A Scots Quair (97 page)

Ewan said he thought the same, for years it was likely the workers' movements would be driven underground, they'd to take advantage of legality as long as they could and then prepare for underground work—perhaps a generation of secret agitation and occasional terrorism. And Trease nodded, and they left all that to heed to itself and Trease sat twinkling, his collar off, and told Ewan of his life as a propagandist far and wide over Scotland and England, agitprop in Glasgow, Lanark, Dundee, the funny occurrences that now seemed funny, they'd seemed dead serious when he was young. He'd tramped to lone villages and stood to speak and been chased from such places by gangs of ploughmen—once taken and stripped and half-drowned in a trough; he'd been jailed again and again for this and that
petty crime he'd never committed, and in time took the lot as just the day's work; he'd been out with Connolly at Easter in Dublin, an awfully mismanaged Rising that. But the things he minded best were the silly, small things—nights in mining touns when he'd finished an address to a local branch and the branch secretary would hie him away home to his house: and Trease find the house a single room, with a canty dame, the miner's wife, cooking them a supper and bidding them welcome: and they'd sit and eat and Trease all the time have a bit of a worry on his mind—where the hell was he going to sleep?: and the miner would say
Well, look this way,
comrade
, and Trease would hear a bit creak at the back of the room—the miner's wife getting into bed: and he and the miner would sit and claik the moon into morning and both give a yawn and the miner would say
Time for the bed. I'll lie in
the middle and you in the front:
and in they'd get and soon be asleep, nothing queer and antrin in it at all, not even when the miner got up and out at the chap of six and left you lying there with his mate, you'd as soon have thought of touching your sister.

And Ewan laughed and then grew serious and spoke of his work in the Stoddart yard, he was raising up something of a cell in the yard, could Jim dig out a bundle of pamphlets for him? They'd all been Labour when he went to Stoddart's, but already he'd another four in the cell. Trease said he'd give him pamphlets enough, Stoddart's was a place worth bothering about, how long did Ewan think he would last before he was fired by the management? Ewan said he thought a couple of months, you never could tell, damned nuisance, he was getting interested in granite. And that led him on to metallurgy, on and on, and Trease sat and listened and poured himself a fresh cup of tea now and then … till Ewan pulled himself up with a laugh:
Must clear out now. I've been
blithering for hours
.

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.

Chris said Why? and Neil licked his lips and thought
Boadicea probably looked like that. She'd strip well—and damn
it, she does—for Ogilvie
. Then he pushed his cup over for replenishing, they were sitting at tea alone, and told the tale about Mr Piddle that had come up to the office as he left. Mrs Ogilvie knew this side-line of Piddle's?—sending fishing news to the
Tory Pictman?
Well, he'd been gey late in gathering it to-day, doing another side-line down in Paldy, prevailing on a servant lassie there to steal him the photo of an old woman body who had hanged herself, being weary with age. Back at last he'd come to the office,
he-he!
photo in hand and all set fine, and looked at the clock and saw he'd a bare three minutes to tear down the Mile and reach the train at the Station in time. So he flittered down the stairs like a hen in hysterics and got on his bike and tore up the Mile, and vanished from sight, the
Runner
subs leaning out from their window and betting on the odds that he'd meet that inevitable lorry right now—it was an understood thing that he'd die under a lorry some day, and be carted home in a jam-pot.

Well, it seems that he reached the Station all right, the lorries scattering to right and left and Piddle cycling hell for leather, shooting through the taxi-ranks at the Station and tumbling into the arms of a porter. And the porter asked who he thought he was, Amy Mollison doing a forced landing? Piddle said
He-he!
and dropped his bike and ran like the wind for the
Pictman
train, he knew the platform for it fine, he'd to run half-way up to the middle guard's van.

Well, he rounded into No. 6 platform and gave a bit of a scraich at the sight, the
Pictman
train already in motion and pelting out of Duncairn toun. It was loaded up with Edinburgh students, clowning and playing their usual tricks, a bit fed up with their visit to Duncairn, they'd been leaning out to shout things to the porters when Mr Piddle came hashing in sight, head thrust out like a cobra homing like hell to the jungle with a mongoose close on his tail. And they gave a howl and started to cheer, Mr Piddle running like the wind by now to reach the middle brake. The guard looked out and yelled to him to stop, he'd never make it and do himself a mischief. But the van was chockablock with students, they pushed the guard aside, a half-dozen of them, and thrust out their hands, Piddle thought that fine, if only he could get near enough to hand up the
Pictman
packet to them. And at last, bursting his braces and a half-dozen blood-vessels, or thereabouts, he got close in touch—down came the hands, the students all yelled, and next minute Piddle was plucked from the earth and shot, packet and all, into the guard's van. And then the train vanished with a howl of triumph, an express that didn't stop till it got to Perth.

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—

The Reverend Edward MacShilluck preached from his pulpit next Sunday and said the catastrophe was the Hand of Gawd, mysteriously at work,
ahhhhhhhhhhhh, my brethren,
what if it was a direct chastisement of the proud and terrible spirit
of the times, the young turning from the Kirk and its sacred
message, from purity and chastity and clean-living?
And Craigneuks thought it a bonny sermon, and nearly clapped, it was so excited; and the Reverend MacShilluck went home to his lunch and fell asleep when he'd eaten it and woke with a nasty taste in his mouth and went a little bit stroll up to Pootsy's room, and opened the door and peeped in at her and shoggled his mouth like a teething tiger—

Jim Trease said to Ewan they hadn't done so bad, twenty new members had joined the local, damn neat idea that of Ewan's to have the Gowans windows bashed in. Ewan was to take Kirrieben for the weekend meetings, he himself Paldy and Selden Footforthie. And be sure and rub in the blood and snot well and for God's sake manage a decent collection, he'd be getting in a row with the ec in London, they were so far behind with the Press contribution.

Eh? Of course the Works had been well-protected, that kind of accident would happen anywhere. But Ewan had been right, that was hardly the point, he could rub in if he liked that there had been culpable negligence…. Eh, what was that? Suggest it had all been deliberately planned to see the effect of poison-gas on a crowd? Hell! Anyhow, Ewan could try it. But for Christ's sake mind about the collection—

Alick Watson said in his barrack-room:
See what's waiting us
in the next war, chaps? Skinned to death or else toasted alive like
a winkle in front of a fire, see?
And the rookies said
Christ, they
all saw that
, what was there to be done about it? And Alick
said to organize and stick up for their rights, would they back him today down in the mess if he made a complaint about the mucking meat? They could force they sods to feed them proper, no fear of that if they'd stick together, no need to knuckle-down to the bloody nco's. And if a war came and the chaps in the companies were well-organized: what the hell could the officers do to them then?