# The Prussian Officer and Other Stories/Goose Fair

London: Duckworth & Co., pages 208–222
GOOSE FAIR 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 returning 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 mined 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.
II
In another part of the town, near Sneinton Church, another girl came to the door to look at the night. She was tall and slender, dressed with the severe accuracy which marks the girl of superior culture. Her hair was arranged with simplicity about the long, pale, cleanly cut face. She leaned forward very slightly to glance down the street, listening. She very carefully preserved the appearance of having come quite casually to the door, yet she lingered and lingered and stood very still to listen when she heard a footstep, but when it proved to be only a common man, she drew herself up proudly and looked with a small smile over his head. He hesitated to glance into the open hall, lighted so spaciously with a scarlet-shaded lamp, and at the slim girl in brown silk lifted up before the light. But she, she looked over his head. He passed on.
Presently she started and hung in suspense. Somebody was crossing the road. She ran down the steps in a pretty welcome, not effuse, saying in quick but accurately articulated words: “Will! ​I began to think you’d gone to the fair. I came out to listen to it. I felt almost sure you’d gone. You’re coming in, aren’t you?” She waited a moment anxiously. “We expect you to dinner, you know,” she added wistfully.
The man, who had a short face and spoke with his lip curling up on one side, in a drawling speech with ironically exaggerated intonation, replied after a short hesitation:
“I’m awfully sorry, I am, straight, Lois. It’s a shame. I’ve got to go round to the biz. Man proposes—the devil disposes.” He turned aside with irony in the darkness.
“But surely. Will!” remonstrated the girl, keenly disappointed.
“Fact, Lois!—I feel wild about it myself. But I’ve got to go down to the works. They may be getting a bit warm down there, you know”— he jerked his head in the direction of the fair. “If the Lambs get frisky!—they’re a bit off about the work, and they’d just be in their element if they could set a lighted match to something——”
“Will, you don’t think!” exclaimed the
girl, laying her hand on his arm in the true fashion of romance, and looking up at him earnestly.
“Dad’s not sure,” he replied, looking down at her with gravity. They remained in this attitude for a moment, then he said:
“I might stop a bit. It’s all right for an hour, I should think.”
She looked at him earnestly, then said in tones of deep disappointment and of fortitude: “No, Will, you must go. You’d better go——”
​“It’s a shame!” he murmured, standing a moment at a loose end. Then, glancing down the street to see he was alone, he put his arm round her waist and said in a difficult voice: “How goes it?”
She let him keep her for a moment, then he kissed her as if afraid of what he was doing. They were both uncomfortable.
“Well!” he said at length.
“Good night!” she said, setting him free to go.
He hung a moment near her, as if ashamed. Then “Good night,” he answered, and he broke away. She listened to his footsteps in the night, before composing herself to turn indoors.
“Helloa!” said her father, glancing over his paper as she entered the dining-room. “What’s up, then?”
“Oh, nothing,” she replied, in her calm tones. “Will won’t be here to dinner to-night.”
“What, gone to the fair?”
“No.”
“Oh! What’s got him then?”
Lois looked at her father, and answered:
“He’s gone down to the factory. They are afraid of the hands.”
Her father looked at her closely.
“Oh, aye!” he answered, undecided, and they sat down to dinner.
III
Lois retired very early. She had a fire in her bedroom. She drew the curtains and stood holding aside a heavy fold, looking out at the night. She could see only the nothingness of the fog; not even ​the glare of the fair was evident, though the noise clamoured small in the distance. In front of everything she could see her own faint image. She crossed to the dressing-table, and there leaned her face to the mirror, and looked at herself. She looked a long time, then she rose, changed her dress for a dressing-jacket, and took up “Sesame and Lilies.”
Late in the night she was roused from sleep by a bustle in the house. She sat up and heard a hurrying to and fro and the sound of anxious voices. She put on her dressing-gown and went out to her mother’s room. Seeing her mother at the head of the stairs, she said in her quick, clean voice:
“Mother, what is it?”
