A GAME OF CARDS
I
Micky’s Jim was telling the story of a fight in which he had taken part
and how he knocked down a man twice as heavy as himself with one on the
jaw. Owen Kelly, Gourock Ellen, Dermod, and Norah were the listeners.
The squad had just changed quarters from a farm on which they had been
engaged to the one on which they were now, and it was here that they
were going to end the season. The farm belonged to a surly old man named
Morrison, a short-tempered fellow, always at variance with the squad,
whom he did not like.
Jim was telling the story in the cart-shed. A blazing fire lit up the
place, shadows danced along the roof, outside a slight rain was falling
and the wind blew mournfully in from the hayricks that stood up like
shrouded ghosts in the gloomy stack yard. Presently a man entered, a
red-haired fellow with a limp in one leg and a heavy stick in his hand.
He was a stranger to Norah and Dermod, but the rest of the squad knew
him well and were pleased to see the man with the limp. Owen Kelly,
however, grunted something on seeing the stranger, and a look, certainly
not of pleasure, passed across his face.
“How are ye, Ginger Dubbin?” Micky’s Jim shouted to the visitor. “By
this and by that ye look well on it.”
“The bad are always well fed,” said Owen Kelly in a low voice.
“Have ye the devil’s prayer-book with ye, Ginger?” asked Micky’s Jim.
“Here it is,” said the man, drawing a pack of cards from his pocket and
running his hands along the edge of it.
“We’ll have a bit of the Gospel of Chance,” said Murtagh Gallagher.
“It’s no game for Christians,” remarked Owen Kelly, picking his teeth
with a splinter of wood.
“D’ye know why Owen Kelly doesn’t like Ginger Dubbin?” Gourock Ellen
asked Dermod Flynn in a whisper. “No? Then I’ll tell ye, but never let
dab about it. Four years ago Ginger, drunken old scamp that he is, came
here and played cards with Owen, and Owen won at first, three shillin’s
in all. Then he began to lose and lost half a crown of the money that he
had won. ‘My God!’ said old Owen, and he was nearly greetin’; ‘My God!
that I have ever lived to see this day!’ He has never played since that.
D’ye play, Dermod?”
“I used to play for buttons in Ireland.”
“It’s a bad thing they are, the cards,” said Norah Ryan.
“Turn it up or I’ll gie ye a dunt in the lug!” Micky’s Jim was shouting
to Willie the Duck, who was helping to turn the body of a disused cart
upside down.
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck, but as he spoke he fell prostrate on
his face, causing all who were watching him to burst into loud peals of
laughter.
When the cart was laid down a game of banker commenced and most of the
squad joined in the game. Dermod Flynn watched the players for a little
space; then he rose to his feet.
“Where are ye goin’?” Norah asked.
“To look at the card-players.”
“Don’t, Dermod!”
“Why?”
“Maybe ye’ll learn to play.”
“And if I do?” There was a note of defiance in the boy’s voice, and it
was evident that Norah’s remarks had displeased him.
“Well, do as you like,” said the girl in an injured tone. “But mind that
it’s a sin to play cards.”
Dermod stretched himself, laughed and approached the table. Norah felt a
sudden fear overcome her: she wanted him back, and she was angry with
the cards--little squares of cardboard--that could lure Dermod away from
her side.
He bent over the shoulder of Micky’s Jim, who was smoking and shouting
loudly. All the players, with the exception of Ginger Dubbin, were very
excited: Ginger hummed tunes with equal gusto whether winning or losing.
Most of the players used pence, but a few pieces of silver glittered on
the table, and Micky’s Jim had changed a sovereign. Dermod had never
gambled, although he had often played cards before; then the stakes were
merely buttons, that was not gambling; no one feels very vexed at having
lost a button. Something thrilled Dermod through as he looked at the
coins on the board; the two pieces of silver attracted him strongly. He
had one hand deep in his trousers’ pocket closing tightly over the money
in his possession. How exciting it would be to put something on that
card; he was certain that it would win! Dubbin turned up the card which
Dermod’s imagination pictured to be a good one, and showed an ace, the
winning card. If only he had staked a penny on it, Dermod thought! He
sat down beside Micky’s Jim and gazed across the board.
