Women in Love | Page 3

in
Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a
small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the
whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She
was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment.
It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the
full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she
wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it,
the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced
countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled
with repulsion.
They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden,
where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be
ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.
'It is like a country in an underworld,' said Gudrun. 'The colliers bring it
above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it's marvellous, it's really
marvellous--it's really wonderful, another world. The people are all
ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of

the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It's like
being mad, Ursula.'
The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On
the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite
hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen
through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady
columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of
dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines along
the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle, with dark
slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked was black, trodden-in
by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron
fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed shiny by the
moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going
between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms
folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their
block, stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying
stare of aborigines; children called out names.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these
were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own
world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large
grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And
she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was
contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground.
She was afraid.
She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this
violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart
was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: 'I want to go back, I want
to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.' Yet she
must go forward.
Ursula could feel her suffering.
'You hate this, don't you?' she asked.
'It bewilders me,' stammered Gudrun.

'You won't stay long,' replied Ursula.
And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.
They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill,
into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the
faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded
hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill,
with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the
hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green,
currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming
white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls.
Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high
banks towards the church. There, in the lowest bend of the road, low
under the trees, stood a little group of expectant people, waiting to see
the wedding. The daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district,
Thomas Crich, was getting married to a naval officer.
'Let us go back,' said Gudrun, swerving away. 'There are all those
people.'
And she hung wavering in the road.
'Never mind them,' said Ursula, 'they're all right. They all know me,
they don't matter.'
'But must we go through them?' asked Gudrun.
'They're quite all right, really,' said Ursula, going forward. And together
the two sisters approached the group of uneasy, watchful common
people. They were chiefly women, colliers' wives of the more shiftless
sort. They had watchful, underworld faces.
The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight towards the
gate. The