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.
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