The Rainbow

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Title: The Rainbow
Author: D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Release Date: May 23, 2009 [EBook #28948]
Last updated: December 19, 2019
Language: English
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_Transcriber’s note: a few brief passages found in other editions, but
not in this edition, have been noted as_ [censored material] _as having
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The Rainbow
by D. H. Lawrence
THE
MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY D. H. LAWRENCE
_Random House_ is the publisher of
THE MODERN LIBRARY
BENNETT A. CERF ▪ DONALD S. KLOPFER ▪ ROBERT K. HAAS
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Parkway Printing Company Bound by H. Wolff
TO ELSE
Contents
Chapter I. How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady
Chapter II. They Live at the Marsh
Chapter III. Childhood of Anna Lensky
Chapter IV. Girlhood of Anna Brangwen
Chapter V. Wedding at the Marsh
Chapter VI. Anna Victrix
Chapter VII. The Cathedral
Chapter VIII. The Child
Chapter IX. The Marsh and the Flood
Chapter X. The Widening Circle
Chapter XI. First Love
Chapter XII. Shame
Chapter XIII. The Man’s World
Chapter XIV. The Widening Circle
Chapter XV. The Bitterness of Ecstasy
Chapter XVI. The Rainbow
Chapter I.
HOW TOM BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY
I
The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the
meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees,
separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles away, a
church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town
climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the Brangwens in the
fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at
Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal
land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in
the distance.
There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting
something unknown, about which they were eager. They had that air of
readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy,
the look of an inheritor.
They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves
plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the change in their eyes
from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring
anger; through all the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is
changing.
Living on rich land, on their own land, near to a growing town, they
had forgotten what it was to be in straitened circumstances. They had
never become rich, because there were always children, and the
patrimony was divided every time. But always, at the Marsh, there was
ample.
So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard
because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money.
Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of the last halfpenny,
and instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it
would help to feed the cattle. But heaven and earth was teeming around
them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in
spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws
forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born
on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth,
sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the
daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the
birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were
such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their
furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their
ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like
desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn
away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along
the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the
cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of
the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of
the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of
their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand
on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.
In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray
across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew
cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the house where
the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the
men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and
the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their
blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.
The women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy,
calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese
palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle.
But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of
farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and
the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the
sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.
It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow
to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young
ears of corn wheeling freshly round about; it was enough that they
helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or
broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand. So much
warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood,
earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and
interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged,
their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the
blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of
generation, unable to turn round.
But the woman wanted another form of life than this, something that was
not blood-intimacy. Her house faced out from the farm-buildings and
fields, looked out to the road and the village with church and Hall and
the world beyond. She stood to see the far-off world of cities and
governments and the active scope of man, the magic land to her, where
secrets were made known and desires fulfilled. She faced outwards to
where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the
pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set out to
discover what was beyond, to enlarge their own scope and range and
freedom; whereas the Brangwen men faced inwards to the teeming life of
creation, which poured unresolved into their veins.
Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house towards the
activity of man in the world at large, whilst her husband looked out to
the back at sky and harvest and beast and land, she strained her eyes
to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she
strained to hear how he uttered himself in his conquest, her deepest
desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the
edge of the unknown. She also wanted to know, and to be of the fighting
host.
At home, even so near as Cossethay, was the vicar, who spoke the other,
magic language, and had the other, finer bearing, both of which she
could perceive, but could never attain to. The vicar moved in worlds
beyond where her own menfolk existed. Did she not know her own menfolk:
fresh, slow, full-built men, masterful enough, but easy, native to the
earth, lacking outwardness and range of motion. Whereas the vicar, dark
and dry and small beside her husband, had yet a quickness and a range
of being that made Brangwen, in his large geniality, seem dull and
local. She knew her husband. But in the vicar’s nature was that which
passed beyond her knowledge. As Brangwen had power over the cattle so
the vicar had power over her husband. What was it in the vicar, that
raised him above the common men as man is raised above the beast? She
craved to know. She craved to achieve this higher being, if not in
herself, then in her children. That which makes a man strong even if he
be little and frail in body, just as any man is little and frail beside
a bull, and yet stronger than the bull, what was it? It was not money
nor power nor position. What power had the vicar over Tom
Brangwen—none. Yet strip them and set them on a desert island, and the
vicar was the master. His soul was master of the other man’s. And
why—why? She decided it was a question of knowledge.
The curate was poor enough, and not very efficacious as a man, either,
yet he took rank with those others, the superior. She watched his
children being born, she saw them running as tiny things beside their
mother. And already they were separate from her own children, distinct.
Why were her own children marked below the others? Why should the
curate’s children inevitably take precedence over her children, why
should dominance be given them from the start? It was not money, nor
even class. It was education and experience, she decided.
It was this, this education, this higher form of being, that the mother
wished to give to her children, so that they too could live the supreme
life on earth. For her children, at least the children of her heart,
had the complete nature that should take place in equality with the
living, vital people in the land, not be left behind obscure among the
labourers. Why must they remain obscured and stifled all their lives,
why should they suffer from lack of freedom to move? How should they
learn the entry into the finer, more vivid circle of life?
Her imagination was fired by the squire’s lady at Shelly Hall, who came
to church at Cossethay with her little children, girls in tidy capes of
beaver fur, and smart little hats, herself like a winter rose, so fair
and delicate. So fair, so fine in mould, so luminous, what was it that
Mrs. Hardy felt which she, Mrs. Brangwen, did not feel? How was Mrs.
Hardy’s nature different from that of the common women of Cossethay, in
what was it beyond them? All the women of Cossethay talked eagerly
about Mrs. Hardy, of her husband, her children, her guests, her dress,
of her servants and her housekeeping. The lady of the Hall was the
living dream of their lives, her life was the epic that inspired their
lives. In her they lived imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband
who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her
friend, member of Parliament for the division, they had their own
Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe
and the swine and the endless web.
So the women of the village were fortunate. They saw themselves in the
lady of the manor, each of them lived her own fulfilment of the life of
Mrs. Hardy. And the Brangwen wife of the Marsh aspired beyond herself,
towards the further life of the finer woman, towards the extended being
she revealed, as a traveller in his self-contained manner reveals
far-off countries present in himself. But why should a knowledge of
far-off countries make a man’s life a different thing, finer, bigger?
And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve him? It
is the same thing.
The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the vicar and
Lord William, lean, eager men with strange movements, men who had
command of the further fields, whose lives ranged over a great extent.
Ah, it was something very desirable to know, this touch of the
wonderful men who had the power of thought and comprehension. The women
of the village might be much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and more at their
ease with him, yet if their lives had been robbed of the vicar, and of
Lord William, the leading shoot would have been cut away from them,
they would have been heavy and uninspired and inclined to hate. So long
as the wonder of the beyond was before them, they could get along,
whatever their lot. And Mrs. Hardy, and the vicar, and Lord William,
these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and were visible to the eyes
of Cossethay in their motion.
II
About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh
Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A
high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which
passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a
heavy bridge.
So the Marsh was shut off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small
valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of
Cossethay.
The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across
their land. Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the
other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down
the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was
complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing
supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen.
Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of
the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound along
in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-trees past the
Brangwens’ garden gate.
But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there,
through the dark archway of the canal’s square aqueduct, was a colliery
spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses
plastered on the valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill
of the town.
The homestead was just on the safe side of civilization, outside the
gate. The house stood bare from the road, approached by a straight
garden path, along which at spring the daffodils were thick in green
and yellow. At the sides of the house were bushes of lilac and
guelder-rose and privet, entirely hiding the farm buildings behind.
At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of
two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest
wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing
its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the
canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that
occasionally a man’s figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing
horse traversed the sky.
At first the Brangwens were astonished by all this commotion around
them. The building of a canal across their land made them strangers in
their own place, this raw bank of earth shutting them off disconcerted
them. As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar
embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at
first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain. Then the shrill whistle
of the trains re-echoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure,
announcing the far-off come near and imminent.
As they drove home from town, the farmers of the land met the blackened
colliers trooping from the pit-mouth. As they gathered the harvest, the
west wind brought a faint, sulphurous smell of pit-refuse burning. As
they pulled the turnips in November, the sharp
clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of empty trucks shunting on the line,
vibrated in their hearts with the fact of other activity going on
beyond them.
The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from Heanor, a
daughter of the “Black Horse”. She was a slim, pretty, dark woman,
quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did
not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her
manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long
lamentable complaints, when she raised her voice against her husband in
particular and against everybody else after him, only made those who
heard her wonder and feel affectionately towards her, even while they
were irritated and impatient with her. She railed long and loud about
her husband, but always with a balanced, easy-flying voice and a quaint
manner of speech that warmed his belly with pride and male triumph
while he scowled with mortification at the things she said.
Consequently Brangwen himself had a humorous puckering at the eyes, a
sort of fat laugh, very quiet and full, and he was spoilt like a lord
of creation. He calmly did as he liked, laughed at their railing,
excused himself in a teasing tone that she loved, followed his natural
inclinations, and sometimes, pricked too near the quick, frightened and
broke her by a deep, tense fury which seemed to fix on him and hold him
for days, and which she would give anything to placate in him. They
were two very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of
each other, yet living in their separate ways from one root.
There were four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran away early
to sea, and did not come back. After this the mother was more the node
and centre of attraction in the home. The second boy, Alfred, whom the
mother admired most, was the most reserved. He was sent to school in
Ilkeston and made some progress. But in spite of his dogged, yearning
effort, he could not get beyond the rudiments of anything, save of
drawing. At this, in which he had some power, he worked, as if it were
his hope. After much grumbling and savage rebellion against everything,
after much trying and shifting about, when his father was incensed
against him and his mother almost despairing, he became a draughtsman
in a lace-factory in Nottingham.
He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad Derbyshire
accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work and to his town
position, making good designs, and becoming fairly well-off. But at
drawing, his hand swung naturally in big, bold lines, rather lax, so
that it was cruel for him to pedgill away at the lace designing,
working from the tiny squares of his paper, counting and plotting and
niggling. He did it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels
within him, adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost. And he
came back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly man.
He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some social
superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his dogged fashion,
with a passion for outward refinement in the household, mad when
anything clumsy or gross occurred. Later, when his three children were
growing up, and he seemed a staid, almost middle-aged man, he turned
after strange women, and became a silent, inscrutable follower of
forbidden pleasure, neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a
qualm.
Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything to do
with learning. From the first he hung round the slaughter-house which
stood away in the third yard at the back of the farm. The Brangwens had
always killed their own meat, and supplied the neighbourhood. Out of
this grew a regular butcher’s business in connection with the farm.
As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood that ran
across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the crew-yard, by the
sight of the man carrying across to the meat-shed a huge side of beef,
with the kidneys showing, embedded in their heavy laps of fat.
He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular features
something like a later Roman youth. He was more easily excitable, more
readily carried away than the rest, weaker in character. At eighteen he
married a little factory girl, a pale, plump, quiet thing with sly eyes
and a wheedling voice, who insinuated herself into him and bore him a
child every year and made a fool of him. When he had taken over the
butchery business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of
contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to be found
in his public house blathering away as if he knew everything, when in
reality he was a noisy fool.
Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a
time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her
numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.
The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his brothers, so had
belonged rather to the company of his sisters. He was his mother’s
favourite. She roused herself to determination, and sent him forcibly
away to a grammar-school in Derby when he was twelve years old. He did
not want to go, and his father would have given way, but Mrs. Brangwen
had set her heart on it. Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body,
with full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and
when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the family
failed before her.
So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first. He believed
his mother was right in decreeing school for him, but he knew she was
only right because she would not acknowledge his constitution. He knew,
with a child’s deep, instinctive foreknowledge of what is going to
happen to him, that he would cut a sorry figure at school. But he took
the infliction as inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature,
as if his being were wrong, and his mother’s conception right. If he
could have been what he liked, he would have been that which his mother
fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been clever, and
capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her aspiration for him,
therefore he knew it as the true aspiration for any boy. But you can’t
make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as he told his mother very early,
with regard to himself; much to her mortification and chagrin.
When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his physical
inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale and ghastly in
his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in what he had to learn.
But it was no good. If he beat down his first repulsion, and got like a
suicide to the stuff, he went very little further. He could not learn
deliberately. His mind simply did not work.
In feeling he was developed, sensitive to the atmosphere around him,
brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. So he had
a low opinion of himself. He knew his own limitation. He knew that his
brain was a slow hopeless good-for-nothing. So he was humble.
But at the same time his feelings were more discriminating than those
of most of the boys, and he was confused. He was more sensuously
developed, more refined in instinct than they. For their mechanical
stupidity he hated them, and suffered cruel contempt for them. But when
it came to mental things, then he was at a disadvantage. He was at
their mercy. He was a fool. He had not the power to controvert even the
most stupid argument, so that he was forced to admit things he did not
in the least believe. And having admitted them, he did not know whether
he believed them or not; he rather thought he did.
But he loved anyone who could convey enlightenment to him through
feeling. He sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher of literature
read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, or Shelley’s “Ode to
the West Wind”. His lips parted, his eyes filled with a strained,
almost suffering light. And the teacher read on, fired by his power
over the boy. Tom Brangwen was moved by this experience beyond all
calculation, he almost dreaded it, it was so deep. But when, almost
secretly and shamefully, he came to take the book himself, and began
the words “Oh wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being,” the very
fact of the print caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over
his skin, the blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting
passion of rage and incompetence. He threw the book down and walked
over it and went out to the cricket field. And he hated books as if
they were his enemies. He hated them worse than ever he hated any
person.
He could not voluntarily control his attention. His mind had no fixed
habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere to start from.
For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known in himself, that he
could apply to learning. He did not know how to begin. Therefore he was
helpless when it came to deliberate understanding or deliberate
learning.
He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him, he was
helpless as an idiot. So that he felt that the ground was never sure
under his feet, he was nowhere. His final downfall was his complete
inability to attend to a question put without suggestion. If he had to
write a formal composition on the Army, he did at last learn to repeat
the few facts he knew: “You can join the army at eighteen. You have to
be over five foot eight.” But he had all the time a living conviction
that this was a dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt.
Then he reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched
out what he had written, made an agonized effort to think of something
in the real composition style, failed, became sullen with rage and
humiliation, put the pen down and would have been torn to pieces rather
than attempt to write another word.
He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar School got used
to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at learning, but
respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only one narrow,
domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue
eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a horrid scene, when the boy
laid open the master’s head with a slate, and then things went on as
before. The teacher got little sympathy. But Brangwen winced and could
not bear to think of the deed, not even long after, when he was a grown
man.
He was glad to leave school. It had not been unpleasant, he had enjoyed
the companionship of the other youths, or had thought he enjoyed it,
the time had passed very quickly, in endless activity. But he knew all
the time that he was in an ignominious position, in this place of
learning. He was aware of failure all the while, of incapacity. But he
was too healthy and sanguine to be wretched, he was too much alive. Yet
his soul was wretched almost to hopelessness.
He had loved one warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a consumptive
type. The two had had an almost classic friendship, David and Jonathan,
wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the server. But he had never felt
equal with his friend, because the other’s mind outpaced his, and left
him ashamed, far in the rear. So the two boys went at once apart on
leaving school. But Brangwen always remembered his friend that had
been, kept him as a sort of light, a fine experience to remember.
Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his own
again. “I have got a turnip on my shoulders, let me stick to th’
fallow,” he said to his exasperated mother. He had too low an opinion
of himself. But he went about at his work on the farm gladly enough,
glad of the active labour and the smell of the land again, having youth
and vigour and humour, and a comic wit, having the will and the power
to forget his own shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional
rages, but usually on good terms with everybody and everything.
When he was seventeen, his father fell from a stack and broke his neck.
Then the mother and son and daughter lived on at the farm, interrupted
by occasional loud-mouthed lamenting, jealous-spirited visitations from
the butcher Frank, who had a grievance against the world, which he felt
was always giving him less than his dues. Frank was particularly
against the young Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom returned
the hatred violently, his face growing red and his blue eyes staring.
Effie sided with Tom against Frank. But when Alfred came, from
Nottingham, heavy jowled and lowering, speaking very little, but
treating those at home with some contempt, Effie and the mother sided
with him and put Tom into the shade. It irritated the youth that his
elder brother should be made something of a hero by the women, just
because he didn’t live at home and was a lace-designer and almost a
gentleman. But Alfred was something of a Prometheus Bound, so the women
loved him. Tom came later to understand his brother better.
As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of the farm
devolved on to him. He was only eighteen, but he was quite capable of
doing everything his father had done. And of course, his mother
remained as centre to the house.
The young man grew up very fresh and alert, with zest for every moment
of life. He worked and rode and drove to market, he went out with
companions and got tipsy occasionally and played skittles and went to
the little travelling theatres. Once, when he was drunk at a public
house, he went upstairs with a prostitute who seduced him. He was then
nineteen.
The thing was something of a shock to him. In the close intimacy of the
farm kitchen, the woman occupied the supreme position. The men deferred
to her in the house, on all household points, on all points of morality
and behaviour. The woman was the symbol for that further life which
comprised religion and love and morality. The men placed in her hands
their own conscience, they said to her “Be my conscience-keeper, be the
angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming.” And the
woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly in her, receiving
her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger, rebelling and
storming, but never for a moment really escaping in their own souls
from her prerogative. They depended on her for their stability. Without
her, they would have felt like straws in the wind, to be blown hither
and thither at random. She was the anchor and the security, she was the
restraining hand of God, at times highly to be execrated.
Now when Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, a youth fresh like a plant, rooted
in his mother and his sister, found that he had lain with a prostitute
woman in a common public house, he was very much startled. For him
there was until that time only one kind of woman—his mother and sister.
But now? He did not know what to feel. There was a slight wonder, a
pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash and of cold fear
lest this was all that would happen, lest his relations with woman were
going to be no more than this nothingness; there was a slight sense of
shame before the prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his
inefficiency; there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of her;
there was a moment of paralyzed horror when he felt he might have taken
a disease from her; and upon all this startled tumult of emotion, was
laid the steadying hand of common sense, which said it did not matter
very much, so long as he had no disease. He soon recovered balance, and
really it did not matter so very much.
But it had shocked him, and put a mistrust into his heart, and
emphasized his fear of what was within himself. He was, however, in a
few days going about again in his own careless, happy-go-lucky fashion,
his blue eyes just as clear and honest as ever, his face just as fresh,
his appetite just as keen.
Or apparently so. He had, in fact, lost some of his buoyant confidence,
and doubt hindered his outgoing.
For some time after this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank,
more backward from companionship. The disillusion of his first carnal
contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a
woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious
impulses, put a bit in his mouth. He had something to lose which he was
afraid of losing, which he was not sure even of possessing. This first
affair did not matter much: but the business of love was, at the bottom
of his soul, the most serious and terrifying of all to him.
He was tormented now with sex desire, his imagination reverted always
to lustful scenes. But what really prevented his returning to a loose
woman, over and above the natural squeamishness, was the recollection
of the paucity of the last experience. It had been so nothing, so
dribbling and functional, that he was ashamed to expose himself to the
risk of a repetition of it.
He made a strong, instinctive fight to retain his native cheerfulness
unimpaired. He had naturally a plentiful stream of life and humour, a
sense of sufficiency and exuberance, giving ease. But now it tended to
cause tension. A strained light came into his eyes, he had a slight
knitting of the brows. His boisterous humour gave place to lowering
silences, and days passed by in a sort of suspense.
He did not know there was any difference in him, exactly; for the most
part he was filled with slow anger and resentment. But he knew he was
always thinking of women, or a woman, day in, day out, and that
infuriated him. He could not get free: and he was ashamed. He had one
or two sweethearts, starting with them in the hope of speedy
development. But when he had a nice girl, he found that he was
incapable of pushing the desired development. The very presence of the
girl beside him made it impossible. He could not think of her like
that, he could not think of her actual nakedness. She was a girl and he
liked her, and dreaded violently even the thought of uncovering her. He
knew that, in these last issues of nakedness, he did not exist to her
nor she to him. Again, if he had a loose girl, and things began to
develop, she offended him so deeply all the time, that he never knew
whether he was going to get away from her as quickly as possible, or
whether he were going to take her out of inflamed necessity. Again he
learnt his lesson: if he took her it was a paucity which he was forced
to despise. He did not despise himself nor the girl. But he despised
the net result in him of the experience—he despised it deeply and
bitterly.
Then, when he was twenty-three, his mother died, and he was left at
home with Effie. His mother’s death was another blow out of the dark.
He could not understand it, he knew it was no good his trying. One had
to submit to these unforeseen blows that come unawares and leave a
bruise that remains and hurts whenever it is touched. He began to be
afraid of all that which was up against him. He had loved his mother.
After this, Effie and he quarrelled fiercely. They meant a very great
deal to each other, but they were both under a strange, unnatural
tension. He stayed out of the house as much as possible. He got a
special corner for himself at the “Red Lion” at Cossethay, and became a
usual figure by the fire, a fresh, fair young fellow with heavy limbs
and head held back, mostly silent, though alert and attentive, very
hearty in his greeting of everybody he knew, shy of strangers. He
teased all the women, who liked him extremely, and he was very
attentive to the talk of the men, very respectful.
To drink made him quickly flush very red in the face, and brought out
the look of self-consciousness and unsureness, almost bewilderment, in
his blue eyes. When he came home in this state of tipsy confusion his
sister hated him and abused him, and he went off his head, like a mad
bull with rage.
He had still another turn with a light-o’-love. One Whitsuntide he went
a jaunt with two other young fellows, on horseback, to Matlock and
thence to Bakewell. Matlock was at that time just becoming a famous
beauty-spot, visited from Manchester and from the Staffordshire towns.
In the hotel where the young men took lunch, were two girls, and the
parties struck up a friendship.
The Miss who made up to Tom Brangwen, then twenty-four years old, was a
handsome, reckless girl neglected for an afternoon by the man who had
brought her out. She saw Brangwen and liked him, as all women did, for
his warmth and his generous nature, and for the innate delicacy in him.
But she saw he was one who would have to be brought to the scratch.
However, she was roused and unsatisfied and made mischievous, so she
dared anything. It would be an easy interlude, restoring her pride.
She was a handsome girl with a bosom, and dark hair and blue eyes, a
girl full of easy laughter, flushed from the sun, inclined to wipe her
laughing face in a very natural and taking manner.
Brangwen was in a state of wonder. He treated her with his chaffing
deference, roused, but very unsure of himself, afraid to death of being
too forward, ashamed lest he might be thought backward, mad with desire
yet restrained by instinctive regard for women from making any definite
approach, feeling all the while that his attitude was ridiculous, and
flushing deep with confusion. She, however, became hard and daring as
he became confused, it amused her to see him come on.
“When must you get back?” she asked.
“I’m not particular,” he said.
There the conversation again broke down.
Brangwen’s companions were ready to go on.
“Art commin’, Tom,” they called, “or art for stoppin’?”
“Ay, I’m commin’,” he replied, rising reluctantly, an angry sense of
futility and disappointment spreading over him.
He met the full, almost taunting look of the girl, and he trembled with
unusedness.
“Shall you come an’ have a look at my mare,” he said to her, with his
hearty kindliness that was now shaken with trepidation.
“Oh, I should like to,” she said, rising.
And she followed him, his rather sloping shoulders and his cloth
riding-gaiters, out of the room. The young men got their own horses out
of the stable.
“Can you ride?” Brangwen asked her.
“I should like to if I could—I have never tried,” she said.
“Come then, an’ have a try,” he said.
And he lifted her, he blushing, she laughing, into the saddle.
“I s’ll slip off—it’s not a lady’s saddle,” she cried.
“Hold yer tight,” he said, and he led her out of the hotel gate.
The girl sat very insecurely, clinging fast. He put a hand on her
waist, to support her. And he held her closely, he clasped her as in an
embrace, he was weak with desire as he strode beside her.
The horse walked by the river.
“You want to sit straddle-leg,” he said to her.
“I know I do,” she said.
It was the time of very full skirts. She managed to get astride the
horse, quite decently, showing an intent concern for covering her
pretty leg.
“It’s a lot’s better this road,” she said, looking down at him.
“Ay, it is,” he said, feeling the marrow melt in his bones from the
look in her eyes. “I dunno why they have that side-saddle business,
twistin’ a woman in two.”
“Should us leave you then—you seem to be fixed up there?” called
Brangwen’s companions from the road.
He went red with anger.
“Ay—don’t worry,” he called back.
“How long are yer stoppin’?” they asked.
“Not after Christmas,” he said.
And the girl gave a tinkling peal of laughter.
“All right—by-bye!” called his friends.
And they cantered off, leaving him very flushed, trying to be quite
normal with the girl. But presently he had gone back to the hotel and
given his horse into the charge of an ostler and had gone off with the
girl into the woods, not quite knowing where he was or what he was
doing. His heart thumped and he thought it the most glorious adventure,
and was mad with desire for the girl.
