would.'
'Yes,' cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. 'Why couldn't he
take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He's a fool, and a
bully. Does he think it's manly, to torture a horse? It's a living
thing, why should he bully it and torture it?'
There was a pause, then the gate-keeper shook his head, and replied:
'Yes, it's as nice a little mare as you could set eyes on--beautiful
little thing, beautiful. Now you couldn't see his father treat any
animal like that--not you. They're as different as they welly can be,
Gerald Crich and his father--two different men, different made.'
Then there was a pause.
'But why does he do it?' cried Ursula, 'why does he? Does he think he's
grand, when he's bullied a sensitive creature, ten times as sensitive
as himself?'
Again there was a cautious pause. Then again the man shook his head, as
if he would say nothing, but would think the more.
'I expect he's got to train the mare to stand to anything,' he replied.
'A pure-bred Harab--not the sort of breed as is used to round
here--different sort from our sort altogether. They say as he got her
from Constantinople.'
'He would!' said Ursula. 'He'd better have left her to the Turks, I'm
sure they would have had more decency towards her.'
The man went in to drink his can of tea, the girls went on down the
lane, that was deep in soft black dust. Gudrun was as if numbed in her
mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down
into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of
the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure
control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and
thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into
unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.
On the left, as the girls walked silently, the coal-mine lifted its
great mounds and its patterned head-stocks, the black railway with the
trucks at rest looked like a harbour just below, a large bay of
railroad with anchored wagons.
Near the second level-crossing, that went over many bright rails, was a
farm belonging to the collieries, and a great round globe of iron, a
disused boiler, huge and rusty and perfectly round, stood silently in a
paddock by the road. The hens were pecking round it, some chickens were
balanced on the drinking trough, wagtails flew away in among trucks,
from the water.
On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road-side, was a heap of
pale-grey stones for mending the roads, and a cart standing, and a
middle-aged man with whiskers round his face was leaning on his shovel,
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