The scene on these occasions at our railroad station is one to which the experience of twenty years has not been able to make me indifferent. The pain and heartbreak of it are as keen to-day as they were when first I saw it. On the platform are women—old women for the most part, mothers and grandmothers—weeping without restraint. Their eyes are swollen; their cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and then one of them wails aloud, and the others, catching the sound, wail with her, their voices rising and falling in a weird melody, like the Church's ancient plain song.
The men stand more silent; but very often their eyes are wet, too. Their lips, tightly pressed, twitch spasmodically. Occasionally an uncontrollable sob breaks from one of them.
The windows of the railway carriages are crowded with the faces of boys and girls, all of them weeping with the helpless abandonment of sheer despair. The engine whistles. There is a rush to the carriage windows. Faces and hands are thrust out of them. There is a frenzied pressing of lips to lips, a clinging of fingers intertwined, until some railway official, mercifully brutal, by main force pushes the people back.
The train moves slowly and gathers speed. A long, sad cry comes from the people left behind, swelling to a pitch of actual agony, until some brave soul somewhere in the crowd chokes down a sob, waves his hat, and makes a pretence to cheer.
That day I saw among the crowd on the platform Tom Dever and his wife. They were both weeping. I looked at the window of the carriage in front of them and saw Onnie.
Alone among the crowd of departing girls she was not crying. Her face was very pale. Her eyes, unnaturally large, seemed full of the sorrow of farewell; but her head was proudly posed. She stood upright while the others stooped or crouched.
I felt a sudden thrill. The girl was going out into a wide, strange world, sad, but not in despair—going to win through, to conquer, not to be beaten. From the carriage in which I sat I heard the last loud cry as the train moved out the blessing, "God be with you, and good luck!" the pitiful cheer; and then Onnie's voice, clear above the wailing:
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
I bade farewell to Onnie an hour later when I left the train at the station where I had to stop. I asked her whether she wanted to go to America or would rather have stayed at home. Her answer seemed to me characteristic of the fatalism of our people.
"Sure, it was before me anyway," she said; "and it might as well be now as some other time. What was there for me at home?—only the daylight."
There was, of course, more than the daylight. There were lobsters in that cleft of the rock, to be hauled out of it when the tide was low. I reminded Onnie of the lobster she once caught for me and she smiled wanly. There were also periwinkles among the pools on the outlying reef. Onnie remembered them well enough.
"It was out of the price of them," she said, "that I made the money to pay my passage—what was wanted along with what my aunt sent home. I made a deal out of the periwinkles last summer."
So it was for a ticket to America and not for ribbons that the money went; but it must have been hard to save enough!
"I kept what I got," said Onnie; "and along with the few shillings I had in the Post Office Savings Bank I had enough to buy what clothes was wanted. Do you mind the shilling you gave me the day I made the cup of tea for you? Well, that was the first shilling ever I had of my own; and I put it in the savings bank."
"Do you mean to tell me——" I said.
I got no further, for the train started and Onnie was borne away from me. I am no stranger to the power of saving possessed by the West of Ireland peasants. It no longer surprises me to find that some small farmer, who has lived all his life in extreme penury, leaves fortunes of fifty pounds each to his three daughters when he dies—money gathered well-nigh penny by penny through many years; and his at the end by virtue of an amazing power of not spending; but I confess that Onnie's hoarding startled me.
I thought of her laughing among the rocks of the reef, with the sunlight in her hair. I thought of her singing in the boat as she and the others rowed home. I have heard of girls singing blithely over their wheels as they spun flax for their bridal linen; but no man ever yet heard of a girl singing over the making of her shroud! Yet, if Onnie worked all summer in order to make money to take her to America, it must have been for her very like the sewing of a shroud.
It is thus, at all events, that the mothers of our Irish boys and girls think about the emigration to America.
"I've had seven children," one of them will say, "and I've lost five of them. Two of them I buried and three are gone to America."
And yet Onnie sang over the business merrily! I went my way, wondering what the future had hidden in it for her and what America would make of her.
I do not know the end—the final achievement of Onnie Dever; but chance gave me a glimpse of her halfway through her career. I was in one of the large cities of the Middle West, a place that boasts about its progress with boasting that is entirely justified. It is a city that has gone ahead fast in the last fifteen years, and which is destined, I imagine, to go faster yet, and to go very far. My wife was with me, and certain needs of hers took us into a large department store. We found—I ought to say she found—the required garment or something very like it.
There was a question of certain alterations. I, who have no taste for the details of a woman's dress and am useless as an adviser on the hang of a skirt or the set of a frill, retired to some distance. I took my stand beside the gate of the lift.
Just as I left the scene of action I heard the very grandly dressed young lady who had attended to our wants offering to send for the head of the department. I turned away and found an agreeable employment for my time in explaining to the man who worked the lift that I did not want to go either up or down.
He passed frequently, for there were many customers in the store, and I had to repeat my explanation every time he reached my floor. He appeared to find it difficult to believe that any one would stand opposite the gate of the cage merely for the fun of watching him, and every time he saw me he stopped and invited me to go with him. After a while he began to lose his temper with me, and I thought it better to turn my back on him and look the other way.
Standing beside my wife, explaining to her the beauties of a certain evening gown, was Onnie Dever Tom. I recognised her at the first glance. A second look made me doubtful. A long stare and some thought convinced me that I must be wrong.
In the first place, the lady who handled the silken flounces of the gown her subordinate held for her looked six inches taller than I remembered Onnie to have been. Long, narrow skirts, especially when very well cut, produce this illusion of height. When last I had a good look at Onnie she was wearing a crimson petticoat that reached very little below her knees. She certainly did not look tall then.
The dressing of the hair is also a disturbing thing. Onnie's, even when she was in the train on her way to the steamer, hung down her back in a long, thick pigtail. The fashion of ladies' hair-doing is not to be described by any words in the English language. I suppose I must use a French word and say that the coiffure of the chief of this department puzzled me; but most perplexing of all was the look of calm authority on her face.
Onnie Dever, even in her tenderest years, had a masterful way with her. I remembered how she had once lectured me on the management of boats, and how she held the flapping lobster at arm's length; but mere masterful self-assertiveness is a very different thing from settled authority. Most fools are self-assertive; but it is only the few men and women who have some strength of real wisdom in them who can reduce those round them to submissiveness, and it is the power of really ruling others that gives the look of authority to the face.
My reason told me that the young lady before me could