fact, and lose your job and your lyin' time. If you give me seven-and-six I'll not give you away!"
"I'll give you the half-crown," said Billy.
"I'm losin' my time talkin' to you," said Joe pleasantly, and he pulled out his watch. "Every minute I stop here I'm goin' to put my charge up a shillin'."
"I'll give you the five shillin's if you go away and keep clear of Paisley," growled the ganger. "Five shillin's! you damned cheat! Are you not content with that?"
"One minute," said Joe solemnly. "Eight-and-six."
"My God!" Billy cried. "You're goin' to rob me. I'll give you the seven-and-six."
We were heartily enjoying it. There were over one hundred men looking on, and Joe, now master of the strained situation, kept looking steadfastly at his watch, as if nothing else in the world mattered.
"Two minutes; nine-and-six," he said at the end of the stated time.
"Here's your nine-and-six!" roared Billy, passing some silver coins through the grating. "Here, take it and be damned to you!"
Joe put the money in his pocket, cast a benevolent glance at Billy, and my mate and I went out from Kinlochleven. We did not go into the shack which we had occupied for over a year. There was nothing there belonging to us, all our property was on our backs or in our pockets, so we turned away straight from the pay-office and took to the road again.
The great procession filed down the hillside. Hundreds of men had been paid off on the same evening. The job was nearly completed, and only a few hands were required to finish the remainder of the labour. Some men decided to stay, but a great longing took possession of them at the last moment, and they followed those who were already on the road.
Civilisation again! Away behind the hunchbacked mountains the sunset flamed in all its colours. Islands of jasper were enshrined in lakes of turquoise, rivers of blood flowed through far-spreading plains of dark cumulus that were enshrouded in the spell of eternal silence. Overhead the blue was of the deepest, save where one stray cloud blushed to find itself alone in the vastness of the high heavens.
We were an army of scarecrows, ragged, unkempt scare crows of civilisation. We came down from Kinlochleven in the evening with the glow of the setting sun full in our faces, and never have I looked on an array of men such as we were. Some were old, lame men who might not live until they obtained their next job, and who would surely drop at their post when they obtained it. These were the veterans of labour, crawling along limply in the rear, staggering over boulders and hillocks, men who were wasted in the long struggle and who were now bound for a new place—a place where a man might die. They had built their last town and were no longer wanted there or anywhere else. Strong lusty fellows like myself took the lead. We possessed hale and supple limbs, and a mile or two of a journey meant very little to any of us.
Now and again I looked behind at the followers. The great army spread out in the centre and tailed away towards the end. A man at the rear sat down and took a stone out of his boot. His comrades helped him to his feet when he had finished his task. He was a very old, decrepit, and weary man; the look of death was in his eyes, but he wanted to walk on. Maybe he would sit down again at the foot of the mountain. Maybe he would sleep there, for further down the night breezes were warmer, much warmer, than the cold winds on the hillside. Probably the old fellow thought of these things as he tumbled down the face of the mountain; and perhaps he knew that death was waiting for him at the bottom.
Some sang as they journeyed along. They sang about love, about drink, about women and gambling. Most of us joined in the singing. Maybe the man at the rear sang none, but we could not hear him if he did, he was so far behind.
The sun paled out and hid behind a hump of the mountain. Overhead a few stars twinkled mockingly. In the distance the streams could be heard falling over the cliffs. Still the mountain vomited out the human throng, and over all the darkness of the night settled slowly.
What did the men think of as they walked down from Kinlochleven? It is hard to say, for the inmost thoughts of a most intimate friend are hidden from us, for they lack expression and cannot be put into words. As to myself, I found that my thoughts were running back to Norah Ryan and the evenings we spent on the shores of the Clyde. I was looking backward; I had no thoughts, no plans, for the future.
I was now almost careless of life, indifferent towards fortune, and the dreams of youth had given place to a placid acceptance of stern realities. On the way up to the hills I had longed for things beyond my reach—wealth, comfort, and the love of fair women. But these longings had now given place to an almost unchanging calm, an indifference towards women, and an almost stoical outlook on the things that are. Nothing was to me pleasurable, nothing made me sad. During the last months in Kinlochleven I had very little desire for drink or cards, but true to custom I gave up neither. With no man except Moleskin did I exchange confidences, and even these were of the very slightest. To the rest of my mates I was always the same, except perhaps in the whisky saloon or in a fight. They thought me very strong in person and in character, but when I pried deeply into my own nature I found that I was full of vanity and weaknesses. The heat of a good fire after a hard day's work caused me to feel happier; hunger made me sour, a good meal made me cheerful. One day I was fit for any work; the next day I was lazy and heedless, and at times I so little resembled myself that I might be taken for a man of an entirely opposite character. Still, the river cannot be expected to take on the same form in shine as in shadow, in level as in steep, and in fall as in freshet. I am a creature of environment, an environment that is eternally changing. Not being a stone or clod, I change with it. I was a man of many humours, of many inconsistencies. The pain of a corn changed my outlook on life. Moleskin himself was sometimes disgusting in my sight; at other times I was only happy in his company. But all the time I was the same in the eyes of my mates, stolid, unsympathetic, and cold. In the end most of my moods went, and although I had mapped out no course of conduct, I settled into a temperate contentment, which, though far removed from gladness, had no connection with melancholy.
Since I came to Kinlochleven I had not looked on a woman, and the thoughts of womankind had almost entirely gone from my mind. With the rest of the men it was the same. The sexual instinct was almost dead in them. Women were merely dreams of long ago; they were so long out of sight that the desire for their company had almost expired in every man of us. Still, it was strange that I should think of Norah Ryan as I trudged down the hillside from Kinlochleven.
The men were still singing out their songs, and Joe hummed the chorus through the teeth that held his empty pipe as he walked along.
Suddenly the sound of singing died and Moleskin ceased his bellowing chorus. A great silence fell on the party. The nailed shoes rasping on the hard earth, and the half-whispered curse of some falling man as he tripped over a hidden boulder, were the only sounds that could be heard in the darkness.
And down the face of the mountain the ragged army tramped slowly on.