Afterwards he glowed with pleasure. By Jove, but that was something
like! He [stayed the afternoon with the girl, and] wanted to stay the
night. She, however, told him this was impossible: her own man would be
back by dark, and she must be with him. He, Brangwen, must not let on
that there had been anything between them.
She gave him an intimate smile, which made him feel confused and
gratified.
He could not tear himself away, though he had promised not to interfere
with the girl. He stayed on at the hotel over night. He saw the other
fellow at the evening meal: a small, middle-aged man with iron-grey
hair and a curious face, like a monkey’s, but interesting, in its way
almost beautiful. Brangwen guessed that he was a foreigner. He was in
company with another, an Englishman, dry and hard. The four sat at
table, two men and two women. Brangwen watched with all his eyes.
He saw how the foreigner treated the women with courteous contempt, as
if they were pleasing animals. Brangwen’s girl had put on a ladylike
manner, but her voice betrayed her. She wanted to win back her man.
When dessert came on, however, the little foreigner turned round from
his table and calmly surveyed the room, like one unoccupied. Brangwen
marvelled over the cold, animal intelligence of the face. The brown
eyes were round, showing all the brown pupil, like a monkey’s, and just
calmly looking, perceiving the other person without referring to him at
all. They rested on Brangwen. The latter marvelled at the old face
turned round on him, looking at him without considering it necessary to
know him at all. The eyebrows of the round, perceiving, but unconcerned
eyes were rather high up, with slight wrinkles above them, just as a
monkey’s had. It was an old, ageless face.
The man was most amazingly a gentleman all the time, an aristocrat.
Brangwen stared fascinated. The girl was pushing her crumbs about on
the cloth, uneasily, flushed and angry.
As Brangwen sat motionless in the hall afterwards, too much moved and
lost to know what to do, the little stranger came up to him with a
beautiful smile and manner, offering a cigarette and saying:
“Will you smoke?”
Brangwen never smoked cigarettes, yet he took the one offered, fumbling
painfully with thick fingers, blushing to the roots of his hair. Then
he looked with his warm blue eyes at the almost sardonic, lidded eyes
of the foreigner. The latter sat down beside him, and they began to
talk, chiefly of horses.
Brangwen loved the other man for his exquisite graciousness, for his
tact and reserve, and for his ageless, monkey-like self-surety. They
talked of horses, and of Derbyshire, and of farming. The stranger
warmed to the young fellow with real warmth, and Brangwen was excited.
He was transported at meeting this odd, middle-aged, dry-skinned man,
personally. The talk was pleasant, but that did not matter so much. It
was the gracious manner, the fine contact that was all.
They talked a long while together, Brangwen flushing like a girl when
the other did not understand his idiom. Then they said good night, and
shook hands. Again the foreigner bowed and repeated his good night.
“Good night, and bon voyage.”
Then he turned to the stairs.
Brangwen went up to his room and lay staring out at the stars of the
summer night, his whole being in a whirl. What was it all? There was a
life so different from what he knew it. What was there outside his
knowledge, how much? What was this that he had touched? What was he in
this new influence? What did everything mean? Where was life, in that
which he knew or all outside him?
He fell asleep, and in the morning had ridden away before any other
visitors were awake. He shrank from seeing any of them again, in the
morning.
His mind was one big excitement. The girl and the foreigner: he knew
neither of their names. Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his
nature, and he would be burned out of cover. Of the two experiences,
perhaps the meeting with the foreigner was the more significant. But
the girl—he had not settled about the girl.
He did not know. He had to leave it there, as it was. He could not sum
up his experiences.
The result of these encounters was, that he dreamed day and night,
absorbedly, of a voluptuous woman and of the meeting with a small,
withered foreigner of ancient breeding. No sooner was his mind free, no
sooner had he left his own companions, than he began to imagine an
intimacy with fine-textured, subtle-mannered people such as the
foreigner at Matlock, and amidst this subtle intimacy was always the
satisfaction of a voluptuous woman.
He went about absorbed in the interest and the actuality of this dream.
His eyes glowed, he walked with his head up, full of the exquisite
pleasure of aristocratic subtlety and grace, tormented with the desire
for the girl.
Then gradually the glow began to fade, and the cold material of his
customary life to show through. He resented it. Was he cheated in his
illusion? He balked the mean enclosure of reality, stood stubbornly
like a bull at a gate, refusing to re-enter the well-known round of his
own life.
He drank more than usual to keep up the glow. But it faded more and
more for all that. He set his teeth at the commonplace, to which he
would not submit. It resolved itself starkly before him, for all that.
He wanted to marry, to get settled somehow, to get out of the quandary
he found himself in. But how? He felt unable to move his limbs. He had
seen a little creature caught in bird-lime, and the sight was a
nightmare to him. He began to feel mad with the rage of impotency.
He wanted something to get hold of, to pull himself out. But there was
nothing. Steadfastly he looked at the young women, to find a one he
could marry. But not one of them did he want. And he knew that the idea
of a life among such people as the foreigner was ridiculous.
Yet he dreamed of it, and stuck to his dreams, and would not have the
reality of Cossethay and Ilkeston. There he sat stubbornly in his
corner at the “Red Lion”, smoking and musing and occasionally lifting
his beer-pot, and saying nothing, for all the world like a gorping
farm-labourer, as he said himself.
Then a fever of restless anger came upon him. He wanted to go
away—right away. He dreamed of foreign parts. But somehow he had no
contact with them. And it was a very strong root which held him to the
Marsh, to his own house and land.
Then Effie got married, and he was left in the house with only Tilly,
the cross-eyed woman-servant who had been with them for fifteen years.
He felt things coming to a close. All the time, he had held himself
stubbornly resistant to the action of the commonplace unreality which
wanted to absorb him. But now he had to do something.
He was by nature temperate. Being sensitive and emotional, his nausea
prevented him from drinking too much.
But, in futile anger, with the greatest of determination and apparent
good humour, he began to drink in order to get drunk. “Damn it,” he
said to himself, “you must have it one road or another—you can’t hitch
your horse to the shadow of a gate-post—if you’ve got legs you’ve got
to rise off your backside some time or other.”
So he rose and went down to Ilkeston, rather awkwardly took his place
among a gang of young bloods, stood drinks to the company, and
discovered he could carry it off quite well. He had an idea that
everybody in the room was a man after his own heart, that everything
was glorious, everything was perfect. When somebody in alarm told him
his coat pocket was on fire, he could only beam from a red, blissful
face and say “Iss-all-ri-ight—iss-al’-ri-ight—it’s a’ right—let it be,
let it be——” and he laughed with pleasure, and was rather indignant
that the others should think it unnatural for his coat pocket to
burn:—it was the happiest and most natural thing in the world—what?
He went home talking to himself and to the moon, that was very high and
small, stumbling at the flashes of moonlight from the puddles at his
feet, wondering What the Hanover! then laughing confidently to the
moon, assuring her this was first class, this was.
In the morning he woke up and thought about it, and for the first time
in his life, knew what it was to feel really acutely irritable, in a
misery of real bad temper. After bawling and snarling at Tilly, he took
himself off for very shame, to be alone. And looking at the ashen
fields and the putty roads, he wondered what in the name of Hell he
could do to get out of this prickly sense of disgust and physical
repulsion. And he knew that this was the result of his glorious
evening.
And his stomach did not want any more brandy. He went doggedly across
the fields with his terrier, and looked at everything with a jaundiced
eye.
The next evening found him back again in his place at the “Red Lion”,
moderate and decent. There he sat and stubbornly waited for what would
happen next.
Did he, or did he not believe that he belonged to this world of
Cossethay and Ilkeston? There was nothing in it he wanted. Yet could he
ever get out of it? Was there anything in himself that would carry him
out of it? Or was he a dunderheaded baby, not man enough to be like the
other young fellows who drank a good deal and wenched a little without
any question, and were satisfied.
He went on stubbornly for a time. Then the strain became too great for
him. A hot, accumulated consciousness was always awake in his chest,
his wrists felt swelled and quivering, his mind became full of lustful
images, his eyes seemed blood-flushed. He fought with himself
furiously, to remain normal. He did not seek any woman. He just went on
as if he were normal. Till he must either take some action or beat his
head against the wall.
Then he went deliberately to Ilkeston, in silence, intent and beaten.
He drank to get drunk. He gulped down the brandy, and more brandy, till
his face became pale, his eyes burning. And still he could not get
free. He went to sleep in drunken unconsciousness, woke up at four
o’clock in the morning and continued drinking. He _would_ get free.
Gradually the tension in him began to relax. He began to feel happy.
His riveted silence was unfastened, he began to talk and babble. He was
happy and at one with all the world, he was united with all flesh in a
hot blood-relationship. So, after three days of incessant
brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had
achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the
end of youth’s most passionate desire. But he had achieved his
satisfaction by obliterating his own individuality, that which it
depended on his manhood to preserve and develop.
So he became a bout-drinker, having at intervals these bouts of three
or four days of brandy-drinking, when he was drunk for the whole time.
He did not think about it. A deep resentment burned in him. He kept
aloof from any women, antagonistic.
When he was twenty-eight, a thick-limbed, stiff, fair man with fresh
complexion, and blue eyes staring very straight ahead, he was coming
one day down from Cossethay with a load of seed out of Nottingham. It
was a time when he was getting ready for another bout of drinking, so
he stared fixedly before him, watchful yet absorbed, seeing everything
and aware of nothing, coiled in himself. It was early in the year.
He walked steadily beside the horse, the load clanked behind as the
hill descended steeper. The road curved down-hill before him, under
banks and hedges, seen only for a few yards ahead.
Slowly turning the curve at the steepest part of the slope, his horse
britching between the shafts, he saw a woman approaching. But he was
thinking for the moment of the horse.
Then he turned to look at her. She was dressed in black, was apparently
rather small and slight, beneath her long black cloak, and she wore a
black bonnet. She walked hastily, as if unseeing, her head rather
forward. It was her curious, absorbed, flitting motion, as if she were
passing unseen by everybody, that first arrested him.
She had heard the cart, and looked up. Her face was pale and clear, she
had thick dark eyebrows and a wide mouth, curiously held. He saw her
face clearly, as if by a light in the air. He saw her face so
distinctly, that he ceased to coil on himself, and was suspended.
“That’s her,” he said involuntarily. As the cart passed by, splashing
through the thin mud, she stood back against the bank. Then, as he
walked still beside his britching horse, his eyes met hers. He looked
quickly away, pressing back his head, a pain of joy running through
him. He could not bear to think of anything.
He turned round at the last moment. He saw her bonnet, her shape in the
black cloak, the movement as she walked. Then she was gone round the
bend.
She had passed by. He felt as if he were walking again in a far world,
not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality. He went on, quiet,
suspended, rarefied. He could not bear to think or to speak, nor make
any sound or sign, nor change his fixed motion. He could scarcely bear
to think of her face. He moved within the knowledge of her, in the
world that was beyond reality.
The feeling that they had exchanged recognition possessed him like a
madness, like a torment. How could he be sure, what confirmation had
he? The doubt was like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness,
annihilating. He kept within his breast the will to surety. They had
exchanged recognition.
He walked about in this state for the next few days. And then again
like a mist it began to break to let through the common, barren world.
He was very gentle with man and beast, but he dreaded the starkness of
disillusion cropping through again.
As he was standing with his back to the fire after dinner a few days
later, he saw the woman passing. He wanted to know that she knew him,
that she was aware. He wanted it said that there was something between
them. So he stood anxiously watching, looking at her as she went down
the road. He called to Tilly.
“Who might that be?” he asked.
Tilly, the cross-eyed woman of forty, who adored him, ran gladly to the
window to look. She was glad when he asked her for anything. She craned
her head over the short curtain, the little tight knob of her black
hair sticking out pathetically as she bobbed about.
“Oh why”—she lifted her head and peered with her twisted, keen brown
eyes—“why, you know who it is—it’s her from th’ vicarage—you know—”
“_How_ do I know, you hen-bird,” he shouted.
Tilly blushed and drew her neck in and looked at him with her
squinting, sharp, almost reproachful look.
“Why you do—it’s the new housekeeper.”
“Ay—an’ what by that?”
“Well, an’ _what_ by that?” rejoined the indignant Tilly.
“She’s a woman, isn’t she, housekeeper or no housekeeper? She’s got
more to her than that! Who is she—she’s got a name?”
“Well, if she has, _I_ don’t know,” retorted Tilly, not to be badgered
by this lad who had grown up into a man.
“What’s her name?” he asked, more gently.
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you,” replied Tilly, on her dignity.
“An’ is that all as you’ve gathered, as she’s housekeeping at the
vicarage?”
“I’ve ’eered mention of ’er name, but I couldn’t remember it for my
life.”
“Why, yer riddle-skulled woman o’ nonsense, what have you got a head
for?”
“For what other folks ’as got theirs for,” retorted Tilly, who loved
nothing more than these tilts when he would call her names.
There was a lull.
“I don’t believe as anybody could keep it in their head,” the
woman-servant continued, tentatively.
“What?” he asked.
“Why, ’er name.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s fra some foreign parts or other.”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s all I do know, as she is.”
“An’ wheer do you reckon she’s from, then?”
“I don’t know. They do say as she hails fra th’ Pole. I don’t know,”
Tilly hastened to add, knowing he would attack her.
“Fra th’ Pole, why do _you_ hail fra th’ Pole? Who set up that
menagerie confabulation?”
“That’s what they say—I don’t know——”
“Who says?”
“Mrs. Bentley says as she’s fra th’ Pole—else she is a Pole, or
summat.”
Tilly was only afraid she was landing herself deeper now.
“Who says she’s a Pole?”
“They all say so.”
“Then what’s brought her to these parts?”
“I couldn’t tell you. She’s got a little girl with her.”
“Got a little girl with her?”
“Of three or four, with a head like a fuzz-ball.”
“Black?”
“White—fair as can be, an’ all of a fuzz.”
“Is there a father, then?”
“Not to my knowledge. I don’t know.”
“What brought her here?”
“I couldn’t say, without th’ vicar axed her.”
“Is the child her child?”
“I s’d think so—they say so.”
“Who told you about her?”
“Why, Lizzie—a-Monday—we seed her goin’ past.”
“You’d have to be rattling your tongues if anything went past.”
Brangwen stood musing. That evening he went up to Cossethay to the “Red
Lion”, half with the intention of hearing more.
She was the widow of a Polish doctor, he gathered. Her husband had
died, a refugee, in London. She spoke a bit foreign-like, but you could
easily make out what she said. She had one little girl named Anna.
Lensky was the woman’s name, Mrs. Lensky.
Brangwen felt that here was the unreality established at last. He felt
also a curious certainty about her, as if she were destined to him. It
was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.
A swift change had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new
creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence. Things had all
been stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before. Now they were
actualities that he could handle.
He dared scarcely think of the woman. He was afraid. Only all the time
he was aware of her presence not far off, he lived in her. But he dared
not know her, even acquaint himself with her by thinking of her.
One day he met her walking along the road with her little girl. It was
a child with a face like a bud of apple-blossom, and glistening fair
hair like thistle-down sticking out in straight, wild, flamy pieces,
and very dark eyes. The child clung jealously to her mother’s side when
he looked at her, staring with resentful black eyes. But the mother
glanced at him again, almost vacantly. And the very vacancy of her look
inflamed him. She had wide grey-brown eyes with very dark, fathomless
pupils. He felt the fine flame running under his skin, as if all his
veins had caught fire on the surface. And he went on walking without
knowledge.
It was coming, he knew, his fate. The world was submitting to its
transformation. He made no move: it would come, what would come.
When his sister Effie came to the Marsh for a week, he went with her
for once to church. In the tiny place, with its mere dozen pews, he sat
not far from the stranger. There was a fineness about her, a poignancy
about the way she sat and held her head lifted. She was strange, from
far off, yet so intimate. She was from far away, a presence, so close
to his soul. She was not really there, sitting in Cossethay church
beside her little girl. She was not living the apparent life of her
days. She belonged to somewhere else. He felt it poignantly, as
something real and natural. But a pang of fear for his own concrete
life, that was only Cossethay, hurt him, and gave him misgiving.
Her thick dark brows almost met above her irregular nose, she had a
wide, rather thick mouth. But her face was lifted to another world of
life: not to heaven or death: but to some place where she still lived,
in spite of her body’s absence.
The child beside her watched everything with wide, black eyes. She had
an odd little defiant look, her little red mouth was pinched shut. She
seemed to be jealously guarding something, to be always on the alert
for defence. She met Brangwen’s near, vacant, intimate gaze, and a
palpitating hostility, almost like a flame of pain, came into the wide,
over-conscious dark eyes.
The old clergyman droned on, Cossethay sat unmoved as usual. And there
was the foreign woman with a foreign air about her, inviolate, and the
strange child, also foreign, jealously guarding something.
When the service was over, he walked in the way of another existence
out of the church. As he went down the church-path with his sister,
behind the woman and child, the little girl suddenly broke from her
mother’s hand, and slipped back with quick, almost invisible movement,
and was picking at something almost under Brangwen’s feet. Her tiny
fingers were fine and quick, but they missed the red button.
“Have you found something?” said Brangwen to her.
And he also stooped for the button. But she had got it, and she stood
back with it pressed against her little coat, her black eyes flaring at
him, as if to forbid him to notice her. Then, having silenced him, she
turned with a swift “Mother——,” and was gone down the path.
The mother had stood watching impassive, looking not at the child, but
at Brangwen. He became aware of the woman looking at him, standing
there isolated yet for him dominant in her foreign existence.
He did not know what to do, and turned to his sister. But the wide grey
eyes, almost vacant yet so moving, held him beyond himself.
“Mother”, I may have it, mayn’t I?” came the child’s proud, silvery
tones. “Mother”—she seemed always to be calling her mother to remember
her—“mother”—and she had nothing to continue now her mother had replied
“Yes, my child.” But, with ready invention, the child stumbled and ran
on, “What are those people’s names?”
Brangwen heard the abstract:
“I don’t know, dear.”
He went on down the road as if he were not living inside himself, but
somewhere outside.
“Who _was_ that person?” his sister Effie asked.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he answered unknowing.
“She’s _somebody_ very funny,” said Effie, almost in condemnation.
“That child’s like one bewitched.”
“Bewitched—how bewitched?” he repeated.
“You can see for yourself. The mother’s plain, I must say—but the child
is like a changeling. She’d be about thirty-five.”
But he took no notice. His sister talked on.
“There’s your woman for you,” she continued. “You’d better marry
_her._” But still he took no notice. Things were as they were.
Another day, at tea-time, as he sat alone at table, there came a knock
at the front door. It startled him like a portent. No one ever knocked
at the front door. He rose and began slotting back the bolts, turning
the big key. When he had opened the door, the strange woman stood on
the threshold.
“Can you give me a pound of butter?” she asked, in a curious detached
way of one speaking a foreign language.
He tried to attend to her question. She was looking at him
questioningly. But underneath the question, what was there, in her very
standing motionless, which affected him?
He stepped aside and she at once entered the house, as if the door had
been opened to admit her. That startled him. It was the custom for
everybody to wait on the doorstep till asked inside. He went into the
kitchen and she followed.
His tea-things were spread on the scrubbed deal table, a big fire was
burning, a dog rose from the hearth and went to her. She stood
motionless just inside the kitchen.
“Tilly,” he called loudly, “have we got any butter?”
The stranger stood there like a silence in her black cloak.
“Eh?” came the shrill cry from the distance.
He shouted his question again.
“We’ve got what’s on t’ table,” answered Tilly’s shrill voice out of
the dairy.
Brangwen looked at the table. There was a large pat of butter on a
plate, almost a pound. It was round, and stamped with acorns and
oak-leaves.
“Can’t you come when you’re wanted?” he shouted.
“Why, what d’you want?” Tilly protested, as she came peeking
inquisitively through the other door.
She saw the strange woman, stared at her with cross-eyes, but said
nothing.
“_Haven’t_ we any butter?” asked Brangwen again, impatiently, as if he
could command some by his question.
“I tell you there’s what’s on t’ table,” said Tilly, impatient that she
was unable to create any to his demand. “We haven’t a morsel besides.”
There was a moment’s silence.
The stranger spoke, in her curiously distinct, detached manner of one
who must think her speech first.
“Oh, then thank you very much. I am sorry that I have come to trouble
you.”
She could not understand the entire lack of manners, was slightly
puzzled. Any politeness would have made the situation quite impersonal.
But here it was a case of wills in confusion. Brangwen flushed at her
polite speech. Still he did not let her go.
“Get summat an’ wrap _that_ up for her,” he said to Tilly, looking at
the butter on the table.
And taking a clean knife, he cut off that side of the butter where it
was touched.
His speech, the “for her”, penetrated slowly into the foreign woman and
angered Tilly.
“Vicar has his butter fra Brown’s by rights,” said the insuppressible
servant-woman. “We s’ll be churnin’ to-morrow mornin’ first thing.”
“Yes”—the long-drawn foreign yes—“yes,” said the Polish woman, “I went
to Mrs. Brown’s. She hasn’t any more.”
Tilly bridled her head, bursting to say that, according to the
etiquette of people who bought butter, it was no sort of manners
whatever coming to a place cool as you like and knocking at the front
door asking for a pound as a stop-gap while your other people were
short. If you go to Brown’s you go to Brown’s, an’ my butter isn’t just
to make shift when Brown’s has got none.
Brangwen understood perfectly this unspoken speech of Tilly’s. The
Polish lady did not. And as she wanted butter for the vicar, and as
Tilly was churning in the morning, she waited.
“Sluther up now,” said Brangwen loudly after this silence had resolved
itself out; and Tilly disappeared through the inner door.
“I am afraid that I should not come, so,” said the stranger, looking at
him enquiringly, as if referring to him for what it was usual to do.
He felt confused.
“How’s that?” he said, trying to be genial and being only protective.
“Do you——?” she began deliberately. But she was not sure of her ground,
and the conversation came to an end. Her eyes looked at him all the
while, because she could not speak the language.
They stood facing each other. The dog walked away from her to him. He
bent down to it.
“And how’s your little girl?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you, she is very well,” was the reply, a phrase of polite
speech in a foreign language merely.
“Sit you down,” he said.
And she sat in a chair, her slim arms, coming through the slits of her
cloak, resting on her lap.
“You’re not used to these parts,” he said, still standing on the
hearthrug with his back to the fire, coatless, looking with curious
directness at the woman. Her self-possession pleased him and inspired
him, set him curiously free. It seemed to him almost brutal to feel so
master of himself and of the situation.
Her eyes rested on him for a moment, questioning, as she thought of the
meaning of his speech.
“No,” she said, understanding. “No—it is strange.”
“You find it middlin’ rough?” he said.
Her eyes waited on him, so that he should say it again.
“Our ways are rough to you,” he repeated.
“Yes—yes, I understand. Yes, it is different, it is strange. But I was
in Yorkshire——”
“Oh, well then,” he said, “it’s no worse here than what they are up
there.”
She did not quite understand. His protective manner, and his sureness,
and his intimacy, puzzled her. What did he mean? If he was her equal,
why did he behave so without formality?
“No——” she said, vaguely, her eyes resting on him.
She saw him fresh and naïve, uncouth, almost entirely beyond
relationship with her. Yet he was good-looking, with his fair hair and
blue eyes full of energy, and with his healthy body that seemed to take
equality with her. She watched him steadily. He was difficult for her
to understand, warm, uncouth, and confident as he was, sure on his feet
as if he did not know what it was to be unsure. What then was it that
gave him this curious stability?
She did not know. She wondered. She looked round the room he lived in.
It had a close intimacy that fascinated and almost frightened her. The
furniture was old and familiar as old people, the whole place seemed so
kin to him, as if it partook of his being, that she was uneasy.
“It is already a long time that you have lived in this house—yes?” she
asked.
“I’ve always lived here,” he said.
“Yes—but your people—your family?”
“We’ve been here above two hundred years,” he said. Her eyes were on
him all the time, wide-open and trying to grasp him. He felt that he
was there for her.
“It is your own place, the house, the farm——?”
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at her and met her look. It disturbed
her. She did not know him. He was a foreigner, they had nothing to do
with each other. Yet his look disturbed her to knowledge of him. He was
so strangely confident and direct.
“You live quite alone?”
“Yes—if you call it alone?”
She did not understand. It seemed unusual to her. What was the meaning
of it?
And whenever her eyes, after watching him for some time, inevitably met
his, she was aware of a heat beating up over her consciousness. She sat
motionless and in conflict. Who was this strange man who was at once so
near to her? What was happening to her? Something in his young,
warm-twinkling eyes seemed to assume a right to her, to speak to her,
to extend her his protection. But how? Why did he speak to her? Why
were his eyes so certain, so full of light and confident, waiting for
no permission nor signal?
Tilly returned with a large leaf and found the two silent. At once he
felt it incumbent on him to speak, now the serving-woman had come back.
“How old is your little girl?” he asked.
“Four years,” she replied.
“Her father hasn’t been dead long, then?” he asked.
“She was one year when he died.”
“Three years?”
“Yes, three years that he is dead—yes.”
Curiously quiet she was, almost abstracted, answering these questions.
