The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner Page A

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 mothers 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