You turned and went up the deserted stairs to the picture galleries, dusty and dim, drowsily undisturbed but for one room you passed where a keelie was cuddling a girl on the sly, sitting on a bench, they giggled a bit, dried up as you looked and stared and stared. You looked away and about the room, flat seascapes and landscapes, the deadest stuff, why did people make a fuss of pictures? Or music? You’d never seen anything in either. You went and sat down in the Italian room, on the bench in the middle, and stared at a picture, couldn’t be bothered to find out the painter, group of Renaissance people somewhere: soldiers, a cardinal, an angel or so, and a throng of keelies cheering like hell about nothing at all—in the background, as usual. Why not a more typical Italian scene!—a man being broken on the wheel with a club, mashed and smashed till his chest caved in, till his bones were a blood-clottered powdery mess?—

Passed in a minute, that flaring savage sickness, and you got to your feet and went on again: but the same everywhere, as though suddenly unblinded, picture on picture limned in dried blood, never painted or hung in any gallery—pictures of the poor folk since history began, bedevilled and murdered, trodden underfoot, trodden down in the bree, a human slime, hungered, unfed, with their darkened brains, their silly revenges, their infantile hopes—the men who built Münster’s City of God and were hanged and burned in scores by the Church, the Spartacists, the blacks of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Parker’s sailors who were hanged at the Nore, the Broo men manhandled in Royal Mile. Pictures unceasing of the men of your kin, peasants and slaves and common folk and their ghastly lives through six thousand years—oh hell, what had it to do with you?

And you bit your lip to keep something back, something that rose and slew coolness and judgment—steady, white-edged, a rising flame, anger bright as a clear bright flame, as though ’twas yourself that history had tortured, trodden on, spat on, clubbed down in you, as though you were every scream and each wound, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood…. And you gave a queer sob that startled yourself: Something was happening to you: God—what?

*

Ma said, coming down to Chris in the kitchen after collecting the lodgers’ fees, she went round each room of a Sabbath morning before the breakfast time or the kirk: The Murgatroyd creature’s fair in a stew, her dividends are all going down she says and she hardly knows how she’ll Pay her Way. She’s a bittie of a shareholder in Gowans and Gloag’s and there’s not a cent from the firm this year. Aren’t they brutes to mistreat a respectable woman?

Chris asked if that meant that she’d have to leave, and Ma shook her head, Oh no, not her, she’d a bit of a pension as well as an income, a three hundred pounds a year from a trust. Chris stared: Then what’s coming over her? and Ma sighed that Chris didn’t understand and hadn’t a proper sympathy, like, with financial straits of wealthy folk—like herself and their wee Miss Murgatroyd. What the old bitch really wanted of course was her runkled old bottom kicked a bit and turned out into the streets for a night hawking herself at a tanner a time….