“Another cut--for me,” he said, and his voice was a trifle husky. “I’m
going to play.”
He put down a penny and won.
II
The farmer’s son came into the shed. He was a strongly built, handsome
lad of twenty-one, and was employed as a bank clerk in Paisley. It was
now Saturday. He always returned home on week-ends and spent Sunday on
his father’s farm. Eamon Doherty was very pleased to see young Morrison,
who was a great friend of his, and sometimes, when the squad went home
at the end of the year, Eamon stopped with Morrison senior and worked
over the winter on the farm.
The squad interested young Morrison. “These strange, half-savage people
have a certain fascination for me,” he told his friends in town--young
men and women with great ideals and full of schemes and high purposes
for the reformation of the human race. Morrison belonged to a club,
famous for its erudite members, one of whom discovered a grammatical
error in a translation of Karl Marx’s _Kapital_ and another who had
written a volume of verses, _Songs of the Day_. Young Morrison himself
was a thinker, a moralist, earnest and profound in his own estimation.
Coming into contact with the potato diggers on week-ends, he often
wondered why these people were treated like cattle wherever they took up
their temporary abode. Here, on his father’s farm, kindly old men,
lithe, active youths and pure and comely girls were housed like beasts
of burden. The young man often felt so sorry for them that he almost
wept for his own tenderness.
Before entering the shed on this evening he had looked in at them from
the cover of the darkness outside. He noticed the fire shining on their
faces, saw old Maire a Glan telling her beads, the card-players bent
over the cart, the young women knitting, and the two harridans, Gourock
Ellen and Annie, holding out their hacked hands to the blaze.
The gamblers were so interested in their game that they took very little
notice of the young man when he entered the shed; even Eamon Doherty who
was playing had scant leisure to greet the new-comer. Morrison sat down
on an up-ended box beside Gourock Ellen, who was stretching out her
lean, claw-like fingers to the fire.
“Good-evening, Ellen!” he cried jovially, for he knew the woman, and
sitting down, stretched out one delicate hand, on the middle finger of
which a ring glittered, to the stove.
“It may be a guid e’en, but it’s gey cold,” said Ellen.
“There are many new faces here,” said Morrison, looking into the corner
where Norah Ryan was sitting, sewing patches on her working dress. The
girl was deep in thought.
“Why has Dermod gone away and left me for them cards?” she asked herself
and for a while sought in vain for an answer. Then when it came she
thrust it away angrily and refused to give it credence, although the
answer came from the depths of her own soul. “He cares more for the
cards than he cares for me.”
She looked up and saw the glint of the fire on the ring which the
visitor wore, and noticed that he was looking at her. She had not
noticed the man before. Never had such a well-dressed person visited the
squad.
“It’s Alec Morrison, the farmer’s son,” old Maire a Glan, who was
sitting beside the girl, whispered. “He just comes in here like one of
ourselves, as the man said. Just think of that and him a gentleman!”
Norah bowed her head, for Morrison’s eyes were fixed on her still. Why
did he keep staring at her? she asked herself and felt very
uncomfortable, but not displeased. And how that ring sparkled, too! It
must have cost a great amount of money.
A wave of tenderness swept across Morrison as he looked at Norah. “She’s
too good for this sort of life,” he said inwardly as he noticed her
white brow, and the small delicate fingers in which she held the needle.
“It’s criminal to condemn a girl like her to such a life. The sanitary
authorities will not give my father permission to house his cattle in
the stall where that girl has now to sleep. That maiden to sleep there!
I, a man, who should be able to bear suffering and privation, sleep in
soft clothes that are clean and comfortable, and she has to lie in rags,
in straw, in a place that is not good enough for cattle. And all these
people are like myself, people with souls, feelings and passions....”
