Chris sat and laughed, sorry for Mr Piddle though she was, poor little weasel howked off like that. Then Ewan came in and heard the tale and laughed as well, ringing and hearty, no boy’s laugh any longer, Neil thought—far from that lad who’d once thought those silly happenings to folk had little or nothing of humour in them. Damned if one liked the change for all that, a difficult young swine to patronize, growing broader and buirdlier, outjutting chin and radiating lines around the eyes—Quaritch knew the face on a score of heads, he’d seen them on platforms, processions, police courts, face of the typical Communist condottiere, cruel and pig-headed and unreasonable brutes with their planning of a bloody revolution tomorrow when Douglasism were it only applied and the maze of its arguments straightened out would cure all the ills that there were of our time: the only problem was distribution, manufacture and function couldn’t be bettered.

*

It was as though a great hand had battered, broad-nieved, against the houses that packed Footforthie. Windows shook and cracked, the houses quivered, out in the streets folk startled looked up and saw the lift go suddenly grey. Then, belly-twisting, the roar of the explosion.

Folk tore from their houses and into the streets, pointed, and there down by Gowans and Gloag’s in the afternoon air was a pillar of fire sprouting a blossoming to the sky, it changed as you looked and grew black and then green, blue smoke fringe—Christ, what had happened? Next minute the crowd was on the run to the Docks, some crying the fire had broke out in a ship, but you knew that that was a lie. And John—Peter—Thomas—Neil—Oh God, he was there, in Furnaces, Machines—it was and it couldn’t be Gowans and Gloag’s.

Then, rounding into the Dockside way you found the place grown black with folk, bobbies there already crying to keep back, forward the left of the Works like a great bulging blister, a corral of flame, men were running out from Gowans clapping their hands to blackened faces, some screaming and stitering over to the Docks to pitch themselves in agony into the water. And as they did that the blister burst in another explosion that pitched folk head-first down on the ground, right and left—Forward, against the green pallor of the Docks, a rain of stone and iron stanchions fell.

And out of the sunset, and suddenly, the lift covered over with driving clouds.

. . . . .

The Tory Pictman got the news from Duncairn over the telephone, clear-the-line, from Mr Piddle he-heing! like fun: all about the charred bodies, the explosion, the women weeping, the riot that broke out against the Gowans house up in Craigneuks when their windows were bashed in by Reds. And the Pictman printed a leader about it, full of dog Latin and constipated English, but of course not Scotch, it was over-genteel: and it said the affair was very regrettable, like science and religion experiment had its martyrs for the noble cause of defending the State. The treacherous conduct of extremists in exploiting the natural grief of the Duncairn workers was utterly to be deplored. No doubt the strictest of inquiries would be held—