The Emigration of Mary Anne

THE very soul of Mary Anne clung to Ireland as if with fingers and toes. It was not that she saw any of Donegal’s charms with a tourist’s eye — on the contrary, she believed it to be merely a poor barren forsaken spot, and loved it all the more passionately for thus believing. She was one of those for whom emigration is not adventure but doom.

But the path to America had been made easy before her halting feet to the point of slipperiness. A niece of her mother’s had a situation waiting for her in the same house where she was herself employed.

The Duffy family had striven hard to accumulate Mary Anne’s passage money, but some untoward necessity was always gobbling it. Now Cousin Maggie had most generously arranged to send the ticket. Mary Anne was to pay her back in weekly instalments before she set about bringing over Pat James.

This showery summer morning the Duffys had already imbibed their morning tea. Mrs. Duffy was feeding a covey of half-grown chickens on the stone flags before the fire. Barefoot Kitty, her black dress full of rents and her red hair sparkling with rain-drops, charged into the kitchen so impetuously that the chickens scattered before her.

‘The letter!’ she panted. ‘Here is the letter from Cousin Maggie!’

Mary Anne bent closer over her sewing.

‘Lave the birds alone,’ admonished her mother, ‘and put the letter on the dresser till I can get the fowl fed and the hearth trigged up.’

‘I will be fair destroyed waiting, mother.’

‘That letter be’s nayther eating nor drinking. Put the kettle over and bring the full-of-your-arms of turf.’

The last of the outgoing chickens met the first of the incoming neighbors. Mary Anne’s trembling fingers inserted a table-knife in the envelope. A stiff, folded square fell out.

‘The ticket!’ Kitty snatched it ecstatically. ‘Read out the letter, Mary Anne.’

‘One would think it was Kitty going,’ remarked Peggy McGarbey.

‘’Deed, if I had me passage I’d not wait for me breakfast,’ answered that emphatic young person. ‘Read it out!’

With great effort, her sister steadied her voice sufficiently to begin.

‘“DEAR MARY ANNE,—

‘ “ I write you these few lines to let you know that I am in good health, thank God for his blessings to us all, and hoping you are in the same state as this letter leaves me in at present. I am sending your ticket for the sailing of July 25.”’

Mary Anne dropped the letter into her lap; the date had never been set before.

‘To-day we stand the third,’ mused her mother aloud. ‘That gives ye three weeks and a bit over for two blouses more and four shifts.’

‘Oh, drive harder at the reading!’ implored Kitty.

The next sentences in the letter seemed to reprove with pertness what Mrs. Duffy had just said.

‘ “ Do not bring many duds for they won’t look like anything over here and will only be to throw away. The shirt waists you can buy for 98 cents would take your breath. That is four shillings and we think nothing of our shillings in New York.”’

‘It is an old woman I will be when me time comes to be fetched across!’ mourned Kitty.

‘Be first in a wood and last in a bog,’ Mrs. O’Brien warned her. ‘What more is writ in the letter, Mary Anne?’

‘ “ I hope, cousin, you ain’t, so backward as you was in my time there, but can speak up for yourself and not be put upon.” ’

‘I’d like to sec anybody putting it over me!’ Kitty declared.

Mary Anne took advantage of the instant’s pause to resurrect her single recollection of Cousin Maggie. She recalled her as a stranger sitting by the fire in the thong-seated chair now occupied by Mrs. O’Brien. Cousin Maggie had drawn up her blue skirt and blue silk petticoat away from the flagstones. The blue flowers on her hat bobbed time to her strange shrill voice. Altogether she had seemed a highly colored, disconcerting sort of person, and Mary Anne realized that her protecting wing would be anything but downy. She roused herself to read on.

‘ “ You will be losing yourself in this great big house for all the rooms and stairs it has, but you will soon forget how you was ever moping out your life in the peat smoke of Donegal, where, as the word goes, we eat the praties, skins and all.” ’

‘That is only when the spuds be’s scarce,’ averred Peggy McGarvey literally. Mary Anne’s voice strengthened with her indignation at this last slur of Cousin Maggie’s.

‘ “ Saving myself that has sense, the hearts of the Donegal girls around here is stuck to their townlands. They are wishing you to bring over what sods you can in your box as they set terrible store on having one to be tying a green ribbon about it for an orniment.” ’

‘And us burning them common,’ marveled Mrs. O’Brien, but in a voice so low that it did not stop the reading.

‘“I will be taking you to Moving Pictures and to the Bump-the-Bumps at Coney Island, and plenty of the like, until your face will be froze with astonishment, only you must not gape like a greenhorn.” ’

‘They would never be thinking greenhorn on me,’ exulted Kitty.

‘Seems like Kitty has all the consait on Ameriky,’ shrewdly observed Mrs. O’Brien.

‘Mary Anne is a bit backward about going,’ acknowledged her mother, ‘but she is worth two of Kitty at the work, as they will find out when she puts her foot in New York.’

