Now, that had been just a kind of blackmail, as Ake knew right well but didn’t much care, in a minute poor Wabbling Jimmy was ready to offer him half his worldly possessions if only Ake would keep quiet on the subject of Kate. Ake said that he was on the look for a job, what about this sawmill that Jimmy owned? and Jimmy said he seldom interfered, he’d a manager, and Ake said he hardly wanted his job, though he’d tackle a foreman’s he’d manage that fine. So Jimmy in a stew howked out his car and in they got and drove to the Kirrie, a fine sawmill, and they weren’t there long afore the manager came over to ask if Jimmy had yet ta’en on a new foreman in place of a childe that had gotten the sack. And at that what could poor Jimmy do but go a bit blue about the neb and say Ay, I have; and this is him.

So that’s how he’d collared the Duncairn job, not that he was over-keen on the thing, D’you ken now, mistress, what I’ve aye wanted?—Losh, a job on a ship at sea, the fine smell and the pelt of the water below you, there’s fine carpentering work to be done on ships. And Chris, with the teacups cold on the tray, said she thought it a shame he’d never got it, maybe he’d get a job like that yet. Ake nodded, fegs, and he might, not likely, better to hang on the Provost’s tail, old Wabbling Jimmy that was feared at his past. Not that poor Jimmy’s an exception in that: We’re all on leading strings out of the past.

For days you couldn’t forget that scream, tingling, terrified, the lost keelie’s scream as that swine Sim Leslie smashed him down. Again and again you’d start awake, sweating, remembering that from a dream, Duncairn sleeping down Windmill Steps, all the house in sleep, quiet next door, that kid Ellen Johns not dreaming at all. Luck for her and her blah about history and Socialism: she hadn’t a glimpse of what either meant….

Oh, sick of the whole damn idiot mess, drifting about nowadays like a fool, couldn’t settle to anything, couldn’t read a book, caught in the net of this idiot rubbish. Your head had softened like a swede in the rain ever to be taken in with the rot—rot about leading new life to the workers, moulding them into History’s new tool, apprehending a force more sure and certain than the God poor Robert had preached in Segget…. In the workers?—Rats, what was there in them that wasn’t in the people of any class? Some louts, some decent, the most of them brainless, what certain tool to be found in crude dirt? You’d dug deep enough to make sure of that, playing the game as a keelie yourself, fraternizing with the fauna down at the Works—hell, how they stank, the unscrubbed lot, with their idiot ape-maunderings and idiot hopes, their idiot boasts, poor dirty devils. They took you for one of themselves nowadays, so you’d almost become as half-witted as they.