The Fourth Pig

by Warner, Marina, Mitchison, Naomi

  “You refuse, then, to allow this man’s death, even though Ginger—”

  “You lay your tongue off of Ginger, though I say it to your face, sir, whoever you are! Ginger and me, that’s finished. And I’m the only one knows about it now. And this won’t help and it’s not what I’m used to and what we need is Unions for all and all in the Unions! And we aren’t killing anyone, least of all so bloody casual!”

  “Suppose my panthers clawed him a little? … not to death?”

  “It’s not English!” said Bill, white to the lips now, and his hands had twisted all the lining out of his cap, “and it’s not going to do no good!”

  With that, Mr. Denys Backhouse waved his cane once more and the panthers stalked away and disappeared among the foliage, and even that wilted and withered and vanished. But the kilns were down and the brick piles overset, and their owner was still grovelling in the mud. Yet now again he was beginning to murmur words about the police.

  “Come along, Bill,” said Mr. Denys Backhouse, “the car is waiting.” Bill stumbled after him and into the car, not conscious now of shine or softness. By this time Mr. Thompson had crawled to knee-height and was shaking both fists after them. Again the Rolls-Royce drew away. “Where can I drop you, Bill?” asked the film star, flicking a morsel of lime from his trouser-leg. And added: “What do you propose doing now?”

  Bill said: “I’m on the dole. It’s all one to me. Christ, I’m tired! Them bloody brutes.”

  “I could offer you a job,” said his companion slowly.

  “Could you, sir? A tempor’y job, like?”

  “No, permanent. Ginger’s old job, as a matter of fact.”

  “He never said …”

  “I can imagine that he wouldn’t. Yet it was a nice job in a way. Compared with his last. But you would lose your freedom, Bill.”

  “Freedom. What for?”

  “Oh. To vote and all that.”

  “There’s a lot o’ firms where they don’t like you voting Labour. Dunno that I care much. Not if it’s a decent job.”

  “And you’d have to ask before you got married.” “That’s so in some firms. But if it’s a decent job—”

  “And you wouldn’t get any regular wages. But you’d get food and lodging … and a good deal of fun. And if you were ill you’d get looked after.”

  “But—Who are you, anyway, sir?”

  “I happen to be the God Dionysos Bacchos. An Immortal. The God of divine frenzy. By the way, would you like a drink?”

  “I could do with one, sir … And this job?”

  “Your pal Ginger was my slave.”

  “But that’s not … legal.”

  “It is where I come from and would take you. Oh, ever so legal. Would you mind being my slave?”

  “’twouldn’t be so different from now. Wage-slaves, that’s us. In a manner of speaking. Ginger, he used to say so. In a nasty kind of way, if you take me, as though he’d been expecting something else. Which there isn’t. Not for the likes of us. Not yet. And so he gets done in. Christ, I got bloody fond of old Ginger an’ his talk!”

  Bill bowed his head in his hands. Mr. Denys Backhouse lighted a cigarette and watched the even flowing-by of houses; now they were passing through suburban acres of villa and small garden; above none showed any Acropolis. He observed at last: “Do you agree, then, to come?”

  “I dunno,” said Bill. “Why didn’t Ginger never mention you, like?”

  “It’s apt to be rather difficult, mentioning the Gods.”

  “You are a God—straight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then—when it come to them panthers—why did you do what I said? You didn’t need to have—not if you was a God. You might have set them to killing me.”

  “I’m not above taking advice. Besides, was your affair primarily, as Ginger’s friend. I once did something of the same kind with some pirates, but it was my affair then. I’ll tell you all about it if you come with me. In any event, ideas change; no one questioned my action in regard to the pirates, some of whom I killed and some of whom I turned into dolphins; but that was some time ago. Bill, do you believe I’m a God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Coming?”

  “It don’t seem right, somehow, once having run across a God—which I haven’t up till now, for all they give me liquorice sticks at Sunday school—to turn him down. But then—what about Rule Britannia and all that?”

