WHEN one is leaving home every familiar object seems to take on a different aspect and becomes almost strange and foreign. The streets, houses, and landscape which you have gazed on for years become in some way very remote, like objects seen in a dream, but under this guise every familiar landmark becomes dearer than ever it has been before. So Norah Ryan felt as she was leaving home in the June of 1905 bound for the potato fields of Scotland.

“Is this the road to Greenanore, the road that our feet took when goin’ to the town for the stockin’ yarn?” she asked herself several times. “It is changed somehow; it doesn’t seem to be the same place, but for all that I like it better than ever. Why this is I do not know; I seem to be in a dream of some kind.”

Her thoughts were confused and her mind ran on several things at the same time; her mother’s words at leave-taking, the prayer that the child might do well, the quick words of tearless farewell spoken at the doorstep; and as she thought of these things she wondered why her mother did not weep when her only child was leaving her.

The girl was now walking alone to the village of Greenanore. There she would meet all the members of the party, and every step of the journey brought a thousand bygone memories vividly to her mind. Fergus she thought of, his good-bye at the cross-roads, the dog whining in Ballybonar, the lowing cow, the soft song of the sea. Would she ever see Fergus again? Where had he been all these years? Looking into the distance she could see the mountains that hemmed Glenmornan, and light clouds, white and fleecy as Candlemas sheep, resting on the tops of them. Further down, on the foothills, the smoke of peat-fires rose into the air, telling of the turf-savers who laboured on the brown bogs at the stacks and rikkles. Norah thought of Dermod Flynn; indeed she called him to mind daily when gazing towards the hills of Glenmornan, recollecting with a certain feeling of pride the boy’s demeanour at school and his utter indifference towards personal chastisement. The dreamy eyes of Dermod and his manner of looking through the school window at nothing in particular fascinated her; and the very remembrance of the youth standing beside her facing the map of the world always caused a pleasant thrill to run through her body. Now, as she looked at the hills of Glenmornan, the incidents of the morning on which she went to pull bog-bine there came back to her mind, and she wondered if Dermod Flynn thought the hills so much changed on the day when he was setting out for the rabble of Strabane.

A large iron bridge, lately built by the Congested Districts Board, spanned the bay between Frosses and Dooey. Norah crossed over this to the other side, where the black rocks, sharp and pointed, spread over the white sand. It was here that the women slept out on the mid-winter night many years ago; and now Norah had only a very dim remembrance of the event.

Up to the rise of the hill she hurried, and from the townland of Ballybonar looked back at Frosses: at the little strips of land running down to the sea, at the white lime-washed cabins dotted all over the parish, at Frosses graveyard and the lone sycamore tree that grew there, showing like a black stain against the sky. Seeing it, she thought of her father and said an “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” for the repose of his soul. Then her eye roved over Frosses again.

“Maybe after this I’ll never set my two eyes on the place,” she said, then added, “just like Fergus!”

The thought that she might never see the place again filled her with a certain feeling of importance which up to now had been altogether foreign to her.

II

AT the station she met the other members of the potato squad, fifteen in all. Some were sitting on their boxes, others on the bundles bound in cotton handkerchiefs which contained all their clothes and toilet requisites. The latter consisted of combs and hand-mirrors possessed by the women, and razors, the property of the men. Micky’s Jim was pacing up and down the platform, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets and a heavy-bowled wooden pipe in his mouth. From time to time he pulled the pipe from between his teeth, accompanying the action with a knowing shrug of his shoulders, and spat into the four-foot way.

“Is this yerself, Norah?” he exclaimed, casting a patronising glance at the girl as she entered the railway station. “Ye are almost late for the train. Did ye walk the whole way?... Ah! here she comes!”