“Oh, child, don’t ask me! Go to bed, dear, do! I shall surely be worried out of my life.”
“Mother, what is it?” Lois was sharp and emphatic.
“I hope your father won’t go. Now I do hope your father won’t go. He’s got a cold as it is.”
“Mother, tell me what it is?” Lois took her mother’s arm.
“It’s Selby’s. I should have thought you would have heard the fire-engine, and Jack isn’t in yet. I hope we’re safe!” Lois returned to her bedroom and dressed. She coiled her plaited hair, and having put on a cloak, left the house.
She hurried along under the fog-dripping trees towards the meaner part of the town. When she got near, she saw a glare in the fog, and closed her lips tight. She hastened on till she was in the crowd. With peaked, noble face she watched the ​fire. Then she looked a little wildly over the fire-reddened faces in the crowd, and catching sight of her father hurried to him.
“Oh, dadda—is he safe? Is Will safe——?”
“Safe, aye, why not? You’ve no business here. Here, here’s Sampson, he’ll take you home. I’ve enough to bother me; there’s my own place to watch. Go home now, I can’t do with you here.”
“Have you seen Will?” she asked.
“Go home—Sampson, just take Miss Lois home—now!”
“You don’t really know where he is—father?”
“Go home now—I don’t want you here——” her father ordered peremptorily.
The tears sprang to Lois’ eyes. She looked at the fire and the tears were quickly dried by fear. The flames roared and struggled upward. The great wonder of the fire made her forget even her indignation at her father’s light treatment of herself and of her lover. There was a crashing and bursting of timber, as the first floor fell in a mass into the blazing gulf, splashing the fire in all directions, to the terror of the crowd. She saw the steel of the machines growing white-hot and twisting like flaming letters. Piece after piece of the flooring gave way, and the machines dropped in red ruin as the wooden framework burned out. The air became unbreathable; the fog was swallowed up; sparks went rushing up as if they would burn the dark heavens; sometimes cards of lace went whirling into the gulf of the sky, waving with wings of fire. It was dangerous to stand near this great cup of roaring destruction.
​Sampson, the grey old manager of Buxton and Co.’s, led her away as soon as she would turn her face to listen to him. He was a stout, irritable man. He elbowed his way roughly through the crowd, and Lois followed him, her head high, her lips closed. He led her for some distance without speaking, then at last, unable to contain his garrulous irritability, he broke out:
“What do they expect? What can they expect? They can’t expect to stand a bad time. They spring up like mushrooms as big as a house-side, but there’s no stability in ’em. I remember William Selby when he’d run on my errands. Yes, there’s some as can make much out of little, and there’s some as can make much out of nothing, but they find it won’t last. William Selby’s sprung up in a day, and he’ll vanish in a night. You can’t trust to luck alone. Maybe he thinks it’s a lucky thing this fire has come when things are looking black. But you can’t get out of it as easy as that. There’s been a few too many of ’em. No, indeed, a fire’s the last thing I should hope to come to—the very last!”
Lois hurried and hurried, so that she brought the old manager panting in distress up the steps of her home. She could not bear to hear him talking so. They could get no one to open the door for some time. When at last Lois ran upstairs, she found her mother dressed, but all unbuttoned again, lying back in the chair in her daughter’s room, suffering from palpitation of the heart, with “Sesame and Lilies” crushed beneath her. Lois administered brandy, and her decisive words and movements helped largely to bring the good lady to a state of ​recovery sufficient to allow of her returning to her own bedroom.
Then Lois locked the door. She glanced at her fire-darkened face, and taking the flattened Ruskin out of the chair, sat down and wept. After a while she calmed herself, rose, and sponged her face. Then once more on that fatal night she prepared for rest. Instead, however, of retiring, she pulled a silk quilt from her disordered bed and, wrapping it round her, sat miserably to think. It was two o’clock in the morning.