She looked at him again, with some maidenhood opening in her eyes. He
felt he could not move, neither towards her nor away from her.
Something about her presence hurt him, till he was almost rigid before
her. He saw the girl’s wondering look rise in her eyes.
Tilly handed her the butter and she rose.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “How much is it?”
“We’ll make th’ vicar a present of it,” he said. “It’ll do for me goin’
to church.”
“It ’ud look better of you if you went to church and took th’ money for
your butter,” said Tilly, persistent in her claim to him.
“You’d have to put in, shouldn’t you?” he said.
“How much, please?” said the Polish woman to Tilly. Brangwen stood by
and let be.
“Then, thank you very much,” she said.
“Bring your little girl down sometime to look at th’ fowls and horses,”
he said,—“if she’d like it.”
“Yes, she would like it,” said the stranger.
And she went. Brangwen stood dimmed by her departure. He could not
notice Tilly, who was looking at him uneasily, wanting to be reassured.
He could not think of anything. He felt that he had made some invisible
connection with the strange woman.
A daze had come over his mind, he had another centre of consciousness.
In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his body, there had
started another activity. It was as if a strong light were burning
there, and he was blind within it, unable to know anything, except that
this transfiguration burned between him and her, connecting them, like
a secret power.
Since she had come to the house he went about in a daze, scarcely
seeing even the things he handled, drifting, quiescent, in a state of
metamorphosis. He submitted to that which was happening to him, letting
go his will, suffering the loss of himself, dormant always on the brink
of ecstasy, like a creature evolving to a new birth.
She came twice with her child to the farm, but there was this lull
between them, an intense calm and passivity like a torpor upon them, so
that there was no active change took place. He was almost unaware of
the child, yet by his native good humour he gained her confidence, even
her affection, setting her on a horse to ride, giving her corn for the
fowls.
Once he drove the mother and child from Ilkeston, picking them up on
the road. The child huddled close to him as if for love, the mother sat
very still. There was a vagueness, like a soft mist over all of them,
and a silence as if their wills were suspended. Only he saw her hands,
ungloved, folded in her lap, and he noticed the wedding-ring on her
finger. It excluded him: it was a closed circle. It bound her life, the
wedding-ring, it stood for her life in which he could have no part.
Nevertheless, beyond all this, there was herself and himself which
should meet.
As he helped her down from the trap, almost lifting her, he felt he had
some right to take her thus between his hands. She belonged as yet to
that other, to that which was behind. But he must care for her also.
She was too living to be neglected.
Sometimes her vagueness, in which he was lost, made him angry, made him
rage. But he held himself still as yet. She had no response, no being
towards him. It puzzled and enraged him, but he submitted for a long
time. Then, from the accumulated troubling of her ignoring him,
gradually a fury broke out, destructive, and he wanted to go away, to
escape her.
It happened she came down to the Marsh with the child whilst he was in
this state. Then he stood over against her, strong and heavy in his
revolt, and though he said nothing, still she felt his anger and heavy
impatience grip hold of her, she was shaken again as out of a torpor.
Again her heart stirred with a quick, out-running impulse, she looked
at him, at the stranger who was not a gentleman yet who insisted on
coming into her life, and the pain of a new birth in herself strung all
her veins to a new form. She would have to begin again, to find a new
being, a new form, to respond to that blind, insistent figure standing
over against her.
A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame leaped up
him, under his skin. She wanted it, this new life from him, with him,
yet she must defend herself against it, for it was a destruction.
As he worked alone on the land, or sat up with his ewes at lambing
time, the facts and material of his daily life fell away, leaving the
kernel of his purpose clean. And then it came upon him that he would
marry her and she would be his life.
Gradually, even without seeing her, he came to know her. He would have
liked to think of her as of something given into his protection, like a
child without parents. But it was forbidden him. He had to come down
from this pleasant view of the case. She might refuse him. And besides,
he was afraid of her.
But during the long February nights with the ewes in labour, looking
out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he did not belong
to himself. He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something
incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven
travelling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat
small and submissive to the greater ordering.
Unless she would come to him, he must remain as a nothingness. It was a
hard experience. But, after her repeated obliviousness to him, after he
had seen so often that he did not exist for her, after he had raged and
tried to escape, and said he was good enough by himself, he was a man,
and could stand alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night
humble himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing.
He was nothing. But with her, he would be real. If she were now walking
across the frosty grass near the sheep-shelter, through the fretful
bleating of the ewes and lambs, she would bring him completeness and
perfection. And if it should be so, that she should come to him! It
should be so—it was ordained so.
He was a long time resolving definitely to ask her to marry him. And he
knew, if he asked her, she must really acquiesce. She must, it could
not be otherwise.
He had learned a little of her. She was poor, quite alone, and had had
a hard time in London, both before and after her husband died. But in
Poland she was a lady well born, a landowner’s daughter.
All these things were only words to him, the fact of her superior
birth, the fact that her husband had been a brilliant doctor, the fact
that he himself was her inferior in almost every way of distinction.
There was an inner reality, a logic of the soul, which connected her
with him.
One evening in March, when the wind was roaring outside, came the
moment to ask her. He had sat with his hands before him, leaning to the
fire. And as he watched the fire, he knew almost without thinking that
he was going this evening.
“Have you got a clean shirt?” he asked Tilly.
“You know you’ve got clean shirts,” she said.
“Ay,—bring me a white one.”
Tilly brought down one of the linen shirts he had inherited from his
father, putting it before him to air at the fire. She loved him with a
dumb, aching love as he sat leaning with his arms on his knees, still
and absorbed, unaware of her. Lately, a quivering inclination to cry
had come over her, when she did anything for him in his presence. Now
her hands trembled as she spread the shirt. He was never shouting and
teasing now. The deep stillness there was in the house made her
tremble.
He went to wash himself. Queer little breaks of consciousness seemed to
rise and burst like bubbles out of the depths of his stillness.
“It’s got to be done,” he said as he stooped to take the shirt out of
the fender, “it’s got to be done, so why balk it?” And as he combed his
hair before the mirror on the wall, he retorted to himself,
superficially: “The woman’s not speechless dumb. She’s not clutterin’
at the nipple. She’s got the right to please herself, and displease
whosoever she likes.”
This streak of common sense carried him a little further.
“Did you want anythink?” asked Tilly, suddenly appearing, having heard
him speak. She stood watching him comb his fair beard. His eyes were
calm and uninterrupted.
“Ay,” he said, “where have you put the scissors?”
She brought them to him, and stood watching as, chin forward, he
trimmed his beard.
“Don’t go an’ crop yourself as if you was at a shearin’ contest,” she
said, anxiously. He blew the fine-curled hair quickly off his lips.
He put on all clean clothes, folded his stock carefully, and donned his
best coat. Then, being ready, as grey twilight was falling, he went
across to the orchard to gather the daffodils. The wind was roaring in
the apple trees, the yellow flowers swayed violently up and down, he
heard even the fine whisper of their spears as he stooped to break the
flattened, brittle stems of the flowers.
“What’s to-do?” shouted a friend who met him as he left the garden
gate.
“Bit of courtin’, like,” said Brangwen.
And Tilly, in a great state of trepidation and excitement, let the wind
whisk her over the field to the big gate, whence she could watch him
go.
He went up the hill and on towards the vicarage, the wind roaring
through the hedges, whilst he tried to shelter his bunch of daffodils
by his side. He did not think of anything, only knew that the wind was
blowing.
Night was falling, the bare trees drummed and whistled. The vicar, he
knew, would be in his study, the Polish woman in the kitchen, a
comfortable room, with her child. In the darkest of twilight, he went
through the gate and down the path where a few daffodils stooped in the
wind, and shattered crocuses made a pale, colourless ravel.
There was a light streaming on to the bushes at the back from the
kitchen window. He began to hesitate. How could he do this? Looking
through the window, he saw her seated in the rocking-chair with the
child, already in its nightdress, sitting on her knee. The fair head
with its wild, fierce hair was drooping towards the fire-warmth, which
reflected on the bright cheeks and clear skin of the child, who seemed
to be musing, almost like a grown-up person. The mother’s face was dark
and still, and he saw, with a pang, that she was away back in the life
that had been. The child’s hair gleamed like spun glass, her face was
illuminated till it seemed like wax lit up from the inside. The wind
boomed strongly. Mother and child sat motionless, silent, the child
staring with vacant dark eyes into the fire, the mother looking into
space. The little girl was almost asleep. It was her will which kept
her eyes so wide.
Suddenly she looked round, troubled, as the wind shook the house, and
Brangwen saw the small lips move. The mother began to rock, he heard
the slight crunch of the rockers of the chair. Then he heard the low,
monotonous murmur of a song in a foreign language. Then a great burst
of wind, the mother seemed to have drifted away, the child’s eyes were
black and dilated. Brangwen looked up at the clouds which packed in
great, alarming haste across the dark sky.
Then there came the child’s high, complaining, yet imperative voice:
“Don’t sing that stuff, mother; I don’t want to hear it.”
The singing died away.
“You will go to bed,” said the mother.
He saw the clinging protest of the child, the unmoved farawayness of
the mother, the clinging, grasping effort of the child. Then suddenly
the clear childish challenge:
“I want you to tell me a story.”
The wind blew, the story began, the child nestled against the mother,
Brangwen waited outside, suspended, looking at the wild waving of the
trees in the wind and the gathering darkness. He had his fate to
follow, he lingered there at the threshold.
The child crouched distinct and motionless, curled in against her
mother, the eyes dark and unblinking among the keen wisps of hair, like
a curled-up animal asleep but for the eyes. The mother sat as if in
shadow, the story went on as if by itself. Brangwen stood outside
seeing the night fall. He did not notice the passage of time. The hand
that held the daffodils was fixed and cold.
The story came to an end, the mother rose at last, with the child
clinging round her neck. She must be strong, to carry so large a child
so easily. The little Anna clung round her mother’s neck. The fair,
strange face of the child looked over the shoulder of the mother, all
asleep but the eyes, and these, wide and dark, kept up the resistance
and the fight with something unseen.
When they were gone, Brangwen stirred for the first time from the place
where he stood, and looked round at the night. He wished it were really
as beautiful and familiar as it seemed in these few moments of release.
Along with the child, he felt a curious strain on him, a suffering,
like a fate.
The mother came down again, and began folding the child’s clothes. He
knocked. She opened wondering, a little bit at bay, like a foreigner,
uneasy.
“Good evening,” he said. “I’ll just come in a minute.”
A change went quickly over her face; she was unprepared. She looked
down at him as he stood in the light from the window, holding the
daffodils, the darkness behind. In his black clothes she again did not
know him. She was almost afraid.
But he was already stepping on to the threshold, and closing the door
behind him. She turned into the kitchen, startled out of herself by
this invasion from the night. He took off his hat, and came towards
her. Then he stood in the light, in his black clothes and his black
stock, hat in one hand and yellow flowers in the other. She stood away,
at his mercy, snatched out of herself. She did not know him, only she
knew he was a man come for her. She could only see the dark-clad man’s
figure standing there upon her, and the gripped fist of flowers. She
could not see the face and the living eyes.
He was watching her, without knowing her, only aware underneath of her
presence.
“I come to have a word with you,” he said, striding forward to the
table, laying down his hat and the flowers, which tumbled apart and lay
in a loose heap. She had flinched from his advance. She had no will, no
being. The wind boomed in the chimney, and he waited. He had
disembarrassed his hands. Now he shut his fists.
He was aware of her standing there unknown, dread, yet related to him.
“I came up,” he said, speaking curiously matter-of-fact and level, “to
ask if you’d marry me. You are free, aren’t you?”
There was a long silence, whilst his blue eyes, strangely impersonal,
looked into her eyes to seek an answer to the truth. He was looking for
the truth out of her. And she, as if hypnotized, must answer at length.
“Yes, I am free to marry.”
The expression of his eyes changed, became less impersonal, as if he
were looking almost at her, for the truth of her. Steady and intent and
eternal they were, as if they would never change. They seemed to fix
and to resolve her. She quivered, feeling herself created, will-less,
lapsing into him, into a common will with him.
“You want me?” she said.
A pallor came over his face.
“Yes,” he said.
Still there was no response and silence.
“No,” she said, not of herself. “No, I don’t know.”
He felt the tension breaking up in him, his fists slackened, he was
unable to move. He stood there looking at her, helpless in his vague
collapse. For the moment she had become unreal to him. Then he saw her
come to him, curiously direct and as if without movement, in a sudden
flow. She put her hand to his coat.
“Yes I want to,” she said, impersonally, looking at him with wide,
candid, newly-opened eyes, opened now with supreme truth. He went very
white as he stood, and did not move, only his eyes were held by hers,
and he suffered. She seemed to see him with her newly-opened, wide
eyes, almost of a child, and with a strange movement, that was agony to
him, she reached slowly forward her dark face and her breast to him,
with a slow insinuation of a kiss that made something break in his
brain, and it was darkness over him for a few moments.
He had her in his arms, and, obliterated, was kissing her. And it was
sheer, bleached agony to him, to break away from himself. She was there
so small and light and accepting in his arms, like a child, and yet
with such an insinuation of embrace, of infinite embrace, that he could
not bear it, he could not stand.
He turned and looked for a chair, and keeping her still in his arms,
sat down with her close to him, to his breast. Then, for a few seconds,
he went utterly to sleep, asleep and sealed in the darkest sleep,
utter, extreme oblivion.
From which he came to gradually, always holding her warm and close upon
him, and she as utterly silent as he, involved in the same oblivion,
the fecund darkness.
He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new
birth, in the womb of darkness. Aerial and light everything was, new as
a morning, fresh and newly-begun. Like a dawn the newness and the bliss
filled in. And she sat utterly still with him, as if in the same.
Then she looked up at him, the wide, young eyes blazing with light. And
he bent down and kissed her on the lips. And the dawn blazed in them,
their new life came to pass, it was beyond all conceiving good, it was
so good, that it was almost like a passing-away, a trespass. He drew
her suddenly closer to him.
For soon the light began to fade in her, gradually, and as she was in
his arms, her head sank, she leaned it against him, and lay still, with
sunk head, a little tired, effaced because she was tired. And in her
tiredness was a certain negation of him.
“There is the child,” she said, out of the long silence.
He did not understand. It was a long time since he had heard a voice.
Now also he heard the wind roaring, as if it had just begun again.
“Yes,” he said, not understanding. There was a slight contraction of
pain at his heart, a slight tension on his brows. Something he wanted
to grasp and could not.
“You will love her?” she said.
The quick contraction, like pain, went over him again.
“I love her now,” he said.
She lay still against him, taking his physical warmth without heed. It
was great confirmation for him to feel her there, absorbing the warmth
from him, giving him back her weight and her strange confidence. But
where was she, that she seemed so absent? His mind was open with
wonder. He did not know her.
“But I am much older than you,” she said.
“How old?” he asked.
“I am thirty-four,” she said.
“I am twenty-eight,” he said.
“Six years.”
She was oddly concerned, even as if it pleased her a little. He sat and
listened and wondered. It was rather splendid, to be so ignored by her,
whilst she lay against him, and he lifted her with his breathing, and
felt her weight upon his living, so he had a completeness and an
inviolable power. He did not interfere with her. He did not even know
her. It was so strange that she lay there with her weight abandoned
upon him. He was silent with delight. He felt strong, physically,
carrying her on his breathing. The strange, inviolable completeness of
the two of them made him feel as sure and as stable as God. Amused, he
wondered what the vicar would say if he knew.
“You needn’t stop here much longer, housekeeping,” he said.
“I like it also, here,” she said. “When one has been in many places, it
is very nice here.”
He was silent again at this. So close on him she lay, and yet she
answered him from so far away. But he did not mind.
“What was your own home like, when you were little?” he asked.
“My father was a landowner,” she replied. “It was near a river.”
This did not convey much to him. All was as vague as before. But he did
not care, whilst she was so close.
“I am a landowner—a little one,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He had not dared to move. He sat there with his arms round her, her
lying motionless on his breathing, and for a long time he did not stir.
Then softly, timidly, his hand settled on the roundness of her arm, on
the unknown. She seemed to lie a little closer. A hot flame licked up
from his belly to his chest.
But it was too soon. She rose, and went across the room to a drawer,
taking out a little tray-cloth. There was something quiet and
professional about her. She had been a nurse beside her husband, both
in Warsaw and in the rebellion afterwards. She proceeded to set a tray.
It was as if she ignored Brangwen. He sat up, unable to bear a
contradiction in her. She moved about inscrutably.
Then, as he sat there, all mused and wondering, she came near to him,
looking at him with wide, grey eyes that almost smiled with a low
light. But her ugly-beautiful mouth was still unmoved and sad. He was
afraid.
His eyes, strained and roused with unusedness, quailed a little before
her, he felt himself quailing and yet he rose, as if obedient to her,
he bent and kissed her heavy, sad, wide mouth, that was kissed, and did
not alter. Fear was too strong in him. Again he had not got her.
She turned away. The vicarage kitchen was untidy, and yet to him
beautiful with the untidiness of her and her child. Such a wonderful
remoteness there was about her, and then something in touch with him,
that made his heart knock in his chest. He stood there and waited,
suspended.
Again she came to him, as he stood in his black clothes, with blue eyes
very bright and puzzled for her, his face tensely alive, his hair
dishevelled. She came close up to him, to his intent, black-clothed
body, and laid her hand on his arm. He remained unmoved. Her eyes, with
a blackness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and electric
away at the back of them, rejected him and absorbed him at once. But he
remained himself. He breathed with difficulty, and sweat came out at
the roots of his hair, on his forehead.
“Do you want to marry me?” she asked slowly, always uncertain.
He was afraid lest he could not speak. He drew breath hard, saying:
“I do.”
Then again, what was agony to him, with one hand lightly resting on his
arm, she leaned forward a little, and with a strange, primeval
suggestion of embrace, held him her mouth. It was ugly-beautiful, and
he could not bear it. He put his mouth on hers, and slowly, slowly the
response came, gathering force and passion, till it seemed to him she
was thundering at him till he could bear no more. He drew away, white,
unbreathing. Only, in his blue eyes, was something of himself
concentrated. And in her eyes was a little smile upon a black void.
She was drifting away from him again. And he wanted to go away. It was
intolerable. He could bear no more. He must go. Yet he was irresolute.
But she turned away from him.
With a little pang of anguish, of denial, it was decided.
“I’ll come an’ speak to the vicar to-morrow,” he said, taking his hat.
She looked at him, her eyes expressionless and full of darkness. He
could see no answer.
“That’ll do, won’t it?” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, mere echo without body or meaning.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night.”
He left her standing there, expressionless and void as she was. Then
she went on laying the tray for the vicar. Needing the table, she put
the daffodils aside on the dresser without noticing them. Only their
coolness, touching her hand, remained echoing there a long while.
They were such strangers, they must for ever be such strangers, that
his passion was a clanging torment to him. Such intimacy of embrace,
and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not
bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know
how entirely they were strangers to each other. He went out into the
wind. Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about.
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space
and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. Then there
was a blot of cloud, and shadow. Then somewhere in the night a radiance
again, like a vapour. And all the sky was teeming and tearing along, a
vast disorder of flying shapes and darkness and ragged fumes of light
and a great brown circling halo, then the terror of a moon running
liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before
she plunged under cover of cloud again.
Chapter II.
THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH
She was the daughter of a Polish landowner who, deeply in debt to the
Jews, had married a German wife with money, and who had died just
before the rebellion. Quite young, she had married Paul Lensky, an
intellectual who had studied at Berlin, and had returned to Warsaw a
patriot. Her mother had married a German merchant and gone away.
Lydia Lensky, married to the young doctor, became with him a patriot
and an émancipée. They were poor, but they were very conceited. She
learned nursing as a mark of her emancipation. They represented in
Poland the new movement just begun in Russia. But they were very
patriotic: and, at the same time, very “European”.
They had two children. Then came the great rebellion. Lensky, very
ardent and full of words, went about inciting his countrymen. Little
Poles flamed down the streets of Warsaw, on the way to shoot every
Muscovite. So they crossed into the south of Russia, and it was common
for six little insurgents to ride into a Jewish village, brandishing
swords and words, emphasizing the fact that they were going to shoot
every living Muscovite.
Lensky was something of a fire-eater also. Lydia, tempered by her
German blood, coming of a different family, was obliterated, carried
along in her husband’s emphasis of declaration, and his whirl of
patriotism. He was indeed a brave man, but no bravery could quite have
equalled the vividness of his talk. He worked very hard, till nothing
lived in him but his eyes. And Lydia, as if drugged, followed him like
a shadow, serving, echoing. Sometimes she had her two children,
sometimes they were left behind.
She returned once to find them both dead of diphtheria. Her husband
wept aloud, unaware of everybody. But the war went on, and soon he was
back at his work. A darkness had come over Lydia’s mind. She walked
always in a shadow, silenced, with a strange, deep terror having hold
of her, her desire was to seek satisfaction in dread, to enter a
nunnery, to satisfy the instincts of dread in her, through service of a
dark religion. But she could not.
Then came the flight to London. Lensky, the little, thin man, had got
all his life locked into a resistance and could not relax again. He
lived in a sort of insane irritability, touchy, haughty to the last
degree, fractious, so that as assistant doctor in one of the hospitals
he soon became impossible. They were almost beggars. But he kept still
his great ideas of himself, he seemed to live in a complete
hallucination, where he himself figured vivid and lordly. He guarded
his wife jealously against the ignominy of her position, rushed round
her like a brandished weapon, an amazing sight to the English eye, had
her in his power, as if he hypnotized her. She was passive, dark,
always in shadow.
He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he seemed nothing
but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him dying, nursed him,
nursed the baby, but really took no notice of anything. A darkness was
on her, like remorse, or like a remembering of the dark, savage, mystic
ride of dread, of death, of the shadow of revenge. When her husband
died, she was relieved. He would no longer dart about her.
England fitted her mood, its aloofness and foreignness. She had known a
little of the language before coming, and a sort of parrot-mind made
her pick it up fairly easily. But she knew nothing of the English, nor
of English life. Indeed, these did not exist for her. She was like one
walking in the Underworld, where the shades throng intelligibly but
have no connection with one. She felt the English people as a potent,
cold, slightly hostile host amongst whom she walked isolated.
The English people themselves were almost deferential to her, the
Church saw that she did not want. She walked without passion, like a
shade, tormented into moments of love by the child. Her dying husband
with his tortured eyes and the skin drawn tight over his face, he was
as a vision to her, not a reality. In a vision he was buried and put
away. Then the vision ceased, she was untroubled, time went on grey,
uncoloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the
landscape unrolled beside her. When she rocked her baby at evening,
maybe she fell into a Polish slumber song, or she talked sometimes to
herself in Polish. Otherwise she did not think of Poland, nor of that
life to which she had belonged. It was a great blot looming blank in
its darkness. In the superficial activity of her life, she was all
English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and
darknesses of abstraction were Polish.
So she lived for some time. Then, with slight uneasiness, she used half
to awake to the streets of London. She realized that there was
something around her, very foreign, she realized she was in a strange
place. And then, she was sent away into the country. There came into
her mind now the memory of her home where she had been a child, the big
house among the land, the peasants of the village.
She was sent to Yorkshire, to nurse an old rector in his rectory by the
sea. This was the first shake of the kaleidoscope that brought in front
of her eyes something she must see. It hurt her brain, the open country
and the moors. It hurt her and hurt her. Yet it forced itself upon her
as something living, it roused some potency of her childhood in her, it
had some relation to her.
There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now. And there
was a strange insistence of light from the sea, to which she must
attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them, and she stooped to
the disturbing influence near her feet, she even picked one or two
flowers, faintly remembering in the new colour of life, what had been.
All the day long, as she sat at the upper window, the light came off
the sea, constantly, constantly, without refusal, till it seemed to
bear her away, and the noise of the sea created a drowsiness in her, a
relaxation like sleep. Her automatic consciousness gave way a little,
she stumbled sometimes, she had a poignant, momentary vision of her
living child, that hurt her unspeakably. Her soul roused to attention.
Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven,
very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the
sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the
hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church,
and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm
sunshine.
She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck away down
under the trees, she was startled, and wondered what it was. Walking
down, she found the bluebells around her glowing like a presence, among
the trees.
Summer came, the moors were tangled with harebells like water in the
ruts of the roads, the heather came rosy under the skies, setting the
whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past the gorse bushes
shrinking from their presence, she stepped into the heather as into a
quickening bath that almost hurt. Her fingers moved over the clasped
fingers of the child, she heard the anxious voice of the baby, as it
tried to make her talk, distraught.
And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while
remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn came with the
faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter darkened the moors, and
almost savagely she turned again to life, demanding her life back
again, demanding that it should be as it had been when she was a girl,
on the land at home, under the sky. Snow lay in great expanses, the
telegraph posts strode over the white earth, away under the gloom of
the sky. And savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this
was Poland, her youth, that all was her own again.
