Page 235 - lady-chatterlys-lover

bodies and souls of the men.
Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of
them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would
disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had ap-
peared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal
had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of
the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were ele-
mentals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers
were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men,
but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements,
carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of
the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal,
the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the trans-
parency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted,
of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron,
the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood.
The anima of mineral disintegration!
Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the
sand. She was glad even to babble to Clifford. For her fear
of the mining and iron Midlands affected her with a queer
feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
’Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley’s shop,’ she
said.
’Really! Winter would have given you tea.’
’Oh yes, but I daren’t disappoint Miss Bentley.’ Miss
Bentley was a shallow old maid with a rather large nose and
romantic disposition who served tea with a careful intensity
worthy of a sacrament.
’Did she ask after me?’ said Clifford.

Lady Chatterly’s Lover