Women in Love

To Gudrun, however, it was potent and half-repulsive. She could never

tell why Beldover was so utterly different from London and the south,

why one's whole feelings were different, why one seemed to live in

another sphere. Now she realised that this was the world of powerful,

underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their

voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong,

dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange

machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery,

cold and iron.

It was the same every evening when she came home, she seemed to move

through a wave of disruptive force, that was given off from the

presence of thousands of vigorous, underworld, half-automatised

colliers, and which went to the brain and the heart, awaking a fatal

desire, and a fatal callousness.

There came over her a nostalgia for the place. She hated it, she knew

how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless.

Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree

but a machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She

struggled to get more and more into accord with the atmosphere of the

place, she craved to get her satisfaction of it.

She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main street of the town,

that was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent

atmosphere of intense, dark callousness. There were always miners

about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain

beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction

and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to

another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an

intolerable deep resonance, like a machine's burring, a music more

maddening than the siren's long ago.

She found herself, with the rest of the common women, drawn out on

Friday evenings to the little market. Friday was pay-day for the

colliers, and Friday night was market night. Every woman was abroad,

every man was out, shopping with his wife, or gathering with his pals.

The pavements were dark for miles around with people coming in, the

little market-place on the crown of the hill, and the main street of

Beldover were black with thickly-crowded men and women.

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw

a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the

pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers

and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements

towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and

packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all

ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.