“And Maire a Glan, the decent woman, says that,” Norah whispered to herself and blushed. “And them laughin’ as if there was nothing wrong in it. Then there’s no harm in me speakin’ to the farmer’s son.”

At the table the game was now fast and furious. None of the players heard the women’s remarks.

CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE LANE

I

SUNDAY afternoon of a week later.

Alec Morrison was walking along a sheltered lane towards the house, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, a cigarette between his lips, and his mind dwelling on several things which had taken place the week before. On Sundays he liked to walk alone when there was nothing extraneous to distract his mind, and then to ponder over thoughts that thronged his brain from time to time. He was a Progressive, and the term, which might mean anything to the general public, to Morrison meant all that was best in an age that, to him, was extremely reactionary and lacking in earnestness of purpose and clarity of vision. The young man believed that he, himself, realised all the beauty and all the significance of life and the importance of the task allocated in it to man. He also imagined that he possessed unlimited powers and that in the advance of humanity towards perfection he was destined to play an important part. Most young men of sanguine temperament, who read a little, paint a little, and write a little, have at times hallucinations of this kind. The young man’s pet idea was that he, by some inscrutable decree of Fate, had been appointed to show the working classes the road towards a better life, towards enlightenment and prosperity.

Up till very recently (he was now twenty-one) he had taken no notice of the great class to which he did not belong. He lived in middle-class society, was cradled in its smug self-conceit and nourished at the breasts of affectation. He spent many years at school and now realised that he had wasted his time there. After leaving school he entered a bank in Paisley and spent a number of hours daily bending over a desk, copying interminable figures with a weary pen.

Seeing the conditions under which labourers wrought on his father’s farm caused him to think seriously. Once when he was at home two persons, a man and a woman, Donal and Jean, supposed to be husband and wife, got employment in the steading. These two people were very ragged, very dirty, and very dissolute. The woman’s face was hacked in a terrible manner; her nose had been broken, and her figure looked more like a maltreated animal’s than a human being’s. The man was low-set, stunted, and weedy. Both drew their wages daily and got drunk every night. One night when they had returned from a neighbouring village Morrison saw them in their sleeping quarters. A disused pig-sty, no longer tenable for animals, was handed over to these creatures. A pile of dirty straw lay on the floor and on this the man and woman were sleeping, the man snoring loudly, the woman lying face upwards; the blunt nails of her bleeding fingers showed over the filthy bags which covered her body. A guttering candle was dying in the neck of a beer-bottle beside them and the smell of beer pervaded the place.

“It must be an awful life, this,” he said to his father, who accompanied him.

“These kind of people think nothin’ of it,” his father said. “They get drunk every night and are very happy. Whisky is the only thing they want.”