In one of those corners of our land canopied by the fumes of blind
industry, there was, on that day, a lull in darkness. A fresh wind had
split the customary heaven, or roof of hell; was sweeping long drifts of
creamy clouds across a blue still pallid with reek. The sun even
shone--a sun whose face seemed white and wondering. And under that rare
sun all the little town, among its slag heaps and few tall chimneys, had
an air of living faster. In those continuous courts and alleys, where
the women worked, smoke from each little forge rose and dispersed into
the wind with strange alacrity; amongst the women, too, there was that
same eagerness, for the sunshine had crept in and was making pale all
those dark-raftered, sooted ceilings which covered them in, together with
their immortal comrades, the small open furnaces. About their work they
had been busy since seven o'clock; their feet pressing the leather lungs
which fanned the conical heaps of glowing fuel, their hands poking into
the glow a thin iron rod till the end could be curved into a fiery hook;
snapping it with a mallet; threading it with tongs on to the chain;
hammering, closing the link; and; without a second's pause, thrusting the
iron rod again into the glow. And while they worked they chattered,
laughed sometimes, now and then sighed. They seemed of all ages and all
types; from her who looked like a peasant of Provence, broad, brown, and
strong, to the weariest white consumptive wisp; from old women of
seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the
cottage forges there would be but one worker, or two at most; in the shop
forges four, or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of the
grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment without a fiery hook about
to take its place on the growing chains, never a second when the thin
smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming slowly in front of
them, did not escape from out of the dingy, whitewashed spaces past the
dark rafters, away to freedom.
But there had been in the air that morning something more than the white
sunlight. There had been anticipation. And at two o'clock began
fulfilment. The forges were stilled, and from court and alley forth came
the women. In their ragged working clothes, in their best clothes--so
little different; in bonnets, in hats, bareheaded; with babies born and
unborn, they swarmed into the high street and formed across it behind the
band. A strange, magpie, jay-like flock; black, white, patched with
brown and green and blue, shifting, chattering, laughing, seeming
unconscious of any purpose. A thousand and more of them, with faces
twisted and scored by those myriad deformings which a desperate
town-toiling and little food fasten on human visages; yet with hardly a
single evil or brutal face. Seemingly it was not easy to be evil or
brutal on a wage that scarcely bound soul and body. A thousand and more
of the poorest-paid and hardest-worked human beings in the world.
On the pavement alongside this strange, acquiescing assembly of revolt,
about to march in protest against the conditions of their lives, stood a
young woman without a hat and in poor clothes, but with a sort of beauty
in her rough-haired, high cheek-boned, dark-eyed face. She was not one
of them; yet, by a stroke of Nature's irony, there was graven on her face
alone of all those faces, the true look of rebellion; a haughty, almost
fierce, uneasy look--an untamed look. On all the other thousand faces
one could see no bitterness, no fierceness, not even enthusiasm; only a
half-stolid, half-vivacious patience and eagerness as of children going
to a party.
The band played; and they began to march.
Laughing, talking, waving flags, trying to keep step; with the same
expression slowly but surely coming over every face; the future was not;
only the present--this happy present of marching behind the discordance
of a brass band; this strange present of crowded movement and laughter in
open air.
We others--some dozen accidentals like myself, and the tall, grey-haired
lady interested in "the people," together with those few kind spirits in
charge of "the show"--marched too, a little self-conscious, desiring with
a vague military sensation to hold our heads up, but not too much, under
the eyes of the curious bystanders. These--nearly all men--were
well-wishers, it was said, though their faces, pale from their own work
in shop or furnace, expressed nothing but apathy. They wished well, very
dumbly, in the presence of this new thing, as if they found it queer that
women should be doing something for themselves; queer and rather
dangerous. A few, indeed, shuffled along between the column and the
little hopeless shops and grimy factory sheds, and one or two accompanied
their women, carrying the baby. Now and then there passed us some
better-to-do citizen-a housewife, or lawyer's clerk, or ironmonger, with
lips pressed rather tightly together and an air of taking no notice of
this disturbance of traffic, as though the whole thing were a rather poor
joke which they had already heard too often.
So, with laughter and a continual crack of voices our jay-like crew swung
on, swaying and thumping in the strange ecstasy of irreflection, happy to
be moving they knew not where, nor greatly why, under the visiting sun,
to the sound of murdered music. Whenever the band stopped playing,
discipline became as tatterdemalion as the very flags and garments; but
never once did they lose that look of essential order, as if indeed they
knew that, being the worst-served creatures in the Christian world, they
were the chief guardians of the inherent dignity of man.
Hatless, in the very front row, marched a tall slip of a girl,
arrow-straight, and so thin, with dirty fair hair, in a blouse and skirt
gaping behind, ever turning her pretty face on its pretty slim neck from
side to side, so that one could see her blue eyes sweeping here, there,
everywhere, with a sort of flower-like wildness, as if a secret embracing
of each moment forbade her to let them rest on anything and break this
pleasure of just marching. It seemed that in the never-still eyes of
that anaemic, happy girl the spirit of our march had elected to enshrine
itself and to make thence its little excursions to each ecstatic
follower. Just behind her marched a little old woman--a maker of chains,
they said, for forty years--whose black slits of eyes were sparkling,
who fluttered a bit of ribbon, and reeled with her sense of the exquisite
humour of the world. Every now and then she would make a rush at one of
her leaders to demonstrate how immoderately glorious was life. And each
time she spoke the woman next to her, laden with a heavy baby, went off
into squeals of laughter. Behind her, again, marched one who beat time
with her head and waved a little bit of stick, intoxicated by this noble
music.
For an hour the pageant wound through the dejected street, pursuing
neither method nor set route, till it came to a deserted slag-heap,
selected for the speech-making. Slowly the motley regiment swung into
that grim amphitheatre under the pale sunshine; and, as I watched, a
strange fancy visited my brain. I seemed to see over every ragged head
of those marching women a little yellow flame, a thin, flickering gleam,
spiring upward and blown back by the wind. A trick of the sunlight,
maybe? Or was it that the life in their hearts, the inextinguishable
breath of happiness, had for a moment escaped prison, and was fluttering
at the pleasure of the breeze?
Silent now, just enjoying the sound of the words thrown down to them,
they stood, unimaginably patient, with that happiness of they knew not
what gilding the air above them between the patchwork ribands of their
poor flags. If they could not tell very much why they had come, nor
believe very much that they would gain anything by coming; if their
demonstration did not mean to the world quite all that oratory would have
them think; if they themselves were but the poorest, humblest, least
learned women in the land--for all that, it seemed to me that in those
tattered, wistful figures, so still, so trustful, I was looking on such
beauty as I had never beheld. All the elaborated glory of things made,
the perfected dreams of aesthetes, the embroideries of romance, seemed as
nothing beside this sudden vision of the wild goodness native in humble
hearts.
1910.