‘Indeed I would not be killing meself to please them,’ Kitty corroborated.

The letter closed with directions and admonitions concerning Ellis Island. Mary Anne laid letter and ticket in a book which occupied a niche over the box bed.

‘Was not Shane O’Donnell sending ye that book of poetries from Dublin, Mary Anne?’ inquired Mrs. O’Brien.

‘He was,’ admitted Mary Anne blushing.

‘Is he no expected home the day?’

‘He is.’ The crimson wave swept from neck to hair.

‘Billy Gallagher seen him in Dublin, and he does be sayin’ that larnin’ and town clothes has taken great effect on his person; so he is the fine upstandin’ young man altogether and might be of the gentry at the hotel — he looks that respectable.’

‘When he is a master he can be giving a woman a grand place to sit down,’ remarked Peggy McGarvey meaningly as she and Mrs. O’Brien rose to depart. Mary Anne’s face was almost hidden in her sewing.

The following morning Shane appeared in his old clothes among those getting home their turf from the bog. As Mr. Duffy was in Scotland, Pat James and Dermot at the Lagan, and Johneen herding for a neighbor, Mary Anne and Kitty must stack the family peat which had been footed in the late spring.

The Irish have a proverb, ‘There is more nor turf to be found in a bog.’ It is hard to tell whether those who shaped the saying had reference to the pink bell-heather and the bog-cotton like fluttering swan-feathers, or to the vaguely feared ‘water-affairs with red mouths on them fit to swallow a cow’ which are supposed to inhabit the larger brown pools. At all events, whoever said it first felt the brooding magic of the bog’s brown and purple desolation.

The axiom will bear a sentimental

twist as well, for at this season, the bog blossoms with Irish nymphs, bare of arms and ankles, red of cheeks, with wind-blown hair, stepping off briskly under the turf creels. Many a shy gossoon with no word in his mouth by the cottage fire becomes quite conversational when he and a maid wait together in the lee of a turf-stack for a driving shower to pass over.

Mary Anne appeared in shoes and an immaculate blue print dress with crocheted collar of her own make. She descried Shane stacking at some little distance. She noted his new self-possession as he bandied talk with those around him. Was he not going to seek her out and speak with her ? Perhaps she was no longer of his sort. Perhaps he did not wish to remind himself of their boy-and-girl sweethearting. Proudly hurt, Mary Anne betook herself to the farthest side of the Duffy turf rows.

She was too slightly built for the labors of the bog. She struggled, with panting breath, beneath the heavy basket on her back. Suddenly a hand eased the burden; Shane spoke behind her.

‘How are you since, Mary Anne? You load the two creels, yours and mine, and let me carry the both of them.'

‘That will be too much entirely.’

‘It will not. My heart would be burned if I could see you staggerin along under a dark of turf—though I am no saying I like the news going round, Mary Anne.’

He helped her set down the creel. Then she faced him.

‘What news is travelin’ about me, Shane O’Donnell?’

‘That you are for emigrating.'

‘What news is that? You knowed it all the time I was coming up.’

‘But I was thinking you would change when you got big enough to have sense and not go shankin’ it to America like the rest of the girls for to get a lump of line clothes.’

‘Oh, Shane, it is not for that at all, at all. It is against me feet I am going.’

‘Could you no refuse to budge?’

‘ I must get me family over. Maybe when they are across I could be let to come back.’

‘You won’t be the same like you went,’ he mourned. ‘Your pretty red cheeks will be losted, and your voice sounding like yon corn-crake.’

‘Shane,’ she ventured, ‘was you ever studying on America for your own self? Mostlike you would soon be made an alderman; picture just, — and I would be a bit less lonesome for knowing there was somebody nigh I used to herd with in me young days.’

Shane flung out his arms in a free gesture of impatient scorn.

‘How would I look to be emigrating and me joined to the Anti-Emigrating Society in Dublin! Some of us had best be staying with dear old Ireland and work for Home Rule and uplifting our own country instead of deserting her for America!’

‘ Oh, Shane, those are me same feelings!’

‘Then stay in your homeland, alanna,’ pleaded the youth. ‘Stay along with me,’ he added significantly.

Mary Anne drooped toward him, twisting and untwisting nervous fingers.

‘I must get Pat James across,’ she persisted like one conning a welllearned lesson, ‘and Kitty is nigh destroyed with waiting — ’

‘Look and behold ye!’ Shane cried angrily. ‘There you are back to where we took our start. And not satisfied with going your own self you will be robbing the country of all your brothers and sisters. It is plain to be seen you are fashed with our ways of going in Ireland and your heart is turned after the dollars and grand clothes in America!’

The hurt tears burned Mary Anne’s eyes as she ran away from Shane back to her own place, and began tumbling sods into her creel. He toiled on glumly by himself.