But there were no sledges nor bells, she did not see the peasants
coming out like new people, in their sheepskins and their fresh, ruddy,
bright faces, that seemed to become new and vivid when the snow lit up
the ground. It did not come to her, the life of her youth, it did not
come back. There was a little agony of struggle, then a relapse into
the darkness of the convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the
walls, and Christ was white on the cross of victory.
She watched from the sick-room the snow whirl past, like flocks of
shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to a leaden
inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the curving shore, and
the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half submerged. But near at
hand on the trees the snow was soft in bloom. Only the voice of the
dying vicar spoke grey and querulous from behind.
By the time the snowdrops were out, however, he was dead. He was dead.
But with curious equanimity the returning woman watched the snowdrops
on the edge of the grass below, blown white in the wind, but not to be
blown away. She watched them fluttering and bobbing, the white, shut
flowers, anchored by a thread to the grey-green grass, yet never blown
away, not drifting with the wind.
As she rose in the morning, the dawn was beating up white, gusts of
light blown like a thin snowstorm from the east, blown stronger and
fiercer, till the rose appeared, and the gold, and the sea lit up
below. She was impassive and indifferent. Yet she was outside the
enclosure of darkness.
There passed a space of shadow again, the familiarity of dread-worship,
during which she was moved, oblivious, to Cossethay. There, at first,
there was nothing—just grey nothing. But then one morning there was a
light from the yellow jasmine caught her, and after that, morning and
evening, the persistent ringing of thrushes from the shrubbery, till
her heart, beaten upon, was forced to lift up its voice in rivalry and
answer. Little tunes came into her mind. She was full of trouble almost
like anguish. Resistant, she knew she was beaten, and from fear of
darkness turned to fear of light. She would have hidden herself
indoors, if she could. Above all, she craved for the peace and heavy
oblivion of her old state. She could not bear to come to, to realize.
The first pangs of this new parturition were so acute, she knew she
could not bear it. She would rather remain out of life, than be torn,
mutilated into this birth, which she could not survive. She had not the
strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so hostile.
She knew she would die like an early, colourless, scentless flower that
the end of the winter puts forth mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour
her modicum of twinkling life.
But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree, when bees
were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she forgot, she felt like
somebody else, not herself, a new person, quite glad. But she knew it
was fragile, and she dreaded it. The vicar put pea-flower into the
crocuses, for his bees to roll in, and she laughed. Then night came,
with brilliant stars that she knew of old, from her girlhood. And they
flashed so bright, she knew they were victors.
She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the past and
the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to find a great stone
lying above it, she was helpless.
The bewilderment and helplessness continued, she was surrounded by
great moving masses that must crush her. And there was no escape. Save
in the old obliviousness, the cold darkness she strove to retain. But
the vicar showed her eggs in the thrush’s nest near the back door. She
saw herself the mother-thrush upon the nest, and the way her wings were
spread, so eager down upon her secret. The tense, eager, nesting wings
moved her beyond endurance. She thought of them in the morning, when
she heard the thrush whistling as he got up, and she thought, “Why
didn’t I die out there, why am I brought here?”
She was aware of people who passed around her, not as persons, but as
looming presences. It was very difficult for her to adjust herself. In
Poland, the peasantry, the people, had been cattle to her, they had
been her cattle that she owned and used. What were these people? Now
she was coming awake, she was lost.
But she had felt Brangwen go by almost as if he had brushed her. She
had tingled in body as she had gone on up the road. After she had been
with him in the Marsh kitchen, the voice of her body had risen strong
and insistent. Soon, she wanted him. He was the man who had come
nearest to her for her awakening.
Always, however, between-whiles she lapsed into the old
unconsciousness, indifference and there was a will in her to save
herself from living any more. But she would wake in the morning one day
and feel her blood running, feel herself lying open like a flower
unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand.
She got to know him better, and her instinct fixed on him—just on him.
Her impulse was strong against him, because he was not of her own sort.
But one blind instinct led her, to take him, to leave him, and then to
relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. She felt the rooted
safety of him, and the life in him. Also he was young and very fresh.
The blue, steady livingness of his eyes she enjoyed like morning. He
was very young.
Then she lapsed again to stupor and indifference. This, however, was
bound to pass. The warmth flowed through her, she felt herself opening,
unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in full request under the sun, as
the beaks of tiny birds open flat, to receive, to receive. And unfolded
she turned to him, straight to him. And he came, slowly, afraid, held
back by uncouth fear, and driven by a desire bigger than himself.
When she opened and turned to him, then all that had been and all that
was, was gone from her, she was as new as a flower that unsheathes
itself and stands always ready, waiting, receptive. He could not
understand this. He forced himself, through lack of understanding, to
the adherence to the line of honourable courtship and sanctioned,
licensed marriage. Therefore, after he had gone to the vicarage and
asked for her, she remained for some days held in this one spell, open,
receptive to him, before him. He was roused to chaos. He spoke to the
vicar and gave in the banns. Then he stood to wait.
She remained attentive and instinctively expectant before him,
unfolded, ready to receive him. He could not act, because of self-fear
and because of his conception of honour towards her. So he remained in
a state of chaos.
And after a few days, gradually she closed again, away from him, was
sheathed over, impervious to him, oblivious. Then a black, bottomless
despair became real to him, he knew what he had lost. He felt he had
lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication
with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy
stone, he went about unliving.
Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding, was plunged
in a revolt that knew no bounds. Inarticulate, he moved with her at the
Marsh in violent, gloomy, wordless passion, almost in hatred of her.
Till gradually she became aware of him, aware of herself with regard to
him, her blood stirred to life, she began to open towards him, to flow
towards him again. He waited till the spell was between them again,
till they were together within one rushing, hastening flame. And then
again he was bewildered, he was tied up as with cords, and could not
move to her. So she came to him, and unfastened the breast of his
waistcoat and his shirt, and put her hand on him, needing to know him.
For it was cruel to her, to be opened and offered to him, yet not to
know what he was, not even that he was there. She gave herself to the
hour, but he could not, and he bungled in taking her.
So that he lived in suspense, as if only half his faculties worked,
until the wedding. She did not understand. But the vagueness came over
her again, and the days lapsed by. He could not get definitely into
touch with her. For the time being, she let him go again.
He suffered very much from the thought of actual marriage, the intimacy
and nakedness of marriage. He knew her so little. They were so foreign
to each other, they were such strangers. And they could not talk to
each other. When she talked, of Poland or of what had been, it was all
so foreign, she scarcely communicated anything to him. And when he
looked at her, an over-much reverence and fear of the unknown changed
the nature of his desire into a sort of worship, holding her aloof from
his physical desire, self-thwarting.
She did not know this, she did not understand. They had looked at each
other, and had accepted each other. It was so, then there was nothing
to balk at, it was complete between them.
At the wedding, his face was stiff and expressionless. He wanted to
drink, to get rid of his forethought and afterthought, to set the
moment free. But he could not. The suspense only tightened at his
heart. The jesting and joviality and jolly, broad insinuation of the
guests only coiled him more. He could not hear. That which was
impending obsessed him, he could not get free.
She sat quiet, with a strange, still smile. She was not afraid. Having
accepted him, she wanted to take him, she belonged altogether to the
hour, now. No future, no past, only this, her hour. She did not even
notice him, as she sat beside him at the head of the table. He was very
near, their coming together was close at hand. What more!
As the time came for all the guests to go, her dark face was softly
lighted, the bend of her head was proud, her grey eyes clear and
dilated, so that the men could not look at her, and the women were
elated by her, they served her. Very wonderful she was, as she bade
farewell, her ugly wide mouth smiling with pride and recognition, her
voice speaking softly and richly in the foreign accent, her dilated
eyes ignoring one and all the departing guests. Her manner was gracious
and fascinating, but she ignored the being of him or her to whom she
gave her hand.
And Brangwen stood beside her, giving his hearty handshake to his
friends, receiving their regard gratefully, glad of their attention.
His heart was tormented within him, he did not try to smile. The time
of his trial and his admittance, his Gethsemane and his Triumphal Entry
in one, had come now.
Behind her, there was so much unknown to him. When he approached her,
he came to such a terrible painful unknown. How could he embrace it and
fathom it? How could he close his arms round all this darkness and hold
it to his breast and give himself to it? What might not happen to him?
If he stretched and strained for ever he would never be able to grasp
it all, and to yield himself naked out of his own hands into the
unknown power! How could a man be strong enough to take her, put his
arms round her and have her, and be sure he could conquer this awful
unknown next his heart? What was it then that she was, to which he must
also deliver himself up, and which at the same time he must embrace,
contain?
He was to be her husband. It was established so. And he wanted it more
than he wanted life, or anything. She stood beside him in her silk
dress, looking at him strangely, so that a certain terror, horror took
possession of him, because she was strange and impending and he had no
choice. He could not bear to meet her look from under her strange,
thick brows.
“Is it late?” she said.
He looked at his watch.
“No—half-past eleven,” he said. And he made an excuse to go into the
kitchen, leaving her standing in the room among the disorder and the
drinking-glasses.
Tilly was seated beside the fire in the kitchen, her head in her hands.
She started up when he entered.
“Why haven’t you gone to bed?” he said.
“I thought I’d better stop an’ lock up an’ do,” she said. Her agitation
quietened him. He gave her some little order, then returned, steadied
now, almost ashamed, to his wife. She stood a moment watching him, as
he moved with averted face. Then she said:
“You will be good to me, won’t you?”
She was small and girlish and terrible, with a queer, wide look in her
eyes. His heart leaped in him, in anguish of love and desire, he went
blindly to her and took her in his arms.
“I want to,” he said as he drew her closer and closer in. She was
soothed by the stress of his embrace, and remained quite still, relaxed
against him, mingling in to him. And he let himself go from past and
future, was reduced to the moment with her. In which he took her and
was with her and there was nothing beyond, they were together in an
elemental embrace beyond their superficial foreignness. But in the
morning he was uneasy again. She was still foreign and unknown to him.
Only, within the fear was pride, belief in himself as mate for her. And
she, everything forgotten in her new hour of coming to life, radiated
vigour and joy, so that he quivered to touch her.
It made a great difference to him, marriage. Things became so remote
and of so little significance, as he knew the powerful source of his
life, his eyes opened on a new universe, and he wondered in thinking of
his triviality before. A new, calm relationship showed to him in the
things he saw, in the cattle he used, the young wheat as it eddied in a
wind.
And each time he returned home, he went steadily, expectantly, like a
man who goes to a profound, unknown satisfaction. At dinner-time, he
appeared in the doorway, hanging back a moment from entering, to see if
she was there. He saw her setting the plates on the white-scrubbed
table. Her arms were slim, she had a slim body and full skirts, she had
a dark, shapely head with close-banded hair. Somehow it was her head,
so shapely and poignant, that revealed her his woman to him. As she
moved about clothed closely, full-skirted and wearing her little silk
apron, her dark hair smoothly parted, her head revealed itself to him
in all its subtle, intrinsic beauty, and he knew she was his woman, he
knew her essence, that it was his to possess. And he seemed to live
thus in contact with her, in contact with the unknown, the
unaccountable and incalculable.
They did not take much notice of each other, consciously.
“I’m betimes,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered.
He turned to the dogs, or to the child if she was there. The little
Anna played about the farm, flitting constantly in to call something to
her mother, to fling her arms round her mother’s skirts, to be noticed,
perhaps caressed, then, forgetting, to slip out again.
Then Brangwen, talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees,
would be aware of his wife, as, in her tight, dark bodice and her lace
fichu, she was reaching up to the corner cupboard. He realized with a
sharp pang that she belonged to him, and he to her. He realized that he
lived by her. Did he own her? Was she here for ever? Or might she go
away? She was not really his, it was not a real marriage, this marriage
between them. She might go away. He did not feel like a master,
husband, father of her children. She belonged elsewhere. Any moment,
she might be gone. And he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with
ever-raging, ever-unsatisfied desire. He must always turn home,
wherever his steps were taking him, always to her, and he could never
quite reach her, he could never quite be satisfied, never be at peace,
because she might go away.
At evening, he was glad. Then, when he had finished in the yard, and
come in and washed himself, when the child was put to bed, he could sit
on the other side of the fire with his beer on the hob and his long
white pipe in his fingers, conscious of her there opposite him, as she
worked at her embroidery, or as she talked to him, and he was safe with
her now, till morning. She was curiously self-sufficient and did not
say very much. Occasionally she lifted her head, her grey eyes shining
with a strange light, that had nothing to do with him or with this
place, and would tell him about herself. She seemed to be back again in
the past, chiefly in her childhood or her girlhood, with her father.
She very rarely talked of her first husband. But sometimes, all
shining-eyed, she was back at her own home, telling him about the
riotous times, the trip to Paris with her father, tales of the mad acts
of the peasants when a burst of religious, self-hurting fervour had
passed over the country.
She would lift her head and say:
“When they brought the railway across the country, they made afterwards
smaller railways, of shorter width, to come down to our town—a hundred
miles. When I was a girl, Gisla, my German gouvernante, was very
shocked and she would not tell me. But I heard the servants talking. I
remember, it was Pierre, the coachman. And my father, and some of his
friends, landowners, they had taken a wagon, a whole railway wagon—that
you travel in——”
“A railway-carriage,” said Brangwen.
She laughed to herself.
“I know it was a great scandal: yes—a whole wagon, and they had girls,
you know, _filles_, naked, all the wagon-full, and so they came down to
our village. They came through villages of the Jews, and it was a great
scandal. Can you imagine? All the countryside! And my mother, she did
not like it. Gisla said to me, ‘Madame, she must not know that you have
heard such things.’
“My mother, she used to cry, and she wished to beat my father, plainly
beat him. He would say, when she cried because he sold the forest, the
wood, to jingle money in his pocket, and go to Warsaw or Paris or Kiev,
when she said he must take back his word, he must not sell the forest,
he would stand and say, ‘I know, I know, I have heard it all, I have
heard it all before. Tell me some new thing. I know, I know, I know.’
Oh, but can you understand, I loved him when he stood there under the
door, saying only, ‘I know, I know, I know it all already.’ She could
not change him, no, not if she killed herself for it. And she could
change everybody else, but him, she could not change him——”
Brangwen could not understand. He had pictures of a cattle-truck full
of naked girls riding from nowhere to nowhere, of Lydia laughing
because her father made great debts and said, “I know, I know”; of Jews
running down the street shouting in Yiddish, “Don’t do it, don’t do
it,” and being cut down by demented peasants—she called them
“cattle”—whilst she looked on interested and even amused; of tutors and
governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him. And there
she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to him, arrogating a
curious superiority to him, a distance between them, something strange
and foreign and outside his life, talking, rattling, without rhyme or
reason, laughing when he was shocked or astounded, condemning nothing,
confounding his mind and making the whole world a chaos, without order
or stability of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he
had nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he was a
peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a nothing.
He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew so well, and
wondering whether it was really there, the window, the chest of
drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the atmosphere. And
gradually he grew into a raging fury against her. But because he was so
much amazed, and there was as yet such a distance between them, and she
was such an amazing thing to him, with all wonder opening out behind
her, he made no retaliation on her. Only he lay still and wide-eyed
with rage, inarticulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility.
And he remained wrathful and distinct from her, unchanged outwardly to
her, but underneath a solid power of antagonism to her. Of which she
became gradually aware. And it irritated her to be made aware of him as
a separate power. She lapsed into a sort of sombre exclusion, a curious
communion with mysterious powers, a sort of mystic, dark state which
drove him and the child nearly mad. He walked about for days stiffened
with resistance to her, stiff with a will to destroy her as she was.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was connection between them again.
It came on him as he was working in the fields. The tension, the bond,
burst, and the passionate flood broke forward into a tremendous,
magnificent rush, so that he felt he could snap off the trees as he
passed, and create the world afresh.
And when he arrived home, there was no sign between them. He waited and
waited till she came. And as he waited, his limbs seemed strong and
splendid to him, his hands seemed like passionate servants to him,
goodly, he felt a stupendous power in himself, of life, and of urgent,
strong blood.
She was sure to come at last, and touch him. Then he burst into flame
for her, and lost himself. They looked at each other, a deep laugh at
the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of her again, wholesale,
mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth of her, to bury himself in the
depths of her in an inexhaustible exploration, she all the while
revelling in that he revelled in her, tossed all her secrets aside and
plunged to that which was secret to her as well, whilst she quivered
with fear and the last anguish of delight.
What did it matter who they were, whether they knew each other or not?
The hour passed away again, there was severance between them, and rage
and misery and bereavement for her, and deposition and toiling at the
mill with slaves for him. But no matter. They had had their hour, and
should it chime again, they were ready for it, ready to renew the game
at the point where it was left off, on the edge of the outer darkness,
when the secrets within the woman are game for the man, hunted
doggedly, when the secrets of the woman are the man’s adventure, and
they both give themselves to the adventure.
She was with child, and there was again the silence and distance
between them. She did not want him nor his secrets nor his game, he was
deposed, he was cast out. He seethed with fury at the small,
ugly-mouthed woman who had nothing to do with him. Sometimes his anger
broke on her, but she did not cry. She turned on him like a tiger, and
there was battle.
He had to learn to contain himself again, and he hated it. He hated her
that she was not there for him. And he took himself off, anywhere.
But an instinct of gratitude and a knowledge that she would receive him
back again, that later on she would be there for him again, prevented
his straying very far. He cautiously did not go too far. He knew she
might lapse into ignorance of him, lapse away from him, farther,
farther, farther, till she was lost to him. He had sense enough,
premonition enough in himself, to be aware of this and to measure
himself accordingly. For he did not want to lose her: he did not want
her to lapse away.
Cold, he called her, selfish, only caring about herself, a foreigner
with a bad nature, caring really about nothing, having no proper
feelings at the bottom of her, and no proper niceness. He raged, and
piled up accusations that had some measure of truth in them all. But a
certain grace in him forbade him from going too far. He knew, and he
quivered with rage and hatred, that she was all these vile things, that
she was everything vile and detestable. But he had grace at the bottom
of him, which told him that, above all things, he did not want to lose
her, he was not going to lose her.
So he kept some consideration for her, he preserved some relationship.
He went out more often, to the “Red Lion” again, to escape the madness
of sitting next to her when she did not belong to him, when she was as
absent as any woman in indifference could be. He could not stay at
home. So he went to the “Red Lion”. And sometimes he got drunk. But he
preserved his measure, some things between them he never forfeited.
A tormented look came into his eyes, as if something were always
dogging him. He glanced sharp and quick, he could not bear to sit still
doing nothing. He had to go out, to find company, to give himself away
there. For he had no other outlet, he could not work to give himself
out, he had not the knowledge.
As the months of her pregnancy went on, she left him more and more
alone, she was more and more unaware of him, his existence was
annulled. And he felt bound down, bound, unable to stir, beginning to
go mad, ready to rave. For she was quiet and polite, as if he did not
exist, as one is quiet and polite to a servant.
Nevertheless she was great with his child, it was his turn to submit.
She sat opposite him, sewing, her foreign face inscrutable and
indifferent. He felt he wanted to break her into acknowledgment of him,
into awareness of him. It was insufferable that she had so obliterated
him. He would smash her into regarding him. He had a raging agony of
desire to do so.
But something bigger in him withheld him, kept him motionless. So he
went out of the house for relief. Or he turned to the little girl for
her sympathy and her love, he appealed with all his power to the small
Anna. So soon they were like lovers, father and child.
For he was afraid of his wife. As she sat there with bent head, silent,
working or reading, but so unutterably silent that his heart seemed
under the millstone of it, she became herself like the upper millstone
lying on him, crushing him, as sometimes a heavy sky lies on the earth.
Yet he knew he could not tear her away from the heavy obscurity into
which she was merged. He must not try to tear her into recognition of
himself, and agreement with himself. It were disastrous, impious. So,
let him rage as he might, he must withhold himself. But his wrists
trembled and seemed mad, seemed as if they would burst.
When, in November, the leaves came beating against the window shutters,
with a lashing sound, he started, and his eyes flickered with flame.
The dog looked up at him, he sunk his head to the fire. But his wife
was startled. He was aware of her listening.
“They blow up with a rattle,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“The leaves.”
She sank away again. The strange leaves beating in the wind on the wood
had come nearer than she. The tension in the room was overpowering, it
was difficult for him to move his head. He sat with every nerve, every
vein, every fibre of muscle in his body stretched on a tension. He felt
like a broken arch thrust sickeningly out from support. For her
response was gone, he thrust at nothing. And he remained himself, he
saved himself from crashing down into nothingness, from being
squandered into fragments, by sheer tension, sheer backward resistance.
During the last months of her pregnancy, he went about in a surcharged,
imminent state that did not exhaust itself. She was also depressed, and
sometimes she cried. It needed so much life to begin afresh, after she
had lost so lavishly. Sometimes she cried. Then he stood stiff, feeling
his heart would burst. For she did not want him, she did not want even
to be made aware of him. By the very puckering of her face he knew that
he must stand back, leave her intact, alone. For it was the old grief
come back in her, the old loss, the pain of the old life, the dead
husband, the dead children. This was sacred to her, and he must not
violate her with his comfort. For what she wanted she would come to
him. He stood aloof with turgid heart.
He had to see her tears come, fall over her scarcely moving face, that
only puckered sometimes, down on to her breast, that was so still,
scarcely moving. And there was no noise, save now and again, when, with
a strange, somnambulant movement, she took her handkerchief and wiped
her face and blew her nose, and went on with the noiseless weeping. He
knew that any offer of comfort from himself would be worse than
useless, hateful to her, jangling her. She must cry. But it drove him
insane. His heart was scalded, his brain hurt in his head, he went
away, out of the house.
His great and chiefest source of solace was the child. She had been at
first aloof from him, reserved. However friendly she might seem one
day, the next she would have lapsed to her original disregard of him,
cold, detached, at her distance.
The first morning after his marriage he had discovered it would not be
so easy with the child. At the break of dawn he had started awake
hearing a small voice outside the door saying plaintively:
“Mother!”
He rose and opened the door. She stood on the threshold in her
night-dress, as she had climbed out of bed, black eyes staring round
and hostile, her fair hair sticking out in a wild fleece. The man and
child confronted each other.
“I want my mother,” she said, jealously accenting the “my”.
“Come on then,” he said gently.
“Where’s my mother?”
“She’s here—come on.”
The child’s eyes, staring at the man with ruffled hair and beard, did
not change. The mother’s voice called softly. The little bare feet
entered the room with trepidation.
“Mother!”
“Come, my dear.”
The small bare feet approached swiftly.
“I wondered where you were,” came the plaintive voice. The mother
stretched out her arms. The child stood beside the high bed. Brangwen
lightly lifted the tiny girl, with an “up-a-daisy”, then took his own
place in the bed again.
“Mother!” cried the child, as in anguish.
“What, my pet?”
Anna wriggled close into her mother’s arms, clinging tight, hiding from
the fact of the man. Brangwen lay still, and waited. There was a long
silence.
Then suddenly, Anna looked round, as if she thought he would be gone.
She saw the face of the man lying upturned to the ceiling. Her black
eyes stared antagonistic from her exquisite face, her arms clung
tightly to her mother, afraid. He did not move for some time, not
knowing what to say. His face was smooth and soft-skinned with love,
his eyes full of soft light. He looked at her, scarcely moving his
head, his eyes smiling.
“Have you just wakened up?” he said.
“Go away,” she retorted, with a little darting forward of the head,
something like a viper.
“Nay,” he answered, “_I’m_ not going. You can go.”
“Go away,” came the sharp little command.
“There’s room for you,” he said.
“You can’t send your father from his own bed, my little bird,” said her
mother, pleasantly.
The child glowered at him, miserable in her impotence.
“There’s room for you as well,” he said. “It’s a big bed enough.”
She glowered without answering, then turned and clung to her mother.
She would not allow it.
During the day she asked her mother several times:
“When are we going home, mother?”
“We are at home, darling, we live here now. This is our house, we live
here with your father.”
The child was forced to accept it. But she remained against the man. As
night came on, she asked:
“Where are you going to sleep, mother?”
“I sleep with the father now.”
And when Brangwen came in, the child asked fiercely:
“_Why_ do you sleep with _my_ mother? My mother sleeps with me,” her
voice quivering.
“You come as well, an’ sleep with both of us,” he coaxed.
“Mother!” she cried, turning, appealing against him.
“But I must have a husband, darling. All women must have a husband.”
“And you like to have a father with your mother, don’t you?” said
Brangwen.
Anna glowered at him. She seemed to cogitate.
“No,” she cried fiercely at length, “no, I don’t _want._” And slowly
her face puckered, she sobbed bitterly. He stood and watched her,
sorry. But there could be no altering it.
Which, when she knew, she became quiet. He was easy with her, talking
to her, taking her to see the live creatures, bringing her the first
chickens in his cap, taking her to gather the eggs, letting her throw
crusts to the horse. She would easily accompany him, and take all he
had to give, but she remained neutral still.
She was curiously, incomprehensibly jealous of her mother, always
anxiously concerned about her. If Brangwen drove with his wife to
Nottingham, Anna ran about happily enough, or unconcerned, for a long
time. Then, as afternoon came on, there was only one cry—“I want my
mother, I want my mother——” and a bitter, pathetic sobbing that soon
had the soft-hearted Tilly sobbing too. The child’s anguish was that
her mother was gone, gone.
