COAL-DUST
Going home from school in the afternoon, the Brangwen girls descended
the hill between the picturesque cottages of Willey Green till they
came to the railway crossing. There they found the gate shut, because
the colliery train was rumbling nearer. They could hear the small
locomotive panting hoarsely as it advanced with caution between the
embankments. The one-legged man in the little signal-hut by the road
stared out from his security, like a crab from a snail-shell.
Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on a red Arab
mare. He rode well and softly, pleased with the delicate quivering of
the creature between his knees. And he was very picturesque, at least
in Gudrun’s eyes, sitting soft and close on the slender red mare, whose
long tail flowed on the air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at
the crossing to wait for the gate, looking down the railway for the
approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile at his picturesqueness,
Gudrun liked to look at him. He was well-set and easy, his face with
its warm tan showed up his whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue eyes
were full of sharp light as he watched the distance.
The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did
not like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise.
But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp
blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her.
The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through
her till she was rocking with terror. She recoiled like a spring let
go. But a glistening, half-smiling look came into Gerald’s face. He
brought her back again, inevitably.
The noise was released, the little locomotive with her clanking steel
connecting-rod emerged on the highroad, clanking sharply. The mare
rebounded like a drop of water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed
back into the hedge, in fear. But Gerald was heavy on the mare, and
forced her back. It seemed as if he sank into her magnetically, and
could thrust her back against herself.
“The fool!” cried Ursula loudly. “Why doesn’t he ride away till it’s
gone by?”
Gudrun was looking at him with black-dilated, spellbound eyes. But he
sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and
swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his
will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through
her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the
other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing.
The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be done, put on the
brakes, and back came the trucks rebounding on the iron buffers,
striking like horrible cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful
strident concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if
lifted up on a wind of terror. Then suddenly her fore feet struck out,
as she convulsed herself utterly away from the horror. Back she went,
and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she must fall backwards
on top of him. But he leaned forward, his face shining with fixed
amusement, and at last he brought her down, sank her down, and was
bearing her back to the mark. But as strong as the pressure of his
compulsion was the repulsion of her utter terror, throwing her back
away from the railway, so that she spun round and round, on two legs,
as if she were in the centre of some whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint
with poignant dizziness, which seemed to penetrate to her heart.
“No—! No—! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you _fool_—!” cried Ursula
at the top of her voice, completely outside herself. And Gudrun hated
her bitterly for being outside herself. It was unendurable that
Ursula’s voice was so powerful and naked.
A sharpened look came on Gerald’s face. He bit himself down on the mare
like a keen edge biting home, and _forced_ her round. She roared as she
breathed, her nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart,
her eyes frenzied. It was a repulsive sight. But he held on her
unrelaxed, with an almost mechanical relentlessness, keen as a sword
pressing in to her. Both man and horse were sweating with violence. Yet
he seemed calm as a ray of cold sunshine.
Meanwhile the eternal trucks were rumbling on, very slowly, treading
one after the other, one after the other, like a disgusting dream that
has no end. The connecting chains were grinding and squeaking as the
tension varied, the mare pawed and struck away mechanically now, her
terror fulfilled in her, for now the man encompassed her; her paws were
blind and pathetic as she beat the air, the man closed round her, and
brought her down, almost as if she were part of his own physique.
“And she’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!” cried Ursula, frantic with
opposition and hatred of Gerald. She alone understood him perfectly, in
pure opposition.
Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare,
and she turned white. And then on the very wound the bright spurs came
down, pressing relentlessly. The world reeled and passed into
nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more.
When she recovered, her soul was calm and cold, without feeling. The
trucks were still rumbling by, and the man and the mare were still
fighting. But she herself was cold and separate, she had no more
feeling for them. She was quite hard and cold and indifferent.
They could see the top of the hooded guard’s-van approaching, the sound
of the trucks was diminishing, there was hope of relief from the
intolerable noise. The heavy panting of the half-stunned mare sounded
automatically, the man seemed to be relaxing confidently, his will
bright and unstained. The guard’s-van came up, and passed slowly, the
guard staring out in his transition on the spectacle in the road. And,
through the man in the closed wagon, Gudrun could see the whole scene
spectacularly, isolated and momentary, like a vision isolated in
eternity.
Lovely, grateful silence seemed to trail behind the receding train. How
sweet the silence is! Ursula looked with hatred on the buffers of the
diminishing wagon. The gatekeeper stood ready at the door of his hut,
to proceed to open the gate. But Gudrun sprang suddenly forward, in
front of the struggling horse, threw off the latch and flung the gates
asunder, throwing one-half to the keeper, and running with the other
half, forwards. Gerald suddenly let go the horse and leaped forwards,
almost on to Gudrun. She was not afraid. As he jerked aside the mare’s
head, Gudrun cried, in a strange, high voice, like a gull, or like a
witch screaming out from the side of the road:
“I should think you’re proud.”