  “Do you call yourself a free man now, Bill? Are you able freely to create and wander and think and love?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Coming?”

  “Yes.”

  The car now had passed through the suburbs, out into the country, beyond the tram stops, beyond the hikers’ rambling-spots, beyond anything Bill had ever known. Ahead lay a large river, planting itself down across England without leave of atlases. And Bill began to hear the croaking of the chorus of frogs.

  THE FURIES DANCE IN NEW YORK

  So we said, where shall we find the loveliest thing in New York?

  And some said in Fifth Avenue or Fifty-seventh Street, and some said

  In the Socialist Party, or, as they were mostly highbrows,

  In the Communist Party. And what about Radio City?

  And what about Manhattan Bridge and what about …?

  But we were already slinking off,

  Finding the voices a trifle difficult, feeling a little browbeaten, having been told that England

  Is dead and decaying, her culture rotten from its class basis up,

  Or having been told, still worse, that England is marvellous,

  The one place that will be left standing in a chaotic world

  (Like an exhibit of a stage coach and two crinolines).

  So, as I said, nickel in fist, we had slunk off into the El.

  Here in the Natural History Museum, having dodged the meteorites

  Which God the mathematician for some odd reason saw fit

  To strew like Xs over Kansas (X equals nothing),

  We have come to the Indian section. The Indians, as everyone knows,

  Are being assimilated, that is the Good Indians

  Who go to the Church schools and learn to sell things and be customers themselves.

  The Bad Indians were all killed by the ancestors of the Christian Scientists,

  The ancestors of the Rotarians, the readers of Esquire, and the D.A.R.,

  The ancestors of Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Johnson and Huey Long.

  What the hell anyway. The Bad Indians were killed.

  And a good job too.

  This Indian pottery is more beautiful than anything in Fifth Avenue,

  If it had been made to-day in a studio, on some fresh inspiration,

  People would be going crazy over it, the art critics and the highbrows;

  It would be sold for large sums to Park Avenue, but the Communists also

  Would tell us it was authentic.

  This Indian basket work, this exquisite feathering,

  This accurate bloom of colour, this patterned certainty,

  Precariously preserved in a few glass cases, it is astonishing, I think,

  Do you not think so?

  Citizens of New York, flock round in reverence.

  Could you have made these things? No. No fear. Jeez, no!

  What can you make, citizens? They answer, look at us.

  Look at us!

  We are unskilled labour, we can turn wheels, press handles, put salted nuts in bags,

  But we can’t make anything.

  Citizens, citizens, your fathers made ploughshares, made ox-yokes,

  Your mothers embroidered linen shirts, in Dalmatia, in Italy,

  In Greece, in Portugal, in Poland, Hungary, Latvia,

  What have you done with the skill of your fathers and mothers?

  What have you done with their patterns?

  But the citizens shake their heads, not comprehending all this:

  Our fathers and mot
hers were dumb: who wants ox-yokes,

  Who wants embroidered shirts? Woolworths don’t stock them, huh?

  Our fathers and mothers, they got quit of that on Ellis Island.

  We got nothing. We want nothing. See?

  Let us return to the glass cases, to the difficult contemplation of beauty

  That was being made in this continent three centuries ago,

  That was of value for the world, for mankind, for all these abstractions

  Which somehow we believe in (although no doubt

  We shall be told they are the results of a class education

  At places like Oxford, England.)

  And this civilisation was shot up, destroyed, ended,

  Lost for the world and mankind. Lost, all that it might have turned into.

  Lost. Lost.

  People who destroy things are apt to get a curse on them.

  We should have observed this often enough in history

  (Only history is dumb stuff, as Henry Ford said, bunk)

  To have realised its necessity. No use trying to escape

  Once you’ve destroyed something the gods loved, destroyed something

  That should have been eternal. No use, the Furies get after you.