Yet as a rule, Anna seemed cold, resenting her mother, critical of her.
It was:
“I don’t like you to do that, mother,” or, “I don’t like you to say
that.” She was a sore problem to Brangwen and to all the people at the
Marsh. As a rule, however, she was active, lightly flitting about the
farmyard, only appearing now and again to assure herself of her mother.
Happy she never seemed, but quick, sharp, absorbed, full of imagination
and changeability. Tilly said she was bewitched. But it did not matter
so long as she did not cry. There was something heart-rending about
Anna’s crying, her childish anguish seemed so utter and so timeless, as
if it were a thing of all the ages.
She made playmates of the creatures of the farmyard, talking to them,
telling them the stories she had from her mother, counselling them and
correcting them. Brangwen found her at the gate leading to the paddock
and to the duckpond. She was peering through the bars and shouting to
the stately white geese, that stood in a curving line:
“You’re not to call at people when they want to come. You must not do
it.”
The heavy, balanced birds looked at the fierce little face and the
fleece of keen hair thrust between the bars, and they raised their
heads and swayed off, producing the long, can-canking, protesting noise
of geese, rocking their ship-like, beautiful white bodies in a line
beyond the gate.
“You’re naughty, you’re naughty,” cried Anna, tears of dismay and
vexation in her eyes. And she stamped her slipper.
“Why, what are they doing?” said Brangwen.
“They won’t let me come in,” she said, turning her flushed little face
to him.
“Yi, they will. You can go in if you want to,” and he pushed open the
gate for her.
She stood irresolute, looking at the group of bluey-white geese
standing monumental under the grey, cold day.
“Go on,” he said.
She marched valiantly a few steps in. Her little body started
convulsively at the sudden, derisive can-cank-ank of the geese. A
blankness spread over her. The geese trailed away with uplifted heads
under the low grey sky.
“They don’t know you,” said Brangwen. “You should tell ’em what your
name is.”
“They’re _naughty_ to shout at me,” she flashed.
“They think you don’t live here,” he said.
Later he found her at the gate calling shrilly and imperiously:
“My name is Anna, Anna Lensky, and I live here, because Mr. Brangwen’s
my father now. He _is_, yes he _is._ And I live here.”
This pleased Brangwen very much. And gradually, without knowing it
herself, she clung to him, in her lost, childish, desolate moments,
when it was good to creep up to something big and warm, and bury her
little self in his big, unlimited being. Instinctively he was careful
of her, careful to recognize her and to give himself to her disposal.
She was difficult of her affections. For Tilly, she had a childish,
essential contempt, almost dislike, because the poor woman was such a
servant. The child would not let the serving-woman attend to her, do
intimate things for her, not for a long time. She treated her as one of
an inferior race. Brangwen did not like it.
“Why aren’t you fond of Tilly?” he asked.
“Because—because—because she looks at me with her eyes bent.”
Then gradually she accepted Tilly as belonging to the household, never
as a person.
For the first weeks, the black eyes of the child were for ever on the
watch. Brangwen, good-humoured but impatient, spoiled by Tilly, was an
easy blusterer. If for a few minutes he upset the household with his
noisy impatience, he found at the end the child glowering at him with
intense black eyes, and she was sure to dart forward her little head,
like a serpent, with her biting:
“Go away.”
“I’m _not_ going away,” he shouted, irritated at last. “Go
yourself—hustle—stir thysen—hop.” And he pointed to the door. The child
backed away from him, pale with fear. Then she gathered up courage,
seeing him become patient.
“We don’t live with _you,_” she said, thrusting forward her little head
at him. “You—you’re—you’re a bomakle.”
“A what?” he shouted.
Her voice wavered—but it came.
“A bomakle.”
“Ay, an’ you’re a comakle.”
She meditated. Then she hissed forwards her head.
“I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“A comakle.”
“No more am I a bomakle.”
He was really cross.
Other times she would say:
“My mother _doesn’t_ live here.”
“Oh, ay?”
“I want her to go away.”
“Then want’s your portion,” he replied laconically.
So they drew nearer together. He would take her with him when he went
out in the trap. The horse ready at the gate, he came noisily into the
house, which seemed quiet and peaceful till he appeared to set
everything awake.
“Now then, Topsy, pop into thy bonnet.”
The child drew herself up, resenting the indignity of the address.
“I can’t fasten my bonnet myself,” she said haughtily.
“Not man enough yet,” he said, tying the ribbons under her chin with
clumsy fingers.
She held up her face to him. Her little bright-red lips moved as he
fumbled under her chin.
“You talk—nonsents,” she said, re-echoing one of his phrases.
“_That_ face shouts for th’ pump,” he said, and taking out a big red
handkerchief, that smelled of strong tobacco, began wiping round her
mouth.
“Is Kitty waiting for me?” she asked.
“Ay,” he said. “Let’s finish wiping your face—it’ll pass wi’ a
cat-lick.”
She submitted prettily. Then, when he let her go, she began to skip,
with a curious flicking up of one leg behind her.
“Now my young buck-rabbit,” he said. “Slippy!”
She came and was shaken into her coat, and the two set off. She sat
very close beside him in the gig, tucked tightly, feeling his big body
sway, against her, very splendid. She loved the rocking of the gig,
when his big, live body swayed upon her, against her. She laughed, a
poignant little shrill laugh, and her black eyes glowed.
She was curiously hard, and then passionately tenderhearted. Her mother
was ill, the child stole about on tip-toe in the bedroom for hours,
being nurse, and doing the thing thoughtfully and diligently. Another
day, her mother was unhappy. Anna would stand with her legs apart,
glowering, balancing on the sides of her slippers. She laughed when the
goslings wriggled in Tilly’s hand, as the pellets of food were rammed
down their throats with a skewer, she laughed nervously. She was hard
and imperious with the animals, squandering no love, running about
amongst them like a cruel mistress.
Summer came, and hay-harvest, Anna was a brown elfish mite dancing
about. Tilly always marvelled over her, more than she loved her.
But always in the child was some anxious connection with the mother. So
long as Mrs. Brangwen was all right, the little girl played about and
took very little notice of her. But corn-harvest went by, the autumn
drew on, and the mother, the later months of her pregnancy beginning,
was strange and detached, Brangwen began to knit his brows, the old,
unhealthy uneasiness, the unskinned susceptibility came on the child
again. If she went to the fields with her father, then, instead of
playing about carelessly, it was:
“I want to go home.”
“Home, why tha’s nobbut this minute come.”
“I want to go home.”
“What for? What ails thee?”
“I want my mother.”
“Thy mother! Thy mother none wants thee.”
“I want to go home.”
There would be tears in a moment.
“Can ter find t’road, then?”
And he watched her scudding, silent and intent, along the hedge-bottom,
at a steady, anxious pace, till she turned and was gone through the
gateway. Then he saw her two fields off, still pressing forward, small
and urgent. His face was clouded as he turned to plough up the stubble.
The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling
above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like
spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to
earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were
churned deep in mud. Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack.
Inside the house it was dark, and quiet. The child flitted uneasily
round, and now and again came her plaintive, startled cry:
“Mother!”
Mrs. Brangwen was heavy and unresponsive, tired, lapsed back. Brangwen
went on working out of doors.
At evening, when he came in to milk, the child would run behind him.
Then, in the cosy cow-sheds, with the doors shut and the air looking
warm by the light of the hanging lantern, above the branching horns of
the cows, she would stand watching his hands squeezing rhythmically the
teats of the placid beast, watch the froth and the leaping squirt of
milk, watch his hand sometimes rubbing slowly, understandingly, upon a
hanging udder. So they kept each other company, but at a distance,
rarely speaking.
The darkest days of the year came on, the child was fretful, sighing as
if some oppression were on her, running hither and thither without
relief. And Brangwen went about at his work, heavy, his heart heavy as
the sodden earth.
The winter nights fell early, the lamp was lighted before tea-time, the
shutters were closed, they were all shut into the room with the tension
and stress. Mrs. Brangwen went early to bed, Anna playing on the floor
beside her. Brangwen sat in the emptiness of the downstairs room,
smoking, scarcely conscious even of his own misery. And very often he
went out to escape it.
Christmas passed, the wet, drenched, cold days of January recurred
monotonously, with now and then a brilliance of blue flashing in, when
Brangwen went out into a morning like crystal, when every sound rang
again, and the birds were many and sudden and brusque in the hedges.
Then an elation came over him in spite of everything, whether his wife
were strange or sad, or whether he craved for her to be with him, it
did not matter, the air rang with clear noises, the sky was like
crystal, like a bell, and the earth was hard. Then he worked and was
happy, his eyes shining, his cheeks flushed. And the zest of life was
strong in him.
The birds pecked busily round him, the horses were fresh and ready, the
bare branches of the trees flung themselves up like a man yawning, taut
with energy, the twigs radiated off into the clear light. He was alive
and full of zest for it all. And if his wife were heavy, separated from
him, extinguished, then, let her be, let him remain himself. Things
would be as they would be. Meanwhile he heard the ringing crow of a
cockerel in the distance, he saw the pale shell of the moon effaced on
a blue sky.
So he shouted to the horses, and was happy. If, driving into Ilkeston,
a fresh young woman were going in to do her shopping, he hailed her,
and reined in his horse, and picked her up. Then he was glad to have
her near him, his eyes shone, his voice, laughing, teasing in a warm
fashion, made the poise of her head more beautiful, her blood ran
quicker. They were both stimulated, the morning was fine.
What did it matter that, at the bottom of his heart, was care and pain?
It was at the bottom, let it stop at the bottom. His wife, her
suffering, her coming pain—well, it must be so. She suffered, but he
was out of doors, full in life, and it would be ridiculous, indecent,
to pull a long face and to insist on being miserable. He was happy,
this morning, driving to town, with the hoofs of the horse spanking the
hard earth. Well he was happy, if half the world were weeping at the
funeral of the other half. And it was a jolly girl sitting beside him.
And Woman was immortal, whatever happened, whoever turned towards
death. Let the misery come when it could not be resisted.
The evening arrived later very beautiful, with a rosy flush hovering
above the sunset, and passing away into violet and lavender, with
turquoise green north and south in the sky, and in the east, a great,
yellow moon hanging heavy and radiant. It was magnificent to walk
between the sunset and the moon, on a road where little holly trees
thrust black into the rose and lavender, and starlings flickered in
droves across the light. But what was the end of the journey? The pain
came right enough, later on, when his heart and his feet were heavy,
his brain dead, his life stopped.
One afternoon, the pains began, Mrs. Brangwen was put to bed, the
midwife came. Night fell, the shutters were closed, Brangwen came in to
tea, to the loaf and the pewter teapot, the child, silent and
quivering, playing with glass beads, the house, empty, it seemed, or
exposed to the winter night, as if it had no walls.
Sometimes there sounded, long and remote in the house, vibrating
through everything, the moaning cry of a woman in labour. Brangwen,
sitting downstairs, was divided. His lower, deeper self was with her,
bound to her, suffering. But the big shell of his body remembered the
sound of owls that used to fly round the farmstead when he was a boy.
He was back in his youth, a boy, haunted by the sound of the owls,
waking up his brother to speak to him. And his mind drifted away to the
birds, their solemn, dignified faces, their flight so soft and
broad-winged. And then to the birds his brother had shot, fluffy,
dust-coloured, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly asleep. It
was a queer thing, a dead owl.
He lifted his cup to his lips, he watched the child with the beads. But
his mind was occupied with owls, and the atmosphere of his boyhood,
with his brothers and sisters. Elsewhere, fundamental, he was with his
wife in labour, the child was being brought forth out of their one
flesh. He and she, one flesh, out of which life must be put forth. The
rent was not in his body, but it was of his body. On her the blows
fell, but the quiver ran through to him, to his last fibre. She must be
torn asunder for life to come forth, yet still they were one flesh, and
still, from further back, the life came out of him to her, and still he
was the unbroken that has the broken rock in its arms, their flesh was
one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was smitten and
rent, from him who quivered and yielded.
He went upstairs to her. As he came to the bedside she spoke to him in
Polish.
“Is it very bad?” he asked.
She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to
understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to
him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien,
looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could
not grasp him. She closed her eyes.
He turned away, white to the gills.
“It’s not so very bad,” said the midwife.
He knew he was a strain on his wife. He went downstairs.
The child glanced up at him, frightened.
“I want my mother,” she quavered.
“Ay, but she’s badly,” he said mildly, unheeding.
She looked at him with lost, frightened eyes.
“Has she got a headache?”
“No—she’s going to have a baby.”
The child looked round. He was unaware of her. She was alone again in
terror.
“I want my mother,” came the cry of panic.
“Let Tilly undress you,” he said. “You’re tired.”
There was another silence. Again came the cry of labour.
“I want my mother,” rang automatically from the wincing, panic-stricken
child, that felt cut off and lost in a horror of desolation.
Tilly came forward, her heart wrung.
“Come an’ let me undress her then, pet-lamb,” she crooned. “You s’ll
have your mother in th’ mornin’, don’t you fret, my duckie; never mind,
angel.”
But Anna stood upon the sofa, her back to the wall.
“I want my mother,” she cried, her little face quivering, and the great
tears of childish, utter anguish falling.
“She’s poorly, my lamb, she’s poorly to-night, but she’ll be better by
mornin’. Oh, don’t cry, don’t cry, love, she doesn’t want you to cry,
precious little heart, no, she doesn’t.”
Tilly took gently hold of the child’s skirts. Anna snatched back her
dress, and cried, in a little hysteria:
“No, you’re not to undress me—I want my mother,”—and her child’s face
was running with grief and tears, her body shaken.
“Oh, but let Tilly undress you. Let Tilly undress you, who loves you,
don’t be wilful to-night. Mother’s poorly, she doesn’t want you to
cry.”
The child sobbed distractedly, she could not hear.
“I want—my—mother,” she wept.
“When you’re undressed, you s’ll go up to see your mother—when you’re
undressed, pet, when you’ve let Tilly undress you, when you’re a little
jewel in your nightie, love. Oh, don’t you cry, don’t you—”
Brangwen sat stiff in his chair. He felt his brain going tighter. He
crossed over the room, aware only of the maddening sobbing.
“Don’t make a noise,” he said.
And a new fear shook the child from the sound of his voice. She cried
mechanically, her eyes looking watchful through her tears, in terror,
alert to what might happen.
“I want—my—mother,” quavered the sobbing, blind voice.
A shiver of irritation went over the man’s limbs. It was the utter,
persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the voice and the
crying.
“You must come and be undressed,” he said, in a quiet voice that was
thin with anger.
And he reached his hand and grasped her. He felt her body catch in a
convulsive sob. But he too was blind, and intent, irritated into
mechanical action. He began to unfasten her little apron. She would
have shrunk from him, but could not. So her small body remained in his
grasp, while he fumbled at the little buttons and tapes, unthinking,
intent, unaware of anything but the irritation of her. Her body was
held taut and resistant, he pushed off the little dress and the
petticoats, revealing the white arms. She kept stiff, overpowered,
violated, he went on with his task. And all the while she sobbed,
choking:
“I want my mother.”
He was unheedingly silent, his face stiff. The child was now incapable
of understanding, she had become a little, mechanical thing of fixed
will. She wept, her body convulsed, her voice repeating the same cry.
“Eh, dear o’ me!” cried Tilly, becoming distracted herself. Brangwen,
slow, clumsy, blind, intent, got off all the little garments, and stood
the child naked in its shift upon the sofa.
“Where’s her nightie?” he asked.
Tilly brought it, and he put it on her. Anna did not move her limbs to
his desire. He had to push them into place. She stood, with fixed,
blind will, resistant, a small, convulsed, unchangeable thing weeping
ever and repeating the same phrase. He lifted one foot after the other,
pulled off slippers and socks. She was ready.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
She did not change. Unheeding, uncaring, she stood on the sofa,
standing back, alone, her hands shut and half lifted, her face, all
tears, raised and blind. And through the sobbing and choking came the
broken:
“I—want—my—mother.”
“Do you want a drink?” he said again.
There was no answer. He lifted the stiff, denying body between his
hands. Its stiff blindness made a flash of rage go through him. He
would like to break it.
He set the child on his knee, and sat again in his chair beside the
fire, the wet, sobbing, inarticulate noise going on near his ear, the
child sitting stiff, not yielding to him or anything, not aware.
A new degree of anger came over him. What did it all matter? What did
it matter if the mother talked Polish and cried in labour, if this
child were stiff with resistance, and crying? Why take it to heart? Let
the mother cry in labour, let the child cry in resistance, since they
would do so. Why should he fight against it, why resist? Let it be, if
it were so. Let them be as they were, if they insisted.
And in a daze he sat, offering no fight. The child cried on, the
minutes ticked away, a sort of torpor was on him.
It was some little time before he came to, and turned to attend to the
child. He was shocked by her little wet, blinded face. A bit dazed, he
pushed back the wet hair. Like a living statue of grief, her blind face
cried on.
“Nay,” he said, “not as bad as that. It’s not as bad as that, Anna, my
child. Come, what are you crying for so much? Come, stop now, it’ll
make you sick. I wipe you dry, don’t wet your face any more. Don’t cry
any more wet tears, don’t, it’s better not to. Don’t cry—it’s not so
bad as all that. Hush now, hush—let it be enough.”
His voice was queer and distant and calm. He looked at the child. She
was beside herself now. He wanted her to stop, he wanted it all to
stop, to become natural.
“Come,” he said, rising to turn away, “we’ll go an’ supper-up the
beast.”
He took a big shawl, folded her round, and went out into the kitchen
for a lantern.
“You’re never taking the child out, of a night like this,” said Tilly.
“Ay, it’ll quieten her,” he answered.
It was raining. The child was suddenly still, shocked, finding the rain
on its face, the darkness.
“We’ll just give the cows their something-to-eat, afore they go to
bed,” Brangwen was saying to her, holding her close and sure.
There was a trickling of water into the butt, a burst of rain-drops
sputtering on to her shawl, and the light of the lantern swinging,
flashing on a wet pavement and the base of a wet wall. Otherwise it was
black darkness: one breathed darkness.
He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they entered into the high,
dry barn, that smelled warm even if it were not warm. He hung the
lantern on the nail and shut the door. They were in another world now.
The light shed softly on the timbered barn, on the whitewashed walls,
and the great heap of hay; instruments cast their shadows largely, a
ladder rose to the dark arch of a loft. Outside there was the driving
rain, inside, the softly-illuminated stillness and calmness of the
barn.
Holding the child on one arm, he set about preparing the food for the
cows, filling a pan with chopped hay and brewer’s grains and a little
meal. The child, all wonder, watched what he did. A new being was
created in her for the new conditions. Sometimes, a little spasm,
eddying from the bygone storm of sobbing, shook her small body. Her
eyes were wide and wondering, pathetic. She was silent, quite still.
In a sort of dream, his heart sunk to the bottom, leaving the surface
of him still, quite still, he rose with the panful of food, carefully
balancing the child on one arm, the pan in the other hand. The silky
fringe of the shawl swayed softly, grains and hay trickled to the
floor; he went along a dimly-lit passage behind the mangers, where the
horns of the cows pricked out of the obscurity. The child shrank, he
balanced stiffly, rested the pan on the manger wall, and tipped out the
food, half to this cow, half to the next. There was a noise of chains
running, as the cows lifted or dropped their heads sharply; then a
contented, soothing sound, a long snuffing as the beasts ate in
silence.
The journey had to be performed several times. There was the rhythmic
sound of the shovel in the barn, then the man returned walking stiffly
between the two weights, the face of the child peering out from the
shawl. Then the next time, as he stooped, she freed her arm and put it
round his neck, clinging soft and warm, making all easier.
The beasts fed, he dropped the pan and sat down on a box, to arrange
the child.
“Will the cows go to sleep now?” she said, catching her breath as she
spoke.
“Yes.”
“Will they eat all their stuff up first?”
“Yes. Hark at them.”
And the two sat still listening to the snuffing and breathing of cows
feeding in the sheds communicating with this small barn. The lantern
shed a soft, steady light from one wall. All outside was still in the
rain. He looked down at the silky folds of the paisley shawl. It
reminded him of his mother. She used to go to church in it. He was back
again in the old irresponsibility and security, a boy at home.
The two sat very quiet. His mind, in a sort of trance, seemed to become
more and more vague. He held the child close to him. A quivering little
shudder, re-echoing from her sobbing, went down her limbs. He held her
closer. Gradually she relaxed, the eyelids began to sink over her dark,
watchful eyes. As she sank to sleep, his mind became blank.
When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in a
timeless stillness. What was he listening for? He seemed to be
listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life. He
remembered his wife. He must go back to her. The child was asleep, the
eyelids not quite shut, showing a slight film of black pupil between.
Why did she not shut her eyes? Her mouth was also a little open.
He rose quickly and went back to the house.
“Is she asleep?” whispered Tilly.
He nodded. The servant-woman came to look at the child who slept in the
shawl, with cheeks flushed hot and red, and a whiteness, a wanness
round the eyes.
“God-a-mercy!” whispered Tilly, shaking her head.
He pushed off his boots and went upstairs with the child. He became
aware of the anxiety grasped tight at his heart, because of his wife.
But he remained still. The house was silent save for the wind outside,
and the noisy trickling and splattering of water in the water-butts.
There was a slit of light under his wife’s door.
He put the child into bed wrapped as she was in the shawl, for the
sheets would be cold. Then he was afraid that she might not be able to
move her arms, so he loosened her. The black eyes opened, rested on him
vacantly, sank shut again. He covered her up. The last little quiver
from the sobbing shook her breathing.
This was his room, the room he had had before he married. It was
familiar. He remembered what it was to be a young man, untouched.
He remained suspended. The child slept, pushing her small fists from
the shawl. He could tell the woman her child was asleep. But he must go
to the other landing. He started. There was the sound of the owls—the
moaning of the woman. What an uncanny sound! It was not human—at least
to a man.
He went down to her room, entering softly. She was lying still, with
eyes shut, pale, tired. His heart leapt, fearing she was dead. Yet he
knew perfectly well she was not. He saw the way her hair went loose
over her temples, her mouth was shut with suffering in a sort of grin.
She was beautiful to him—but it was not human. He had a dread of her as
she lay there. What had she to do with him? She was other than himself.
Something made him go and touch her fingers that were still grasped on
the sheet. Her brown-grey eyes opened and looked at him. She did not
know him as himself. But she knew him as the man. She looked at him as
a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her: an
impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed
again. A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his
entrails, passing off into the infinite.
When her pains began afresh, tearing her, he turned aside, and could
not look. But his heart in torture was at peace, his bowels were glad.
He went downstairs, and to the door, outside, lifted his face to the
rain, and felt the darkness striking unseen and steadily upon him.
The swift, unseen threshing of the night upon him silenced him and he
was overcome. He turned away indoors, humbly. There was the infinite
world, eternal, unchanging, as well as the world of life.
Chapter III.
CHILDHOOD OF ANNA LENSKY
Tom Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his stepchild Anna.
When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill of pleasure. He liked
the confirmation of fatherhood. It gave him satisfaction to know he had
a son. But he felt not very much outgoing to the baby itself. He was
its father, that was enough.
He was glad that his wife was mother of his child. She was serene, a
little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In the birth of the
child she seemed to lose connection with her former self. She became
now really English, really Mrs. Brangwen. Her vitality, however, seemed
lowered.
She was still, to Brangwen, immeasurably beautiful. She was still
passionate, with a flame of being. But the flame was not robust and
present. Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but like some flower
opened in the shade, that could not bear the full light. She loved the
baby. But even this, with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her,
a shadowiness even in her mother-love. When Brangwen saw her nursing
his child, happy, absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin
flame. For he perceived how he must subdue himself in his approach to
her. And he wanted again the robust, moral exchange of love and passion
such as he had had at first with her, at one time and another, when
they were matched at their highest intensity. This was the one
experience for him now. And he wanted it, always, with remorseless
craving.
She came to him again, with the same lifting of her mouth as had driven
him almost mad with trammelled passion at first. She came to him again,
and, his heart delirious in delight and readiness, he took her. And it
was almost as before.
Perhaps it was quite as before. At any rate, it made him know
perfection, it established in him a constant eternal knowledge.
But it died down before he wanted it to die down. She was finished, she
could take no more. And he was not exhausted, he wanted to go on. But
it could not be.
So he had to begin the bitter lesson, to abate himself, to take less
than he wanted. For she was Woman to him, all other women were her
shadows. For she had satisfied him. And he wanted it to go on. And it
could not. However he raged, and, filled with suppression that became
hot and bitter, hated her in his soul that she did not want him,
however he had mad outbursts, and drank and made ugly scenes, still he
knew, he was only kicking against the pricks. It was not, he had to
learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that
she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him
in her own way, and to her own measure. And she had spent much life
before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give
him fulfilment. She had taken him and given him fulfilment. She still
could do so, in her own times and ways. But he must control himself,
measure himself to her.
