The train was an hour-and-a-quarter late at Finnabeg. Sir James
McClaren, alone in a first-class smoking compartment, was not surprised.
He had never travelled in Ireland before, but he held a belief that time
is very little accounted of west of the Shannon. He looked out of the
window at the rain-swept platform. It seemed to him that every passenger
except himself was leaving the train at Finnabeg. This did not surprise
him much. There was only one more station, Dunadea, the terminus of
the branch line on which Sir James was travelling. It lay fifteen miles
further on, across a desolate stretch of bog. It was not to be supposed
that many people wanted to go to Dunadea.
Sir James looking out of his window, noticed that the passengers who
alighted did not leave the station. They stood in groups on the platform
and talked to each other. They took no notice of the rain, though it was
very heavy.
Now and then one or two of them came to Sir James’ carriage and peered
in through the window. They seemed interested in him. A tall young
priest stared at him for a long time. Two commercial travellers joined
the priest and looked at Sir James. A number of women took the place of
the priest and the commercial travellers when they went away. Finally,
the guard, the engine driver, and the station master came and looked in
through the window. They withdrew together and sat on a barrow at the
far end of the platform. They lit their pipes and consulted together.
The priest joined them and offered advice. Sir James became a little
impatient.
Half an hour passed. The engine driver, the station master, and the
guard knocked the ashes out of their pipes and walked over to Sir James’
compartment. The guard opened the door.
“Is it Dunadea you’re for, your honour?” he said.
“Yes,” said Sir James. “When are you going on?”
The guard turned to the engine driver.
“It’s what I’m after telling you,” he said, “it’s Dunadea the
gentleman’s for.”
“It might be better for him,” said the engine driver, “if he was to
content himself with Finnabeg for this day at any rate.”
“Do you hear that, your honour?” said the guard. “Michael here, says it
would be better for you to stay in Finnabeg.”
“There’s a grand hotel, so there is,” said the station master, “the same
that’s kept by Mrs. Mulcahy, and devil the better you’ll find between
this and Dublin.”
Sir James looked from one man to the other in astonishment. Nowadays the
public is accustomed to large demands from railway workers, demands for
higher wages and shorter hours. But Sir James had never before heard of
an engine driver who tried to induce a passenger to get out of his train
fifteen miles short of his destination.
“I insist,” he said abruptly, “on your taking me on to Dunadea.”
“It’s what I told you all along, Michael,” said the guard. “He’s a
mighty determined gentleman, so he is. I knew that the moment I set eyes
on him.”
The guard was perfectly right. Sir James was a man of most determined
character. His career proved it. Before the war he had been professor
of economics in a Scottish University, lecturing to a class of ten or
twelve students for a salary of £250 a year. When peace came he was the
head of a newly-created Ministry of Strikes, controlling a staff of a
thousand or twelve hundred men and women, drawing a salary of £2,500 a
year. Only a man of immense determination can achieve such results. He
had garnered in a knighthood as he advanced. It was the reward of signal
service to the State when he held the position of Chief Controller of
Information and Statistics.
“Let him not be saying afterwards that he didn’t get a proper warning,”
said the engine driver.
He walked towards his engine as he spoke. The guard and the station
master followed him.
“I suppose now, Michael,” said the guard, “that you’ll not be wanting
me.”
“I will not,” said the engine driver. “The train will do nicely without
you for as far as I’m going to take her.”
Sir James did not hear either the guard’s question or the driver’s
answer. He did hear, with great satisfaction, what the station master
said next.
“Are you right there now?” the man shouted, “for if you are it’s time
you were starting.”
He unrolled a green flag and waved it. He blew a shrill blast on his
whistle. The driver stepped into the cab of the engine and handled his
levers. The train started.
Sir James leaned back in the corner of his compartment and smiled. The
track over which he travelled was badly laid and the train advanced by
jerks and bumps. But the motion was pleasant to Sir James. Any forward
movement of that train would have been pleasant to him. Each bump and
jerk brought him a little nearer to Dunadea and therefore a little
nearer to Miss Molly Dennison. Sir James was very heartily in love with
a girl who seemed to him to be the most beautiful and the most charming
in the whole world. Next day, such was his good fortune, he was to marry
her. Under the circumstances a much weaker man than Sir James would
have withstood the engine driver and resisted the invitation of
Mrs. Mulcahy’s hotel in Finnabeg. Under the circumstances even an
intellectual man of the professor type was liable to pleasant day
dreams.
Sir James’ thoughts went back to the day, six months before, when he
had first seen Miss Molly Dennison. She had been recommended to him by
a friend as a young lady likely to make an efficient private secretary.
