PAGE 6
According To The Pattern
by
“There is coming the Registration of Workers Act, by which every worker will be held to his locality, to his own enormous advantage. And it will end strikes, and trades unionism will deservedly crumble. In future these men will be able to settle down, and with God’s blessing bring children into the world, and their condition will be a delight unto themselves and a profit to the community.
“But we must do more. I must do more. And you must help me. We must stand together. Slander never creates; it shackles and kills. We must be solid. Midway off the Cardigan coast–in beautiful Morfa–there is a rock–Birds’ Rock. As a boy I used to climb to the top of it, and watch the waters swirling and tumbling about it, and around it and against it. But I was unafraid. For I knew that the rock was old when man was young, and that it had braved all the washings of the sea.”
The men congratulated Ben; and Ben came home and he stood at a mirror, and shaping his body put out his arms.
“How’s this for my maiden speech in the house?” he asked his wife. Presently he paused. “You’re a fine one to be an M.P.’s lady,” he said. “You stout, underworked fool.”
Ben urged on his imaginings: he advised his monarch, and to him for favors merchants brought their gold, and mothers their daughters. Winter and spring moved, and then his mind brought his enemies to his door.
“As the root of a tree spreads in the bosom of the earth,” he said, “so my fame shall spread over the world”; and he built a fence about his house.
But his mind would not be stilled. Every midnight his enemies were at the fence, and he could not sleep for the dreadful outcry; every midnight he arose from his bed and walked aside the fence, testing the strength of it with a hand and a shoulder and shooing away his enemies as one does a brood of chickens from a cornfield.
His fortieth summer ran out–a season of short days and nights speeding on the heels of night. Then peace fell upon him; and at dusk of a day he came into his room, and he saw one sitting in a chair. He went up to the chair and knelt on a knee, and said: “Your Majesty….”