He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential
energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other
centres of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child. And he
was jealous of the child.
But he loved her, and time came to give some sort of course to his
troublesome current of life, so that it did not foam and flood and make
misery. He formed another centre of love in her child, Anna. Gradually
a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child, relieving the
main flood to his wife. Also he sought the company of men, he drank
heavily now and again.
The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby
came. Seeing the mother with the baby boy, delighted and serene and
secure, Anna was at first puzzled, then gradually she became indignant,
and at last her little life settled on its own swivel, she was no more
strained and distorted to support her mother. She became more childish,
not so abnormal, not charged with cares she could not understand. The
charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had devolved
elsewhere than on her. Gradually the child was freed. She became an
independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own centre.
Of her own choice, she then loved Brangwen most, or most obviously. For
these two made a little life together, they had a joint activity. It
amused him, at evening, to teach her to count, or to say her letters.
He remembered for her all the little nursery rhymes and childish songs
that lay forgotten at the bottom of his brain.
At first she thought them rubbish. But he laughed, and she laughed.
They became to her a huge joke. Old King Cole she thought was Brangwen.
Mother Hubbard was Tilly, her mother was the old woman who lived in a
shoe. It was a huge, it was a frantic delight to the child, this
nonsense, after her years with her mother, after the poignant
folk-tales she had had from her mother, which always troubled and
mystified her soul.
She shared a sort of recklessness with her father, a complete, chosen
carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her
voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was
dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes.
Brangwen called him the blackbird.
“Hallo,” Brangwen would cry, starting as he heard the wail of the child
announcing it wanted to be taken out of the cradle, “there’s the
blackbird tuning up.”
“The blackbird’s singing,” Anna would shout with delight, “the
blackbird’s singing.”
“When the pie was opened,” Brangwen shouted in his bawling bass voice,
going over to the cradle, “the bird began to sing.”
“Wasn’t it a dainty dish to set before a king?” cried Anna, her eyes
flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwen
for confirmation. He sat down with the baby, saying loudly:
“Sing up, my lad, sing up.”
And the baby cried loudly, and Anna shouted lustily, dancing in wild
bliss:
“Sing a song of sixpence
Pocketful of posies,
Ascha! Ascha!——”
Then she stopped suddenly in silence and looked at Brangwen again, her
eyes flashing, as she shouted loudly and delightedly:
“I’ve got it wrong, I’ve got it wrong.”
“Oh, my sirs,” said Tilly entering, “what a racket!”
Brangwen hushed the child and Anna flipped and danced on. She loved her
wild bursts of rowdiness with her father. Tilly hated it, Mrs. Brangwen
did not mind.
Anna did not care much for other children. She domineered them, she
treated them as if they were extremely young and incapable, to her they
were little people, they were not her equals. So she was mostly alone,
flying round the farm, entertaining the farm-hands and Tilly and the
servant-girl, whirring on and never ceasing.
She loved driving with Brangwen in the trap. Then, sitting high up and
bowling along, her passion for eminence and dominance was satisfied.
She was like a little savage in her arrogance. She thought her father
important, she was installed beside him on high. And they spanked
along, beside the high, flourishing hedge-tops, surveying the activity
of the countryside. When people shouted a greeting to him from the road
below, and Brangwen shouted jovially back, her little voice was soon
heard shrilling along with his, followed by her chuckling laugh, when
she looked up at her father with bright eyes, and they laughed at each
other. And soon it was the custom for the passerby to sing out: “How
are ter, Tom? Well, my lady!” or else, “Mornin’, Tom, mornin’, my
Lass!” or else, “You’re off together then?” or else, “You’re lookin’
rarely, you two.”
Anna would respond, with her father: “How are you, John! _Good_
mornin’, William! Ay, makin’ for Derby,” shrilling as loudly as she
could. Though often, in response to “You’re off out a bit then,” she
would reply, “Yes, we are,” to the great joy of all. She did not like
the people who saluted him and did not salute her.
She went into the public-house with him, if he had to call, and often
sat beside him in the bar-parlour as he drank his beer or brandy. The
landladies paid court to her, in the obsequious way landladies have.
“Well, little lady, an’ what’s your name?”
“Anna Brangwen,” came the immediate, haughty answer.
“Indeed it is! An’ do you like driving in a trap with your father?”
“Yes,” said Anna, shy, but bored by these inanities. She had a
touch-me-not way of blighting the inane inquiries of grown-up people.
“My word, she’s a fawce little thing,” the landlady would say to
Brangwen.
“Ay,” he answered, not encouraging comments on the child. Then there
followed the present of a biscuit, or of cake, which Anna accepted as
her dues.
“What does she say, that I’m a fawce little thing?” the small girl
asked afterwards.
“She means you’re a sharp-shins.”
Anna hesitated. She did not understand. Then she laughed at some
absurdity she found.
Soon he took her every week to market with him. “I can come, can’t I?”
she asked every Saturday, or Thursday morning, when he made himself
look fine in his dress of a gentleman farmer. And his face clouded at
having to refuse her.
So at last, he overcame his own shyness, and tucked her beside him.
They drove into Nottingham and put up at the “Black Swan”. So far all
right. Then he wanted to leave her at the inn. But he saw her face, and
knew it was impossible. So he mustered his courage, and set off with
her, holding her hand, to the cattle-market.
She stared in bewilderment, flitting silent at his side. But in the
cattle-market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy,
filthy boots, and leathern leggins. And the road underfoot was all
nasty with cow-muck. And it frightened her to see the cattle in the
square pens, so many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness
of men and a yelling of drovers. Also she felt her father was
embarrassed by her, and ill-at-ease.
He brought her a cake at the refreshment-booth, and set her on a seat.
A man hailed him.
“_Good_ morning, Tom. That thine, then?”—and the bearded farmer jerked
his head at Anna.
“Ay,” said Brangwen, deprecating.
“I did-na know tha’d one that old.”
“No, it’s my missis’s.”
“Oh, that’s it!” And the man looked at Anna as if she were some odd
little cattle. She glowered with black eyes.
Brangwen left her there, in charge of the barman, whilst he went to see
about the selling of some young stirks. Farmers, butchers, drovers,
dirty, uncouth men from whom she shrank instinctively stared down at
her as she sat on her seat, then went to get their drink, talking in
unabated tones. All was big and violent about her.
“Whose child met that be?” they asked of the barman.
“It belongs to Tom Brangwen.”
The child sat on in neglect, watching the door for her father. He never
came; many, many men came, but not he, and she sat like a shadow. She
knew one did not cry in such a place. And every man looked at her
inquisitively, she shut herself away from them.
A deep, gathering coldness of isolation took hold on her. He was never
coming back. She sat on, frozen, unmoving.
When she had become blank and timeless he came, and she slipped off her
seat to him, like one come back from the dead. He had sold his beast as
quickly as he could. But all the business was not finished. He took her
again through the hurtling welter of the cattle-market.
Then at last they turned and went out through the gate. He was always
hailing one man or another, always stopping to gossip about land and
cattle and horses and other things she did not understand, standing in
the filth and the smell, among the legs and great boots of men. And
always she heard the questions:
“What lass is that, then? I didn’t know tha’d one o’ that age.”
“It belongs to my missis.”
Anna was very conscious of her derivation from her mother, in the end,
and of her alienation.
But at last they were away, and Brangwen went with her into a little
dark, ancient eating-house in the Bridlesmith-Gate. They had cow’s-tail
soup, and meat and cabbage and potatoes. Other men, other people, came
into the dark, vaulted place, to eat. Anna was wide-eyed and silent
with wonder.
Then they went into the big market, into the corn exchange, then to
shops. He bought her a little book off a stall. He loved buying things,
odd things that he thought would be useful. Then they went to the
“Black Swan”, and she drank milk and he brandy, and they harnessed the
horse and drove off, up the Derby Road.
She was tired out with wonder and marvelling. But the next day, when
she thought of it, she skipped, flipping her leg in the odd dance she
did, and talked the whole time of what had happened to her, of what she
had seen. It lasted her all the week. And the next Saturday she was
eager to go again.
She became a familiar figure in the cattle-market, sitting waiting in
the little booth. But she liked best to go to Derby. There her father
had more friends. And she liked the familiarity of the smaller town,
the nearness of the river, the strangeness that did not frighten her,
it was so much smaller. She liked the covered-in market, and the old
women. She liked the “George Inn”, where her father put up. The
landlord was Brangwen’s old friend, and Anna was made much of. She sat
many a day in the cosy parlour talking to Mr. Wigginton, a fat man with
red hair, the landlord. And when the farmers all gathered at twelve
o’clock for dinner, she was a little heroine.
At first she would only glower or hiss at these strange men with their
uncouth accent. But they were good-humoured. She was a little oddity,
with her fierce, fair hair like spun glass sticking out in a flamy halo
round the apple-blossom face and the black eyes, and the men liked an
oddity. She kindled their attention.
She was very angry because Marriott, a gentleman-farmer from Ambergate,
called her the little pole-cat.
“Why, you’re a pole-cat,” he said to her.
“I’m not,” she flashed.
“You are. That’s just how a pole-cat goes.”
She thought about it.
“Well, you’re—you’re——” she began.
“I’m what?”
She looked him up and down.
“You’re a bow-leg man.”
Which he was. There was a roar of laughter. They loved her that she was
indomitable.
“Ah,” said Marriott. “Only a pole-cat says that.”
“Well, I am a pole-cat,” she flamed.
There was another roar of laughter from the men.
They loved to tease her.
“Well, me little maid,” Braithwaite would say to her, “an’ how’s th’
lamb’s wool?”
He gave a tug at a glistening, pale piece of her hair.
“It’s not lamb’s wool,” said Anna, indignantly putting back her
offended lock.
“Why, what’st ca’ it then?”
“It’s hair.”
“Hair! Wheriver dun they rear that sort?”
“Wheriver dun they?” she asked, in dialect, her curiosity overcoming
her.
Instead of answering he shouted with joy. It was the triumph, to make
her speak dialect.
She had one enemy, the man they called Nut-Nat, or Nat-Nut, a cretin,
with inturned feet, who came flap-lapping along, shoulder jerking up at
every step. This poor creature sold nuts in the public-houses where he
was known. He had no roof to his mouth, and the men used to mock his
speech.
The first time he came into the “George” when Anna was there, she
asked, after he had gone, her eyes very round:
“Why does he do that when he walks?”
“’E canna ’elp ’isself, Duckie, it’s th’ make o’ th’ fellow.”
She thought about it, then she laughed nervously. And then she
bethought herself, her cheeks flushed, and she cried:
“He’s a _horrid_ man.”
“Nay, he’s non horrid; he canna help it if he wor struck that road.”
But when poor Nat came wambling in again, she slid away. And she would
not eat his nuts, if the men bought them for her. And when the farmers
gambled at dominoes for them, she was angry.
“They are dirty-man’s nuts,” she cried.
So a revulsion started against Nat, who had not long after to go to the
workhouse.
There grew in Brangwen’s heart now a secret desire to make her a lady.
His brother Alfred, in Nottingham, had caused a great scandal by
becoming the lover of an educated woman, a lady, widow of a doctor.
Very often, Alfred Brangwen went down as a friend to her cottage, which
was in Derbyshire, leaving his wife and family for a day or two, then
returning to them. And no one dared gainsay him, for he was a
strong-willed, direct man, and he said he was a friend of this widow.
One day Brangwen met his brother on the station.
“Where are _you_ going to, then?” asked the younger brother.
“I’m going down to Wirksworth.”
“You’ve got friends down there, I’m told.”
“Yes.”
“I s’ll have to be lookin’ in when I’m down that road.”
“You please yourself.”
Tom Brangwen was so curious about the woman that the next time he was
in Wirksworth he asked for her house.
He found a beautiful cottage on the steep side of a hill, looking clean
over the town, that lay in the bottom of the basin, and away at the old
quarries on the opposite side of the space. Mrs. Forbes was in the
garden. She was a tall woman with white hair. She came up the path
taking off her thick gloves, laying down her shears. It was autumn. She
wore a wide-brimmed hat.
Brangwen blushed to the roots of his hair, and did not know what to
say.
“I thought I might look in,” he said, “knowing you were friends of my
brother’s. I had to come to Wirksworth.”
She saw at once that he was a Brangwen.
“Will you come in?” she said. “My father is lying down.”
She took him into a drawing-room, full of books, with a piano and a
violin-stand. And they talked, she simply and easily. She was full of
dignity. The room was of a kind Brangwen had never known; the
atmosphere seemed open and spacious, like a mountain-top to him.
“Does my brother like reading?” he asked.
“Some things. He has been reading Herbert Spencer. And we read Browning
sometimes.”
Brangwen was full of admiration, deep thrilling, almost reverential
admiration. He looked at her with lit-up eyes when she said, “we read”.
At last he burst out, looking round the room:
“I didn’t know our Alfred was this way inclined.”
“He is quite an unusual man.”
He looked at her in amazement. She evidently had a new idea of his
brother: she evidently appreciated him. He looked again at the woman.
She was about forty, straight, rather hard, a curious, separate
creature. Himself, he was not in love with her, there was something
chilling about her. But he was filled with boundless admiration.
At tea-time he was introduced to her father, an invalid who had to be
helped about, but who was ruddy and well-favoured, with snowy hair and
watery blue eyes, and a courtly naïve manner that again was new and
strange to Brangwen, so suave, so merry, so innocent.
His brother was this woman’s lover! It was too amazing. Brangwen went
home despising himself for his own poor way of life. He was a
clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud. More than ever he
wanted to clamber out, to this visionary polite world.
He was well off. He was as well off as Alfred, who could not have above
six hundred a year, all told. He himself made about four hundred, and
could make more. His investments got better every day. Why did he not
do something? His wife was a lady also.
But when he got to the Marsh, he realized how fixed everything was, how
the other form of life was beyond him, and he regretted for the first
time that he had succeeded to the farm. He felt a prisoner, sitting
safe and easy and unadventurous. He might, with risk, have done more
with himself. He could neither read Browning nor Herbert Spencer, nor
have access to such a room as Mrs. Forbes’s. All that form of life was
outside him.
But then, he said he did not want it. The excitement of the visit began
to pass off. The next day he was himself, and if he thought of the
other woman, there was something about her and her place that he did
not like, something cold something alien, as if she were not a woman,
but an inhuman being who used up human life for cold, unliving
purposes.
The evening came on, he played with Anna, and then sat alone with his
own wife. She was sewing. He sat very still, smoking, perturbed. He was
aware of his wife’s quiet figure, and quiet dark head bent over her
needle. It was too quiet for him. It was too peaceful. He wanted to
smash the walls down, and let the night in, so that his wife should not
be so secure and quiet, sitting there. He wished the air were not so
close and narrow. His wife was obliterated from him, she was in her own
world, quiet, secure, unnoticed, unnoticing. He was shut down by her.
He rose to go out. He could not sit still any longer. He must get out
of this oppressive, shut-down, woman-haunt.
His wife lifted her head and looked at him.
“Are you going out?” she asked.
He looked down and met her eyes. They were darker than darkness, and
gave deeper space. He felt himself retreating before her, defensive,
whilst her eyes followed and tracked him own.
“I was just going up to Cossethay,” he said.
She remained watching him.
“Why do you go?” she said.
His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.
“No reason particular,” he said, beginning to fill his pipe again,
mechanically.
“Why do you go away so often?” she said.
“But you don’t want me,” he replied.
She was silent for a while.
“You do not want to be with me any more,” she said.
It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was his
secret.
“Yi,” he said.
“You want to find something else,” she said.
He did not answer. “Did he?” he asked himself.
“You should not want so much attention,” she said. “You are not a
baby.”
“I’m not grumbling,” he said. Yet he knew he was.
“You think you have not enough,” she said.
“How enough?”
“You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do
you do to make me love you?”
He was flabbergasted.
“I never said I hadn’t enough in you,” he replied. “I didn’t know you
wanted making to love me. What do you want?”
“You don’t make it good between us any more, you are not interested.
You do not make me want you.”
“And you don’t make me want you, do you now?” There was a silence. They
were such strangers.
“Would you like to have another woman?” she asked.
His eyes grew round, he did not know where he was. How could she, his
own wife, say such a thing? But she sat there, small and foreign and
separate. It dawned upon him she did not consider herself his wife,
except in so far as they agreed. She did not feel she had married him.
At any rate, she was willing to allow he might want another woman. A
gap, a space opened before him.
“No,” he said slowly. “What other woman should I want?”
“Like your brother,” she said.
He was silent for some time, ashamed also.
“What of her?” he said. “I didn’t like the woman.”
“Yes, you liked her,” she answered persistently.
He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own heart so
callously. And he was indignant. What right had she to sit there
telling him these things? She was his wife, what right had she to speak
to him like this, as if she were a stranger.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I want no woman.”
“Yes, you would like to be like Alfred.”
His silence was one of angry frustration. He was astonished. He had
told her of his visit to Wirksworth, but briefly, without interest, he
thought.
As she sat with her strange dark face turned towards him, her eyes
watched him, inscrutable, casting him up. He began to oppose her. She
was again the active unknown facing him. Must he admit her? He resisted
involuntarily.
“Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you than me?” she
said.
The turbulence raged in his breast.
“I don’t,” he said.
“Why do you?” she repeated. “Why do you want to deny me?”
Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely, isolated, unsure. She
had seemed to him the utterly certain, satisfied, absolute, excluding
him. Could she need anything?
“Why aren’t you satisfied with me?—I’m not satisfied with you. Paul
used to come to me and take me like a man does. You only leave me alone
or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again—so that you
can forget me again.”
“What am I to remember about you?” said Brangwen.
“I want you to know there is somebody there besides yourself.”
“Well, don’t I know it?”
“You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing there.
When Paul came to me, I was something to him—a woman, I was. To you I
am nothing—it is like cattle—or nothing——”
“You make me feel as if _I_ was nothing,” he said.
They were silent. She sat watching him. He could not move, his soul was
seething and chaotic. She turned to her sewing again. But the sight of
her bent before him held him and would not let him be. She was a
strange, hostile, dominant thing. Yet not quite hostile. As he sat he
felt his limbs were strong and hard, he sat in strength.
She was silent for a long time, stitching. He was aware, poignantly, of
the round shape of her head, very intimate, compelling. She lifted her
head and sighed. The blood burned in him, her voice ran to him like
fire.
“Come here,” she said, unsure.
For some moments he did not move. Then he rose slowly and went across
the hearth. It required an almost deathly effort of volition, or of
acquiescence. He stood before her and looked down at her. Her face was
shining again, her eyes were shining again like terrible laughter. It
was to him terrible, how she could be transfigured. He could not look
at her, it burnt his heart.
“My love!” she said.
And she put her arms round him as he stood before her round his thighs,
pressing him against her breast. And her hands on him seemed to reveal
to him the mould of his own nakedness, he was passionately lovely to
himself. He could not bear to look at her.
“My dear!” she said. He knew she spoke a foreign language. The fear was
like bliss in his heart. He looked down. Her face was shining, her eyes
were full of light, she was awful. He suffered from the compulsion to
her. She was the awful unknown. He bent down to her, suffering, unable
to let go, unable to let himself go, yet drawn, driven. She was now the
transfigured, she was wonderful, beyond him. He wanted to go. But he
could not as yet kiss her. He was himself apart. Easiest he could kiss
her feet. But he was too ashamed for the actual deed, which were like
an affront. She waited for him to meet her, not to bow before her and
serve her. She wanted his active participation, not his submission. She
put her fingers on him. And it was torture to him, that he must give
himself to her actively, participate in her, that he must meet and
embrace and know her, who was other than himself. There was that in him
which shrank from yielding to her, resisted the relaxing towards her,
opposed the mingling with her, even while he most desired it. He was
afraid, he wanted to save himself.
There were a few moments of stillness. Then gradually, the tension, the
withholding relaxed in him, and he began to flow towards her. She was
beyond him, the unattainable. But he let go his hold on himself, he
relinquished himself, and knew the subterranean force of his desire to
come to her, to be with her, to mingle with her, losing himself to find
her, to find himself in her. He began to approach her, to draw near.
His blood beat up in waves of desire. He wanted to come to her, to meet
her. She was there, if he could reach her. The reality of her who was
just beyond him absorbed him. Blind and destroyed, he pressed forward,
nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of himself, he received
within the darkness which should swallow him and yield him up to
himself. If he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness,
if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one
consummation, that were supreme, supreme.
Their coming together now, after two years of married life, was much
more wonderful to them than it had been before. It was the entry into
another circle of existence, it was the baptism to another life, it was
the complete confirmation. Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge,
their footsteps were lit-up with discovery. Wherever they walked, it
was well, the world re-echoed round them in discovery. They went gladly
and forgetful. Everything was lost, and everything was found. The new
world was discovered, it remained only to be explored.
They had passed through the doorway into the further space, where
movement was so big, that it contained bonds and constraints and
labours, and still was complete liberty. She was the doorway to him, he
to her. At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and
had stood in the doorways facing each other, whilst the light flooded
out from behind on to each of their faces, it was the transfiguration,
glorification, the admission.
And always the light of the transfiguration burned on in their hearts.
He went his way, as before, she went her way, to the rest of the world
there seemed no change. But to the two of them, there was the perpetual
wonder of the transfiguration.
He did not know her any better, any more precisely, now that he knew
her altogether. Poland, her husband, the war—he understood no more of
this in her. He did not understand her foreign nature, half German,
half Polish, nor her foreign speech. But he knew her, he knew her
meaning, without understanding. What she said, what she spoke, this was
a blind gesture on her part. In herself she walked strong and clear, he
knew her, he saluted her, was with her. What was memory after all, but
the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been
fulfilled? What was Paul Lensky to her, but an unfulfilled possibility
to which he, Brangwen, was the reality and the fulfilment? What did it
matter, that Anna Lensky was born of Lydia and Paul? God was her father
and her mother. He had passed through the married pair without fully
making Himself known to them.
Now He was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as they stood
together. When at last they had joined hands, the house was finished,
and the Lord took up his abode. And they were glad.
The days went on as before, Brangwen went out to his work, his wife
nursed her child and attended in some measure to the farm. They did not
think of each other—why should they? Only when she touched him, he knew
her instantly, that she was with him, near him, that she was the
gateway and the way out, that she was beyond, and that he was
travelling in her through the beyond. Whither?—What does it matter? He
responded always. When she called, he answered, when he asked, her
response came at once, or at length.
Anna’s soul was put at peace between them. She looked from one to the
other, and she saw them established to her safety, and she was free.
She played between the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud in
confidence, having the assurance on her right hand and the assurance on
her left. She was no longer called upon to uphold with her childish
might the broken end of the arch. Her father and her mother now met to
the span of the heavens, and she, the child, was free to play in the
space beneath, between.
Chapter IV.
GIRLHOOD OF ANNA BRANGWEN
When Anna was nine years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames’ school in
Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her inconsequential
fashion, doing very much as she liked, disconcerting old Miss Coates by
her indifference to respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna
only laughed at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized her in superb,
childish fashion.
The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt for
ordinary people, a benevolent superiority. She was very shy, and
tortured with misery when people did not like her. On the other hand,
she cared very little for anybody save her mother, whom she still
rather resentfully worshipped, and her father, whom she loved and
patronized, but upon whom she depended. These two, her mother and
father, held her still in fee. But she was free of other people,
towards whom, on the whole, she took the benevolent attitude. She
deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or arrogance, however. As a child,
she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof. She could confer
favours, but, save from her mother and father, she could receive none.
She hated people who came too near to her. Like a wild thing, she
wanted her distance. She mistrusted intimacy.
In Cossethay and Ilkeston she was always an alien. She had plenty of
acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom she met were
significant to her. They seemed part of a herd, undistinguished. She
did not take people very seriously.
She had two brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom she was
intimately related to but whom she never mingled with, and Fred, fair
and responsive, whom she adored but did not consider as a real,
separate thing. She was too much the centre of her own universe, too
little aware of anything outside.
The first _person_ she met, who affected her as a real, living person,
whom she regarded as having definite existence, was Baron Skrebensky,
her mother’s friend. He also was a Polish exile, who had taken orders,
and had received from Mr. Gladstone a small country living in
Yorkshire.
When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother to spend a
few days with the Baron Skrebensky. He was very unhappy in his
red-brick vicarage. He was vicar of a country church, a living worth a
little over two hundred pounds a year, but he had a large parish
containing several collieries, with a new, raw, heathen population. He
went to the north of England expecting homage from the common people,
for he was an aristocrat. He was roughly, even cruelly received. But he
never understood it. He remained a fiery aristocrat. Only he had to
learn to avoid his parishioners.
Anna was very much impressed by him. He was a smallish man with a
rugged, rather crumpled face and blue eyes set very deep and glowing.
His wife was a tall thin woman, of noble Polish family, mad with pride.
He still spoke broken English, for he had kept very close to his wife,
both of them forlorn in this strange, inhospitable country, and they
always spoke in Polish together. He was disappointed with Mrs.
Brangwen’s soft, natural English, very disappointed that her child
spoke no Polish.
