From where you are, you can hear, in Factor Row in the spring, moonless night, Ms Das, an on-shift cotton mill worker, dream of
a lover, taller than the airship docks, Andalusian-maned, and Thoroughbred-legged, Clydesdale curves with pony nimbleness, wide-nostrilled, churning up the cobbles while her eyes like velvet stroke slow and low over Parvathi Das's lonely longing lying form...
MS BAHUR : Parvathi Das!
MS DAS : Layla Bahur!
MS BAHUR : I am a woman mad with love. I love you more than all the spinning mules and power looms, the water wheels and steam engines, the dyes and thread in my factories. I want you more than the terrycloth, the muslin, the seersucker, the cambric, the corduroy, the calico, the canvas, the denim your hands have touched. I need you more than the money they sell for. Throw away your work and your aches and pains, I will warm and sooth you, I will lie beside you and provide everything for you...
MS DAS : I will weave you dreams to use up the warp and the weft, to replace the cloth I once wove. I will build you a family that sound the clacks and clangs, to replace the machines that fall silent...
MS BAHUR : Parvathi, my Parvathi, if I ask you the question would you will you answer
MS DAS : Yes, oh, yes, my Layla, yes...
MS BAHUR : And all the mill's mule carriages shall draw out to form our wedding arch.
Come now, drift through the dark, come across the soot-soaked street from factory to warehouse from cotton thread to cotton cloth to the loveless lightless loft of a poor merchant's store where alone and anxiously Eric Cobham hugs his pillows to his chest while he snores and shifts and sighs over
his wife, the figurehead of a cloud-sailed oak-ribbed clipper, touched by all her sailors for luck, stroked by their affection, smiling under their kisses, sighing for their weight, forever out of his reach...
ERIC COBHAM : Come home to me, come home!
Old Abraham, an engine stoker,
OLD ABRAHAM : giggles in his sleep and cries hot coaldust-loaded tears when he sees, exactly as it was years ago, clean white snow beyond the door of the warm old farmhouse; and he runs to the cosy clean white kitchen where his mother makes llechau cymreig with dry clean white flour, and steals a slice to eat in his cocoon of warm clean white bedclothes while he watches the feathery clean white flakes fall outside and his mother calls out for the stolen food.