Tales of the Five Towns | Page 3

marshalled his geese with notable
gumption, adopted towards them exactly the correct stress of
persuasion, and presently he smiled to see them preceding him in the
direction of Hillport. He looked neither to right nor left, but simply at
his geese, and thus the quidnuncs of the market-place and the
supporters of shop-fronts were unable to catch his eye. He tried to feel
like a gooseherd; and such was his histrionic quality, his instinct for the
dramatic, he was a gooseherd, despite his blue Melton overcoat, his
hard felt hat with the flattened top, and that opulent-curving collar

which was the secret despair of the young dandies of Hillport. He had
the most natural air in the world. The geese were the victims of this
imaginative effort of Mr. Curtenty's. They took him seriously as a
gooseherd. These fourteen intelligences, each with an object in life,
each bent on self-aggrandisement and the satisfaction of desires, began
to follow the line of least resistance in regard to the superior
intelligence unseen but felt behind them, feigning, as geese will, that it
suited them so to submit, and that in reality they were still quite
independent. But in the peculiar eye of the Barnacle gander, who was
leading, an observer with sufficient fancy might have deciphered a mild
revolt against this triumph of the absurd, the accidental, and the futile; a
passive yet Promethean spiritual defiance of the supreme powers.
Mr. Curtenty got his fourteen intelligences safely across the top of St.
Luke's Square, and gently urged them into the steep defile of Oldcastle
Street. By this time rumour had passed in front of him and run off
down side-streets like water let into an irrigation system. At every
corner was a knot of people, at most windows a face. And the
Deputy-Mayor never spoke nor smiled. The farce was enormous; the
memory of it would survive revolutions and religions.
Halfway down Oldcastle Street the first disaster happened. Electric
tramways had not then knitted the Five Towns in a network of steel;
but the last word of civilization and refinement was about to be uttered,
and a gang of men were making patterns with wires on the skyscape of
Oldcastle Street. One of the wires, slipping from its temporary gripper,
swirled with an extraordinary sound into the roadway, and writhed
there in spirals. Several of Mr. Curtenty's geese were knocked down,
and rose obviously annoyed; but the Barnacle gander fell with a
clinging circle of wire round his muscular, glossy neck, and did not rise
again. It was a violent, mysterious, agonizing, and sudden death for
him, and must have confirmed his theories about the arbitrariness of
things. The thirteen passed pitilessly on. Mr. Curtenty freed the gander
from the coiling wire, and picked it up, but, finding it far too heavy to
carry, he handed it to a Corporation road-sweeper.
'I'll send for it,' he said; 'wait here.'

These were the only words uttered by him during a memorable journey.
The second disaster was that the deceitful afternoon turned to rain--cold,
cruel rain, persistent rain, full of sinister significance. Mr. Curtenty
ruefully raised the velvet of his Melton. As he did so a brougham rolled
into Oldcastle Street, a little in front of him, from the direction of St.
Peter's Church, and vanished towards Hillport. He knew the carriage;
he had bought it and paid for it. Deep, far down, in his mind stirred the
thought:
'I'm just the least bit glad she didn't see me.'
He had the suspicion, which recurs even to optimists, that happiness is
after all a chimera.
The third disaster was that the sun set and darkness descended. Mr.
Curtenty had, unfortunately, not reckoned with this diurnal
phenomenon; he had not thought upon the undesirability of being under
compulsion to drive geese by the sole illumination of gas-lamps lighted
by Corporation gas.
After this disasters multiplied. Dark and the rain had transformed the
farce into something else. It was five-thirty when at last he reached The
Firs, and the garden of The Firs was filled with lamentable
complainings of a remnant of geese. His man Pond met him with a
stable-lantern.
'Damp, sir,' said Pond.
'Oh, nowt to speak of,' said Mr. Curtenty, and, taking off his hat, he
shot the fluid contents of the brim into Pond's face. It was his way of
dotting the 'i' of irony. 'Missis come in?'
'Yes, sir; I have but just rubbed the horse down.'
So far no reference to the surrounding geese, all forlorn in the heavy
winter rain.

'I've gotten a two-three geese and one gander here for Christmas,' said
Mr. Curtenty after a pause. To inferiors he always used the dialect.
'Yes, sir.'
'Turn 'em into th' orchard, as you call it.'
'Yes, sir.'
'They aren't all here. Thou