Easter

Friend we will take the path that leads down from the flagstaff by the pond through the gorse thickets; see, the golden spikes have thrust their points through, and last year's bracken lies yellow-brown and trampled. The sapling birch-groves have shown no leaf, and the wistarias on the desolate pergola are shorn and ashen. We lurch on, and, stumbling, touch each other. You do not shrink, friend. There you, and I here, side by side, we go, jesting. We do not seek, we do not avoid, contact.

Here is the road, with the budding elm-trees lining it, and there the low gate in the wall; on the other side, the people. Are they not aliens? You and I for a moment see them shabby of limb and soul, patched up to make shift. We laugh and strengthen each other; But the evil is done.

Is not the whole park made for them, and the bushes and plants and trees and grasses, have they not grown to their standard? The paths are worn to the gravel with their feet; the green moss will not carpet them. The flags of the stone steps are hollowed; and you and I must strive to remain two and not to merge in the multitude. It impinges on us; it separates us; we shrink from it; we brave through it; we laugh; we jest; we jeer; and we save the fragments of our souls.

Between two clipped privet hedges now; we will close our eyes for life's sake to life's patches. Here, maybe, there is quiet; pass first under the bare branches, beyond is a pool flanked with sedge, and a swan among water-lilies. But here too is a group of men and women and children; and the swan has forgotten its pride; it thrusts its white neck among them, and gobbles at nothing; then tires of the cheat and sails off; but its breast urges before it a sheet of sodden newspaper that, drifting away, reveals beneath the immaculate white splendour of its neck and wings a breast black with scum.

Friend, we are beaten.