  Pretty soon, boy, they’ll have you down

  And rip your guts out.

  And it isn’t much of a step from shooting Indians

  To shooting strikers. It isn’t much of a step

  From exterminating the Indian civilisation to exterminating

  Your own.

  And who will weep on the grave, who will put Fifth Avenue

  In a glass case? Who will be there to contemplate? Only the Furies

  In their black shirts and red shirts, dancing the Horst Wessel Carmagnole?

  Will they be there? Or nothing?

  Or is it possible

  That a few Indians may come back, slowly, out of the Reservations,

  Out of the Pueblos, smiling a little, a little,

  Stretching their arms a little, looking about them a little?

  And they will begin putting things in order, letting the decent earth

  And the decent rivers eat up what they will, letting iron rust

  And concrete crumble, and the old bodies of Fords

  Be grown over quietly with brambles where in time will nest

  Oriole and cardinal.

  And they will dance the rain dances and bring back the rain

  To the parched deserts which the settlers’ ploughing made

  Out of the buffalo lands. And they will watch the forest growing,

  Slowly and softly growing on the eroded mountain sides,

  Till the top soil comes back. And there will be no newspapers

  To eat the forests. And there will be no advertisements

  On the trunks of the forest trees. And the Indians will move quietly

  About the forests, with their minds full of patterns.

  And there is no doubt they will be a hundred per cent

  American …

  GRAND-DAUGHTER

  (For Stella Benson and The House of Living Alone)

  Last week I was looking through some of the political books of the nineteen-thirties. It is queer reading those old books now, careful, angry, unhappy books in hard red covers with sad black lettering. All the authors, with their prefaces and tables of statistics and careful indexes, speak of the new times which they tried to foresee, as though it would all make a great difference to people; but they never saw what kind of a difference it was going to be. Most of the people who wrote those books were economists, poor things, or else a special sort of historian which existed then, who was trained to see just one particular kind of event, like a truffle-pig. And those who were capable of seeing other sorts of events such as we can see now (Brailsford for instance) were rather ashamed of this side of their minds. There were also, of course, the physicists and to some extent the biologists and biochemists, though the latter were usually humbler, having rather less immediate contact with the technocrats and a good deal of sympathy, because of their manual technique, with the factory workers.

  My grandfather on my mother’s side must have read dozens of these books; he even wrote one or two. They must have affected him considerably. I take it they made people gloomy and over intent on that side of life, and must have made them feel inferior and changeable compared with the figures and statistics which strode about over their heads. I should have hated living then! Yet I expect my grandfather believed in it all, or at any rate thought there was no other kind of thing which could better be believed in.

  His wife, my grandmother, was very much laughed at for saying that the industrial revolution had destroyed magic. She was of course a Marxist, as most of them were, and preferred seeing things in economic terms. It was plain to her that play of any kind must have been exceedingly ill-thought-of in the moral system of a ruling class which had made its position by making other people work for it, and, to some extent, by working itself. Magic was one step beyond play. And so the whole idea of magic had become immoral—it had in fact arrived at the stage of immorality where people cease altogether to believe in a thing—and serious, moral people such as socialists did not use the word at all. But my grandmother managed to use it to herself, and she could at least see in a kind of apologetic, theoretical way, that good magic, being essentially democratic, could not work itself out in a pyramidal society of haves on a basis of have-nots, but must at best go underground and at worst turn into something evil and individual and undemocratic.

  It was rare for anyone to see even that much. Most people were hopelessly under the sway of the economists and the early technocrats. So, when my grandmother once said that she wanted socialism so as to set magic free, they all laughed at her. But yet she did not wholly believe in it herself. She must have felt that it was the same thing as the Good Life, which is of course only half the truth.

