THE hour was half-past ten in the forenoon. In the village (“town” the peasantry called it) of Greenanore two rows of houses ran parallel along a miry street which measured east to west some two hundred yards. At one end of the street were the police barracks and at the other end the workhouse. Behind the latter rose the Catholic chapel, and further back the brown moors stretched to the hills which looked down upon the bay where the women crossed in the early morning.

The houses in the village were dull, dirty and dilapidated. There were eight public-houses, a few grocers’ shops, a smithy where the blacksmith, who mended scythes or shod donkeys, got paid in kind for his services. The policemen, one to every fifty souls in the village, paraded idly up and down the street, their heavy batons clanking against their trousers, and their boots, spotlessly clean, rasping eternally on the pavement. Their sole occupation seemed to be the kicking of unoffending dogs that spent their days and nights in a vain search for some eatable garbage in the gutter. The dogs were skeletons; and when kicked they would slink quietly out of the way, lacking courage either to snap or snarl. Even a kick brought no yelp from them, they were almost insensible to every feeling but that of the heavy hunger which dulled their natural activity. At night they were silent ghosts prowling about looking for a morsel to eat. Now and again they howled mournfully, sitting on their haunches in a circle; and when the people heard the lonely sound they would say: “There, the dogs are crying because they have got no souls.”

A little pot-bellied man stepped briskly along the street of the village, one gloved hand grasping a stout stick, the other, also gloved, sunk in the capacious pocket of a heavy overcoat. He walked as if he lacked knee-joints, throwing the legs out from his hips, but, save for this, there was nothing remarkable about the man except perhaps his stoutness. The people of Greenanore, battling daily against the terrible spectre of hunger, had no time to grow fat, yet this man measured forty inches round the waist. In the midst of extreme poverty he, strange to say, had grown corpulent and rich. His name was Farley McKeown, now possessor of £200,000, part of it invested in South American Railways and part of it in the Donegal Knitting Industry, and nearly all of it earned in the latter.

Farley McKeown was now seventy years of age and unmarried. At one time, years before, he had his desires as most young men have, and the sight of a comely girl going barefooted to Greenanore imparted a fiery and not unpleasant vigour to his body and caused strange but not unnatural thoughts to enter into his mind. He was then a young man of twenty, thoughtful and ambitious. Although his father was poor, the boy, educated by some hedge schoolmaster, showed promise and evinced a desire to become a priest. “It is an easy job,” he said to himself, “and a priest can make plenty of money.” Farley McKeown desired to make money anyway and anyhow.

When the black potato blight, with the fever and famine that followed it, spread over Donegal, Farley McKeown saw his chance. By dint of plausible arguments he persuaded a firm of Londonderry grain merchants to ship a cargo of Indian meal to Greenanore and promised to pay for the consignment within two years from the date of its arrival. When the cargo was landed on Dooey Head the people hailed it as a gift from God and the priest blessed Farley McKeown from the altar steps. The peasants built a large warehouse for McKeown, and in return for the work they were allowed a whole year in which to pay for their meal. Meanwhile the younger generation went off to America, and money flowed in to Donegal and Farley McKeown’s pocket. At the end of two years he had paid the grain merchants, but the peasants found to their astonishment that they had only paid interest on the cost of their food. They were in the man’s clutches, always paying for goods received and in some strange way never clear of debt. This went on for years, and Farley McKeown, a pillar of the Church and the friend of the holy priest, waxed wealthy on the proceeds of his business.

Then he started a knitting industry and again was hailed by the priest as the saviour of the people. From far and near, from the most southerly to the most northerly point of Donegal the peasant women came to Greenanore for yarn, crossing arms of the sea, mountains and moors on their journey, and carrying back bundles of yarn to their homes. The journey was in many cases thirty miles each way, and these miles were tramped by women between a sleep and a sleep, often with only one meal in their stomachs.