The words were distinct and formed. The man, twisting aside on his
dancing horse, looked at her in some surprise, some wondering interest.
Then the mare’s hoofs had danced three times on the drum-like sleepers
of the crossing, and man and horse were bounding springily, unequally
up the road.
The two girls watched them go. The gate-keeper hobbled thudding over
the logs of the crossing, with his wooden leg. He had fastened the
gate. Then he also turned, and called to the girls:
“A masterful young jockey, that; ’ll have his own road, if ever anybody
would.”
“Yes,” cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. “Why couldn’t he
take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He’s a fool, and a
bully. Does he think it’s manly, to torture a horse? It’s a living
thing, why should he bully it and torture it?”
There was a pause, then the gate-keeper shook his head, and replied:
“Yes, it’s as nice a little mare as you could set eyes on—beautiful
little thing, beautiful. Now you couldn’t see his father treat any
animal like that—not you. They’re as different as they welly can be,
Gerald Crich and his father—two different men, different made.”
Then there was a pause.
“But why does he do it?” cried Ursula, “why does he? Does he think he’s
grand, when he’s bullied a sensitive creature, ten times as sensitive
as himself?”
Again there was a cautious pause. Then again the man shook his head, as
if he would say nothing, but would think the more.
“I expect he’s got to train the mare to stand to anything,” he replied.
“A pure-bred Harab—not the sort of breed as is used to round
here—different sort from our sort altogether. They say as he got her
from Constantinople.”
“He would!” said Ursula. “He’d better have left her to the Turks, I’m
sure they would have had more decency towards her.”
The man went in to drink his can of tea, the girls went on down the
lane, that was deep in soft black dust. Gudrun was as if numbed in her
mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down
into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of
the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure
control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and
thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into
unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.
On the left, as the girls walked silently, the coal-mine lifted its
great mounds and its patterned head-stocks, the black railway with the
trucks at rest looked like a harbour just below, a large bay of
railroad with anchored wagons.
Near the second level-crossing, that went over many bright rails, was a
farm belonging to the collieries, and a great round globe of iron, a
disused boiler, huge and rusty and perfectly round, stood silently in a
paddock by the road. The hens were pecking round it, some chickens were
balanced on the drinking trough, wagtails flew away in among trucks,
from the water.
On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road-side, was a heap of
pale-grey stones for mending the roads, and a cart standing, and a
middle-aged man with whiskers round his face was leaning on his shovel,
talking to a young man in gaiters, who stood by the horse’s head. Both
men were facing the crossing.
They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near
distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light,
gay summer dresses, Ursula had an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun
a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose,
the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress over the
wide bay of the railway crossing, white and orange and yellow and rose
glittering in motion across a hot world silted with coal-dust.
The two men stood quite still in the heat, watching. The elder was a
short, hard-faced energetic man of middle age, the younger a labourer
of twenty-three or so. They stood in silence watching the advance of
the sisters. They watched whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they
passed, and whilst they receded down the dusty road, that had dwellings
on one side, and dusty young corn on the other.
Then the elder man, with the whiskers round his face, said in a
prurient manner to the young man:
“What price that, eh? She’ll do, won’t she?”
“Which?” asked the young man, eagerly, with a laugh.
“Her with the red stockings. What d’you say? I’d give my week’s wages
for five minutes; what!—just for five minutes.”
Again the young man laughed.
“Your missis ’ud have summat to say to you,” he replied.
Gudrun had turned round and looked at the two men. They were to her
sinister creatures, standing watching after her, by the heap of pale
grey slag. She loathed the man with whiskers round his face.
“You’re first class, you are,” the man said to her, and to the
distance.
“Do you think it would be worth a week’s wages?” said the younger man,
musing.
“Do I? I’d put ’em bloody-well down this second—”
The younger man looked after Gudrun and Ursula objectively, as if he
wished to calculate what there might be, that was worth his week’s
wages. He shook his head with fatal misgiving.
“No,” he said. “It’s not worth that to me.”
“Isn’t?” said the old man. “By God, if it isn’t to me!”
And he went on shovelling his stones.
The girls descended between the houses with slate roofs and blackish
brick walls. The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all
the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a
narcotic to the senses. On the roads silted with black dust, the rich
light fell more warmly, more heavily, over all the amorphous squalor a
kind of magic was cast, from the glowing close of day.
“It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,” said Gudrun, evidently
suffering from fascination. “Can’t you feel in some way, a thick, hot
attraction in it? I can. And it quite stupifies me.”
They were passing between blocks of miners’ dwellings. In the back
yards of several dwellings, a miner could be seen washing himself in
the open on this hot evening, naked down to the loins, his great
trousers of moleskin slipping almost away. Miners already cleaned were
sitting on their heels, with their backs near the walls, talking and
silent in pure physical well-being, tired, and taking physical rest.
