living in a little flat in London.
Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle
of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place
without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather line old park
of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of
Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy
distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which
began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a
long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick
houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank
dreariness.
Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex
downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the
utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left
it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather
dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the
pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and
the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank
was burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put
it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often,
the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the
earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of
something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna
from the skies of doom.
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful,
but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the
rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and
quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain.
It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror;
she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the
morning it rained.
Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had
a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else
they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard,
shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was
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