And yet how powerfully suggestive the glimpses I have had! Down there, on my heath, covered with a shuttle-work of trams, you may get on to a car about four o’clock in the afternoon to pay a visit, and you may observe a handful of silent, formidable men in the car, a greyish-yellowish-black from head to foot. Like Eugene Stratton, they are black everywhere, except the whites of their eyes. You ask yourself what these begrimed creatures that touch nothing without soiling it are doing abroad at four o’clock in the afternoon, seeing that men are not usually unyoked till six.
They have an uncanny air, especially when you reflect that there is not one arm among them that could not stretch you out with one blow. Then you remember that they have been buried in geological strata probably since five o’clock that morning, and that the sky must look strange to them.
Or you may be walking in the appalling outskirts, miles from town halls and free libraries, but miles also from flowers, and you may see a whole procession of these silent men, encrusted with carbon and perspiration, a perfect pilgrimage of them, winding its way over a down where the sparse grass is sooty and the trees are withered. And then you feel that you yourself are the exotic stranger in those regions. But the procession absolutely ignores you. You might not exist. It goes on, absorbed, ruthless, and sinister. Your feeling is that if you got in its path it would tramp right over you. And it passes out of sight.
Around, dotting the moors, are the mining villages, withdrawn, self-centred, where the entire existence of the community is regulated by a single steam-siren, where good fortune and ill-fortune are common, and where the disaster of one is the disaster of all. Little is known of the life of these villages and townlets--known, that is, by people capable of imaginative external sympathetic comprehension. And herein is probably a reason why the mysterious people remain so mysterious. They live physically separated. A large proportion of them never mingle with the general mass. They are not sufficiently seen of surface-men to maintain curiosity concerning them. They keep themselves to themselves, and circumstances so keep them. Only at elections do they seem to impinge in powerful silence on the destinies of the nation.