He thought through the dark of every night Oh God, if only I could sleep! And sleep came seldom, hour on hour, while he fought to lock back in his memory those pictures: pictures of himself in that prison cell, in the hands of the bobbies while they mauled him about, pictures … and he’d cover his face with his hands, bury his face in the pillow to forget the sick shame of it. He, Εwan Tavendale, held like a beast, his body uncovered and looked upon, jeered at, smeared with the foulness of those filthy eyes as battered by their filthy hands, held and tormented like a frog in the hands of a gang of school-kids. His body that once he’d hardly known, so easy and cool and sweet-running it had been: now in the dark it was a loathsome thing that he lay within, a foul thing he didn’t dare look upon.

In the grip of that fear he locked his room every night, went about the house swathed up to the chin, Chris was watching, she’d know, Chris or else Ellen. Ellen and he once—sickening to think of, filthy and dirty, lips like hers on his…. Oh, God, please let me sleep!

Jim Trease called in that day with the news that the strike at last had come to an end, he sat with Ewan in the sitting-room, big, heavy and red, his little eyes twinkling. They’d all gone back and were cheerily at work making their armament bits again—’twas even said that Gowans were to install a gas-loading plant soon. Oh, the strikers had got the speeding up slowed down and a bit of an increase on all the piece-rates, Bolivia and Japan were in a hell of a stamash to get arms: and Gowans were dancing in tune.

—And I went through what I did—just for that?

Jim Trease nodded, Ay, just for that. And for just the same kind of result he’d been going through the like things a good fifteen years—living on pay a little better than a Broo man’s, working out his guts for those thick-witted sods…. He twinkled his eyes and smoked his cigarette, looking like a Christmas pig, Ewan thought, with some foolish toy stuck in its mouth by a butcher…. And he’d do it another fifteen years till the bobbies got him down in some bit of a riot and managed to kick in his skull, he supposed—For it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans. And suddenly was serious an untwinkling minute: A hell of a thing to be History, Ewan!

And for awhile his words and the image they painted abided with Ewan when Trease himself had gone shambling away across Windmill Place, turning, stout, shabby, to wave ta-ta. A hell of a thing to be History!—not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but LIVING HISTORY ONESELF, being it, making it, eyes for the eyeless, hands for the maimed!—