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.”