“Have you just come to this country for the first time?” he asked Norah,
and when he put the question a sense of shame surged through him.
“The first time,” answered the girl.
“And you’ll not think much of Scotland?” he said.
“People like yerself may like it,” said Maire a Glan; “but as for us,
it’s beyont talkin’ about.... In the last farm we had to sleep in a shed
that was full of rats. They ate our bits of food, aye, and our very
clothes. The floor was alive with wood-lice and worms.... The night
before we left the shed was flooded, and there was eighteen inches of
water on the floor. We had to rise from our beds in the bare pelt and
stand all night up to our knees in the cold water.... There’s Norah Ryan
getting red in the face as if it was her very own fault.”
“Norah! What a pretty name,” said the young man. “And did she sleep in
that shed?”
“The farmers think that we’re pigs,” said Maire a Glan harshly. “That’s
why they treat us like pigs.”
“It’s wrong, very wrong,” said the young man, and his eyes were still
fixed on Norah. The girl wondered why he stared at her in such a manner.
He was handsome to look upon, clean-skinned, dark-eyed, and
well-dressed. She had never spoken to such a well-dressed man in all her
life before; but she felt frightened at something which she could not
understand and wished that the man was gone. An idea came to her that
she was doing something very wrong, and with this idea came fear, fear
of the unknown.
Gourock Ellen, elbows on knees, her hands crossed over her breast and
her thumbs propping her chin, began to tell a story of one of her early
love affairs; how a man would not pay and how she took away his clothes
and vowed to send him out naked into the streets. Morrison listened
attentively and Norah, who did not understand the story fully, and who
was shocked at all she understood, wondered why the farmer’s son was not
horrified at this episode in the life of Ellen.
About ten o’clock he rose to go and stood for a moment talking to
Micky’s Jim at the card-table. Norah examined him attentively. He was
well favoured and vigorous, and he spoke so nicely and quietly too!
“Dermod Flynn is makin’ a fortune,” Jim was saying. Alec Morrison went
to the door; there he stood for a moment and looked back into the shed.
Norah glanced at the youth; their eyes met and both felt that this was
something which they desired.
Morrison’s simplicity, his interest in the squad and his kindly remarks,
established a bond of sympathy between himself and Norah; but even yet
she could not understand why such a well-dressed youth had visited the
squalid shed in which the squad was staying. He seemed out of place; he
could not feel at home in such dirty surroundings. And he had gazed so
earnestly at her: in his eyes was a look of appeal, of entreaty. It
seemed to Norah that it was in her power to bestow some favour on the
youth, give him some precious gift that he desired very earnestly.
Filled with a mixed emotion of pleasure and natural modesty, the girl
wondered if all that had happened was real and if it had any
significance for her.
“The way he looked at me!” she murmured in a puzzled voice. “And him a
gentleman talking to us as if we were of his own kind! He must be very
learned. And why didn’t Dermod Flynn stay with me here, not runnin’ away
to them old cards!”
She glanced at Dermod, whose face was flushed and whose fingers trembled
nervously as he placed a silver coin down on the gaming-table, and
instinctively it was borne to her that something black and ugly had
crept into the purity of the passion which attracted her towards the
Glenmornan youth.
“The blame’s all on me,” she whispered, hardly realising what she was
saying, and began to turn over in her mind every incident of the evening
from the time when she first noticed Alec Morrison sitting by the fire
up till the present moment.
“Did you see the way that the farmer’s son was watchin’ ye, Norah Ryan?”
Maire a Glan asked. “His two eyes were on ye all the time. He’ll be
havin’ a notion of ye.”
“That he will,” said Gourock Ellen, and both women laughed loudly.
“And Maire a Glan, the decent woman, says that,” Norah whispered to
herself and blushed. “And them laughin’ as if there was nothing wrong in
it. Then there’s no harm in me speakin’ to the farmer’s son.”
At the table the game was now fast and furious. None of the players
heard the women’s remarks.