ace 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,