THE PROCESSION

In one of those corners of our land canopied by the fumes of blind
industry, there was, on that day, a lull in darkness. A fresh wind had
split the customary heaven, or roof of hell; was sweeping long drifts of
creamy clouds across a blue still pallid with reek. The sun even
shone--a sun whose face seemed white and wondering. And under that rare
sun all the little town, among its slag heaps and few tall chimneys, had
an air of living faster. In those continuous courts and alleys, where
the women worked, smoke from each little forge rose and dispersed into
the wind with strange alacrity; amongst the women, too, there was that
same eagerness, for the sunshine had crept in and was making pale all
those dark-raftered, sooted ceilings which covered them in, together with
their immortal comrades, the small open furnaces. About their work they
had been busy since seven o'clock; their feet pressing the leather lungs
which fanned the conical heaps of glowing fuel, their hands poking into
the glow a thin iron rod till the end could be curved into a fiery hook;
snapping it with a mallet; threading it with tongs on to the chain;
hammering, closing the link; and; without a second's pause, thrusting the
iron rod again into the glow. And while they worked they chattered,
laughed sometimes, now and then sighed. They seemed of all ages and all
types; from her who looked like a peasant of Provence, broad, brown, and
strong, to the weariest white consumptive wisp; from old women of
seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the
cottage forges there would be but one worker, or two at most; in the shop
forges four, or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of the
grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment without a fiery hook about
to take its place on the growing chains, never a second when the thin
smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming slowly in front of
them, did not escape from out of the dingy, whitewashed spaces past the
dark rafters, away to freedom.

But there had been in the air that morning something more than the white
sunlight. There had been anticipation. And at two o'clock began
fulfilment. The forges were stilled, and from court and alley forth came
the women. In their ragged working clothes, in their best clothes--so
little different; in bonnets, in hats, bareheaded; with babies born and
unborn, they swarmed into the high street and formed across