own life. Only the simple,
superficial fact of living persisted. He was still healthy. He
lived. Therefore he would fill each moment. That had always been
his creed. It was not instinctive easiness: it was the
inevitable outcome of his nature. When he was in the absolute
privacy of his own life, he did as he pleased, unscrupulous,
without any ulterior thought. He believed neither in good nor
evil. Each moment was like a separate little island, isolated
from time, and blank, unconditioned by time.

He lived in a large new house of red brick, standing outside
a mass of homogeneous red-brick dwellings, called Wiggiston.
Wiggiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of
eleven houses on the edge of healthy, half-agricultural country.
Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston
appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings
of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure
ugliness; a grey-black macadamized road, asphalt causeways, held
in between a flat succession of wall, window, and door, a
new-brick channel that began nowhere, and ended nowhere.
Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself
endlessly. Only now and then, in one of the house-windows
vegetables or small groceries were displayed for sale.

In the middle of the town was a large, open, shapeless space,
or market-place, of black trodden earth, surrounded by the same
flat material of dwellings, new red-brick becoming grimy, small
oblong windows, and oblong doors, repeated endlessly, with just,
at one corner, a great and gaudy public house, and somewhere
lost on one of the sides of the square, a large window opaque
and darkish green, which was the post office.

The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers
hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt
pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but
like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the
homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death
rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no
artery, no organic formation. There it lay, like the new
foundations of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a
skin-disease.

Just outside of this, on a little hill, was Tom Brangwen's
big, red-brick house. It looked from the front upon the edge of
the place, a meaningless squalor of ash-pits and closets and
irregular rows of the backs of houses, each with its small
acti