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.
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.