Henceforth Mary Anne made an excuse of preparing the house for her ‘American wake’ to avoid the bog on the days when young O’Donnell was working there. The ‘American wake’ was a night of dancing, from which the assembled friends would escort her to the railway station at daybreak. The house was freshly whitewashed both within and without. In ‘the room’ the chintz curtains of the box beds, that filled one side in a manner quite suggestive of a sleeping car, were laundered and put back stiffly immaculate. Even the black kettle was scrubbed free of soot for the once.

Everything was brought down from the dresser, and colored paper cut in fancy designs to edge the shelves before the dishes were replaced.

It was a gloomy dawn, the one before the last. Mrs. Duffy wet the tea and brought Mary Anne her cup in bed as a fond, parting, motherly attention. That day no work was done. Mary Anne and her mother sat by the fire sobbing aloud at intervals. The younger children hung around, tearful and oppressed. Kitty flung herself stormily about the house. Shane came in the afternoon and sat moodily by the fire. He had no chance to talk with Mary Anne, for the neighbors were constantly coming in with parting gifts for her, and commissions to relatives in America. Kitty appeared in the doorway of ‘the room’ dressed in her bravest.

‘You are no going to put your foot outside and this Mary Anne’s last day?’ reproached her mother.

Kitty tossed her head so defiantly that her shawl slipped back showing the big blue bow in her red hair.

‘Indeed, mother, and it’s weary I am of looking at you all greeting away, so I will be off this sad hour to Barney’s Fair and take me eye around for a pleasant lack’

‘The looks the neighbors will be giving to see you there, and your sister away the morn!’

‘I will not stay at home for the neighbors! I never see any of them between me and the fire but I wish they was in it!’

‘Child of mortality!’ cried the horrified mother.

‘The cat has n’t eaten the year yet!’ was the indignant warning of Peggy McGarvey.

Kitty’s mood swept into repentance as strenuous as her hatefulness.

‘Oh, Peggy! Peggy dear! I was no meaning yourself! I am liking every bone in your body, I am indeed!’

‘Ye he’s the quare thing entirely,’ responded the mollified Mrs. McGarvey.

‘Ye put the heart across in me, Kitty,’ complained her mother.

‘Oh, mother, don’t be saying that!’

Unexpectedly she dropped down on the flagstones by Mrs. Duffy’s chair with her arms around her.

‘Do not be saying it!’ she repeated sobbingly. ‘I wisht I had been a comfort to you, like Mary Anne!’

Before her mother could answer she was up and embracing her sister.

‘Mary Anne darlin’, do not be thinking hard of me when we have got the four seas betwixt us.’

‘I will not!’ Mary Anne promised soothingly.

Sobbing aloud, Kitty wrapped her shawl about her head and ran out of the house. The mother wiped her eyes on her white apron.

‘Kitty is not the worst there is, only her winds blow from all the points to once.’

Two hours later an old schoolmate of Mary Anne’s, from the other end of the townland, arrived with a package of dulse to keep off seasickness.

‘I may never be going me own self — worse luck,’she said, ‘and I am wondering. what a rale ticket would be looking like.'

Mary Ann obligingly reached for the poetry book and opened it.

‘The ticket! It is gone!’ she gasped.

‘It must have got into the box,’cried her mother.

There ’was a rush for the other room. But the box also was gone. Mary Anne’s clothes which had been neatly packed were now in a tumbled heap on the bed. Mary Ann stared white and silent. The company swept back into the kitchen.

Shane announced: ‘Here is a letter from Kitty I found in the book.’

‘Read it out, Shane,’ faltered Mrs. Duffy. ‘Read it out!’

‘Dear Mother,’ it began. ‘Mary Anne hates the going. I am killed with wanting it but you would say I am too young. So I took the ticket and the box and am away. Let Mary Anne stay and marry Shane O’Donnell. Do not think hard of me, mother darling. Pray for me and forgive —’

‘God save us!’ shrieked Mrs. Duffy. ‘That wild young thing! She will be destroying herself!’

Shane spoke to the mother, but he was watching Mary Anne.

‘Ye could be overtaking her at the ship in Londonderry.’

Mary Anne clung dizzily to the dresser.

‘Oh, mother,’ she pleaded, ‘ do let her go instead of me. It will be a hundred times worse now for the one blessed minute I was thinking meself to be tree of America! ’

The mother hesitated.

‘What was that in the letter about you and Shane O’Donnell?' inquired Peggy McGarvey.

At that the two young people made their escape into the open by simultaneous impulse. Shane led the way and Mary Anne followed unnoticingly around the shoulder of a hill until they came to a heap of stones, washed clean of mud and sod by the rains of a decade, but still to be distinguished from the piling of nature.

Shane pointed to the heap.

‘What stones are there?'

Mary Anne laughed out in lighthearted reaction.

‘They are what is remaining of the bit house you was making for me once when I was a wee one,’

‘Do you mind me saying some day I would be building you a better house that would not be falling on you?'

‘ I mind, Shane. But that was our childish blathers.’

‘No blathers whatever. Wait you here at home, mavourneen, the two years until I finish my scholarship and am a master. Then it is the grand wee house I will be making you.’

Across the heap of stones their hands met.