IV
The fire was sunk to cold ashes in the grate, and the grey morning was creeping through the half-opened curtains like a thing ashamed, when Lois awoke. It was painful to move her head: her neck was cramped. The girl awoke in full recollection. She sighed, roused herself and pulled the quilt closer about her. For a little while she sat and mused. A pale, tragic resignation fixed her face like a mask. She remembered her father’s irritable answer to her question concerning her lover’s safety—“Safe, aye—why not?” She knew that he suspected the factory of having been purposely set on fire. But then, he had never liked Will. And yet—and yet—Lois’ heart was heavy as lead. She felt her lover was guilty. And she felt she must hide her secret of his last communication to her. She saw herself being cross-examined—“When did you last see this man?” But she would hide what he had said about watching at the works. How dreary it was—and how dreadful. ​Her life was ruined now, and nothing mattered any more. She must only behave with dignity, and submit to her own obliteration. For even if Will were never accused, she knew in her heart he was guilty. She knew it was over between them.
It was dawn among the yellow fog outside, and Lois, as she moved mechanically about her toilet, vaguely felt that all her days would arrive slowly struggling through a bleak fog. She felt an intense longing at this uncanny hour to slough the body’s trammelled weariness and to issue at once into the new bright warmth of the far Dawn where a lover waited transfigured; it is so easy and pleasant in imagination to step out of the chill grey dampness of another terrestrial daybreak, straight into the sunshine of the eternal morning? And who can escape his hour? So Lois performed the meaningless routine of her toilet, which at last she made meaningful when she took her black dress, and fastened a black jet brooch at her throat.
Then she went downstairs and found her father eating a mutton chop. She quickly approached and kissed him on the forehead. Then she retreated to the other end of the table. Her father looked tired, even haggard.
“You are early,” he said, after a while. Lois did not reply. Her father continued to eat for a few moments, then he said:
“Have a chop—here’s one! Ring for a hot plate. Eh, what? Why not?”
Lois was insulted, but she gave no sign. She sat down and took a cup of coffee, making no pretence to eat. Her father was absorbed, and had forgotten her.
​“Our Jack’s not come home yet.” he said at last.
Lois stirred faintly. “Hasn’t he?” she said.
“No.” There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.
“Selby’s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it——”
“You have no loss, dadda?”
“Nothing to mention.” After another silence, her father said:
“I’d rather be myself than William Selby, Of course it may merely be bad luck—you don’t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn’t like to add one to the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ‘George’ when it broke out—I don’t know where the lad was——!”
“Father,” broke in Lois, “why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as if Will had done it?” She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her pale, mute face.
“I don’t talk as if Will had done it,” he said. “I don’t even think it.”
Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left the room. Her father sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees whistled faintly into the fire. He was not thinking about her.
Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlour-maid, to go out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.
​The churches were chiming half-past eight when the young lady and the maid set off down the street. Nearer the fair, swarthy, thin-legged men were pushing barrels of water towards the market place, and the gipsy women, with hard brows, and dressed in tight velvet bodices, hurried along the pavement with jugs of milk, and great brass water ewers and loaves and breakfast parcels. People were just getting up, and in the poorer streets was a continual splash of tea-leaves, flung out on to the cobble-stones. A teapot came crashing down from an upper story just behind Lois, and she, starting round and looking up, thought that the trembling, drink-bleared man at the upper window, who was stupidly staring after his pot, had had designs on her life; and she went on her way shuddering at the grim tragedy of life.
In the dull October morning the ruined factory was black and ghastly. The window-frames were all jagged, and the walls stood gaunt. Inside was a tangle of twisted débris, the iron, in parts red with bright rust, looking still hot; the charred wood was black and satiny; from dishevelled heaps, sodden with water, a faint smoke rose dimly. Lois stood and looked. If he had done that! He might even be dead there, burned to ash and lost for ever. It was almost soothing to feel so. He would be safe in the eternity which now she must hope in.
