The Rainbow

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.