SHEILA CARROL
I
Norah travelled through the streets all day, looking for her friend and
fearing that every eye was fixed on her, that everybody knew the secret
which she tried to conceal. Her feet were sore, her breath came in
short, sudden gasps as she took her way into dark closes and climbed
creaking stairs; and never were her efforts rewarded by success. Here in
the poorer parts of the city, in the crooked lanes and straggling
alleys, were dirt, darkness, and drunkenness. A thousand smells greeted
the nostrils, a thousand noises grated on the ears; lights flared
brightly in the beershops; fights started at the corners; ballad singers
croaked out their songs; intoxicated men fell in the gutters; policemen
stood at every turning, their helmets glistening, their faces calm,
their eyes watchful. The evening had come and all was noise, hurry, and
excitement.
“Isaac Levison, Pawnbroker; 2 Up,” Norah read on a plate outside the
entrance of a close and went in.
“I wonder if Sheila will be here?” she asked herself, and smiled sadly
as she called to mind the number of closes she had crawled into during
the whole long trying day.
Dragging her feet after her, she made her way up the crooked stairs and
rapped with her knuckles at a door on which the words “Caretaker’s
office” were painted in black letters. A woman, with a string for a neck
and wisps of red hair hanging over her face, poked out her head.
“Up yet,” was the answer when Norah asked if anybody named Sheila Carrol
dwelt on the stairs.
“After all my searchin’ she’s here at last,” said the young woman. “It’s
Sheila Carrol herself that’s in the place.”
The beansho opened the door when she heard a rapping outside. She knew
her visitor at once.
“Come in, Norah Ryan,” she said, catching the girl’s hands and squeezing
them tightly. “It’s good of ye to come. No one from Frosses, only Oiney
Dinchy’s gasair, have I seen here for a long while. But ye’ll be tired,
child?”
“It’s in an ill way that I come to see ye, Sheila Carrol,” said Norah.
“It’s an ill way, indeed it is,” and then, sitting down, she told her
story quietly as if that which she spoke of did not interest her in any
way.
“Poor child!” said Sheila, when the pitiful tale came to an end. “Why
has God put that burden on yer little shoulders? But there’s no use in
pining, Norah. Mind that, child!”
“I would like to die, Sheila Carrol,” said Norah, looking round the bare
room, but not feeling in the least interested in what she saw. One
chair, a bed, a holy water stoup, a little black crucifix from which the
arms of the Christ had fallen away, an orange box on which lay a pair of
scissors and a pile of cloth: that was all the room contained. A feeble
fire burned in the grate and a battered oil-lamp threw a dim light over
the compartment.
“I once had thoughts that were like that, meself,” said Sheila. She
placed a little tin pannikin on the fire and fanned the flame with her
apron. “People face a terrible lot in body and in soul before they face
death. That’s the way God made us, child. We do be like grains of corn
under a mill-stone, and everything but the breath of our bodies squeezed
out of us. Sometimes I do be thinkin’ that the word ‘hope’ is blotted
from me soul; but then after a wee while I do be happy in my own way
again.”
“But did ye not find yer own burden hard to bear, Sheila?”
“Hard indeed, child, but it’s trouble that makes us wise,” said the
beansho, pouring tea into the pannikin that was now bubbling merrily.
“The father of me boy died on the sea and me goin’ to be married to him
when the season of Lent was by. The cold grey morning when the boat came
in keel up on Dooey Strand was a hard and black one for me. Ah! the cold
break of day; sorrow take it! The child came and I was not sorry at all,
as the people thought I should be. He was like the man I loved, and if
the bitin’ tongues of the Frosses people was quiet I would be very
happy, I would indeed, Norah! But over here in this country it was sore
and bitter to me. I mind the first night that I stopped in Glasgow with
the little boy. He was between my arms and I was lookin’ out through the
window of 47 at the big clock with the light inside of it. It was a lazy
clock that night and I thought that the light of day would never put a
colour on the sky. But the mornin’ did come and many mornin’s since
then, and stone-cold they were too!”
Then Sheila told the story of her life in Scotland, and Norah, hardly
realising what was spoken, listened almost dumbly, feeling at intervals
the child within her moving restlessly, stretching out as if with a hand
and pressing against her side, causing a quivering motion to run through
her body.
Sheila’s story was a pitiful one. When first she came to Glasgow she
took an attic room at the top of a four-storeyed building and for this
she paid a weekly rent of three shillings and sixpence.
“‘Twas the dirty place to live in, Norah, for all the smells and stinks
of the houses down under came up to me,” said the woman. “And three
white shillin’s and sixpence a week for that place that one wouldn’t put
pigs into! The houses away at home may be bad, but there’s always the
fresh air and no drunk men or bad women lyin’ across yer door every time
ye go outside. 47 was a rotten place; worse even than this, and this is
bad. Look at the sheets and blankets on the bed behind ye, Norah, look
at the colour of them and the writin’ on them.”
Norah gazed at the bed and saw on every article of clothing, stamped in
large blue letters, the words: “STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT.”
