He lived in a large new house of red brick, standing outside
a mass of homogeneous red-brick dwellings, called Wiggiston.
Wiggiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of
eleven houses on the edge of healthy, half-agricultural country.
Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston
appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings
of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure
ugliness; a grey-black macadamized road, asphalt causeways, held
in between a flat succession of wall, window, and door, a
new-brick channel that began nowhere, and ended nowhere.
Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself
endlessly. Only now and then, in one of the house-windows
vegetables or small groceries were displayed for sale.
In the middle of the town was a large, open, shapeless space,
or market-place, of black trodden earth, surrounded by the same
flat material of dwellings, new red-brick becoming grimy, small
oblong windows, and oblong doors, repeated endlessly, with just,
at one corner, a great and gaudy public house, and somewhere
lost on one of the sides of the square, a large window opaque
and darkish green, which was the post office.
The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers
hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt
pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but
like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the
homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death
rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no
artery, no organic formation. There it lay, like the new
foundations of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a
skin-disease.
Just outside of this, on a little hill, was Tom Brangwen's
big, red-brick house. It looked from the front upon the edge of
the place, a meaningless squalor of ash-pits and closets and
irregular rows of the backs of houses, each with its small
activity made sordid by barren cohesion with the rest of the
small activities. Farther off was the great colliery that went
night and day. And all around was the country, green with two
winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the darker woods
in the distance.
The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now, when
he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in
the actuality of the place. It was like some gruesome dream,
some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete.
Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor-car at the raw
little station, and drove through what seemed to them like the
horrible raw beginnings of something. The place was a moment of
chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was
fascinated by the many men who were there--groups of men
standing in the streets, four or five men walking in a gang
together, their dogs running behind or before. They were all
decently dressed, and most of them rather gaunt. The terrible
gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her. Like creatures
with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate
being, within some utterly unliving shell, they passed
meaninglessly along, with strange, isolated dignity. It was as
if a hard, horny shell enclosed them all.