A Maggot - John Fowles Read Free Page B

be glimpsed or heard looms, but the spinning
predominated. The mechanical jenny was still several decades in the
future and the bottleneck in the ancient hand process always lay with
the production of the yarn, for which the great weaving, finishing
and market centres like Tiverton and Exeter and their rich clothiers
had an insatiable greed. In all this, too, the endless treadling,
blurred wheels, distaffs, the very scent of raw wool, our travellers
found nothing picturesque or of interest. Throughout the country,
industry still lay inside the cottage, in outwork, in the domestic
system.
    This contempt, or blindness, was returned, in an
inverse way. The riders were forced to go at an even slower pace by a
lumbering ox-cart, which left no room to pass; and the doorway
spinners, the townspeople about in the street, or attracted to their
windows and thresholds by the horses' hooves, betrayed a similar
sense of alienation by staring, as the shepherd's children had, at
these strangers as if they were indeed foreigners, and not to be
trusted. There was also the beginning of a political and a class
feeling about this. It has been proved fifty years earlier, in the
neighbouring counties of Somerset and Dorset, when nearly half of
those who had flocked to join the Monmouth Rebellion had come from
the cloth trade; most of the rest had come from the agricultural
community, and virtually none at all from the local gentry. It would
be wrong to speak yet of a trade-union mindedness, or even of the mob
spirit by then recognized and feared in larger cities; but of an
inherent resentment of those who lived in a world not ruled by cloth,
here was evidence.
    The two gentlemen studiously avoided the watching
eyes; and a sternness and gravity in their demeanour forbade greeting
or enquiry, if now chowring comment. The young woman passenger did
from time to time glance shily sideways; but something bizarre in her
muffled appearance puzzled the spectators. Only the man in the faded
scarlet coat at the rear seemed like a normal traveller. He gave
stare for stare; and even tipped his hat to two girls in a doorway.
    Then a young man in a smock darted forward from the
niche of a cob buttress supporting a leaning cottage wall and
brandished an osier ring of dead birds up at the military-looking
man. He had the sly grin of a yokel, half joker, half village idiot.
    'Buy 'un, maister? Penny a'oop, penny a'oop!'
    He was waved aside, but walked backwards, still
thrusting the little ring of dead birds, each pierced through the
neck, crimson and brown breasts and coal-black heads, up towards the
rider. Hoops, or bullfinches, then had a price on their head, paid
against their bodies by parish vestries.
    'Where be's 'ee to then, maister?'
    The man in the scarlet coat rode on a pace or two in
silence, and threw an answer back over his shoulder.
    'The fleas in thy poxy inn.'
    'What business?'
    Again the rider waited to answer, and this time did
not turn his head.
    'None o' thine.'
    The ox-cart now turned into a smith's yard, and the
cavalcade could go more quickly. In a hundred yards or so they came
to a more open square, paved with small dark setts sunk on edge.
Though the sun had set, the sky had now cleared extensively in the
west. Rose streaks of vapour floated in a honeycoloured light,
suffusing the canopy still above with pink and amethyst tints.
Somewhat finer and taller buildings surrounded this square and its
central building, an open-sided shed, or market, made of massive oak
timbers and with a steep-pitched and stone-tiled roof. There was a
clothier's shop, a saddler's, a grocer's, an apothecary and
barber-surgeon's, the latter being the nearest the place had to a
doctor; a cordwainer's. At the far end of the square beyond the
market house stood a knot of people, around a long wooden pole lying
on its side, the central totem for the next day's celebrations, in
process of being dressed with streamers.
    Closer, beside the roof-supporting outer columns