<SPAN name="vol_2_chap_11"></SPAN>
<h3>Volume Two--Chapter Eleven.</h3>
<h4>The Bottom of the Square.</h4>
<p>Another procession—that of the Old Church Sunday school—came up, with
standards floating and drums beating, out of the steepness of Woodisun Bank, and turned
into Wedgwood Street, which thenceforward was loosely thronged by procession and
sightseers. The importance of the festival was now quite manifest, for at the end of the
street could be seen Saint Luke’s Square, massed with human beings in movement.
Osmond Orgreave and his daughter were lost to view in the brave crowd; but after a little,
Edwin distinctly saw Janet’s sunshade leave Wedgwood Street at the corner of the
Wedgwood Institution and bob slowly into the Cock Yard, which was a narrow thoroughfare
leading to the market-place and the Town Hall, and so to the top of Saint Luke’s
Square. He said nothing, and kept straight on along Wedgwood Street past the Covered
Market.</p>
<p>“I hope you didn’t catch cold in the rain the other night,” he
remarked—grimly, as he thought.</p>
<p>“I should have thought it would have been you who were more likely to catch
cold,” Hilda replied, in her curt manner. She looked in front of her. The words seem
to him to carry a double meaning. Suddenly she moved her head, glanced full at him for an
instant, and glanced behind her. “Where are they?” she inquired.</p>
<p>“The others? Aren’t they in front? They must be some where
about.”</p>
<p>Unless she also had marked their deviation into the Cock Yard, why had she glanced
behind her in asking where they were? She knew as well as he that they had started in
front. He could only deduce that she had been as willing as himself to lose Mr Orgreave
and Janet. Just then an acquaintance raised his hat to Edwin in acknowledgement of the
lady’s presence, and he responded with pride. Whatever his private attitude to
Hilda, he was undeniably proud to be seen in the streets with a disdainful, aloof girl
unknown to the town. It was an experience entirely new to him, and it flattered him. He
desired to look long at her face, to examine her expression, to make up his mind about
her; but he could not, because they were walking side by side. The sole manifestation of
her that he could judge was her voice. It was a remarkable voice, rather deep, with a sort
of chiselled intonation. The cadences of it fell on the ear softly and yet ruthlessly, and
when she had finished speaking you became aware of silence, as after a solemn utterance of
destiny. What she happened to have been saying seemed to be immaterial to the effect,
which was physical, vibratory.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>At the border of Saint Luke’s Square, junction of eight streets, true centre of
the town’s traffic, and the sole rectangular open space enclosed completely by
shops, they found a line of constables which yielded only to processions and to the
bearers of special rosettes. ‘The Square,’ as it was called by those who
inhabited it, had been chosen for the historic scene of the day because of its pre-eminent
claim and suitability; the least of its advantages—its slope, from the top of which
it could be easily dominated by a speaker on a platform—would alone have secured for
it the honours of the Centenary.</p>
<p>As the police cordon closed on the procession from the Old Church, definitely dividing
the spectators from the spectacle, it grew clear that the spectators were in the main a
shabby lot; persons without any social standing: unkempt idlers, good-for-nothings,
wastrels, clay-whitened pot-girls who had to work even on that day, and who had run out
for a few moments in their flannel aprons to stare, and a few score ragamuffins, whose
parents were too poor or too careless to make them superficially presentable enough to
figure in a procession. Nearly the whole respectability of the town was either fussily
marshalling processions or gazing down at them in comfort from the multitudinous open
windows of the Square. The ‘leads’ over the projecting windows of
Baines’s, the chief draper’s, were crowded with members of the ruling
caste.</p>
<p>And even within the Square, it could be seen, between the towering backs of constables,
that the spectacle itself was chiefly made up of indigence bedecked. The thousands of
perspiring children, penned like sheep, and driven to and fro like sheep by anxious and
officious rosettes, nearly all had the air of poverty decently putting the best face on
itself; they were nearly all, beneath their vague sense of importance, wistful with the
resigned fatalism of the young and of the governed. They knew not precisely why they were
there; but merely that they had been commanded to be there, and that they were hot and
thirsty, and that for weeks they had been learning hymns by heart for this occasion, and
that the occasion was glorious. Many of the rosettes themselves had a poor, driven look.
None of these bought suits at Shillitoe’s, nor millinery at Baines’s. None of
them gave orders for printing, nor had preferences in the form of ledgers, nor held views
on Victor Hugo, nor drank wine, nor yearned for perfection in the art of social
intercourse. To Edwin, who was just beginning to touch the planes of worldliness and of
dilettantism in art, to Edwin, with the mysterious and haughty creature at his elbow, they
seemed to have no more in common with himself and her than animals had. And he wondered by
virtue of what decree he, in the Shillitoe suit, and the grand house waiting for him up at
Bleakridge, had been lifted up to splendid ease above the squalid and pitiful human
welter.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>Such musings were scarcely more than subconscious in him. He stood now a few inches
behind Hilda, and, above these thoughts, and beneath the stir and strident glitter and
noise of the crawling ant-heap, his mind was intensely occupied with Hilda’s ear and
her nostril. He could watch her now at leisure, for the changeful interest of the scene
made conversation unnecessary and even inept. What a lobe! What a nostril! Every curve of
her features seemed to express a fine arrogant acrimony and harsh truculence. At any rate
she was not half alive; she was alive in every particle of herself. She gave off
antipathies as a liquid gives off vapour. Moods passed across her intent face like a wind
over a field. Apparently she was so rapt as to be unaware that her sunshade was not
screening her. Sadness prevailed among her moods.</p>
<p>The mild Edwin said secretly:</p>
<p>“By Jove! If I had you to myself, my lady, I’d soon teach you a thing or
two!” He was quite sincere, too.</p>
<p>His glance, roving, discovered Mrs Hamps above him, ten feet over his head, at the
corner of the Baines balcony. He flushed, for he perceived that she must have been waiting
to catch him. She was at her most stately and most radiant, wonderful in lavender, and she
poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition.</p>
<p>Everybody should be made aware that Mrs Hamps was greeting her adored nephew, who was
with a lady friend of the Orgreaves.</p>
<p>She leaned slightly from her cane chair.</p>
<p>“Isn’t it a beautiful sight?” she cried. Her voice sounded thin and
weak against the complex din of the Square.</p>
<p>He nodded, smiling.</p>
<p>“Oh! I think it’s a beautiful sight!” she cried once more, ecstatic.
People turned to see whom she was addressing.</p>
<p>But though he nodded again he did not think it was a beautiful sight. He thought it was
a disconcerting sight, a sight vexatious and troublesome. And he was in no way
tranquillised by the reflection that every town in England had the same sight to show at
that hour.</p>
<p>And moreover, anticipating their next interview, he could, in fancy, plainly hear his
Aunt Clara saying, with hopeless, longing benignancy: “Oh, Edwin, how I <i>do</i>
wish I could have seen you in the Square, bearing your part!”</p>
<p>Hilda seemed to be oblivious of Mrs Hamps’s ejaculations, but immediately
afterwards she straightened her back, with a gesture that Edwin knew, and staring into his
eyes said, as it were resentfully—</p>
<p>“Well, they evidently aren’t here!”</p>
<p>And looked with scorn among the sightseers. It was clear that the crowd contained
nobody of the rank and stamp of the Orgreaves.</p>
<p>“They may have gone up the Cock Yard—if you know where that is,” said
Edwin.</p>
<p>“Well, don’t you think we’d better find them somehow?”</p>
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