The daughters of Donegal are splendid knitters. But how difficult to make are those wonderful stockings when there is nothing but the peat fire or the rushlight to show the women the dreary and countless stitches that go to make the whole marvellous work. How quick those irons flash in the firelight, how they tinkle, tinkle one against another as the nimble fingers wind the threads around them, but alas! how wearying the toil! And the time usually taken to make a pair of socks was sixteen hours, and the wages paid for sixteen hours’ work was a penny farthing.

II

FARLEY McKeown strutted along the street, inflating his stomach with dignity as he walked and casting careless looks around him. All those whom he met saluted him, the men raised their hands to their caps, the women bowed gravely, and the children, when they saw him coming, ran away. An old sow, black and dirty from her wallow in some near midden, rushed violently into the street and grunted as she mouthed at the grime in the gutter. A peasant boy, dressed in trousers and shirt, got hold of one of the young pigs and the animal squealed loudly. This startled the mother and she peered round, her little stupid eyes blinking angrily. On seeing that one of her young was possibly in danger she charged full at the youth, who, hurriedly dropping the sucker, sought the safety of a near doorway. A few hens rushed off with long, remarkable strides that made one wonder how the spider-shanked, ungainly birds saved themselves from toppling over. A rooster—a defiant Sultan—who did not share in the trepidacious exit of his wives, crowed loudly and looked valiantly at the sow, as much as to say: “I, for one, am not the least afraid of you.” The boy finding himself safe ventured out again into the street, but coming face to face with Farley McKeown hurried off even more rapidly than when pursued by the sow. The man noticed the doubtful mark of respect which the youth showed him, purred approvingly and smiled, the smile giving him the appearance of an over-fed, serious frog.

McKeown walked along the street towards a spacious three-storied building containing many large windows and heavy, painted doors. This was the warehouse in which he stored his yarn. One door was open, and in front of this a crowd of barefooted women and children were standing, most of them holding large bundles of stockings which they frequently changed from one hand to another. They did not dare to rest their bundles on the street, which was wet with the slabbery sleet of mid-November.

Farley McKeown came to the door and from there surveyed the women with a fixed stare. They shuffled uneasily, a few crossed themselves, and one, a young girl, ventured to say: “It’s a cold morning this, Farley McKeown, thanks be to God!”

The merchant made no answer. To see those creatures, shrinking before his gaze, filled him with a comfortable sense of importance. They were afraid of him, just as he was afraid of God, and he thought that he must be like God in their eyes. He fixed another withering glance on the crowd, then turned and hurried upstairs to the top floor, there to enter a room where two young men were seated over a desk struggling with long rows of figures in dirty ledgers. A peat fire blazed brightly in one corner of the room, and the cheerful flame was a red rag to the eyes of the proprietor. He looked sternly at the fire, then at the clerks, then at the fire, then back to the clerks again.

“Warm here, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. “Yes, it’s warm, very warm; very comfortable indeed, isn’t it? It’s nice to have a fire on a cold morning, very nice indeed. If you were working in your fathers’ fields you’d have a fire out by your sides, you’d carry a fire about in your pockets all day, you would indeed. Is it not enough for you to have a roof over you?” he cried in an angry tone, his voice rising shrilly; “a roof over your head and four good walls to keep the winds of heaven away from your bodies? No, it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t atall, atall! I gave you orders not to put a fire on till I came into the office myself, and what do I see here now? One would think that it’s not me that owns this business. Who does own it, I’d like to know! Is it me or is it you?”

Gasping for breath, he flopped down suddenly into a chair, and drawing off his gloves he stuffed them into the pocket of his coat. Then taking an account book he stroked out several figures with his pen, while between every pen stroke he turned round and shouted: “Is it me that owns this business or is it you? Eh?”