  My grandparents on the other side presumably did not even read the gloomy old books, or very rarely; in general they were too tired and under-fed and ignorant to read much unless it had been predigested for them. Still, perhaps they read bits of them sometimes. It’s hard to picture at all how they lived; one has to make a great effort and find the right sympathetic formulæ before one can begin to understand their lives. However, it is quite worthwhile doing. Then one can arrive at the crushing dullness of their routine of existence and their consequent inability to look forward at change. Those two other grandparents of mine were both Labour Party members, as they called it, which meant in a way that they wanted new times to come, yet they never thought of these new times as being different in detail from what had already been experienced.

  Yes, I suppose it all happened curiously differently from any way that anyone in, say, the nineteen thirties, supposed. None of them foresaw the technocrats, not at least with anything like accuracy. Still less did they foresee how the final cracking-up of the pyramid would happen. I expect they were all so dried-up and unhappy and resentful that they had to see it wrong. I very much doubt, even, whether many of them had the sense to be happy when it did come—but so differently from their intentions. Perhaps they’d all been longing for the chance to hit back, poor dears, for themselves or others, and of course there was none of that.

  Probably even someone like my mother’s mother was deeply surprised when, for instance, the dancing started. She used to dance as a young woman—or so one gathers from old letters—but as she grew older and more involved, so that kind of thing dropped out of her way of life. Any dancing which she or her husband might have taken part in was the curious individual dancing of the epoch, in which couples crossed and crossed one another’s pattern or purpose and each one of a couple could be separate in thought and feeling, even without pleasure. It seems so plain now, that no sensible person ought to have been astonished at the connection between the new democracy and the great patterns of dancing that spread out from London and Birmingham, but yet it appears that the
y were.

  One takes all these things for granted so much that it is hard to think oneself back to their viewpoint. The fundamental which they never saw is, I take it, the plain fact (given the nature of the Universe) that if one thing is altered everything is altered. It only remains to discover the key thing or things; but these are sometimes so apparently incongruous that educated people used to dislike taking them seriously. No doubt in the very old days, magic—for why not stick to a good word?—was practised by men and women who did not know what they were doing, often did something else by mistake, and were anyway frightened of the possibilities of their own technique. The early evidence is proof of this. As magic, with the decline of even agricultural equality, came unstuck from its place in society, so the practisers of magic came to be unsocial or anti-social persons, and by the end of the nineteenth century “magic,” such as it was, had mainly got into the hands of a particularly nasty type of person, with whom decent members of society would not associate, and whom they could not trust to tell the truth.

  Besides this there was, during my grandmother’s time, another thing which worried people. I wonder if I can explain it! Historically, it seems clear, their morality had become increasingly rationalist—due no doubt very largely to the instruments of precision of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; but that is neither here nor there. They were very proud and anxious about this rationalism of theirs, which was still a symbol of their only recent freeing from the primitive (though of course not really earliest) tyrannies of kings by divine right and the various organised priesthoods and religions. All intelligent, forward-thinking people, even in the so-called imaginative professions, insisted on the recognition of their rationality and put it constantly into their talk and writing. If they had not done so, they would have been ashamed to face their own technocrats and economists! Yet, of course, that was not the whole of life. They would naturally not allow the other side to be pointed out to them by priests; but occasionally a doctor, and very rarely some writer whom they trusted, was allowed to do so. But the difficulty was that they saw this other side taking shape in several comic, but extremely unpleasant and dangerous, group madnesses, such as that which affected the Fascists in Italy or the Nazis in Germany. What they did not, apparently, realise, was that the Nazi irrationality—or perhaps anti-technocracy?—was only successful because it gave some solid fulfilment to a definite need in human beings. The rationalists stupidly feared and hated this need (exactly as an earlier generation feared and hated other kinds of needs in human beings) and refused to satisfy it decently and creatively. Yet, if in the end the new thing had not happened, had not, as it were, cracked and pushed up through the unencumbered soil of democracy and equality, this evil reflection of the other side might well have lasted for generations, instead of dying out as rapidly and completely as it actually did in Germany and elsewhere.