I
Through the gloom of evening, and the flare of torches of the night
before the fair, through the still fogs of the succeeding dawn came
paddling the weary geese, lifting their poor feet that had been dipped
in tar for shoes, and trailing them along the cobble-stones into the
town. Last of all, in the afternoon, a country girl drove in her dozen
birds, disconsolate because she was so late. She was a heavily built
girl, fair, with regular features, and yet unprepossessing. She needed
chiselling down, her contours were brutal. Perhaps it was weariness
that hung her eyelids a little lower than was pleasant. When she spoke
to her clumsily lagging birds it was in a snarling nasal tone. One of
the silly things sat down in the gutter and refused to move. It looked
very ridiculous, but also rather pitiful, squat there with its head up,
refusing to be urged on by the ungentle toe of the girl. The latter
swore heavily, then picked up the great complaining bird, and fronting
her road stubbornly, drove on the lamentable eleven.
No one had noticed her. This afternoon the women were not sitting
chatting on their doorsteps, seaming up the cotton hose, or swiftly
passing through their fingers the piled white lace; and in the high
dark houses the song of the hosiery frames was hushed: “Shackety-boom,
Shackety-shackety-boom, Z—zzz!” As she dragged up Hollow Stone, people
returned from the fair chaffed her and asked her what o’clock it was.
She did not reply, her look was sullen. The Lace Market was quiet as
the Sabbath: even the great brass plates on the doors were dull with
neglect. There seemed an afternoon atmosphere of raw discontent. The
girl stopped a moment before the dismal prospect of one of the great
warehouses that had been gutted with fire. She looked at the lean,
threatening walls, and watched her white flock waddling in reckless
misery below, and she would have laughed out loud had the wall fallen
flat upon them and relieved her of them. But the wall did not fall, so
she crossed the road, and walking on the safe side, hurried after her
charge. Her look was even more sullen. She remembered the state of
trade—Trade, the invidious enemy; Trade, which thrust out its hand and
shut the factory doors, and pulled the stockingers off their seats, and
left the web half-finished on the frame; Trade, which mysteriously
choked up the sources of the rivulets of wealth, and blacker and more
secret than a pestilence, starved the town. Through this morose
atmosphere of bad trade, in the afternoon of the first day of the fair,
the girl strode down to the Poultry with eleven sound geese and one
lame one to sell.
The Frenchmen were at the bottom of it! So everybody said, though
nobody quite knew how. At any rate, they had gone to war with the
Prussians and got beaten, and trade was ruined in Nottingham!
A little fog rose up, and the twilight gathered around. Then they
flared abroad their torches in the fair, insulting the night. The girl
still sat in the Poultry, and her weary geese unsold on the stones,
illuminated by the hissing lamp of a man who sold rabbits and pigeons
and such-like assorted live-stock.