THE PASSING DAYS
I
They came and went, days monotonously slow, each bearing with it its
burden of sorrows and regrets, of fear and unhappiness. The life of the
two women was ever the same: out of bed at five in the morning, a
salutation exchanged with old Meg as she went to her work; breakfast--a
crust of bread and a cup of tea; the light, weak and sickly, peeping
through the narrow, murky window, the eternal scissors and needles, the
white heaps of shirts, the feather-stitching and finishing. In the
morning the cripple next door clattered downstairs on crutches, the card
with the rude inscription, PARALYSED FOR LIFE, shaking to and fro as he
moved. All day long he lay on the cold flagged pavement begging his
daily bread. Tommy Macara, the lad with the rickets, came out singing to
the landing on his way to the industrial school. He stuck his head
through the door and shouted: “Ye twa women, warkin’ hard.” Both loved
little Tommy, his cheery laugh, his childish carelessness, his poor body
twisted out of shape by the humours of early disease. His legs would
twitch as he stood at the door, making an effort to control the tremors;
sometimes he would laugh awkwardly at this and hurry away. Thus the
morning.
Noon.--A quarrel at No. 8. The two loose women who lived there argued
about the spoils taken from a drunken sailor the night before, and came
to blows. One was dressed, the other, just out of bed, had only time to
wrap the blanket round her body. Both came out on the landing tearing at
each other’s hair and swearing. All the doors in the place opened; women
ragged to the point of nudity, men dirty and unshaven, hurried out to
watch the fight, which was long and severe. The women bit and scratched,
and the younger--Bessie was her name--a plump girl wearing the blanket
on which the words STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT could be read at a
distance--was deprived of her only article of apparel, and she scurried
rapidly indoors. The onlookers laughed loudly and clapped their hands;
the elder, a light-limbed lassie with very white teeth, returned to her
room closing the door behind her. Now and again a shriek could be heard
from the apartment, then a hoarse gurgle, as if somebody was getting
strangled, afterwards silence. The watchers retired indoors, and peace
settled on the stairhead. Only the two women, Sheila and Norah, never
ceased work; the needles and scissors still sparkled over and through
the white shirts.
Evening.--Meg returned half-tipsy and singing a chorus, half the words
of which she had forgotten. The day’s work had been a very trying one,
the dust rising from the rags did not agree with her asthma. On entering
she looked fixedly at Sheila, shook her head sadly, ran her fingers over
Norah’s hair and began the chorus again, but stopped in the middle of it
and started to weep. After a while she reeled into her own room, closed
the door behind her, and sank to sleep on the floor beside the dead
fire.
Little Tom Macara came up the stair, looked in, the eternal smile on his
pinched face, and cried out in a thin voice: “Ah! the women are warkin’
awa’ yet. They never have a meenit to spare!”
“Never a minute, Tom,” Sheila answered, and the boy went off, whistling
a music-hall tune. Tom’s mother was consumptive, his father epileptic;
he had two brothers and three sisters all older than himself. After Tom,
the man with the crutches came upstairs. From the street to the top of
the landing was a weary climb, but often he got helped on the journey;
sometimes the two whores escorted him up, sometimes Sheila gave him an
arm, and everybody on the stairs liked the man. He was always in good
humour and could sing a capital song.
Later in the evening, those who indulged in intoxicants became drunk; an
ex-soldier, with one sleeve of his coat hanging loosely from his
shoulder, who lived with two women, kicked one unmercifully and got
dragged off to prison; the two harlots netted two men, one of them a
well-dressed fellow with a gold tie-pin and a ring on his finger, and
took them to their room; the paralytic could be heard singing and his
voice seemed to be ever so far away. Sheila and Norah were still busy
with the shirts, sewing their lives into every stitch of their work.
“And them two women at No. 8, there’s not the least bit of harm in them
at bottom,” Sheila would exclaim. “They help the old cripple up every
time they meet him on the stairs. And to think of it! there’s seventeen
thousand women like them in Glasgow!”
“God be good to us!”
Midnight came and quiet, and still the two women worked on. Outside on
the landing into the common sink the water kept dripping from the tap.
