Part 3

The big shoes that must once have belonged to the visitor's man, hit the floor loosely as she walked slowly out. Then as lodger I was given the only chair at the breakfast-table. The mother and girl sat at a plank bench and supped their tea from their saucerless cups. As there was no place else to sit, the children took their bread and jam as they perched on the bed, and when they finished, surreptitiously wiped their fingers on the brown-covered hay mattress. Before we were through, they had run to the street and back to warm their cold legs inside the fender till the floor was tracked with mud from the street, ashes from the grate, and bits of crumbled bread.

In the evening I heard the murmur of revolution. With the shawled mothers who line the lane on a pleasant evening, I stood between the widow and a twenty-year-old girl who held her tiny blind baby in her arms. Across the narrow street with its water-filled gutters, barefoot children in holey sweaters or with burlap tied about their shoulders, slapped their feet as they jigged, or jumped at hop-scotch. Back of them in typical Dublin decay rose the stables of an anciently prosperous shipping concern; in the v dip of the roofless walls, spiky grass grew and through the barred windows the wet gray sky was slotted. Suddenly the girl-mother spoke:

"Why, there's himself coming back, Mary. See him turning up from the timber on the quay. There was sorrow in his eyes like the submarine times when he came to tell me no boat docked this morning. Baby or no baby, I'll have to get work for myself, for he's not given me a farthing for a fortnight."

A big Danish-looking chap was homing towards the door. Without meeting the girl's eyes, he slunk into the doorway. His broad shoulders sagged under his sun-faded coat, and he blocked the light from the glassless window on the staircase as he disappeared. When he slouched out again his hand dropped from his hip pocket.

"It's to drill he's going," The young mother snugged her shawl in more tightly about her baby. Then she said with a little break in her voice: "Oh, it's very pleasant, just this, with the girls jigging and rattling their legs of a spring evening."

A girl's voice defiantly telling a soldier that if he didn't wear his civvies when he came to call he needn't come at all, rose clearly from a dark doorway. A lamplighter streaked yellow flame into the square lamp hanging from the stone shell opposite. A jarvey, hugging a bundle of hay, drove his horse clankingly over the cobblestones. Then grimly came the whisper of the widow of the rebellion close to my ear:

"Oh, we'll have enough in the army this time."

Difficult as the Irish worker's fight is, the able person is loath to give up and accept charity. But whether she wants to or not, if she can't find work she must go to the poorhouse. Before the war it was estimated that over one-half the inmates of the Irish workhouses were employable. During the war, when there were more jobs than usual to be had, there was a great exodus from the hated poorhouse; there was a drop in workhouse wards from 400,000 to 250,000. But now jobs are getting less again and there is a melancholy return back over the hills to the poorhouse.

Night refuges, I found, are the last stage in this journey. There, with every day out of work, women become more unemployable--clothes and constitutions wear out; minds lose hope in effort and rely on luck. As I sat with a tableful of charwomen and general housework girls in a refuge in Dublin, I read two ads from the paper. One offered a job for a general servant with wages at $50 a year. The other ran: "Wanted: a strong humble general housework girl to live out; $1.25 a week." I put the choice up to the table.

"If you haven't anybody of your own to live with," advised a husky-voiced, mufflered girl next me as she warmed her fingers about her mug of tea and regarded me from under her cotton velvet hat with some suspicion, "you should get the job living with the family. It takes five dollars a week to live by yourself." Then forestalling a protest she added: "You'll get two early evenings off--at eight o'clock."

"Whatever you get, don't let it go." A bird-faced woman leaned over the table so that the green black plume of her charity bonnet wagged across the center of the table. With her little warning eyes still on my face she settled back impressively. As she extracted a half sheet of newspaper from under her beaded cape and furtively wrapped up one of the two "hunks" of bread that each refugee got, she continued: "Once I gave up a place because they let me have just potatoes and onions for dinner. No, hold on to whatever you get--whatever." And after we had night prayers that were so long drawn out that someone moaned: "Do they want to scourge us with praying?", the old charwoman repeated the hopeless words: "Hold on to whatever you get--whatever."

In the pale gold light that flooded through the windows of the sixty-bed dormitory, the women turned down the mussed toweling sheets from the bolsters across the reddish gray spreads.