Anna loved to watch him. She liked the big, new, rambling vicarage,
desolate and stark on its hill. It was so exposed, so bleak and bold
after the Marsh. The Baron talked endlessly in Polish to Mrs. Brangwen;
he made furious gestures with his hands, his blue eyes were full of
fire. And to Anna, there was a significance about his sharp, flinging
movements. Something in her responded to his extravagance and his
exuberant manner. She thought him a very wonderful person. She was shy
of him, she liked him to talk to her. She felt a sense of freedom near
him.
She never could tell how she knew it, but she did know that he was a
knight of Malta. She could never remember whether she had seen his
star, or cross, of his order or not, but it flashed in her mind, like a
symbol. He at any rate represented to the child the real world, where
kings and lords and princes moved and fulfilled their shining lives,
whilst queens and ladies and princesses upheld the noble order.
She had recognized the Baron Skrebensky as a real person, he had had
some regard for her. But when she did not see him any more, he faded
and became a memory. But as a memory he was always alive to her.
Anna became a tall, awkward girl. Her eyes were still very dark and
quick, but they had grown careless, they had lost their watchful,
hostile look. Her fierce, spun hair turned brown, it grew heavier and
was tied back. She was sent to a young ladies’ school in Nottingham.
And at this period she was absorbed in becoming a young lady. She was
intelligent enough, but not interested in learning. At first, she
thought all the girls at school very ladylike and wonderful, and she
wanted to be like them. She came to a speedy disillusion: they galled
and maddened her, they were petty and mean. After the loose, generous
atmosphere of her home, where little things did not count, she was
always uneasy in the world, that would snap and bite at every trifle.
A quick change came over her. She mistrusted herself, she mistrusted
the outer world. She did not want to go on, she did not want to go out
into it, she wanted to go no further.
“What do _I_ care about that lot of girls?” she would say to her
father, contemptuously; “they are nobody.”
The trouble was that the girls would not accept Anna at her measure.
They would have her according to themselves or not at all. So she was
confused, seduced, she became as they were for a time, and then, in
revulsion, she hated them furiously.
“Why don’t you ask some of your girls here?” her father would say.
“They’re not coming here,” she cried.
“And why not?”
“They’re bagatelle,” she said, using one of her mother’s rare phrases.
“Bagatelles or billiards, it makes no matter, they’re nice young lasses
enough.”
But Anna was not to be won over. She had a curious shrinking from
commonplace people, and particularly from the young lady of her day.
She would not go into company because of the ill-at-ease feeling other
people brought upon her. And she never could decide whether it were her
fault or theirs. She half respected these other people, and continuous
disillusion maddened her. She wanted to respect them. Still she thought
the people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed
always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that
irritated her beyond bearing. She would rather stay at home and avoid
the rest of the world, leaving it illusory.
For at the Marsh life had indeed a certain freedom and largeness. There
was no fret about money, no mean little precedence, nor care for what
other people thought, because neither Mrs. Brangwen nor Brangwen could
be sensible of any judgment passed on them from outside. Their lives
were too separate.
So Anna was only easy at home, where the common sense and the supreme
relation between her parents produced a freer standard of being than
she could find outside. Where, outside the Marsh, could she find the
tolerant dignity she had been brought up in? Her parents stood
undiminished and unaware of criticism. The people she met outside
seemed to begrudge her her very existence. They seemed to want to
belittle her also. She was exceedingly reluctant to go amongst them.
She depended upon her mother and her father. And yet she wanted to go
out.
At school, or in the world, she was usually at fault, she felt usually
that she ought to be slinking in disgrace. She never felt quite sure,
in herself, whether she were wrong, or whether the others were wrong.
She had not done her lessons: well, she did not see any reason why she
_should_ do her lessons, if she did not want to. Was there some occult
reason why she should? Were these people, schoolmistresses,
representatives of some mystic Right, some Higher Good? They seemed to
think so themselves. But she could not for her life see why a woman
should bully and insult her because she did not know thirty lines of As
You Like It. After all, _what_ did it matter if she knew them or not?
Nothing could persuade her that it was of the slightest importance.
Because she despised inwardly the coarsely working nature of the
mistress. Therefore she was always at outs with authority. From
constant telling, she came almost to believe in her own badness, her
own intrinsic inferiority. She felt that she ought always to be in a
state of slinking disgrace, if she fulfilled what was expected of her.
But she rebelled. She never really believed in her own badness. At the
bottom of her heart she despised the other people, who carped and were
loud over trifles. She despised them, and wanted revenge on them. She
hated them whilst they had power over her.
Still she kept an ideal: a free, proud lady absolved from the petty
ties, existing beyond petty considerations. She would see such ladies
in pictures: Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was one of her models. This
lady was proud and royal, and stepped indifferently over all small,
mean desires: so thought Anna, in her heart. And the girl did up her
hair high under a little slanting hat, her skirts were fashionably
bunched up, she wore an elegant, skin-fitting coat.
Her father was delighted. Anna was very proud in her bearing, too
naturally indifferent to smaller bonds to satisfy Ilkeston, which would
have liked to put her down. But Brangwen was having no such thing. If
she chose to be royal, royal she should be. He stood like a rock
between her and the world.
After the fashion of his family, he grew stout and handsome. His blue
eyes were full of light, twinkling and sensitive, his manner was
deliberate, but hearty, warm. His capacity for living his own life
without attention from his neighbours made them respect him. They would
run to do anything for him. He did not consider them, but was
open-handed towards them, so they made profit of their willingness. He
liked people, so long as they remained in the background.
Mrs. Brangwen went on in her own way, following her own devices. She
had her husband, her two sons and Anna. These staked out and marked her
horizon. The other people were outsiders. Inside her own world, her
life passed along like a dream for her, it lapsed, and she lived within
its lapse, active and always pleased, intent. She scarcely noticed the
outer things at all. What was outside was outside, non-existent. She
did not mind if the boys fought, so long as it was out of her presence.
But if they fought when she was by, she was angry, and they were afraid
of her. She did not care if they broke a window of a railway carriage
or sold their watches to have a revel at the Goose Fair. Brangwen was
perhaps angry over these things. To the mother they were insignificant.
It was odd little things that offended her. She was furious if the boys
hung around the slaughter-house, she was displeased when the school
reports were bad. It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused
of, so long as they were not stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to
brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain _gaucherie_, a
gawkiness on Anna’s part that irritated her against the girl. Certain
forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother’s eyes glow with
curious rage. Otherwise she was pleased, indifferent.
Pursuing her splendid-lady ideal, Anna became a lofty demoiselle of
sixteen, plagued by family shortcomings. She was very sensitive to her
father. She knew if he had been drinking, were he ever so little
affected, and she could not bear it. He flushed when he drank, the
veins stood out on his temples, there was a twinkling, cavalier
boisterousness in his eye, his manner was jovially overbearing and
mocking. And it angered her. When she heard his loud, roaring,
boisterous mockery, an anger of resentment filled her. She was quick to
forestall him, the moment he came in.
“You look a sight, you do, red in the face,” she cried.
“I might look worse if I was green,” he answered.
“Boozing in Ilkeston.”
“And what’s wrong wi’ Il’son?”
She flounced away. He watched her with amused, twinkling eyes, yet in
spite of himself said that she flouted him.
They were a curious family, a law to themselves, separate from the
world, isolated, a small republic set in invisible bounds. The mother
was quite indifferent to Ilkeston and Cossethay, to any claims made on
her from outside, she was very shy of any outsider, exceedingly
courteous, winning even. But the moment the visitor had gone, she
laughed and dismissed him, he did not exist. It had been all a game to
her. She was still a foreigner, unsure of her ground. But alone with
her own children and husband at the Marsh, she was mistress of a little
native land that lacked nothing.
She had some beliefs somewhere, never defined. She had been brought up
a Roman Catholic. She had gone to the Church of England for protection.
The outward form was a matter of indifference to her. Yet she had some
fundamental religion. It was as if she worshipped God as a mystery,
never seeking in the least to define what He was.
And inside her, the subtle sense of the Great Absolute wherein she had
her being was very strong. The English dogma never reached her: the
language was too foreign. Through it all she felt the great Separator
who held life in His hands, gleaming, imminent, terrible, the Great
Mystery, immediate beyond all telling.
She shone and gleamed to the Mystery, Whom she knew through all her
senses, she glanced with strange, mystic superstitions that never found
expression in the English language, never mounted to thought in
English. But so she lived, within a potent, sensuous belief that
included her family and contained her destiny.
To this she had reduced her husband. He existed with her entirely
indifferent to the general values of the world. Her very ways, the very
mark of her eyebrows were symbols and indication to him. There, on the
farm with her, he lived through a mystery of life and death and
creation, strange, profound ecstasies and incommunicable satisfactions,
of which the rest of the world knew nothing; which made the pair of
them apart and respected in the English village, for they were also
well-to-do.
But Anna was only half safe within her mother’s unthinking knowledge.
She had a mother-of-pearl rosary that had been her own father’s. What
it meant to her she could never say. But the string of moonlight and
silver, when she had it between her fingers, filled her with strange
passion. She learned at school a little Latin, she learned an Ave Maria
and a Pater Noster, she learned how to say her rosary. But that was no
good. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Benedicta tu in
mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus. Ave Maria, Sancta
Maria, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,
Amen.”
It was not right, somehow. What these words meant when translated was
not the same as the pale rosary meant. There was a discrepancy, a
falsehood. It irritated her to say, “Dominus tecum,” or, “benedicta tu
in mulieribus.” She loved the mystic words, “Ave Maria, Sancta Maria;”
she was moved by “benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus,” and by “nunc
et in hora mortis nostrae.” But none of it was quite real. It was not
satisfactory, somehow.
She avoided her rosary, because, moving her with curious passion as it
did, it _meant_ only these not very significant things. She put it
away. It was her instinct to put all these things away. It was her
instinct to avoid thinking, to avoid it, to save herself.
She was seventeen, touchy, full of spirits, and very moody: quick to
flush, and always uneasy, uncertain. For some reason or other, she
turned more to her father, she felt almost flashes of hatred for her
mother. Her mother’s dark muzzle and curiously insidious ways, her
mother’s utter surety and confidence, her strange satisfaction, even
triumph, her mother’s way of laughing at things and her mother’s silent
overriding of vexatious propositions, most of all her mother’s
triumphant power maddened the girl.
She became sudden and incalculable. Often she stood at the window,
looking out, as if she wanted to go. Sometimes she went, she mixed with
people. But always she came home in anger, as if she were diminished,
belittled, almost degraded.
There was over the house a kind of dark silence and intensity, in which
passion worked its inevitable conclusions. There was in the house a
sort of richness, a deep, inarticulate interchange which made other
places seem thin and unsatisfying. Brangwen could sit silent, smoking
in his chair, the mother could move about in her quiet, insidious way,
and the sense of the two presences was powerful, sustaining. The whole
intercourse was wordless, intense and close.
But Anna was uneasy. She wanted to get away. Yet wherever she went,
there came upon her that feeling of thinness, as if she were made
smaller, belittled. She hastened home.
There she raged and interrupted the strong, settled interchange.
Sometimes her mother turned on her with a fierce, destructive anger, in
which was no pity or consideration. And Anna shrank, afraid. She went
to her father.
He would still listen to the spoken word, which fell sterile on the
unheeding mother. Sometimes Anna talked to her father. She tried to
discuss people, she wanted to know what was meant. But her father
became uneasy. He did not want to have things dragged into
consciousness. Only out of consideration for her he listened. And there
was a kind of bristling rousedness in the room. The cat got up and
stretching itself, went uneasily to the door. Mrs. Brangwen was silent,
she seemed ominous. Anna could not go on with her fault-finding, her
criticism, her expression of dissatisfactions. She felt even her father
against her. He had a strong, dark bond with her mother, a potent
intimacy that existed inarticulate and wild, following its own course,
and savage if interrupted, uncovered.
Nevertheless Brangwen was uneasy about the girl, the whole house
continued to be disturbed. She had a pathetic, baffled appeal. She was
hostile to her parents, even whilst she lived entirely with them,
within their spell.
Many ways she tried, of escape. She became an assiduous church-goer.
But the _language_ meant nothing to her: it seemed false. She hated to
hear things expressed, put into words. Whilst the religious feelings
were inside her they were passionately moving. In the mouth of the
clergyman, they were false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the
tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She
went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But
then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And
she felt always belittled, as if never, never could she stretch her
length and stride her stride.
Her mind reverted often to the torture cell of a certain Bishop of
France, in which the victim could neither stand nor lie stretched out,
never. Not that she thought of herself in any connection with this. But
often there came into her mind the wonder, how the cell was built, and
she could feel the horror of the crampedness, as something very real.
She was, however, only eighteen when a letter came from Mrs. Alfred
Brangwen, in Nottingham, saying that her son William was coming to
Ilkeston to take a place as junior draughtsman, scarcely more than
apprentice, in a lace factory. He was twenty years old, and would the
Marsh Brangwens be friendly with him.
Tom Brangwen at once wrote offering the young man a home at the Marsh.
This was not accepted, but the Nottingham Brangwens expressed
gratitude.
There had never been much love lost between the Nottingham Brangwens
and the Marsh. Indeed, Mrs. Alfred, having inherited three thousand
pounds, and having occasion to be dissatisfied with her husband, held
aloof from all the Brangwens whatsoever. She affected, however, some
esteem of Mrs. Tom, as she called the Polish woman, saying that at any
rate she was a lady.
Anna Brangwen was faintly excited at the news of her Cousin Will’s
coming to Ilkeston. She knew plenty of young men, but they had never
become real to her. She had seen in this young gallant a nose she
liked, in that a pleasant moustache, in the other a nice way of wearing
clothes, in one a ridiculous fringe of hair, in another a comical way
of talking. They were objects of amusement and faint wonder to her,
rather than real beings, the young men.
The only man she knew was her father; and, as he was something large,
looming, a kind of Godhead, he embraced all manhood for her, and other
men were just incidental.
She remembered her cousin Will. He had town clothes and was thin, with
a very curious head, black as jet, with hair like sleek, thin fur. It
was a curious head: it reminded her she knew not of what: of some
animal, some mysterious animal that lived in the darkness under the
leaves and never came out, but which lived vividly, swift and intense.
She always thought of him with that black, keen, blind head. And she
considered him odd.
He appeared at the Marsh one Sunday morning: a rather long, thin youth
with a bright face and a curious self-possession among his shyness, a
native unawareness of what other people might be, since he was himself.
When Anna came downstairs in her Sunday clothes, ready for church, he
rose and greeted her conventionally, shaking hands. His manners were
better than hers. She flushed. She noticed that he now had a thick
fledge on his upper lip, a black, finely-shapen line marking his wide
mouth. It rather repelled her. It reminded her of the thin, fine fur of
his hair. She was aware of something strange in him.
His voice had rather high upper notes, and very resonant middle notes.
It was queer. She wondered why he did it. But he sat very naturally in
the Marsh living-room. He had some uncouthness, some natural
self-possession of the Brangwens, that made him at home there.
Anna was rather troubled by the strangely intimate, affectionate way
her father had towards this young man. He seemed gentle towards him, he
put himself aside in order to fill out the young man. This irritated
Anna.
“Father,” she said abruptly, “give me some collection.”
“What collection?” asked Brangwen.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she cried, flushing.
“Nay,” he said, “what collection’s this?”
“You know it’s the first Sunday of the month.”
Anna stood confused. Why was he doing this, why was he making her
conspicuous before this stranger?
“I want some collection,” she reasserted.
“So tha says,” he replied indifferently, looking at her, then turning
again to this nephew.
She went forward, and thrust her hand into his breeches pocket. He
smoked steadily, making no resistance, talking to his nephew. Her hand
groped about in his pocket, and then drew out his leathern purse. Her
colour was bright in her clear cheeks, her eyes shone. Brangwen’s eyes
were twinkling. The nephew sat sheepishly. Anna, in her finery, sat
down and slid all the money into her lap. There was silver and gold.
The youth could not help watching her. She was bent over the heap of
money, fingering the different coins.
“I’ve a good mind to take half a sovereign,” she said, and she looked
up with glowing dark eyes. She met the light-brown eyes of her cousin,
close and intent upon her. She was startled. She laughed quickly, and
turned to her father.
“I’ve a good mind to take half a sovereign, our Dad,” she said.
“Yes, nimble fingers,” said her father. “You take what’s your own.”
“Are you coming, our Anna?” asked her brother from the door.
She suddenly chilled to normal, forgetting both her father and her
cousin.
“Yes, I’m ready,” she said, taking sixpence from the heap of money and
sliding the rest back into the purse, which she laid on the table.
“Give it here,” said her father.
Hastily she thrust the purse into his pocket and was going out.
“You’d better go wi’ ’em, lad, hadn’t you?” said the father to the
nephew.
Will Brangwen rose uncertainly. He had golden-brown, quick, steady
eyes, like a bird’s, like a hawk’s, which cannot look afraid.
“Your Cousin Will ’ll come with you,” said the father.
Anna glanced at the strange youth again. She felt him waiting there for
her to notice him. He was hovering on the edge of her consciousness,
ready to come in. She did not want to look at him. She was antagonistic
to him.
She waited without speaking. Her cousin took his hat and joined her. It
was summer outside. Her brother Fred was plucking a sprig of flowery
currant to put in his coat, from the bush at the angle of the house.
She took no notice. Her cousin followed just behind her.
They were on the high road. She was aware of a strangeness in her
being. It made her uncertain. She caught sight of the flowering currant
in her brother’s buttonhole.
“Oh, our Fred,” she cried. “Don’t wear that stuff to go to church.”
Fred looked down protectively at the pink adornment on his breast.
“Why, I like it,” he said.
“Then you’re the only one who does, I’m sure,” she said.
And she turned to her cousin.
“Do _you_ like the smell of it?” she asked.
He was there beside her, tall and uncouth and yet self-possessed. It
excited her.
“I can’t say whether I do or not,” he replied.
“Give it here, Fred, don’t have it smelling in church,” she said to the
little boy, her page.
Her fair, small brother handed her the flower dutifully. She sniffed it
and gave it without a word to her cousin, for his judgment. He smelled
the dangling flower curiously.
“It’s a funny smell,” he said.
And suddenly she laughed, and a quick light came on all their faces,
there was a blithe trip in the small boy’s walk.
The bells were ringing, they were going up the summery hill in their
Sunday clothes. Anna was very fine in a silk frock of brown and white
stripes, tight along the arms and the body, bunched up very elegantly
behind the skirt. There was something of the cavalier about Will
Brangwen, and he was well dressed.
He walked along with the sprig of currant-blossom dangling between his
fingers, and none of them spoke. The sun shone brightly on little
showers of buttercup down the bank, in the fields the fool’s-parsley
was foamy, held very high and proud above a number of flowers that
flitted in the greenish twilight of the mowing-grass below.
They reached the church. Fred led the way to the pew, followed by the
cousin, then Anna. She felt very conspicuous and important. Somehow,
this young man gave her away to other people. He stood aside and let
her pass to her place, then sat next to her. It was a curious
sensation, to sit next to him.
The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on
the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar
behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees.
She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around
her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of
the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had
entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she
knew.
She was curiously elated. She sat in a glowing world of unreality, very
delightful. A brooding light, like laughter, was in her eyes. She was
aware of a strange influence entering in to her, which she enjoyed. It
was a dark enrichening influence she had not known before. She did not
think of her cousin. But she was startled when his hands moved.
She wished he would not say the responses so plainly. It diverted her
from her vague enjoyment. Why would he obtrude, and draw notice to
himself? It was bad taste. But she went on all right till the hymn
came. He stood up beside her to sing, and that pleased her. Then
suddenly, at the very first word, his voice came strong and
over-riding, filling the church. He was singing the tenor. Her soul
opened in amazement. His voice filled the church! It rang out like a
trumpet, and rang out again. She started to giggle over her hymn-book.
But he went on, perfectly steady. Up and down rang his voice, going its
own way. She was helplessly shocked into laughter. Between moments of
dead silence in herself she shook with laughter. On came the laughter,
seized her and shook her till the tears were in her eyes. She was
amazed, and rather enjoyed it. And still the hymn rolled on, and still
she laughed. She bent over her hymn-book crimson with confusion, but
still her sides shook with laughter. She pretended to cough, she
pretended to have a crumb in her throat. Fred was gazing up at her with
clear blue eyes. She was recovering herself. And then a slur in the
strong, blind voice at her side brought it all on again, in a gust of
mad laughter.
She bent down to prayer in cold reproof of herself. And yet, as she
knelt, little eddies of giggling went over her. The very sight of his
knees on the praying cushion sent the little shock of laughter over
her.
She gathered herself together and sat with prim, pure face, white and
pink and cold as a Christmas rose, her hands in her silk gloves folded
on her lap, her dark eyes all vague, abstracted in a sort of dream,
oblivious of everything.
The sermon rolled on vaguely, in a tide of pregnant peace.
Her cousin took out his pocket-handkerchief. He seemed to be drifted
absorbed into the sermon. He put his handkerchief to his face. Then
something dropped on to his knee. There lay the bit of flowering
currant! He was looking down at it in real astonishment. A wild snort
of laughter came from Anna. Everybody heard: it was torture. He had
shut the crumpled flower in his hand and was looking up again with the
same absorbed attention to the sermon. Another snort of laughter from
Anna. Fred nudged her remindingly.
Her cousin sat motionless. Somehow he was aware that his face was red.
She could feel him. His hand, closed over the flower, remained quite
still, pretending to be normal. Another wild struggle in Anna’s breast,
and the snort of laughter. She bent forward shaking with laughter. It
was now no joke. Fred was nudge-nudging at her. She nudged him back
fiercely. Then another vicious spasm of laughter seized her. She tried
to ward it off in a little cough. The cough ended in a suppressed
whoop. She wanted to die. And the closed hand crept away to the pocket.
Whilst she sat in taut suspense, the laughter rushed back at her,
knowing he was fumbling in his pocket to shove the flower away.
In the end, she felt weak, exhausted and thoroughly depressed. A
blankness of wincing depression came over her. She hated the presence
of the other people. Her face became quite haughty. She was unaware of
her cousin any more.
When the collection arrived with the last hymn, her cousin was again
singing resoundingly. And still it amused her. In spite of the shameful
exhibition she had made of herself, it amused her still. She listened
to it in a spell of amusement. And the bag was thrust in front of her,
and her sixpence was mingled in the folds of her glove. In her haste to
get it out, it flipped away and went twinkling in the next pew. She
stood and giggled. She could not help it: she laughed outright, a
figure of shame.
“What were you laughing about, our Anna?” asked Fred, the moment they
were out of the church.
“Oh, I couldn’t help it,” she said, in her careless, half-mocking
fashion. “I don’t know _why_ Cousin Will’s singing set me off.”
“What was there in my singing to make you laugh?” he asked.
“It was so loud,” she said.
They did not look at each other, but they both laughed again, both
reddening.
“What were you snorting and laughing for, our Anna?” asked Tom, the
elder brother, at the dinner table, his hazel eyes bright with joy.
“Everybody stopped to look at you.” Tom was in the choir.
She was aware of Will’s eyes shining steadily upon her, waiting for her
to speak.
“It was Cousin Will’s singing,” she said.
At which her cousin burst into a suppressed, chuckling laugh, suddenly
showing all his small, regular, rather sharp teeth, and just as quickly
closing his mouth again.
“Has he got such a remarkable voice on him then?” asked Brangwen.
“No, it’s not that,” said Anna. “Only it tickled me—I couldn’t tell you
why.”
And again a ripple of laughter went down the table.
Will Brangwen thrust forward his dark face, his eyes dancing, and said:
“I’m in the choir of St. Nicholas.”
“Oh, you go to church then!” said Brangwen.
“Mother does—father doesn’t,” replied the youth.
It was the little things, his movement, the funny tones of his voice,
that showed up big to Anna. The matter-of-fact things he said were
absurd in contrast. The things her father said seemed meaningless and
neutral.
During the afternoon they sat in the parlour, that smelled of geranium,
and they ate cherries, and talked. Will Brangwen was called on to give
himself forth. And soon he was drawn out.
He was interested in churches, in church architecture. The influence of
Ruskin had stimulated him to a pleasure in the mediæval forms. His talk
was fragmentary, he was only half articulate. But listening to him, as
he spoke of church after church, of nave and chancel and transept, of
rood-screen and font, of hatchet-carving and moulding and tracery,
speaking always with close passion of particular things, particular
places, there gathered in her heart a pregnant hush of churches, a
mystery, a ponderous significance of bowed stone, a dim-coloured light
through which something took place obscurely, passing into darkness: a
high, delighted framework of the mystic screen, and beyond, in the
furthest beyond, the altar. It was a very real experience. She was
carried away. And the land seemed to be covered with a vast, mystic
church, reserved in gloom, thrilled with an unknown Presence.
Almost it hurt her, to look out of the window and see the lilacs
towering in the vivid sunshine. Or was this the jewelled glass?
He talked of Gothic and Renaissance and Perpendicular, and Early
English and Norman. The words thrilled her.
