yes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to
conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than
Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the
very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very
back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the
bubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of majolica weight
and luminosity, quite ignorant of the sky, heavy and satisfying.

Slaves of the underworld! She watched the swing of the grey colliers
along the pavement with a new fascination, hypnotized by a new
vision. Slaves--the underground trolls and iron-workers, magic,
mischievous, and enslaved, of the ancient stories. But tall--the
miners seemed to her to loom tall and grey, in their enslaved magic.
Slaves who would cause the superimposed day-order to fall. Not
because, individually, they wanted to. But because, collectively,
something bubbled up in them, the force of darkness which had no
master and no control. It would bubble and stir in them as
earthquakes stir the earth. It would be simply disastrous, because
it had no master. There was no dark master in the world. The puerile
world went on crying out for a new Jesus, another Saviour from the
sky, another heavenly superman. When what was wanted was a Dark
Master from the underworld.

So they streamed past her, home from work--grey from head to foot,
distorted in shape, cramped, with curious faces that came out pallid
from under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring,
their bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were--yet they
seemed to her to loom like strange, valid figures of fairy-lore,
unrealized and as yet unexperienced. The miners, the iron-workers,
those who fashion the stuff of the underworld.

As it always comes to its children, the nostalgia of the repulsive,
heavy-footed Midlands came over her again, even whilst she was
there in the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yet
insatiable craving--as if for an earthquake. To feel the earth heave
and shudder and shatter the world from beneath. To go down in the
debacle.

And so, in spite of everything, poverty, dowdiness, obscurity, and
nothingness, she was content to stay in abeyance at home for the
time. True, she was filled with the same old, slow, dreadful craving
of the Midlands: a craving insatiable and inexplicable. But the very
craving kept her still. For at this time she did not translate it
into a d