“That’s because someone may steal the rags,” said Sheila. “This room is
furnished by the landlord, God forgive him for the furnishin’ of it! And
he’s afraid that his tenants will run away and try to pawn the
bedclothes. Lyin’ under the blankets all night with STOLEN FROM JAMES
MOFFAT writ on them is a quare way of sleepin’. But what can a woman
like me do? And 47 was worse nor this; and the work! ’Twas beyond
speakin’ about!
“The first job I got was the finishin’ of dongaree jackets, sewin’
buttons on them, and things like that! I was up in the mornin’ at six
and went to bed the next mornin’ at one, and hard at it all the time I
wasn’t sleepin’. Sunday was the same as any other day; always work,
always the needle. I used to make seven shillin’s a week; half of that
went in rent and the other half kept meself and my boy. Talk about teeth
growin’ long with hunger at times when the work was none too plentiful!
Sometimes, Norah----”
Sheila paused. Norah was listening intently, her lips a little apart,
like a child’s.
“Sometimes, Norah, I went out beggin’ on the streets--me, a Frosses
woman too,” Sheila resumed with a sigh. “Then one night when I asked a
gentleman for a few pence to buy bread he handed me over to the police.
Said I was accostin’ him. I didn’t even know what it meant at the time;
now--But I hope ye never know what it means.... Anyway I was sent to
jail for three weeks.”
“To jail, Sheila!” Norah exclaimed.
“True as God, child, and my boy left alone in that dirty attic. There
was I not knowin’ what was happenin’ to him, and when I came out of
prison I heard that the police had caught him wanderin’ out in the
streets and put him in a home. But I didn’t see him; I was slapped into
jail again.”
“What for, Sheila?”
“Child neglect, girsha,” said the woman, lifting her scissors and
cutting fiercely at a strip of cloth as she spoke. “I don’t know how
they made it out again’ me, but the law is far beyond simple people like
us. I was put in for three months that time and when I came out----”
A tear dropped from Sheila’s eyes and fell on the cloth which lay on her
lap.
“The little fellow, God rest his soul! was dead,” said the woman. “Then
I hadn’t much to live for and I was like to die. But people can stand a
lot one way and another, a terrible lot entirely. After that I thought
of making shirts and I got a sewin’ machine from a big firm on the
instalment system. A shillin’ a week I had to pay for the machine. I
could have done well at the shirt-makin’, but things seemed somehow to
be again’ me. On the sixth week I couldn’t pay the shillin’. It was due
on a Friday and Saturday was my own pay day. I prayed to the traveller
to wait for the morrow, but he wouldn’t, and took the machine away.
’Twas the big firm of ---- too, that did that. Think of it! them with
their mills and their riches and me only a poor woman. Nor it wasn’t as
if I wasn’t wantin’ to pay neither. But that’s the way of the world,
girsha; the bad, black world, cold as the rocks on Dooey Strand it is,
aye, and colder.
“Sometimes after the sewin’ machine went I used to go out on the streets
and sing songs, and at that sort of work, not at all becomin’ for a
Frosses woman, I could always make the price of a bunk in the Rat-pit,
the place where ye were last night, Norah. Ah! how often have I had my
night’s sleep there! Then again I would come back to 47 and start some
decent work that wasn’t half as easy or half as well paid as the singin’
of songs. So I went from one thing to another and here I am at this very
minute.”
Sheila paused in her talk but not in the work which she had just
started.
“Not much of a room, this one, neither,” she remarked, casting her eye
on the bed, but not missing a stitch in her sewing as she spoke. “Four
shillin’s I pay for it a week and it’s supposed to hold two people.
Outside the door you can see that ticketed up, ‘To hold two adults,’
like the price marked on a pair of secondhand trousers. I’m all alone
here; only the woman, old Meg, that stops in the room behind this one,
passes through here on her way to work. But ye’ll stay here with me now,
two Frosses people in the one room, so to speak.”
“What kind of work are ye doin’ here?” asked Norah, pointing to the
cloth which Sheila was sewing.
“Shirt-finishin’,” Sheila replied. “For every shirt there’s two rows of
feather-stitchin’, eight buttonholes and seven buttons sewed on, four
seams and eight fasteners. It takes me over an hour to do each shirt
and the pay is a penny farthing. I can make about fifteen pence a day,
but out of that I have to buy my own thread. But ye’ll be tired, child,
listenin’ to me clatterin’ here all night.”
“I’m not tired listenin’ to ye at all, but it’s sorrow that’s with me
because life was so hard on ye,” said Norah. “Everything was black
again’ ye.”
“One gets used to it all,” said Sheila with the air of resignation which
sits on the shoulders of those to whom the keys of that delicious
mystery known as happiness are forever lost. “One gets used to things,
no matter how hard they be, and one doesn’t like to die.”
But now Norah listened almost heedlessly. Thoughts dropped into her mind
and vanished with the frightful rapidity of things falling into empty
space; and memories of still more remote things, faint, far away and
almost undefined, were wafted against her soul.
The girl fell into a heavy slumber.
II
In the morning she awoke to find herself lying in bed, the blankets on
which the blue letters STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT were stamped wrapped
tightly around her, and Sheila Carrol lying by her side. For a moment
she wondered vaguely how she had got into the bunk, then raising herself
on her elbow, she looked round the room.