"My clothes dried on me after the rain, and I do be coughing till my chest is sore," said the girl who had sat next me at the table and was next me in the sleeping room. "There was too many at the dispensary to wait."

Out of a sagging pocket in her creased mackintosh she took a clothes brush. She slipped her skirt from under her coat and with her blue-cold hand passed the flat brush back and forth over the muddy hem.

"If I had a bit o' black for my shoes now--with your clothes I could get me a housemaid's job easy," Her muffler covered the fact that she had no shirtwaist. Then she added encouragingly: "You'd better get a job quick. There's only one blanket on these beds and clothes run down using them for covers at night."

Opposite us a gray-cheeked mother was wrapping a black petticoat about the legs of a small child. She tucked the little girl in the narrow bed they were both to sleep in, and babbled softly to the drowsy child:

"No place yet. My heart do be falling out o' me. Well, I'm not to blame because it's you that keeps me from getting it. You--" she bent over the bed and ended sharply: "Oh, my darling, shall we die in Dublin?"

Through the dusk, above the sound of coughing and canvas stretching as the women settled themselves for the night, there rose the soft voices of two women telling welcome fairy stories to each other:

"It was a wild night," said one. "She was going along the Liffey, and the wind coming up from the sea blew the cape about her face and she half fell into the water. He caught her, they kept company for seven years and then he married her. Who do you suppose he turned out to be? Why, a wealthy London baker. Och, God send us all fortune."

There was silence, then the whisper of the mother:

"Look up to the windows, darling. There's just a taste of daylight left."

Gradually it grew dark and quiet in this vault of human misery. Then, far away from some remote chapel in the house, there floated the triumphant words of the practising choir:

"Alleluia! Alleluia!"

ILL.

What do emigration and low wages do to Irish health? Social conditions result in an extraordinary percentage of tuberculosis and lunacy, and in a baby shortage in Ireland. Individual propensities to sexual excess or common crime are, incidentally, responsible for little of the ill health in Ireland.

Ireland's tuberculosis rate is higher than that of most of the countries in the "civilized" world. Through Sir William Thompson, registrar-general of Ireland, I was given much material about tuberculosis in Ireland. An international pre-war chart showed Ireland fourth on the tuberculosis list--it was exceeded only by Austria, Hungary, and Servia. During the war, Ireland's tuberculosis mortality rate showed a tendency to increase; in 1913, her death list from tuberculosis was 9,387 and in 1917 it was 9,680.

Emigration is heat to the tuberculosis thermometer. Why? Sir Robert Matheson, ex-registrar-general of Ireland, explained at a meeting of the Woman's National Health Association. The more fit, he said, emigrate, and the less fit stay home and propagate weak children. Besides, emigrants who contract the disease elsewhere come home to die. Many so return from the United States. Numbers of the 50,000 annual migrants from the west coast of Ireland to the English harvests return to nurse the tuberculosis they contracted across the channel. Dr. Birmingham, of the Westport Union, is quoted as saying that in September a disease known locally as the "English cold" is prevalent among the young men who have been harvesting in England. Sometimes it is simple bronchitis. Mostly it is incipent phthisis. It is easily traced to the wretched sleeping places called "Paddy houses" in which Irish laborers are permitted to be housed in England. These "Paddy houses" are often death traps--crowded, dark, unventilated barns in which the men have to sleep on coarse bags on the floor.

The Irish wage causes tuberculosis to mount higher. Dr. Andrew Trimble, chief tuberculosis officer for Belfast, comments on the fact that the sex affected proves that economic conditions are to blame. Under conditions of poverty, women become ill more quickly than men. Dr. Trimble writes: "In Belfast and in Ireland generally more females suffer from tuberculosis than males. In Great Britain, however, the reverse is the case.... In former years, however, they had much the same experience as we have in Ireland ... and it would be necessary to go back over twenty-five years to come to a point where the mortality from tuberculosis among women equalled that now obtaining with us. It would seem that the hardships associated with poor economic conditions--insufficient wages, bad housing and want of fresh air, good food and sufficient clothing--tell more heavily on the female than on the male, and with the march of progress and better conditions of living ... tuberculosis amongst women is automatically reduced."