Page:Sons and Lovers, 1913, Lawrence.djvu/283

Rh with power. She appeared almost insignificant, drowning her stature in her stoop, as she shrank from the public gaze.

The Castle grounds were very green and fresh. Climbing the precipitous ascent, he laughed and chattered, but she was silent, seeming to brood over something. There was scarcely time to go inside the squat, square building that crowns the bluff of rock. They leaned upon the wall where the cliff runs sheer down to the Park. Below them, in their holes in the sandstone, pigeons preened themselves and cooed softly. Away down upon the boulevard at the foot of the rock, tiny trees stood in their own pools of shadow, and tiny people went scurrying about in almost ludicrous importance.

“You feel as if you could scoop up the folk like tadpoles, and have a handful of them,” he said.

She laughed, answering:

“Yes; it is not necessary to get far off in order to see us proportionately. The trees are much more significant.”

“Bulk only,” he said.

She laughed cynically.

Away beyond the boulevard the thin stripes of the metals showed upon the railway track, whose margin was crowded with little stacks of timber, beside which smoking toy engines fussed. Then the silver string of the canal lay at random among the black heaps. Beyond, the dwellings, very dense on the river flat, looked like black, poisonous herbage, in thick rows and crowded beds, stretching right away, broken now and then by taller plants, right to where the river glistened in a hieroglyph across the country. The steep scarp cliffs across the river looked puny. Great stretches of country, darkened with trees and faintly brightened with corn-land, spread towards the haze, where the hills rose blue beyond grey.

“It is comforting,” said Mrs. Dawes, “to think the town goes no farther. It is only a little sore upon the country yet.”

“A little scab,” Paul said.

She shivered. She loathed the town. Looking drearily across at the country which was forbidden her, her impassive face, pale and hostile, she reminded Paul of one of the bitter, remorseful angels.

“But the town’s all right,” he said; “it’s only temporary. This is the crude, clumsy make-shift we’ve practised on, till we find out what the idea is. The town will come all right.”

The pigeons in the pockets of rock, among the perched bushes, cooed comfortably. To the left the large church of