I
Nan returned frequently along the road on the top of the dyke, on the
red and gray February evenings, when the stillness was absolute; on
either side of the dyke the floods lay, placid and flat as mirrors, over
broad miles of country, reflecting the crimson sun up a path of
roughened and reddened splendour. The water-filled ruts along the road
glowed with the same light; long narrow lines of fire. How dismal that
flooded land would have been without that light; gray, only gray,
without the red! All the most dismal elements were present: a few
isolated and half-submerged trees stuck up here and there out of the
water, and at intervals the upper half of a gate and gate-posts
protruded, the entrance to some now invisible field; useless,
ridiculous, and woebegone. But that red light, cold and fiery, scored
its bar of blood across the gray lagoons.
The village lay in front of her, at the end of the road, and behind the
village rose the three high chimneys of the factory, black amongst the
gray waters, the gray sky, threatening and desolate in the midst of
desolation. The three black plumes of smoke drifted upwards, converged
into a large leisurely volume, and dispersed; already in the dusk the
red glow at their base was becoming visible, and a single star appeared
high above them, as though a spark that had floated out from the heart
of the factory now hung suspended in supercilious vigil. The abbey on
the farther side lay heaped in a mass as dark as the mass of the
factory. Nan would shift to the other hand the basket she was carrying
home from the market-town of Spalding; walking along the elevation of
the dyke, she made a tiny, upright figure in the great circle of the
flat country, for here the disc of the horizon was as apparent as it is
at sea. The group of village, factory, and church, emerged like an
island loaded with strange and sombre piles of architecture, adrift from
all other encampments of men. Abbot’s Etchery lay before her, against
that formidable foundry of the heavens, that swarthy splendour of smoke
and sunset, and as she continued to advance she thought that she
re-entered an angry prison, too barbarous, too inimical, for her to
dwell beneath it, and live.