The apartment was a very small one, with one four-paned window and two
doors, one of which led, as Norah knew, out to the landing, and one, as
she guessed, into the room belonging to old Meg, the woman whom Sheila
had spoken of the night before. The window was cracked and crooked, the
floor and doors creaked at every move, a musty odour of decay and death
filled the whole place. A heap of white shirts was piled on the orange
box that stood in the middle of the floor, one shirt, the “finishing” of
which had not been completed, lay on an old newspaper beside the
fireplace. It looked as if Sheila had become suddenly tired in the midst
of her feather-stitching and had slipped into bed. She was now awake and
almost as soon as she had opened her eyes was out of the blankets, had
wrapped a few rags round her bony frame and was busy at work with her
needle. Sleep for the woman was only a slight interruption of her
eternal routine.
“Have a wee wink more,” she cried to Norah, “and I’ll just make a good
warm cup of tay for ye when I get this row finished. Little rogue of all
the world! ye’re tired out and worn!”
Norah smiled sadly, got up, dressed herself, and going down on her knees
by the bedside, said her prayers.
“It’s like Frosses again,” said Sheila, when the girl’s prayers came to
an end. “Even seein’ ye there on yer knees takes back old times. But
often I do be thinkin’ that prayin’ isn’t much good. There was old
Doalty Farrel; ye mind him talkin’ about politics the night yer father,
God rest him! was underboard. Well, Doalty was a very holy man, as ye
know yerself, and he used to go down on his knees when out in the very
fields and pray and pray. Well and good; he went down one day on his
knees in the snow and when he got home he had a pain in one of his legs.
That night it was in his side, in the mornin’ Doalty was dead. Gasair
Oiney Dinchy was tellin’ me all about it.”
“But they say in Frosses that God was so pleased with Doalty that He
took him up to heaven before his time,” said Norah.
“But it’s not many that like to go to heaven before their time,” Sheila
remarked as she rose from her seat and set about to kindle the fire. At
the same moment the door leading in from the compartment opened, and an
old woman, very ugly, her teeth worn to the gums, the stumps unhealthily
yellow, her eyes squinting and a hairy wart growing on her right cheek,
entered the room.
“Good morra, Meg,” said Sheila, who was fanning the fire into flame with
her apron. “Are ye goin’ to yer work?”
“Goin’ to my work,” replied Meg and turned her eyes to Norah. “A friend,
I see,” she remarked.
“A countrywoman of my own,” said Sheila.
“Are ye new to Glesga?” Meg asked Norah, who was gazing absently out of
the window.
“I have only just come here,” said the girl.
“Admirin’ the view!” remarked Meg with a wheezy laugh as she took her
place beside the girl at the window. “A fine sight to look at, that.
Dirty washin’ hung out to dry; dirty houses; everything dirty. Look down
at the yard!”
A four-square block of buildings with outhouses, slaty grey and ugly,
scabbed on to the walls, enclosed a paved courtyard, at one corner of
which stood a pump, at another a stable with a heap of manure piled high
outside the door. Two grey long-bodied rats could be seen running across
from the pump to the stable, a ragged tramp who had slept all night on
the warm dunghill shuffled up to his feet, rubbed the sleep and dirt
from his eyes, then slunk away from the place as if conscious of having
done something very wrong.
“That man has slept here for many a night,” said Meg; then pointing her
finger upwards over the roofs of many houses to a spire that pierced
high through the smoke-laden air, she said: “That’s the Municipal
Buildin’s; that’s where the rich people meet and talk about the best
thing to be done with houses like these. It’s easy to talk over yonder;
that house cost five hunner and fifty thousand pounds to build. A gey
guid hoose, surely, isn’t it, Sheila Carrol?”
“It’s comin’ half-past five, Meg, and it’s time ye were settin’ out for
yer work,” was Sheila’s answer. “Ye’d spend half yer life bletherin’.”
“A good, kindly and decent woman she is,” Sheila told Norah when Meg
took her departure. “Works very hard and, God forgive her! drinks very
hard too. Nearly every penny that doesn’t go in rent does in the
crathur, and she’s happy enough in her own way although a black
Prodesan.... Ah! there’s some quare people here on this stair when ye
come to know them all!”
Over a tin of tea and a crust Sheila made plans for the future. “I can
earn about one and three a day at the finishin’,” she said. “I have to
buy my own thread out of that, three bobbins a week at twopence ha’penny
a bobbin.
“Ye used to be a fine knitter, Norah,” Sheila continued. “D’ye mind the
night long ago on Dooey Strand? God knows it was hardships enough for
the strong women like us to sleep out in the snow, not to mention a
young girsha like yerself. But ye were the great knitter then and ye’ll
be nimble with yer fingers yet, I’ll go bail. Sewing ye might be able to
take a turn at.”
“I used to be good with needle, Sheila,” said the girl.
“Then that’ll be what we’ll do. We’ll work together, me and yerself, and
we’ll get on together well and cheaper. It’ll be only the one fire and
the one light; and now, if ye don’t mind, we’ll begin work and I’ll show
ye what’s to be done.”