Chapter III

All the crowds crowd in Battersea’s Green Park;
The deer are fed, the ducks quack on the water;
On the trim paths the Sabbath-resting clerk
Walks slowly with his wife and son and daughter,
Or seeks the grass where orators breathe slaughter,
Some singing hymns to variegate their turns,
Or waving flags with portraits of John Burns.

Middle the plot there brays a brazen band,
Peaked caps, red jerseys, other things of blue;
And when they cease behold a figure stand,
A bright-haired wench who wears those garments too.
She preaches truth as few but she can do
Concerning drink and cigarettes and betting,
So that the mob must listen though they’re sweating.

“S’welp me, it’s hot.” “Yes, s’welp me, so it is.”
“Ain’t it a shame the pubs ain’t open Sundays,
Just as they be Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Liz,
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays,
To close the ---- up on just this one day’s
’Bout the worst thing the ---- law has done.”
“Yus, so it is.” “Gorblimey, wot a sun!”

But though the high sun spilled a raging heat,
They could not go, they had to stay and hear,
So tense her accents were, her voice so sweet.
“Crikey,” says Bill, “she’s a ’ard egg, no fear.”
Says Sam, “By Gosh, I’ll drop the ---- beer.”
“You won’t.” “I will.” “You won’t.” “What will you bet?”
“A ... no, by gum,’ere comes a Suffragette!”

It was a Suffragette with purple banner,
Handbell and bag of many-coloured bills,
At once in her inimitable manner
She draws the crowd; the space around her fills,
While Flo’s grows empty; soon her pitch is still’s
The solitudes of the Antarctic Ocean,
For even the band had shared the crowd’s emotion.

Not a man trod her corner of the Park,
A quarter-mile around the place was void,
Only her voice to one lost mongrel’s bark
Rang on, and still, as with sound texts she toyed,
She did not seem the slightest bit annoyed.
But Life shrank low, and greedy Death did dance,
For here at last had come old mother’s chance!

Old mother had been hiding ’hind a tree,
Old mother who had sworn the end of Flo,
Weapon in hand she stole up stealthily
Towards the daughter who had grieved her so.
“Aha!” she cried, “you little bitch, Ho, ho,
I’ll pay you out now for your vile desertion ...”
In Flo’s plain blouse she made a neat insertion!

Flo fell, she fell, did Barmaid Flo, she fell;
The carving-knife was sticking in her back,
And as she fell she cried out, “Well, well, well,
What is the motive of this base attack?”
But her old mother shrieked aloud, “Alack,
This was my child, this was my little child,
O, I must cover her with blossoms wild.”

So sought she underneath the elms and oaks,
Garlic and dandelions, peonies
And cabbage-wort and sprole and old-man’s-mokes,
And lillikens and dinks and bitter-ease,
And mortmains that the hind in autumn sees
In places where the mist lies on the hay
And all the land is frozen with the May.

And with her arms full, poor old mother staggered
To her poor child there dead upon the grass,
“My little Flo,” she whimpered, “I’ll be jaggered
I don’t know how it ever come to pass,
I don’t know how I done it, little lass;
Whyever did I sharp that carvin’ knife
And let out all my lovely darlin’s life?”

“She wor a merry grig, wor little Flo,
She kep the family goin’ nicely, she did,
There never was a wheeze she didn’t know,
She always pinched us anything we needed;
Cripes, but I cannot tell why I proceeded,
Just ’cos she left the family to starve,
My pretty Flo’s sweet darlin’ back to carve.”

And so she brought the flowers to her dead,
And piled them on her feet and face and breast,
Flo lay there still as down the blossoms shed,
A heavenly angel lying down to rest,
A downy bird at evening on its nest,
A cloud, a moth, a wave, a steamer, or
Almost any other metaphor.

“Good-bye, my little Flo,” said poor old mother
“You had your faults, I willingly admit,
Yet I am, taking one thing with another,
Sorry for my rash act more than a bit,
But still, I do not want to swing for it.
Mum is the word, least said is soonest mended.”
So mother left the Park, and all was ended.

No. 5. MR. G. K. CHESTERTON

When I leapt over Tower Bridge
There were three that watched below,
A bald man and a hairy man,
And a man like Ikey Mo.

When I leapt over London Bridge
They quailed to see my tears,
As terrible as a shaken sword
And many shining spears.

But when I leapt over Blackfriars
The pigeons on St. Paul’s
Grew ghastly white as they saw the sight
Like an awful sun that falls;

And all along from Ludgate
To the wonder of Charing Cross,
The devil flew through a host of hearts--
A messenger of loss.

With a rumour of ghostly things that pass
With a thunderous pennon of pain,
To a land where the sky is as red as the grass,
And the sun as green as the rain.

No. 6. CANON H. D. RAWNSLEY

Britannia mourns for good grey heads that fall,
Survivors from our great Victoria’s reign;
For they were men; take them for all in all
We shall not look upon their like again.

No. 7. NUMEROUS CELTS

There’s a grey wind wails on the clover
And grey hills, and mist around the hills,
And a far voice sighing a song that is over
And my grey heart that a strange longing fills.

A sheen of dead swords that shake upon the wind,
And a harp that sleeps though the wind is blowing
Over the hills and the seas and the great hills behind,
The great hills of Kerry, where my heart would be going.

For I would be in Kerry now where quiet is the grass,
And the birds are crying in the low light,
And over the stone hedges the shadows pass,
And a fiddle weeps at the shadow of the night.

With Pat Doogan
Father Murphy
Brown maidens
King Cuchullain
The Kine
The Sheep
Some old women
Some old men
And Uncle White Sea-gull and all.

(_Chorus_) And Uncle White Sea-gull and all.

No. 8. THE PEOPLE WHO WRITE IN SECRET WHAT IN PUBLIC THEY ALLEGE
TO BE FOLK-SONGS

The night it was so cold, and the moon it was so clear,
When I stood at the churchyard gate a-parting from my dear,
A-parting from my dear, for to bid my dear good-bye!
And I parted from my dear when the moon was in the sky.

“I never shall forget,” said he, “wherever I may roam,
The day that I parted from my own true love at home,
My own true love at home that was always true to me,
I never shall forget my love wherever I may be.
But I must off to Barbary for good King George to fight,
And it’s farewell to Bayswater and to the Isle of Wight,
And it’s farewell to my true love, it’s farewell to you,
It’s farewell to my own dear love, so faithful and so true.”

He kissed me good-bye, and he gave me a ring,
And he rode away to Lunnon for to fight for the King;
Oh! lonely am I now, and sair, sair cold my pillow,
And I must bind my head with O the green willow.

For last night there came a white angel to my bed,
And he told to me that my own dear love was dead;
My own dear love is dead, and I am all alone
(So it’s surely rather obtuse of you to ask me why I moan).

No. 9. MR. H. G. WELLS

I

I do not quite know how to begin.... Ever since I left England and settled here in this quiet Putumayo valley I have been wondering and wondering.... I want to put everything down quite frankly so that you who come after me shall understand. It is very peaceful here in the forest, and as my mind goes back to that roaring old England, with its strange welter of aspirations and basenesses, that little old England, so far away now, a small green jewel in the great sea, I break into a smile of tender tolerance. Here, as the immemorial procession of day and night, of summer and winter, sweeps over the earth, amid the vast serenities of primeval nature, it all seems so very far away, so small, so queerly inconsequent.... The men who made me, the men who broke me, the women I loved, the sprawling towns, the confused effort, and that ungainly lop-sided structure of our twentieth-century civilization, with its strange welter of sex....