She had never seen
anything like it. She thought it was hell, with the naked, swearing,
fighting people, and the red fires leaping night and day. Nevertheless,
if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to
brave and cross it.
The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, rough and fierce and hard,
frightened her. The women did not look like women, and the children ran
and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with
dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace
in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in
the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and
multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger and death.
She got through it somehow, hiding often from the ferocious youngsters,
and going sleepless rather than lie in those dens of filth; but she
seemed so many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last behind
her,--so many, many years older than when she had sat and spun in the
garden at home.
When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again,
only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to
spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food.
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