The day was death. A chalk road, pale in dust,
Accused with leprous finger the long moors.
The drab, damp air so blanketed the town
No doddered oak swung leathern leaf. The chimneys
Pushed oddling pillars at the loose-hung sky.
May, pansy, lilac, dense as the night steam
Of lowland swamps, fettered the sodden air,
And, through the haze, along the ragstone houses,
Blood-lichens dulled to a rotten-apple brown.
Behind close doors pale women drooped and dragged
In customary toils. They dusted shelves
Or changed from chair to chair dull, cotton cushions:
Soon, vacantly, they bore them back and wiped
With languid arms the black, unspotted shelves.
Such mind’s own symbols of despair they went
That never movement shook a face to grief--
At first they looked no more than cheerless women,
But dug deep in the plaster of their flesh
Those eyes were year-dead, underpouched with blue.
A word would sear the silence of a week.
Of a sudden, turning a byeway corner, a cripple,
Bloodless with age, lumbered along the road.
The motes of dust whirled at his iron-shod crutches
And quickly settled. A dog whined. The old
Cripple looked round and saw no man, but gave
A cruel, crackling chuckle, swung a yard,
And stopped to look about and laugh again.
‘That,’ said a girl in a flat voice, ‘is God.’
She turned and slid the table-cover straight.
Her mother could not answer, but she thought
‘It must be Beggar Joe, gone lately mad.’
He lumbered along the road and turned a corner.
His tapping faded and the day was death.