Sir James, who had just become Head of the Ministry of Strikes, wanted a
private secretary. He appointed Miss Dennison, and saw her for the
first time when she presented herself in his office. At that moment his
affection was born. It grew and strengthened day by day. Miss Molly’s
complexion was the radiant product of the soft, wet, winds of Connaugh,
which had blown on her since her birth. Not even four years’ work in
Government offices in London had dulled her cheeks. Her smile had the
fresh innocence of a child’s and she possessed a curious felicity
of manner which was delightful though a little puzzling. Her view of
strikes and the important work of the Ministry was fresh and quite
unconventional. Sir James, who had all his life moved among serious and
earnest people, found Miss Molly’s easy cheerfulness very fascinating.
Even portentous words like syndicalism, which rang in other people’s
ears like the passing bells of our social order, moved her to airy
laughter. There were those, oldish men and slightly less oldish women,
who called her flippant. Sir James offered her his hand, his heart, his
title, and a share of his £2,500 a year. Miss Molly accepted all four,
resigned her secretaryship and went home to her father’s house in
Dunadea to prepare her trousseau.
The train stopped abruptly. But even the bump and the ceasing of noise
did not fully arouse Sir James from his pleasant dreams. He looked out
of the window and satisfied himself that he had not reached Dunadea
station or indeed any other station. The rain ran down the window
glass, obscuring his view of the landscape. He was dimly aware of a
wide stretch of grey-brown bog, of drifting grey clouds and of a single
whitewashed cottage near the railway line. He lit a cigarette and lay
back again. Molly’s face floated before his eyes. The sound of Molly’s
voice was fresh in his memory. He thought of the next day and the return
journey across the bog with Molly by his side.
At the end of half an hour he awoke to the fact that the train was still
at rest. He looked out again and saw nothing except the rain, the bog,
and the cottage. This time he opened the window and put out his head. He
looked up the line and down it. There was no one to be seen.
“The signals,” thought Sir James, “must be against us.” He looked again,
first out of one window, then out of the other. There was no signal in
sight. The single line of railway ran unbroken across the bog, behind
the train and in front of it. Sir James, puzzled, and a little wet, drew
back into his compartment and shut the window. He waited, with rapidly
growing impatience, for another half hour. Nothing happened. Then he saw
a man come out of the cottage near the line. He was carrying a basket
in one hand and a teapot in the other. He approached the train. He
came straight to Sir James’ compartment and opened the door. Sir James
recognised the engine driver.
“I was thinking,” said the man, “that maybe your honour would be glad
of a cup of tea and a bit of bread. I am sorry there is no butter, but,
sure, butter is hard to come by these times.”
He laid the teapot on the floor and put the basket on the seat in front
of Sir James. He unpacked it, taking out a loaf of home made bread, a
teacup, a small bottle of milk, and a paper full of sugar.
“It’s not much to be offering a gentleman like yourself,” he said, “but
it’s the best we have, and seeing that you’ll be here all night and best
part of to-morrow you’ll be wanting something to eat.”
Sir James gasped with astonishment.
“Here all night!” he said. “Why should we be here all night? Has the
engine broken down?”
“It has not,” said the driver.
“Then you must go on,” said Sir James. “I insist on your going on at
once.”
The driver poured out a cup of tea and handed it to Sir James. Then he
sat down and began to talk in a friendly way.
“Sure, I can’t go on,” he said, “when I’m out on strike.”
Sir James was so startled that he upset a good deal of tea. As Head of
the Ministry of Strikes he naturally had great experience, but he had
never before heard of a solitary engine driver going on strike in the
middle of a bog.
“The way of it is this,” the driver went on. “It was giv out, by them
that does be managing things that there was to be a general strike on
the first of next month. You might have heard of that, for it was in all
the papers.”
Sir James had heard of it. It was the subject of many notes and reports
in his Ministry.
“But this isn’t the 1st of next month,” he said.
“It is not,” said the driver. “It’s no more than the 15th of this month.
But the way I’m placed at present, it wouldn’t be near so convenient to
me to be striking next month as it is to be striking now. There’s talk
of moving me off this line and putting me on to the engine that does be
running into Athlone with the night mail; and it’s to-morrow the change
is to be made. Now I needn’t tell you that Athlone’s a mighty long way
from where we are this minute.”
He paused and looked at Sir James with an intelligent smile.
“My wife lives in the little house beyond there,” he said pointing out
of the window to the cottage. “And what I said to myself was this: If
I am to be striking--which I’ve no great wish to do--but if it must
be--and seemingly it must--I may as well do it in the convenientest
place I can; for as long as a man strikes the way he’s told, there can’t
be a word said to him; and anyway the 1st of next month or the 15th of
this month, what’s the differ? Isn’t one day as good as another?”
