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. Never before had Rachel actually seen the lamp put out. Never before had she noticed, as she noticed now, that the lamp had a number, an identity--1054. The meek acquiescence of the lamp, and the man's preoccupied haste, seemed to bear some deep significance, which, however, she could not seize. But the aspect of the man afflicted her, she did not know why.
Then a number of other figures, in a long spasmodic procession, passed up the lane after the man, and were gone out of sight. Their heavy boots clacked on the pavement. They wore thick, dirty greyish-black clothes, but no overcoats; small tight caps in their hands, and dark kerchiefs round their necks: about thirty of them in all, colliers on their way to one of the pits on the Moorthorne ridge. They walked quickly, but they did not hurry as their forerunner hurried. Several of them smoked pipes. Though some walked in pairs, none spoke; none looked up or aside. With one man walked stolidly a young woman, her overskirt raised and pulled round her head from the back for a shawl; but even these two did not converse. The procession closed with one or two stragglers. Rachel had never seen these pilgrims before, but she had heard them; and Mrs. Maldon had been acquainted with all their footfalls. They were tragic to Rachel; they infected her with the most recondite horror of existence; they left tragedy floating behind them in the lane like an invisible but oppressive cloud. Their utterly incurious indifference to Rachel in her peignoir at the window was somehow harrowing.
The dank lane and vaporous, stagnant landscape were once more dead and silent, and would for a long time remain so, for though potters begin work early, colliers begin work much earlier, living in a world of customs of their own. At last a thin column of smoke issued magically from a chimney down to the left. Some woman was about; some woman's day had opened within that house. At the thought of that unseen woman in that unknown house Rachel could have cried. She could not remain at the window. She was unhappy; but it was not her woe that overcame her, for if she was unhappy, her unhappiness was nevertheless exquisite. It was the mere realization that men and women lived that rendered her emotions almost insupportable. She felt her youth. She thought, "I am only a girl, and yet my life is ruined already." And even that thought she hugged amorously as though it were beautiful. Amid the full disaster and regret, she was glad to be alive. She could not help exulting in the dreadful moment.