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 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.