The train came in sight, puffing round the curve; the women rose from their seats, clutched hastily at their bundles and formed into a row on the verge of the platform; the men, most of whom were smoking, took their pipes from their mouths, hit the bowls sharply against their palms, thus emptying them of white ash; then, with a feigned look of unconcern on their faces, they picked up their belongings with a leisure which implied that they were men well used to such happenings. They were posing a little; knowing that those who came to see them off would tell for days in Frosses how indifferently Mick or Ned took the train leading to the land beyond the water. “Just went on the train with no more concern on their faces than if they were going to a neighbour’s wake!” the Frosses people would say.

The train puffed into the station, the driver descended from his post, yawned, stretched his arms, and surveyed the crowd with a look of superior disdain. The fireman, with an oil-can in his hands, raced along the footplate and disappeared behind the engine, only to come back almost immediately, puffing and wiping the sweat from his face with a piece of torn and dirty rag.

“All aboard!” Micky’s Jim shouted in an excited voice, forgetting pose for a moment. “Hurry up now or the train will be away, leavin’ the biggest half of ye standin’ here. A train isn’t like Oiney Dinchy’s cuddy cart; it hasn’t to stop seven times in order to get right started. Hurry up! Go in sideways, Willie the Duck; ye cannot go through a door frontways carrying a bundle under yer oxter. Yer stupid ways would drive a sensible man to pot! Hurry up and come on now! Get a move on ye, every one of the whole lot of ye!”

Presently all, with the exception of the speaker, were in their compartments and looking for seats. Micky’s Jim remained on the platform, waiting for the train to start, when he could show by boarding it as it steamed out of the station that he had learned a thing or two beyond the water in his time; a thing or two not known to all the Frosses people.

A ticket collector examined the tickets, chatting heartily as he did so. When he found that Norah had not procured hers he ran off and came back with one, smiling happily as if glad to be of assistance to the girl. A lady and gentleman, tourists no doubt, paced up and down the platform, eyeing everybody with the tourists’ rude look of enquiry; a stray dog sniffed at Micky’s Jim’s trousers and got kicked for its curiosity; the engine driver yawned again, made the sign of the cross on his open mouth and mounted to his place; the whistle sounded, and with Micky’s Jim standing on the foot-board the train steamed out of the station.

Norah, who had never been on a train before, took up her seat near the window, and rubbed the pane with her shawl in order to get a better view of the country, which seemed to be flying past with remarkable speed. The telegraph wires were sinking and rising; the poles like big hands gripped them up, dropped them, but only to lift them up again as threads are lifted on the fingers of a knitter.

There were eleven people in the compartment, four women and seven men. One of the latter, Eamon Doherty, was eating a piece of dry bread made from Indian meal; the rest of the men were smoking black clay pipes, so short of shank that the bowls almost touched the noses of the smokers. But Jim’s pipe was different from any of these; it was a wooden one, “real briar root” he said, and was awfully proud of it. It had cost three shillings and sixpence in a town beyond the water, he now told the party, not indeed for the first time; but none of the listeners believed him. Two of the women said their prayers; one wept because she was leaving Ireland, and Norah Ryan spent her time looking out of the window.

III

“WHO’LL take a drink?” asked Micky’s Jim, pulling a half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and drawing out the cork with his fingers. “Good stuff this is, and I’m as dry as the rafters of hell.... Will ye have a wee drop, Willie the Duck?”

“No, sure,” answered Willie, who was sitting beside the weeping woman, his one leg across the other, and his hands clasped over his stomach. “I would take it if I hadn’t the pledge against drink, indeed I would. Aye, sure!”

“Aye sure, be hanged!” Jim blurted out. “Ye’ve got to take it, for it’s die-dog-or-eat-the-gallows this time. Are ye goin’ to take it?”

“No, sure——”

“Why d’ye always say ‘Aye, sure’ and ‘No, sure’ when talking to a person?” asked Jim, replacing the cork in the bottle, which he now tried to balance on the point of his finger. “Is it a habit that ye’ve got into, Willie the Duck?”

“Aye, sure,” answered Willie, edging away from Micky’s Jim, who was balancing the bottle successfully within an inch of the roof. “Ye’ll let that bottle fall on me head.”

