At the Crest I looked back. What a world it was! And suddenly it came
to me that I was looking at this world for the last time. If I overtook
the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them—or hang. I stopped
and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly valley.
It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never to
return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that had
borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some
indefinable manner, strange. I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it
from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened by
night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear afternoon
sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity. And perhaps, too,
there was something in the emotions through which I had been passing
for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to pierce
the unusual, to question the accepted. But it came to me then, I am
sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was
the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks,
railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches,
chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly
smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin.
Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing
ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the
potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in
church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the
dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of
industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked
amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its
disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a
morass.
I did not think these things clearly that afternoon. Much less did I
ask how I, with my murderous purpose, stood to them all. I write down
that realization of disorder and suffocation here and now as though I
had thought it, but indeed then I only felt it, felt it transitorily as
I looked back, and then stood with the thing escaping from my mind.