He evidently felt that his explanation was sufficient and satisfactory.
He rose to his feet and opened the door of the compartment.
“I’m sorry now,” he said, “if I’m causing any inconvenience to a
gentleman like yourself. But what can I do? I offered to leave you
behind at Finnabeg, but you wouldn’t stay. Anyway the night’s warm
and if you stretch yourself on the seat there you won’t know it till
morning, and then I’ll bring you over another cup of tea so as you won’t
be hungry. It’s a twenty-four hour strike, so it is; and I won’t be
moving on out of this before two o’clock or may be half past. But what
odds? The kind of place Dunadea is, a day or two doesn’t matter one way
or another, and if it was the day after to-morrow in place of to-morrow
you got there it would be the same thing in the latter end.”
He climbed out of the compartment as he spoke and stumped back through
the rain to his cottage. Sir James was left wondering how the people
of Dunadea managed to conduct the business of life when one day was
the same to them as another and the loss of a day now and then did not
matter. He was quite certain that the loss of a day mattered a great
deal to him, his position being what it was. He wondered what Miss Molly
Dennison would think when he failed to appear at her father’s house that
evening for dinner; what she would think--the speculation nearly drove
him mad--when he did not appear in the church next day. He put on an
overcoat, took an umbrella and set off for the engine driver’s cottage.
He had to climb down a steep embankment and then cross a wire fence. He
found it impossible to keep his umbrella up, which distressed him, for
he was totally unaccustomed to getting wet.
He found the driver, who seemed to be a good and domesticated man,
sitting at his fireside with a baby on his knee. His wife was washing
clothes in a corner of the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” said Sir James, “but my business in Dunadea is very
important. There will be serious trouble if----”
“There’s no use asking me to go on with the train,” said the driver,
“for I can’t do it. I’d never hear the last of it if I was to be a
blackleg.”
The woman at the washtub looked up.
“Don’t be talking that way, Michael,” she said, “let you get up and take
the gentleman along to where he wants to go.”
“I will not,” said the driver, “I’d do it if I could but I won’t have it
said that I was the one to break the strike.”
It was very much to the credit of Sir James that he recognised the
correctness of the engine driver’s position. It is not pleasant to be
held up twenty-four hours in the middle of a bog. It is most unpleasant
to be kept away from church on one’s own wedding day. But Sir James
knew that strikes are sacred things, far more sacred than weddings. He
hastened to agree with the engine driver.
“I know you can’t go on,” he said, “nothing would induce me to ask you
such a thing. But perhaps---”
The woman at the washtub did not reverence strikes or understand the
labour movement. She spoke abruptly.
“Have sense the two of you,” she said, “What’s to hinder you taking the
gentleman into Dunadea, Michael?”
“It’s what I can’t do nor won’t,” said her husband.
“I’m not asking you to,” said Sir James. “I understand strikes
thoroughly and I know you can’t do it. All I came here for was to ask
you to tell me where I could find a telegraph office.”
“There’s no telegraphic office nearer than Dunadea,” said the engine
driver, “and that’s seven miles along the railway and maybe nine if you
go round by road.”
Sir James looked out at the rain. It was thick and persistent. A strong
west wind swept it in sheets across the bog. He was a man of strong will
and great intellectual power; but he doubted if he could walk even seven
miles along the sleepers of a railway line against half a gale of wind,
wearing on his feet a pair of patent leather boots bought for a wedding.
“Get up out of that, Michael,” said the woman, “And off with you to
Dunadea with the gentleman’s telegram. You’ll break no strike by doing
that, so not another word out of your head.”
“I’ll--I’ll give you ten shillings with pleasure,” said Sir James,
“I’ll give you a pound if you’ll take a message for me to Mr. Dennison’s
house.”
“Anything your honour chooses to give,” said the woman, “will be
welcome, for we are poor people. But it’s my opinion that Michael ought
to do it for nothing seeing it’s him and his old strike that has things
the way they are.”
“To listen to you talking,” said the driver, “anybody would think I’d
made the strike myself; which isn’t true at all, for there’s not a man
in the country that wants it less than me.”
Sir James tore a leaf from his note book and wrote a hurried letter to
Miss Dennison. The engine driver tucked it into the breast pocket of his
coat and trudged away through the rain. His wife invited Sir James to
sit by the fire. He did so gladly, taking the stool her husband had
left. He even, after a short time, found that he had taken the child on
to his knee. It was a persistent child, which clung round his legs and
stared at him till he took it up. The woman went on with her washing.