Their voices sounded out with strong intonation, and the broad dialect
was curiously caressing to the blood. It seemed to envelop Gudrun in a
labourer’s caress, there was in the whole atmosphere a resonance of
physical men, a glamorous thickness of labour and maleness, surcharged
in the air. But it was universal in the district, and therefore
unnoticed by the inhabitants.
To Gudrun, however, it was potent and half-repulsive. She could never
tell why Beldover was so utterly different from London and the south,
why one’s whole feelings were different, why one seemed to live in
another sphere. Now she realised that this was the world of powerful,
underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their
voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong,
dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange
machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery,
cold and iron.
It was the same every evening when she came home, she seemed to move
through a wave of disruptive force, that was given off from the
presence of thousands of vigorous, underworld, half-automatised
colliers, and which went to the brain and the heart, awaking a fatal
desire, and a fatal callousness.
There came over her a nostalgia for the place. She hated it, she knew
how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless.
Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree
but a machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She
struggled to get more and more into accord with the atmosphere of the
place, she craved to get her satisfaction of it.
She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main street of the town,
that was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent
atmosphere of intense, dark callousness. There were always miners
about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain
beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction
and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to
another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an
intolerable deep resonance, like a machine’s burring, a music more
maddening than the siren’s long ago.
She found herself, with the rest of the common women, drawn out on
Friday evenings to the little market. Friday was pay-day for the
colliers, and Friday night was market night. Every woman was abroad,
every man was out, shopping with his wife, or gathering with his pals.
The pavements were dark for miles around with people coming in, the
little market-place on the crown of the hill, and the main street of
Beldover were black with thickly-crowded men and women.
It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw
a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the
pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers
and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements
towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and
packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all
ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.
The carts that came could not pass through. They had to wait, the
driver calling and shouting, till the dense crowd would make way.
Everywhere, young fellows from the outlying districts were making
conversation with the girls, standing in the road and at the corners.
The doors of the public-houses were open and full of light, men passed
in and out in a continual stream, everywhere men were calling out to
one another, or crossing to meet one another, or standing in little
gangs and circles, discussing, endlessly discussing. The sense of talk,
buzzing, jarring, half-secret, the endless mining and political
wrangling, vibrated in the air like discordant machinery. And it was
their voices which affected Gudrun almost to swooning. They aroused a
strange, nostalgic ache of desire, something almost demoniacal, never
to be fulfilled.
Like any other common girl of the district, Gudrun strolled up and
down, up and down the length of the brilliant two-hundred paces of the
pavement nearest the market-place. She knew it was a vulgar thing to
do; her father and mother could not bear it; but the nostalgia came
over her, she must be among the people. Sometimes she sat among the
louts in the cinema: rakish-looking, unattractive louts they were. Yet
she must be among them.
And, like any other common lass, she found her ‘boy.’ It was an
electrician, one of the electricians introduced according to Gerald’s
new scheme. He was an earnest, clever man, a scientist with a passion
for sociology. He lived alone in a cottage, in lodgings, in Willey
Green. He was a gentleman, and sufficiently well-to-do. His landlady
spread the reports about him; he _would_ have a large wooden tub in his
bedroom, and every time he came in from work, he _would_ have pails and
pails of water brought up, to bathe in, then he put on clean shirt and
under-clothing _every_ day, and clean silk socks; fastidious and
exacting he was in these respects, but in every other way, most
ordinary and unassuming.
Gudrun knew all these things. The Brangwen’s house was one to which the
gossip came naturally and inevitably. Palmer was in the first place a
friend of Ursula’s. But in his pale, elegant, serious face there showed
the same nostalgia that Gudrun felt. He too must walk up and down the
street on Friday evening. So he walked with Gudrun, and a friendship
was struck up between them. But he was not in love with Gudrun; he
_really_ wanted Ursula, but for some strange reason, nothing could
happen between her and him. He liked to have Gudrun about, as a
fellow-mind—but that was all. And she had no real feeling for him. He
was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back him. But he was really
impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery. He
was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an
egoist. He was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and
despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as machinery fascinated
him. They were a new sort of machinery to him—but incalculable,
incalculable.
So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to the cinema with
him. And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his
sarcastic remarks. There they were, the two of them: two elegants in
one sense: in the other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the
people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to
be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young
bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power,
and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a
sort of rottenness in the will.
Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how she was sinking
in. And then she was filled with a fury of contempt and anger. She felt
she was sinking into one mass with the rest—all so close and
intermingled and breathless. It was horrible. She stifled. She prepared
for flight, feverishly she flew to her work. But soon she let go. She
started off into the country—the darkish, glamorous country. The spell
was beginning to work again.