Domestic fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Women -- England -- Fiction
"I shall go to the drawing-room window, mother," said Cyril.
She nodded. He crept out of the bedroom.
St. Luke's Square was a sea of hats and memorial cards. Most of the
occupiers of the Square had hung out flags at half-mast, and a flag at
half-mast was flying over the Town Hall in the distance. Sightseers
were at every window. The two bands had united at the top of the
Square; and behind them, on a North Staffordshire Railway lorry, stood
the white-clad Rector and several black figures. The Rector was
speaking; but only those close to the lorry could hear his feeble
treble voice.
Such was the massive protest of Bursley against what Bursley regarded
as a callous injustice. The execution of Daniel Povey had most
genuinely excited the indignation of the town. That execution was not
only an injustice; it was an insult, a humiliating snub. And the worst
was that the rest of the country had really discovered no sympathetic
interest in the affair. Certain London papers, indeed, in commenting
casually on the execution, had slurred the morals and manners of the
Five Towns, professing to regard the district as notoriously beyond the
realm of the Ten Commandments. This had helped to render furious the
townsmen. This, as much as anything, had encouraged the spontaneous
outburst of feeling which had culminated in a St. Luke's Square full of
people with memorial cards in their hats. The demonstration had
scarcely been organized; it had somehow organized itself, employing the
places of worship and a few clubs as centres of gathering. And it
proved an immense success. There were seven or eight thousand people in
the Square, and the pity was that England as a whole could not have had
a glimpse of the spectacle. Since the execution of the elephant,
nothing had so profoundly agitated Bursley. Constance, who left the
bedroom momentarily for the drawing-room, reflected that the death and
burial of Cyril's honoured grandfather, though a resounding event, had
not caused one-tenth of the stir which she beheld. But then John Baines
had killed nobody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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