Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/123

Rh Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
 * And squelch the passers flat against the wall;

If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
 * He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.

And I meet a sort of simpleton beside—
 * The kind that life is always giving beans;

With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
 * He fell in love and married in his teens;

At thirty bob he stuck, but he knows it isn't luck;
 * He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.

And the god-almighty devil and the fool
 * That meet me in the High Street on the strike,

When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
 * Are my good and evil angels if you like;

And both of them together in every kind of weather
 * Ride me like a double-seated "bike."

That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled;
 * But I have a high old hot un in my mind,

A most engrugious notion of the world
 * That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind:

I give it at a glance when I say "There ain't no chance,
 * Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind."

And it's this way that I make it out to be:
 * No fathers, mothers, countries, climates—none!—

Not Adam was responsible for me;
 * Nor society, nor systems, nary one!

A little sleeping seed, I woke—I did indeed—
 * A million years before the blooming sun.

Rh