At her side the pretty, sympathetic maid chatted plaintively. Suddenly, from one of her lapses into silence, she exclaimed:
“Why, if there isn’t Mr. Jack!”
​Lois turned suddenly and saw her brother and her lover approaching her. Both looked soiled, untidy and wan. Will had a black eye, some ten hours old, well coloured. Lois turned very pale as they approached. They were looking gloomily at the factory, and for a moment did not notice the girls.
“I’ll be jiggered if there ain’t our Lois!” exclaimed Jack, the reprobate, swearing under his breath.
“Oh, God!” exclaimed the other in disgust.
“Jack, where have you been?” said Lois sharply, in keen pain, not looking at her lover. Her sharp tone of suffering drove her lover to defend himself with an affectation of comic recklessness.
“In quod,” replied her brother, smiling sicklily.
“Jack!” cried his sister very sharply.
“Fact.”
Will Selby shuffled on his feet and smiled, trying to turn away his face so that she should not see his black eye. She glanced at him. He felt her boundless anger and contempt, and with great courage he looked straight at her, smiling ironically. Unfortunately his smile would not go over his swollen eye, which remained grave and lurid.
“Do I look pretty?” he inquired with a hateful twist of his lip.
“Very!” she replied.
“I thought I did,” he replied. And he turned to look at his father’s ruined works, and he felt miserable and stubborn. The girl standing there so clean and out of it all! Oh, God, he felt sick. He turned to go home.
​The three went together, Lois silent in anger and resentment. Her brother was tired and over-strung, but not suppressed. He chattered on, blindly.
“It was a lark we had! We met Bob Osborne and Freddy Mansell coming down Poultry. There was a girl with some geese. She looked a tanger sitting there, all like statues, her and the geese. It was Will who began it. He offered her threepence and asked her to begin the show. She called him a—she called him something, and then somebody poked an old gander to stir him up, and somebody squirted him in the eye. He upped and squawked and started off with his neck out. Laugh! We nearly killed ourselves, keeping back those old birds with squirts and teasers. Oh, Lum! Those old geese, oh, scrimmy, they didn’t know where to turn, they fairly went off their dots, coming at us right an’ left, and such a row—it was fun, you never knew? Then the girl she got up and knocked somebody over the jaw, and we were right in for it. Well, in the end, Billy here got hold of her round the waist——”
“Oh, dry it up!” exclaimed Will bitterly.
Jack looked at him, laughed mirthlessly, and continued: “An’ we said we’d buy her birds. So we got hold of one goose apiece—an’ they took some holding, I can tell you—and off we set round the fair, Billy leading with the girl. The bloomin’ geese squawked an’ pecked. Laugh—I thought I should a’ died. Well, then we wanted the girl to have her birds back—and then she fired up. She got some other chaps on her side, and there was a proper old ​row. The girl went tooth and nail for Will there—she was dead set against him. She gave him a black eye, by gum, and we went at it, I can tell you. It was a free fight, a beauty, an’ we got run in. I don’t know what became of the girl.”
Lois surveyed the two men. There was no glimmer of a smile on her face, though the maid behind her was sniggering. Will was very bitter. He glanced at his sweetheart and at the ruined factory.
“How’s dad taken it?” he asked, in a biting, almost humble tone.
“I don’t know,” she replied coldly. “Father’s in an awful way. I believe everybody thinks you set the place on fire.”
Lois drew herself up. She had delivered her blow. She drew herself up in cold condemnation and for a moment enjoyed her complete revenge. He was despicable, abject in his dishevelled, disfigured, unwashed condition.
“Aye, well, they made a mistake for once,” he replied, with a curl of the lip.
Curiously enough, they walked side by side as if they belonged to each other. She was his conscience-keeper. She was far from forgiving him, but she was still further from letting him go. And he walked at her side like a boy who has to be punished before he can be exonerated. He submitted. But there was a genuine bitter contempt in the curl of his lip.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 93 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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