After a while he ceased to speak, probably forgetting his rage in the midst of the work, and for two hours there was almost total silence save for the low scratchings of pen on paper and the occasional grunt which emanated from the throat of Farley McKeown. Suddenly, however, he stopped in the middle of his work and looked at the skylight above, through which snow was falling, and some of it skiting off the window-ledge dropped on the top of his head, which being bald was extremely sensitive to climatic changes. Then he gave an order slowly and emphatically:

“Dony McNelis, close the window.”

One of the clerks, a tall lank youth, rose like a rubber ball, bounded on top of his seat and closed the window with a bang. On stepping down to resume his work, he noticed the crowd of women, now greatly increased by the party which had crossed the bay in the morning, standing huddled together in the street. The sleet was falling thickly—it was now more snow than sleet—and the clothes of the women were covered with a fleecy whiteness. The clerk paused in his descent and looked at the women, then he spoke to the yarn-seller.

“Would it not be better to attend to these women now?” he asked. “Some of them have been out on the cold street since the dawn.”

Farley McKeown turned round sharply. “Is this my business or is it yours?” he cried, rising from the chair and stamping his feet on the floor. “Mine or yours, eh? Have I to run like a dog and attend to these people, have I? I’ve kept them from death and the workhouse for the last forty years, have I not? And now you want me to run out and attend on them, do you? I’ve taken you, Dony McNelis, into my office out of pure charity, and how much money is it that your mother owes me? Couldn’t I turn her out of house and home at a moment’s notice? And in face of that you come here and tell me how to run my own business. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Eh?”

The boy sat down without a word, and catching a piece of waste paper off the table, he crumpled it angrily in his hand; then rising again he confronted his master.

“There are women out there from Tweedore and Frosses,” he said. “They have travelled upwards of thirty miles, hungry, all of them, I’ll go bail, and maybe not a penny in their pockets. If they don’t catch the tide when it’s out they’ll have to sleep on the rocks of Dooey all night, and if they do there’ll be more curses on your head in the morning than all the masses ever said and all the prayers ever prayed will be fit to wash away. It’s nearly one of the clock now, and they’ll have to race and catch the tide afore it’s on the turn, so it would be the best thing to do to attend to them this minute.”

The youth stood for a moment after he had delivered this speech, the longest ever made by him in his life, and seemed on the point of saying something more vehement. All at once, however, he sat down again and went on with his work as if nothing unusual had happened.

Farley McKeown was a superstitious man. He feared the curse of an angry woman as much as he feared the curse of a priest of the Catholic Church. And those women would curse him if they slept all night on Dooey Head. For a moment he glared angrily at Dony McNelis, then went to the window facing the street, opened it and looked out on the shivering creatures assembled in the falling snow.

“Are there many Tweedore and Frosses people here?” he shouted.

“There’s a good lot of us here, and we’re afraid that we’ll be a wee bit late for the tide if we don’t get away this very minute,” said a voice from the crowd. Maire a Crick, the fatalist, was speaking.

“Have ye any stockings with ye?”

“Sorrow the one has one that’s not on her feet, save Maire a Glan, and she doesn’t come from our side of the water,” Maire a Crick answered. “When we were here the last day we couldn’t get a taste of yarn and we had to sleep all night on the rocks of Dooey. All night, mind, Farley McKeown, and the sky glowering like a hangman and the sea rushing like horses of war up on the strand. God be with us! but it will be a cold place on a night like this. For the love of Mary, give us some yarn, Farley McKeown,” said the old woman in a piteous voice. “Twenty-four hours have passed since I saw bread or that what buys it.”

McKeown turned round to his clerks. “Is there much yarn down below?” he asked.

“Plenty,” said Dony McNelis, wiping his pen on his coat-sleeve.

“If they had my yarn with them and miss the tide, they’d ruin the stuff,” thought Farley McKeown; then turning to the women he shouted in a loud voice: “There’s no yarn for the Tweedore and Frosses women this day. Maybe if they come to-morrow or the day after they’ll get some.”

Having said these words he shut the window.