‘No, we shouldn’t. You were bound
to save us from being murdered.’
‘Then we should have had to kill a lot of other
people.’
’That doesn’t matter. We were preaching
the Truth. You can’t stop us. We shall
go on preaching in London; and then you’ll
see!’
‘You can see now,’ said Pirolo, and opened
a lower shutter.
We were closing on the Little Village, with her three
million people spread out at ease inside her ring
of girdling Main-Traffic lights—those eight
fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking,
Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.
Leopold Vincent’s new company looked, with small
pale faces, at the silence, the size, and the separated
houses.
Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly—always
without shame.
MACDONOUGH’S SONG
Whether the State can
loose and bind
In Heaven
as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill
mankind
Before or
after the birth—
These are matters of
high concern
Where State-kept
schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have
lived to learn)
Endeth in
Holy War.
Whether The People be
led by the Lord,
Or lured
by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to
die by the sword
Or cheaper
to die by vote—
These are the things
we have dealt with once,
(And they
will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however
it runs,
Endeth in
wholly Slave.
Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
Saying—after—me:—
Once there was The People—Terror
gave it birth; Once there was The People and
it made a Hell of Earth. Earth arose and
crushed it. Listen, O ye slain! Once
there was The People—it shall never be again!
(March 1914)
The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely
see a cow’s length across a field. Every
blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried
water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing
ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook
below. A week’s November rain on water-logged
land had gorged her to full flood, and she proclaimed
it aloud.
Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed
hedge that ran down the hillside and disappeared into
mist beside those roarings. They stood back and
took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow
of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed
a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.
‘I reckon she’s about two rod thick,’
said Jabez the younger, ‘an’ she hasn’t
felt iron since—when has she, Jesse?’