“Aye, sure,” shouted Micky’s Jim and shook the bottle with perilous carelessness, holding out the free hand in case it should fall. “It wouldn’t crack a wooden head anyhow.”

“That’s Brockagh station that we’re comin’ into now, as the man said,” remarked one of the women who had been praying. The woman was Maire a Glan, who had been going beyond the water to work for the last four or five years. Things were not going well at home; her husband lay ill with paralysis, the children from a monetary point of view were useless as yet—the oldest boy, thin and weakly, a cripple from birth, went about on crutches, the younger ones were eternally crying for bread. Maire a Glan placed the rosary round her neck and took a piece of oaten bread from the bundle at her feet.

“Will ye have a wee bit to eat, Norah Ryan?” she asked.

“My thanks to ye, Maire a Glan, but I’m not hungry,” answered Norah, rubbing the window where her breath had dimmed it.

“I thought that ye might be, seeing that yer eye is not wet on leavin’ home,” said the woman, breaking bread and putting a bit of it in her mouth. “There, the train is stopping!” she went on, “and I have two sisters married within the stretch of a mile from this place.”

“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck with his usual quack. “I know both, and once I had a notion of one of them, meself.”

“Lookin’ for one of God’s stars to light yer pipe with, as the man said,” remarked the woman contemptuously, fixing her eyes on the poor fellow’s hump. “Ye have a burden enough on yer shoulders and not to be thinkin’ at all of a wife.”

“Them that carries the burden should be the first to complain of it,” said Willie the Duck, edging still further away from Micky’s Jim, who was now standing up and balancing the whisky bottle on the point of his nose. The women tittered, the men drew their pipes from their mouths and gave vent to loud guffaws. The train started out from Brockagh station, a porter ran after it, shut a door, and again Norah Ryan watched the fields run past and the telegraph wires rise and fall.

“I’ll bet that not one of ye knows who’s comin’ to join us at Derry,” said Micky’s Jim, tiring of his play and putting the bottle back in his pocket, after having taken a sup of its contents.

“Who?” asked several voices.

“Dermod Flynn from Glenmornan.”

“I haven’t seen that gasair for the last two years or more,” said Murtagh Gallagher, a young man of twenty-five, who came from the townland of Meenahalla in the parish of Frosses. “If I mind right, he was sort of soft in the head.”

A faint blush rose to Norah Ryan’s cheek, and though she still looked out of the window she now failed to see the objects flying past. The conversation had suddenly become very interesting for her.

“He has been working with a farmer beyont the mountains this long while,” said Micky’s Jim. “But I’m keepin’ a place for him in the squad, and ye’ll see him on the Glasgow boat this very night. Ye have said that he was soft in his head, Murtagh Gallagher. Well, that remark applies to me.”

Jim spat on his hands, rose to his feet, shoved his fist under Murtagh’s nose and cried: “Smell that! There’s the smell of dead men off that fist! Dermod Flynn soft in the head, indeed! I’ll soft ye, ye—ye flat-nosed flea-catcher ye!”

“I was only making fun,” said Murtagh.

“Make it to his face then!”

“D’ye mind how Dermod Flynn knocked Master Diver down with his fist in the very school?” asked Judy Farrel, who was also one of the party.

“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck. “But it wasn’t with his fist but with a stick that he struck Master Diver, and mind ye he made the blood to flow!”

“I’ll soon make blood to flow!” said Micky’s Jim, still holding his fist under Murtagh Gallagher’s nose.

“I was only in fun,” Gallagher repeated. “Ye’re as hasty as a briar, Jim, for one cannot open his lips but ye want to blacken his eyes.”

“Now sit down, Micky’s Jim,” said Maire a Glan. “It’s not nice to see two people, both of them from Donegal, fighting when they’re away from home.”

