He had come
down the clayey incline from the unfinished red bridge to welcome
her, and when the salutations were over they stood still, he
gazing apparently at the horizon and she at the yellow marl round
the edges of his boots. The encounter was as far away from
Sophia's ideal conception as Manchester from Venice.
"So this is the new railway!" said she.
"Yes," said he. "This is your new railway. You can see it better
from the bridge."
"But it's very sludgy up there," she objected with a pout.
"Further on it's quite dry," he reassured her.
From the bridge they had a sudden view of a raw gash in the earth;
and hundreds of men were crawling about in it, busy with minute
operations, like flies in a great wound. There was a continuous
rattle of picks, resembling a muffled shower of hail, and in the
distance a tiny locomotive was leading a procession of tiny
waggons.
"And those are the navvies!" she murmured.
The unspeakable doings of the navvies in the Five Towns had
reached even her: how they drank and swore all day on Sundays, how
their huts and houses were dens of the most appalling infamy, how
they were the curse of a God-fearing and respectable district! She
and Gerald Scales glanced down at these dangerous beasts of prey
in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy
chests.
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