A LITTLE TRAGEDY
"The sweat was wet on his steaming loins and shoulders bent and
scarred,
And he dropped to earth like a spavined mule that's struck in the
knacker's yard.
Bury him deep in the red, red muck, and pile the clay on his
breast,
For all that he needs for his years of toil are years of unbroken
rest."
--_From the song that follows._
Talking of thieving puts me in mind of the tragedy of English Bill. Bill
was a noted thief. He would have robbed his mother's corpse, it was
said. There were three sayings in Kinlochleven, and they were as
follows:
Moleskin Joe would gamble on his father's tombstone.
English Bill would rob his mother of her winding-sheet.
Flynn would fight his own shadow and get the best of it.
The three of us were mates, and we were engaged on a special job,
blasting a rock facing, in the corner of a secluded cutting. There was
very little room for movement, and we had to do the job all by
ourselves. One evening we set seven charges of dynamite in the holes
which we had drilled during the day, put the fuses alight, and hurried
off to a place of safety, and there waited until the explosion was over.
While the thunder of the riven earth was still in our ears the ganger
blew his whistle, the signal to cease work and return to our shacks.
Next morning Bill reappeared wearing a strong heavily-soled pair of new
bluchers which he had purchased on the evening previously.
"They're a good pair of understandings, Bill," I said, as I examined my
mate's boots with a feeling of envy.
"A damned good pair!" said Moleskin ruefully, looking at his own bare
toes peeping through the ragged leather of his emaciated uppers.
Bill's face glowed with pride as he lifted his pick and proceeded to
clean out the refuse from the rock face. Bill was always in a hurry to
start work, and Joe often prophesied that the man would come to a bad
end. On this morning Joe was in a bad temper, for he had drunk too well
the night before.
"Stow it, you fool," he growled at Bill. "You're a damned hasher, and no
ganger within miles of you!"
Bill made no reply, but lifted his pick and drove it into the rock which
we had blasted on the day before. As he struck the ground there was a
deadly roar; the pick whirled round, sprung upwards, twirled in the air
like a wind-swept straw, and entered Bill's throat just a finger's
breadth below the Adam's apple. One of the dynamite charges had failed
to explode on the previous day, and Bill had struck it with the point of
the pick, and with this tool which had earned him his livelihood for
many years sticking in his throat he stood for a moment swaying
unsteadily. He laughed awkwardly as if ashamed of what had happened,
then dropped silently to the ground. The pick slipped out, a red foam
bubbled on the man's lips for a second, and that was all.
The sight unnerved us for a moment, but we quickly recovered. We had
looked on death many times, and our virgin terror was now almost lost.
"He's no good here now," said Moleskin sadly. "We'll look for a
muck-barrow and wheel him down to the hut. Didn't I always say that he
would come to a bad end, him with his hurry and flurry and his frothy
get-about way?"
"He saved us by his hurry, anyhow," I remarked.
We turned the man over and straightened his limbs, then hurried off for
a muck-barrow. On coming back we discovered that some person had stolen
the man's boots.
"They should have been taken by us before we left him," I said.
"You're damned right," assented Joe.
Several of the men gathered around, and together we wheeled poor Bill
down to the hut along the rickety barrow road. His face was white under
the coating of beard, and his poor naked feet looked very blue and cold.
All the workmen took off their caps and stood bareheaded until we passed
out of sight. No one knew whose turn would come next. When Bill was
buried I wrote, at the request of Moleskin Joe, a song on the tragedy. I
called the song "A Little Tragedy," and I read it to my mate as we sat
together in a quiet corner of the hut.
"A LITTLE TRAGEDY.
"The sweat was wet on his steaming loins and shoulders bent and
scarred,
And he dropped to earth like a spavined mule that's struck in the
knacker's yard.
Bury him deep in the red, red muck, and pile the clay on his
breast,
For all that he needs for his years of toil are years of unbroken
rest.
"And who has mothered this kinless one? Why should we want to know
As we hide his face from the eyes of men and his flesh from the
hooded crow?
Had he a sweetheart to wait for him, with a kiss for his toil-worn
face?
It doesn't matter, for here or there another can fill his place.
"Is there a prayer to be prayed for him? Or is there a bell to
toll?
We'll do the best for the body that's dead, and God can deal with
the soul.
We'll bury him decently out of sight, and he who can may pray.
For maybe our turn will come to-morrow though his has come to-day.
"And maybe Bill had hopes of his own and a sort of vague desire
For a pure woman to share his home and sit beside his fire;
Joys like these he has maybe desired, but living and dying wild,
He has never known of a maiden's love nor felt the kiss of a child.
"In life he was worth some shillings a day when there was work to
do,
In death he is worth a share of the clay which in life he laboured
through;
Wipe the spume from his pallid lips, and quietly cross his hands,
And leave him alone with the Mother Earth and the Master who
understands."
My mate seemed very much impressed by the poem, and remained silent for
a long while after I had finished reading it from the dirty scrap of
tea-paper on which it was written.
"Have you ever cared a lot for some one girl, Flynn?" he asked suddenly.
"No," I answered, for I had never disclosed my little love affair to any
man.
"Have you ever cared a lot for one girl, Flynn?" repeated Joe.
"I have cared--once," I replied, and, obeying the impulse of the moment,
I told Joe the story. He looked grave when I had finished.
"They're all the same," he said; "all the same. I cared for a wench
myself one time and I intended to marry her."
I looked at my mate's unshaven face, his dirty clothes, and I laughed
outright.
"I'm nothin' great in the beauty line," went on Moleskin as if divining
my thoughts; "but when I washed myself years ago I was pretty passable.
She was a fine girl, mine, and I thought that she was decent and
aboveboard. It cost me money and time to find out what she was, and in
the end I found that she was the mother of two kids, and the lawful wife
of no man. It was a great slap in the face for me, Flynn."
"It must have been," was all that I could say.
"By God! it was," Moleskin replied. "I tried to drink my regret away,
but I never could manage it. Have you ever wrote a love song?"
"I've written one," I said.
"Will you say it to me?" asked Joe.
I had written a love song long before, and knew it by heart, for it was
a song which I liked very much. I recited it to my mate, speaking in
half-whispers so that the gamblers at the far end of the shack could not
hear me.
"A LOVE SONG
"Greater by far than all that men know, or all that men see is
this--
The lingering clasp of a maiden's hand and the warmth of her virgin
kiss,
The tresses that cover the pure white brow in many a clustering
curl,
And the deep look of honest love in the grey eyes of a girl.
"Because of that I am stronger than death and life is barren no
more,
For otherwise wrongs that I hardly feel would sink to the heart's
deep core,
For otherwise hope were utterly lost in the endless paths of
wrong--
But only to look in her soft grey eyes--I am strong, I am strong!
"Does she love as I love? I do not know, but all that I know is
this--
'Tis enough to stay for an hour at her side and dream awhile of her
kiss,
'Tis enough to clasp the hands of her, and 'neath the shade of her
hair
To press my lips on her lily brow and leave my kisses there.
"In the dreary days on the vagrant ways whereon my feet have trod
She came as a star to cheer my way, a guiding star from God,
She came from the dreamy choirs of heaven, lovely and wondrous
wise,
And I follow the path that is lighted up by her eyes, her eyes."
"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.