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.
