"We won't have room in the kirkeyaard."

(200.4-202.3)  Yesterday we left off with the washerwomen discussing how ALP donned a luxurious gown, and today we pick up with them recounting how she was "brahming" (or singing) love songs (that sometimes tilt toward the bawdy end of the spectrum) to HCE.  HCE, however, was unmoved by ALP's songs, because he was "as deaf as a yawn."  ALP walked out of the house, but instead of exacting some kind of revenge on HCE for ignoring her attempts to arouse him, she instead stood in the doorway, smoking a pipe and making signs to every woman that walked by to come into the house.  One by one, she would show the women how to perform a striptease and offer them a silver coin.  According to the washerwomen, then, ALP was "[t]hrowing all the neiss little whores in the world at him" to "hug and hab haven in Humpy's apron!"

The women then change the subject from ALP's procuring of prostitutes for HCE to the contents of ALP's letter.  In this telling, the letter consists of a poem or song written by ALP, the first verse of which is, "By earth and the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!"  The song goes on to explain that ALP is waiting for HCE "to wake himself out of his winter's doze and bore me down like he used to."  In the meantime, she looks for work from a lord or knight so that she can feed her family, and she ends the song by expressing her desire to leave her bed and breathe the salty air on the beach.  If you read the "bankside" of the opening verse literally, this is a song of the river waiting for the winter to end so that the snow will thaw and the flowing water of spring will cut deeper riverbanks and enable the river to run to the ocean.  If you read "bankside" as "backside," however, it's a song of sexual frustration, with ALP wishing to be more attractive so that either HCE will become interested in her again or she will be able to leave the marital bed and seek new pleasures down by the ocean.

The third subject of today's reading is ALP's children.  One washerwoman asks how many children ALP had.  No one seems to know for sure, but the most prominent theory indicates that she has 111.  Some say that she had these children "wan bywan bywan" (one by one by one, or 1-1-1), and that she can't remember half of their names.  "They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle," one woman says.  It seems that another theory is that ALP had a number of litters of children, ranging from twins and triplets to octuplets and nonuplets.  In regard to this unbelievable number of children, one washerwoman references perhaps my favorite philosopher in saying, "We won't have room in the kirkeyaard."