“Fightin’!” exclaimed Jim, dropping into his seat and pulling out his pipe. “I see no fightin’.... I wish to God that someone would fight.... Sort of soft in the head, indeed!... I never could stand a man from Meenahalla, anyway.”

IV

THE train sped on. House, field, and roadway whirled by, and Norah, almost bewildered, ceased to wonder where this road ran to, who lived in that house, what was the name of this village and whether that large building with the spire on top of it was a church (Bad luck to it!) or chapel (God bless it!).

“I’ll see him again,” she thought, her mind reverting to Dermod Flynn. “I wonder how he’ll look now; if his hair is still as curly as when he was at Frosses school.... Two years away from his own home and the home of all his people! Such a long while, and now he’ll know everything about the whole world.” Mixed with these lip-spoken words was the remembrance of her mother all alone in the old cabin at Frosses, and a vague feeling of regret filled her mind.

“Are you getting homesick, Norah?” Maire a Glan enquired, speaking in Gaelic, which came more easily than English to her tongue. “It’s not the dry eye that always tells of the lightest heart, I know myself.”

“Old Oiney Dinchy has a fine daughter,” Eamon Doherty was saying.

“She’s as stuck-up as Dooey Head,” piped Judy Farrel in a weak, thin voice.

“Micky’s Jim has a notion of her, I hear,” remarked Willie the Duck. “But what girl hasn’t Jim a notion of?”

Jim cleaned out the bowl of his pipe with a rusty nail and fell asleep while engaged on the task. The conversation went on.

“Old Farley McKeown is goin’ to get married to an English lady.”

“A young soncy wench she is, they say!”

“Think of that, for old Farley! A wrinkled old stick of seventy! Ah! the shameless old thing!”

“It’ll be a cold bed for the girl that is alongside of him. She’ll need a lot of blankets, as the man said.”

“Aye, sure, and she will that.”

“But he’s the man that has the money to pay for them.”

Norah, deep in a dreamy mood, listened idly to snatches of song, the laughter, and the voices that seemed to be speaking at a very remote distance; but after a while, sinking into the quiet isolation of her own thoughts, the outside world became non-existent to the young girl. She was thinking of Dermod; why he persisted in coming up before her mind’s eye she could not explain, but the dream of meeting with him on the streets of Derry exerted a restful influence over her and she fell into a light slumber.

“It’s the soncy girl she looks with the sleep on her.”

Almost imperceptibly Norah opened her eyes. The transition was so quiet that she was hardly aware that she had slept, and those who looked on were hardly aware that she had wakened. It was Maire a Glan who had been speaking. The train now stood at a station and Micky’s Jim was walking up and down the platform, his pipe in his mouth and his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. Facing the window was a bookstall and a white-faced girl handing to some man a newspaper and a book with a red cover, Norah recollected that Fergus often read books with red covers just like the one that was handed over the counter of the bookstall. That it was possible to have a shop containing nothing but books and papers came as a surprise to Norah Ryan. Over the bookstall in white letters was the station’s name—Strabane. Of this town Norah had often heard. It was to the hiring market of Strabane that Dermod Flynn had gone two years ago. Other two trains stood at the station, one on each side, and both full of passengers.

“Where are all those people going, Maire a Glan?” asked Norah.

“Everywhere, as the man said,” answered the old woman, who was telling her rosary and taking no notice of anything but the black beads passing through her fingers.

A boy walked up and down in front of the carriage, selling oranges at fourpence a dozen. Micky’s Jim bought sixpence worth and handed them through the window, telling all inside to eat as many as they liked; he would pay. Maire a Glan left her beads aside until the feast was finished. The engine whistled; Micky’s Jim boarded the moving train and again the fields were running past and the telegraph wires rising and falling.

“‘Twon’t be long till we are on the streets of Derry now,” said Micky’s Jim, drawing another half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and digging out the cork with a clasp-knife.

“‘Twon’t be very long, no, sure,” said Willie the Duck, edging away from Micky’s Jim.