“What,” said Sir James, “is the immediate cause of this strike?”
“Cause!” she said. “There’s no cause, only foolishness. If it was more
wages they were after I would say there was some sense in it. Or if it
was less work they wanted you could understand it--though it’s more work
and not less the most of the men in this country should be doing. But
the strike that’s in it now isn’t what you might call a strike at all.
It’s a demonstration, so it is. That’s what they’re saying anyway. It’s
a demonstration in favour of the Irish Republic, which some of them
play-boys is after getting up in Dublin. The Lord save us, would nothing
do them only a republic?”
Two hours later Sir James went back to his railway carriage. He had
listened with interest to the opinions of the engine driver’s wife on
politics and the Labour Movement. He was convinced that a separate and
independent Ministry of Strikes ought to be established in Dublin. His
own office was plainly incapable of dealing with Irish conditions. He
took from his bag a quantity of foolscap paper and set to work to draft
a note to the Prime Minister on the needs and ideas of Irish Labour.
He became deeply interested in his work and did not notice the passing
time.
He was aroused by the appearance of Miss Molly Dennison at the door of
his carriage. Her hair, which was blown about her face, was exceedingly
wet. The water dripped from her skirt and sleeves of her jacket. Her
complexion was as radiant and her smile as brilliant as ever.
“Hullo, Jimmy,” she said. “What a frowst! Fancy sitting in that poky
little carriage with both windows shut. Get up and put away your silly
old papers. If you come along at once we’ll just be in time for dinner.”
“How did you get here,” said Sir James. “I never thought--. In this
weather--. How _did_ you get here?”
“On my bike, of course,” said Molly. “Did a regular sprint. Wind behind
me. Going like blazes. I’d have done it in forty minutes, only Michael
ran into a sheep and I had to wait for him.”
Sir James was aware that the engine driver, grinning broadly, was on the
step of the carriage behind Molly.
“I lent Michael Dad’s old bike,” said Molly, “and barring the accident
with the sheep, he came along very well.”
“What I’m thinking,” said the driver, “is that you’ll never be able to
fetch back against the wind that does be in it. I wouldn’t say but
you might do it, miss; but the gentleman wouldn’t be fit. He’s not
accustomed to the like.”
“We’re not going to ride back,” said Molly. “You’re going to take us
back on the engine, with the two bikes in the tender, on top of the
coal.”
“I can’t do it, miss,” said the driver. “I declare to God I’d be afraid
of my life to do it. Didn’t I tell you I was out on strike?”
“We oughtn’t to ask him,” said Sir James. “Surely, Molly, you must
understand that. It would be an act of gross disloyalty on his part,
disloyalty to his union, to the cause of labour. And any effort we make
to persuade him---- My dear Molly, the right of collective bargaining
which lies at the root of all strikes----”
Molly ignored Sir James and turned to the engine driver.
“Just you wait here five minutes,” she said, “till I get someone who
knows how to talk to you.”
She jumped out of the carriage and ran down the railway embankment. Sir
James and the engine driver watched her anxiously. “I wouldn’t wonder,”
said Michael, “but it might be my wife she’s after.”
He was quite right. Five minutes later, Molly and the engine driver’s
wife were climbing the embankment together.
“I don’t see,” said Sir James, “what your wife has to do with the
matter.”
“By this time to-morrow,” said Michael, “you will see; if so be you’re
married by then, which is what Miss Molly said you will be.”
His wife, with Molly after her, climbed into the carriage.
“Michael,” she said, “did the young lady tell you she’s to be married
to-morrow?”
“She did tell me,” he said, “and I’m sorry for her. But what can I do?
If I was to take that engine into Dunadea they’d call me a blackleg the
longest day ever I lived.”
“I’d call you something a mighty deal worse if you don’t,” said his
wife. “You and your strikes! Strikes, Moyah! And a young lady wanting to
be married!”
Michael turned apologetically to Sir James.
“Women does be terrible set on weddings,” he said, “and that’s a fact.”
“That’ll do now, Michael,” said Molly; “stop talking and put the two
bikes on the tender, and poke up your old fires or what ever it is you
do to make your engine go.”
“Molly,” said Sir James, when Michael and his wife had left the
carriage, “I’ve drawn up a note for the Prime Minister advising the
establishment of a special Ministry of Strikes for Ireland. I feel that
the conditions in this country are so peculiar that our London office
cannot deal with them. I think perhaps I’d better suggest that he should
put you at the head of the new office.”
“Your visit to Ireland is doing you good already,” said Molly. “You’re
developing a sense of humour.”