Sheila made a remark about the people away home in Frosses and wondered
if they were all asleep at that moment. Outside, the city sank to its
repose; only the unfortunate and the unwell were now awake. The
epileptic’s wife coughed continually; Bessie, the plump girl, stole the
pin from the tie of her lover; downstairs the caretaker, the woman with
the red wisps of hair, counted the number of men who went to No. 8; half
the profits went to her.
One o’clock came and, as if by mutual consent, the Irish women left
their work aside and looked out of the window for a moment. High up they
could see the spire of the town hall prodding into the heavens; nearer
and almost as high the tower of a church with the black hands passing on
the lighted face of a clock; closer still the dark windows of the houses
opposite. Glasgow with all its churches, its halls, with its shipping
and commerce, its wharves and factories, its richness and splendour, its
poor and unhappy, its oppressed and miserable, Glasgow, with its
seventeen thousand prostitutes, was asleep.
II
Norah and Sheila went to bed, wrapped the blue-lettered blankets round
their bodies and placed their heads down on the condemnatory sentences:
STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT. Almost immediately Sheila was asleep, her
knees drawn up under her (for the bed was too short for her body) and
her arms around Norah. The young girl could not sleep well now; short
feverish snatches of slumber were followed by sudden awakenings, and
fears and fancies, too subtle to define, constantly preyed on her mind.
Sometimes, when under the influence of a religious melancholy that often
took possession of her, she repeated the _Hail Mary_ over and over
again, but at intervals she stopped in the midst of a prayer, started as
if stung by an asp and exclaimed: “What does the Virgin think of me, me
that has committed one of the worst mortal sins in the world!”
In the midst of a prayer she dropped to sleep, maybe for the third time
in an hour, but immediately was awakened by a sharp rapping at the
door. Sheila heard nothing, she lay almost inert, and perspiring a
little.
“Who’s there?” Norah called out.
“The sanitary,” a hoarse voice answered from the landing.
The girl slipped out of bed, hardly daring to breathe lest her companion
was disturbed, fumbled round for the matches, lit the oil-lamp and
opened the door. Two strangers in uniform stood outside; one, a tall man
with a heavy beard, held a lamp, the other, a sallow-faced, shrunken
individual, hummed a tune in a thin, monotonous voice and picked his
nose with a claw-like finger. The two entered, brushing against the girl
who took up her stand behind the door, making a slight rapping noise
with her heels on the bare floor.
“How many here?” asked the tall man with the beard.
“Two,” Norah answered, “the woman in the bed and me.”
“No one else under the bed?”
“No one,” Norah replied, but the man knelt on the floor, lifted the
bedclothes and peeped under.
“Only one in the next room?” asked the sallow-faced fellow, pointing at
Meg’s door.
“Only one and nobody else.”
They chose not to believe the girl’s statement, rapped on the door,
which was opened after a long delay by old Meg, who had risen naked from
bed and was now hiding her withered body behind a blanket stamped with
the blue lettering. The sentence STOLEN FROM JAMES MOFFAT ran from the
left knee to the right shoulder; the left shoulder was bare, as was also
the left leg from ankle to hip.
“Only one here,” she croaked, glowering evilly at the men who had
disturbed her slumber. “Christ! an auld body has no peace at all here,
for there are always some folk crawlin’ round when decent folk are in
bed. Bed! callin’ it a bed and so particular about it. One would almost
be as well off if they were thrown out a handful of fleas and allowed to
sleep on the doorstep. God’s curse on ye both, comin’ at this hour of
the night to pull an old woman like me from my scratcher.”
The bearded man entered the room, his companion took out a note-book and
wrote something down, shut the book and placed it in his pocket. The
tall man came out again; both bade Norah “Good-night” in apologetic
tones and took their leave. Sheila had slept unmoved through it all.
The young girl closed the door, extinguished the light and re-entered
the bed. She was very tired, but sleep would not come to her eyes. An
hour passed. Sheila was snoring loudly, but Norah awake could hear the
water dropping into the sink on the landing, and the vacant laugh of
Bessie escorting a man upstairs. At night this woman never slept; her
business was then in full swing.
Someone knocked at the door again, and Norah cried, “Who’s there?” “Is
this No. 8?” enquired a man’s voice. Norah answered, “No,” and steps
shuffled along the passage outside. Next instant the crash of someone
falling heavily was heard, then a muttered imprecation, and afterwards
silence.
Norah fell asleep again.