But Mrs Trease came back from the Talkies and wouldn’t hear of it, Jim would need a bit crack and a bit more supper, she thought there was some cheese. Greena Garbage had been right fine, cuddled to death and wedded and bedded. Would Ewan stir up the fire a little and Jim move his meikle shins out of the way? Ta-ra-ra, ’way down in Omaha—

Trease twinkled at Ewan: That’s what you get. Not revolutionary songs, but Ta-ra-ra, ’way down in Omaha. Mrs Trease said Fegs, revolutionary songs gave her a pain in the stomach, they were nearly as dreich as hymns—the only difference being that they promised you hell on earth instead of in hell.

And Ewan sat and looked on and spoke now and then, and liked them well enough, knowing that if it suited the Party purpose Trease would betray him to the police tomorrow, use anything and everything that might happen to him as propaganda and publicity, without caring a fig for liking or aught else. So he’d deal with Mrs Trease, if it came to that…. And Ewan nodded to that, to Trease, to himself, commonsense, no other way to hack out the road ahead. Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for the folk who took the workers’ road; just life that sent tiredness leaping from the brain; that sent death and wealth and ease and comfort shivering away with a dirty smell, a residuum of slag that time scraped out through the bars of the whooming furnace of History—

And then he went out and home through the streets, swinging along and whistling soft, though he hardly knew that till he heard his own wheeber going along the pavement in front, the August night mellow and warm and kind, Duncairn asleep but for a great pelt of lorries going up from the Fishmarket, the cry of a wakeful baby somewhere. And he smiled a little as he heard that cry, remembering Ellen and her saying that Communism would bring a time when there would be no more weeping, neither any tears…. She was no more than a baby herself.

A bobby stopped in a doorway and watched him go by: there was something in that whistle that was bloody eerie, a daft young skate, but he fair could whistle.

It was plain to Chris something drastic must be done to reorganize the house in Windmill Place. With Cushnie first gone and syne Ena Lyon and Ake still seeking about for a job she’d have to get new lodgers one way or the other. But the price Ma Cleghorn had set on the house had made it for folk of the middle-class, except such rare intruders as Ake—and he’d come in search of her, she supposed, much he’d got from the coming, poor wight.

She asked Neil Quaritch when he came to tea, he looked thinner and stringier and tougher than ever, a wee cocky man with a wee cocky beard, pity his nose was as violent as that. Lodgings?—he’d ask some of the men in the Runner. Especially as they might never see Mr Piddle again.