The few miserable trees and bushes on the vague
lands beyond the lane were dripping with water. The sky was low and
heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars
Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to
be not more wet than the rest of the scene. Nothing stirred. Not the
tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey
rhododendron-bush in a front garden below. Every window within sight
had its blind drawn. No smoke rose from any house-chimney, and the
distant industrial smoke on the horizon hung in the lower air, just
under the clouds, undecided and torpid. The wet air was moveless, and
yet she could feel it impinging with its cool, sharp humidity on her
cheek.
The sensation of this contact was delicious. She was surrounded, not
by the slatternly Five Towns landscape and by the wretchedness of the
familiar bedroom, but by the unanswerable, intimidating, inspiring
mystery of life itself. A man came hurrying with a pole out of the
western vista of the lane, and stopped in front of the gas-lamp, and
in an instant the flame was reduced to a little fat worm of blue, and
the man passed swiftly up the lane, looking straight ahead with bent
shoulders, and was gone.
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