“Have you been to Southwell?” he said. “I was there at twelve o’clock
at midday, eating my lunch in the churchyard. And the bells played a
hymn.
“Ay, it’s a fine Minster, Southwell, heavy. It’s got heavy, round
arches, rather low, on thick pillars. It’s grand, the way those arches
travel forward.
“There’s a sedilia as well—pretty. But I like the main body of the
church—and that north porch—”
He was very much excited and filled with himself that afternoon. A
flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing,
burningly real.
His uncle listened with twinkling eyes, half-moved. His aunt bent
forward her dark face, half-moved, but held by other knowledge. Anna
went with him.
He returned to his lodging at night treading quick, his eyes
glittering, and his face shining darkly as if he came from some
passionate, vital tryst.
The glow remained in him, the fire burned, his heart was fierce like a
sun. He enjoyed his unknown life and his own self. And he was ready to
go back to the Marsh.
Without knowing it, Anna was wanting him to come. In him she had
escaped. In him the bounds of her experience were transgressed: he was
the hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside
world.
He came. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, talking again, there
recurred the strange, remote reality which carried everything before
it. Sometimes, he talked of his father, whom he hated with a hatred
that was burningly close to love, of his mother, whom he loved, with a
love that was keenly close to hatred, or to revolt. His sentences were
clumsy, he was only half articulate. But he had the wonderful voice,
that could ring its vibration through the girl’s soul, transport her
into his feeling. Sometimes his voice was hot and declamatory,
sometimes it had a strange, twanging, almost cat-like sound, sometimes
it hesitated, puzzled, sometimes there was the break of a little laugh.
Anna was taken by him. She loved the running flame that coursed through
her as she listened to him. And his mother and his father became to her
two separate people in her life.
For some weeks the youth came frequently, and was received gladly by
them all. He sat amongst them, his dark face glowing, an eagerness and
a touch of derisiveness on his wide mouth, something grinning and
twisted, his eyes always shining like a bird’s, utterly without depth.
There was no getting hold of the fellow, Brangwen irritably thought. He
was like a grinning young tom-cat, that came when he thought he would,
and without cognizance of the other person.
At first the youth had looked towards Tom Brangwen when he talked; and
then he looked towards his aunt, for her appreciation, valuing it more
than his uncle’s; and then he turned to Anna, because from her he got
what he wanted, which was not in the elder people.
So that the two young people, from being always attendant on the elder,
began to draw apart and establish a separate kingdom. Sometimes Tom
Brangwen was irritated. His nephew irritated him. The lad seemed to him
too special, self-contained. His nature was fierce enough, but too much
abstracted, like a separate thing, like a cat’s nature. A cat could lie
perfectly peacefully on the hearthrug whilst its master or mistress
writhed in agony a yard away. It had nothing to do with other people’s
affairs. What did the lad really care about anything, save his own
instinctive affairs?
Brangwen was irritated. Nevertheless he liked and respected his nephew.
Mrs. Brangwen was irritated by Anna, who was suddenly changed, under
the influence of the youth. The mother liked the boy: he was not quite
an outsider. But she did not like her daughter to be so much under the
spell.
So that gradually the two young people drew apart, escaped from the
elders, to create a new thing by themselves. He worked in the garden to
propitiate his uncle. He talked churches to propitiate his aunt. He
followed Anna like a shadow: like a long, persistent, unswerving black
shadow he went after the girl. It irritated Brangwen exceedingly. It
exasperated him beyond bearing, to see the lit-up grin, the cat-grin as
he called it, on his nephew’s face.
And Anna had a new reserve, a new independence. Suddenly she began to
act independently of her parents, to live beyond them. Her mother had
flashes of anger.
But the courtship went on. Anna would find occasion to go shopping in
Ilkeston at evening. She always returned with her cousin; he walking
with his head over her shoulder, a little bit behind her, like the
Devil looking over Lincoln, as Brangwen noted angrily and yet with
satisfaction.
To his own wonder, Will Brangwen found himself in an electric state of
passion. To his wonder, he had stopped her at the gate as they came
home from Ilkeston one night, and had kissed her, blocking her way and
kissing her whilst he felt as if some blow were struck at him in the
dark. And when they went indoors, he was acutely angry that her parents
looked up scrutinizing at him and her. What right had they there: why
should they look up! Let them remove themselves, or look elsewhere.
And the youth went home with the stars in heaven whirling fiercely
about the blackness of his head, and his heart fierce, insistent, but
fierce as if he felt something baulking him. He wanted to smash through
something.
A spell was cast over her. And how uneasy her parents were, as she went
about the house unnoticing, not noticing them, moving in a spell as if
she were invisible to them. She was invisible to them. It made them
angry. Yet they had to submit. She went about absorbed, obscured for a
while.
Over him too the darkness of obscurity settled. He seemed to be hidden
in a tense, electric darkness, in which his soul, his life was
intensely active, but without his aid or attention. His mind was
obscured. He worked swiftly and mechanically, and he produced some
beautiful things.
His favourite work was wood-carving. The first thing he made for her
was a butter-stamper. In it he carved a mythological bird, a phoenix,
something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings, from a circle of
very beautiful flickering flames that rose upwards from the rim of the
cup.
Anna thought nothing of the gift on the evening when he gave it to her.
In the morning, however, when the butter was made, she fetched his seal
in place of the old wooden stamper of oak-leaves and acorns. She was
curiously excited to see how it would turn out. Strange, the uncouth
bird moulded there, in the cup-like hollow, with curious, thick
waverings running inwards from a smooth rim. She pressed another mould.
Strange, to lift the stamp and see that eagle-beaked bird raising its
breast to her. She loved creating it over and over again. And every
time she looked, it seemed a new thing come to life. Every piece of
butter became this strange, vital emblem.
She showed it to her mother and father.
“That is beautiful,” said her mother, a little light coming on to her
face.
“Beautiful!” exclaimed the father, puzzled, fretted. “Why, what sort of
a bird does he call it?”
And this was the question put by the customers during the next weeks.
“What sort of a bird do you call _that,_ as you’ve got on th’ butter?”
When he came in the evening, she took him into the dairy to show him.
“Do you like it?” he asked, in his loud, vibrating voice that always
sounded strange, re-echoing in the dark places of her being.
They very rarely touched each other. They liked to be alone together,
near to each other, but there was still a distance between them.
In the cool dairy the candle-light lit on the large, white surfaces of
the cream pans. He turned his head sharply. It was so cool and remote
in there, so remote. His mouth was open in a little, strained laugh.
She stood with her head bent, turned aside. He wanted to go near to
her. He had kissed her once. Again his eye rested on the round blocks
of butter, where the emblematic bird lifted its breast from the shadow
cast by the candle flame. What was restraining him? Her breast was near
him; his head lifted like an eagle’s. She did not move. Suddenly, with
an incredibly quick, delicate movement, he put his arms round her and
drew her to him. It was quick, cleanly done, like a bird that swoops
and sinks close, closer.
He was kissing her throat. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were
dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright with a fierce
purpose and gladness, like a hawk’s. She felt him flying into the dark
space of her flames, like a brand, like a gleaming hawk.
They had looked at each other, and seen each other strange, yet near,
very near, like a hawk stooping, swooping, dropping into a flame of
darkness. So she took the candle and they went back to the kitchen.
They went on in this way for some time, always coming together, but
rarely touching, very seldom did they kiss. And then, often, it was
merely a touch of the lips, a sign. But her eyes began to waken with a
constant fire, she paused often in the midst of her transit, as if to
recollect something, or to discover something.
And his face became sombre, intent, he did not really hear what was
said to him.
One evening in August he came when it was raining. He came in with his
jacket collar turned up, his jacket buttoned close, his face wet. And
he looked so slim and definite, coming out of the chill rain, she was
suddenly blinded with love for him. Yet he sat and talked with her
father and mother, meaninglessly, whilst her blood seethed to anguish
in her. She wanted to touch him now, only to touch him.
There was the queer, abstract look on her silvery radiant face that
maddened her father, her dark eyes were hidden. But she raised them to
the youth. And they were dark with a flare that made him quail for a
moment.
She went into the second kitchen and took a lantern. Her father watched
her as she returned.
“Come with me, Will,” she said to her cousin. “I want to see if I put
the brick over where that rat comes in.”
“You’ve no need to do that,” retorted her father. She took no notice.
The youth was between the two wills. The colour mounted into the
father’s face, his blue eyes stared. The girl stood near the door, her
head held slightly back, like an indication that the youth must come.
He rose, in his silent, intent way, and was gone with her. The blood
swelled in Brangwen’s forehead veins.
It was raining. The light of the lantern flashed on the cobbled path
and the bottom of the wall. She came to a small ladder, and climbed up.
He reached her the lantern, and followed. Up there in the fowl-loft,
the birds sat in fat bunches on the perches, the red combs shining like
fire. Bright, sharp eyes opened. There was a sharp crawk of
expostulation as one of the hens shifted over. The cock sat watching,
his yellow neck-feathers bright as glass. Anna went across the dirty
floor. Brangwen crouched in the loft watching. The light was soft under
the red, naked tiles. The girl crouched in a corner. There was another
explosive bustle of a hen springing from her perch.
Anna came back, stooping under the perches. He was waiting for her near
the door. Suddenly she had her arms round him, was clinging close to
him, cleaving her body against his, and crying, in a whispering,
whimpering sound.
“Will, I love you, I love you, Will, I love you.” It sounded as if it
were tearing her.
He was not even very much surprised. He held her in his arms, and his
bones melted. He leaned back against the wall. The door of the loft was
open. Outside, the rain slanted by in fine, steely, mysterious haste,
emerging out of the gulf of darkness. He held her in his arms, and he
and she together seemed to be swinging in big, swooping oscillations,
the two of them clasped together up in the darkness. Outside the open
door of the loft in which they stood, beyond them and below them, was
darkness, with a travelling veil of rain.
“I love you, Will, I love you,” she moaned, “I love you, Will.”
He held her as though they were one, and was silent.
In the house, Tom Brangwen waited a while. Then he got up and went out.
He went down the yard. He saw the curious misty shaft coming from the
loft door. He scarcely knew it was the light in the rain. He went on
till the illumination fell on him dimly. Then looking up, through the
blurr, he saw the youth and the girl together, the youth with his back
against the wall, his head sunk over the head of the girl. The elder
man saw them, blurred through the rain, but lit up. They thought
themselves so buried in the night. He even saw the lighted dryness of
the loft behind, and shadows and bunches of roosting fowls, up in the
night, strange shadows cast from the lantern on the floor.
And a black gloom of anger, and a tenderness of self-effacement, fought
in his heart. She did not understand what she was doing. She betrayed
herself. She was a child, a mere child. She did not know how much of
herself she was squandering. And he was blackly and furiously
miserable. Was he then an old man, that he should be giving her away in
marriage? Was he old? He was not old. He was younger than that young
thoughtless fellow in whose arms she lay. Who knew her—he or that
blind-headed youth? To whom did she belong, if not to himself?
He thought again of the child he had carried out at night into the
barn, whilst his wife was in labour with the young Tom. He remembered
the soft, warm weight of the little girl on his arm, round his neck.
Now she would say he was finished. She was going away, to deny him, to
leave an unendurable emptiness in him, a void that he could not bear.
Almost he hated her. How dared she say he was old. He walked on in the
rain, sweating with pain, with the horror of being old, with the agony
of having to relinquish what was life to him.
Will Brangwen went home without having seen his uncle. He held his hot
face to the rain, and walked on in a trance. “I love you, Will, I love
you.” The words repeated themselves endlessly. The veils had ripped and
issued him naked into the endless space, and he shuddered. The walls
had thrust him out and given him a vast space to walk in. Whither,
through this darkness of infinite space, was he walking blindly? Where,
at the end of all the darkness, was God the Almighty still darkly,
seated, thrusting him on? “I love you, Will, I love you.” He trembled
with fear as the words beat in his heart again. And he dared not think
of her face, of her eyes which shone, and of her strange, transfigured
face. The hand of the Hidden Almighty, burning bright, had thrust out
of the darkness and gripped him. He went on subject and in fear, his
heart gripped and burning from the touch.
The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. He went to
see Anna, but again there had come a reserve between them. Tom Brangwen
was gloomy, his blue eyes sombre. Anna was strange and delivered up.
Her face in its delicate colouring was mute, touched dumb and poignant.
The mother bowed her head and moved in her own dark world, that was
pregnant again with fulfilment.
Will Brangwen worked at his wood-carving. It was a passion, a passion
for him to have the chisel under his grip. Verily the passion of his
heart lifted the fine bite of steel. He was carving, as he had always
wanted, the Creation of Eve. It was a panel in low relief, for a
church. Adam lay asleep as if suffering, and God, a dim, large figure,
stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; and Eve, a
small vivid, naked female shape, was issuing like a flame towards the
hand of God, from the torn side of Adam.
Now, Will Brangwen was working at the Eve. She was thin, a keen, unripe
thing. With trembling passion, fine as a breath of air, he sent the
chisel over her belly, her hard, unripe, small belly. She was a stiff
little figure, with sharp lines, in the throes and torture and ecstasy
of her creation. But he trembled as he touched her. He had not finished
any of his figures. There was a bird on a bough overhead, lifting its
wings for flight, and a serpent wreathing up to it. It was not finished
yet. He trembled with passion, at last able to create the new, sharp
body of his Eve.
At the sides, at the far sides, at either end, were two Angels covering
their faces with their wings. They were like trees. As he went to the
Marsh, in the twilight, he felt that the Angels, with covered faces,
were standing back as he went by. The darkness was of their shadows and
the covering of their faces. When he went through the Canal bridge, the
evening glowed in its last deep colours, the sky was dark blue, the
stars glittered from afar, very remote and approaching above the
darkening cluster of the farm, above the paths of crystal along the
edge of the heavens.
She waited for him like the glow of light, and as if his face were
covered. And he dared not lift his face to look at her.
Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm
buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey
horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. Anna
and the young man went on noiselessly by the hedge, along where the
farm-carts had made dark ruts in the grass. They came through a gate
into a wide open field where still much light seemed to spread against
their faces. In the under-shadow the sheaves lay on the ground where
the reapers had left them, many sheaves like bodies prostrate in
shadowy bulk; others were riding hazily in shocks, like ships in the
haze of moonlight and of dusk, farther off.
They did not want to turn back, yet whither were they to go, towards
the moon? For they were separate, single.
“We will put up some sheaves,” said Anna. So they could remain there in
the broad, open place.
They went across the stubble to where the long rows of upreared shocks
ended. Curiously populous that part of the field looked, where the
shocks rode erect; the rest was open and prostrate.
The air was all hoary silver. She looked around her. Trees stood
vaguely at their distance, as if waiting like heralds, for the signal
to approach. In this space of vague crystal her heart seemed like a
bell ringing. She was afraid lest the sound should be heard.
“You take this row,” she said to the youth, and passing on, she stooped
in the next row of lying sheaves, grasping her hands in the tresses of
the oats, lifting the heavy corn in either hand, carrying it, as it
hung heavily against her, to the cleared space, where she set the two
sheaves sharply down, bringing them together with a faint, keen clash.
Her two bulks stood leaning together. He was coming, walking shadowily
with the gossamer dusk, carrying his two sheaves. She waited nearby. He
set his sheaves with a keen, faint clash, next to her sheaves. They
rode unsteadily. He tangled the tresses of corn. It hissed like a
fountain. He looked up and laughed.
Then she turned away towards the moon, which seemed glowingly to
uncover her bosom every time she faced it. He went to the vague
emptiness of the field opposite, dutifully.
They stooped, grasped the wet, soft hair of the corn, lifted the heavy
bundles, and returned. She was always first. She set down her sheaves,
making a pent-house with those others. He was coming shadowy across the
stubble, carrying his bundles, She turned away, hearing only the sharp
hiss of his mingling corn. She walked between the moon and his shadowy
figure.
She took her two new sheaves and walked towards him, as he rose from
stooping over the earth. He was coming out of the near distance. She
set down her sheaves to make a new stook. They were unsure. Her hands
fluttered. Yet she broke away, and turned to the moon, which laid bare
her bosom, so she felt as if her bosom were heaving and panting with
moonlight. And he had to put up her two sheaves, which had fallen down.
He worked in silence. The rhythm of the work carried him away again, as
she was coming near.
They worked together, coming and going, in a rhythm, which carried
their feet and their bodies in tune. She stooped, she lifted the burden
of sheaves, she turned her face to the dimness where he was, and went
with her burden over the stubble. She hesitated, set down her sheaves,
there was a swish and hiss of mingling oats, he was drawing near, and
she must turn again. And there was the flaring moon laying bare her
bosom again, making her drift and ebb like a wave.
He worked steadily, engrossed, threading backwards and forwards like a
shuttle across the strip of cleared stubble, weaving the long line of
riding shocks, nearer and nearer to the shadowy trees, threading his
sheaves with hers.
And always, she was gone before he came. As he came, she drew away, as
he drew away, she came. Were they never to meet? Gradually a low,
deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord,
tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be
together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.
And the work went on. The moon grew brighter, clearer, the corn
glistened. He bent over the prostrate bundles, there was a hiss as the
sheaves left the ground, a trailing of heavy bodies against him, a
dazzle of moonlight on his eyes. And then he was setting the corn
together at the stook. And she was coming near.
He waited for her, he fumbled at the stook. She came. But she stood
back till he drew away. He saw her in shadow, a dark column, and spoke
to her, and she answered. She saw the moonlight flash question on his
face. But there was a space between them, and he went away, the work
carried them, rhythmic.
Why was there always a space between them, why were they apart? Why, as
she came up from under the moon, would she halt and stand off from him?
Why was he held away from her? His will drummed persistently, darkly,
it drowned everything else.
Into the rhythm of his work there came a pulse and a steadied purpose.
He stooped, he lifted the weight, he heaved it towards her, setting it
as in her, under the moonlit space. And he went back for more. Ever
with increasing closeness he lifted the sheaves and swung striding to
the centre with them, ever he drove her more nearly to the meeting,
ever he did his share, and drew towards her, overtaking her. There was
only the moving to and fro in the moonlight, engrossed, the swinging in
the silence, that was marked only by the splash of sheaves, and
silence, and a splash of sheaves. And ever the splash of his sheaves
broke swifter, beating up to hers, and ever the splash of her sheaves
recurred monotonously, unchanging, and ever the splash of his sheaves
beat nearer.
Till at last, they met at the shock, facing each other, sheaves in
hand. And he was silvery with moonlight, with a moonlit, shadowy face
that frightened her. She waited for him.
“Put yours down,” she said.
“No, it’s your turn.” His voice was twanging and insistent.
She set her sheaves against the shock. He saw her hands glisten among
the spray of grain. And he dropped his sheaves and he trembled as he
took her in his arms. He had over-taken her, and it was his privilege
to kiss her. She was sweet and fresh with the night air, and sweet with
the scent of grain. And the whole rhythm of him beat into his kisses,
and still he pursued her, in his kisses, and still she was not quite
overcome. He wondered over the moonlight on her nose! All the moonlight
upon her, all the darkness within her! All the night in his arms,
darkness and shine, he possessed of it all! All the night for him now,
to unfold, to venture within, all the mystery to be entered, all the
discovery to be made.
Trembling with keen triumph, his heart was white as a star as he drove
his kisses nearer.
“My love!” she called, in a low voice, from afar. The low sound seemed
to call to him from far off, under the moon, to him who was unaware. He
stopped, quivered, and listened.
“My love,” came again the low, plaintive call, like a bird unseen in
the night.
He was afraid. His heart quivered and broke. He was stopped.
“Anna,” he said, as if he answered her from a distance, unsure.
“My love.”
And he drew near, and she drew near.
“Anna,” he said, in wonder and the birthpain of love.
“My love,” she said, her voice growing rapturous. And they kissed on
the mouth, in rapture and surprise, long, real kisses. The kiss lasted,
there among the moonlight. He kissed her again, and she kissed him. And
again they were kissing together. Till something happened in him, he
was strange. He wanted her. He wanted her exceedingly. She was
something new. They stood there folded, suspended in the night. And his
whole being quivered with surprise, as from a blow. He wanted her, and
he wanted to tell her so. But the shock was too great to him. He had
never realized before. He trembled with irritation and unusedness, he
did not know what to do. He held her more gently, gently, much more
gently. The conflict was gone by. And he was glad, and breathless, and
almost in tears. But he knew he wanted her. Something fixed in him for
ever. He was hers. And he was very glad and afraid. He did not know
what to do, as they stood there in the open, moonlit field. He looked
through her hair at the moon, which seemed to swim liquid-bright.
She sighed, and seemed to wake up, then she kissed him again. Then she
loosened herself away from him and took his hand. It hurt him when she
drew away from his breast. It hurt him with a chagrin. Why did she draw
away from him? But she held his hand.
“I want to go home,” she said, looking at him in a way he could not
understand.
He held close to her hand. He was dazed and he could not move, he did
not know how to move. She drew him away.
He walked helplessly beside her, holding her hand. She went with bent
head. Suddenly he said, as the simple solution stated itself to him:
“We’ll get married, Anna.”
She was silent.
“We’ll get married, Anna, shall we?”
She stopped in the field again and kissed him, clinging to him
passionately, in a way he could not understand. He could not
understand. But he left it all now, to marriage. That was the solution
now, fixed ahead. He wanted her, he wanted to be married to her, he
wanted to have her altogether, as his own for ever. And he waited,
intent, for the accomplishment. But there was all the while a slight
tension of irritation.
He spoke to his uncle and aunt that night.
“Uncle,” he said, “Anna and me think of getting married.”
“Oh ay!” said Brangwen.
“But how, you have no money?” said the mother.
The youth went pale. He hated these words. But he was like a gleaming,
bright pebble, something bright and inalterable. He did not think. He
sat there in his hard brightness, and did not speak.
“Have you mentioned it to your own mother?” asked Brangwen.
“No—I’ll tell her on Saturday.”
“You’ll go and see her?”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause.
“And what are you going to marry on—your pound a week?”
Again the youth went pale, as if the spirit were being injured in him.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at his uncle with his bright inhuman
eyes, like a hawk’s.
Brangwen stirred in hatred.
“It needs knowing,” he said.
“I shall have the money later on,” said the nephew. “I will raise some
now, and pay it back then.”
“Oh ay!—And why this desperate hurry? She’s a child of eighteen, and
you’re a boy of twenty. You’re neither of you of age to do as you like
yet.”
Will Brangwen ducked his head and looked at his uncle with swift,
mistrustful eyes, like a caged hawk.
“What does it matter how old she is, and how old I am?” he said.
“What’s the difference between me now and when I’m thirty?”
“A big difference, let us hope.”
“But you have no experience—you have no experience, and no money. Why
do you want to marry, without experience or money?” asked the aunt.
“What experience do I want, Aunt?” asked the boy.
And if Brangwen’s heart had not been hard and intact with anger, like a
precious stone, he would have agreed.
Will Brangwen went home strange and untouched. He felt he could not
alter from what he was fixed upon, his will was set. To alter it he
must be destroyed. And he would not be destroyed. He had no money. But
he would get some from somewhere, it did not matter. He lay awake for
many hours, hard and clear and unthinking, his soul crystallizing more
inalterably. Then he went fast asleep.
It was as if his soul had turned into a hard crystal. He might tremble
and quiver and suffer, it did not alter.
The next morning Tom Brangwen, inhuman with anger spoke to Anna.
“What’s this about wanting to get married?” he said.
She stood, paling a little, her dark eyes springing to the hostile,
startled look of a savage thing that will defend itself, but trembles
with sensitiveness.
“I do,” she said, out of her unconsciousness.
His anger rose, and he would have liked to break her.
“You do—you do—and what for?” he sneered with contempt. The old,
childish agony, the blindness that could recognize nobody, the
palpitating antagonism as of a raw, helpless, undefended thing came
back on her.
“I do because I do,” she cried, in the shrill, hysterical way of her
childhood. “_You_ are not my father—my father is dead—_you_ are not my
father.”
She was still a stranger. She did not recognize him. The cold blade cut
down, deep into Brangwen’s soul. It cut him off from her.
“And what if I’m not?” he said.
But he could not bear it. It had been so passionately dear to him, her
“Father—Daddie.”
He went about for some days as if stunned. His wife was bemused. She
did not understand. She only thought the marriage was impeded for want
of money and position.
There was a horrible silence in the house. Anna kept out of sight as
much as possible. She could be for hours alone.
Will Brangwen came back, after stupid scenes at Nottingham. He too was
pale and blank, but unchanging. His uncle hated him. He hated this
youth, who was so inhuman and obstinate. Nevertheless, it was to Will
Brangwen that the uncle, one evening, handed over the shares which he
had transferred to Anna Lensky. They were for two thousand five hundred
pounds. Will Brangwen looked at his uncle. It was a great deal of the
Marsh capital here given away. The youth, however, was only colder and
more fixed. He was abstract, purely a fixed will. He gave the shares to
Anna.
After which she cried for a whole day, sobbing her eyes out. And at
night, when she had heard her mother go to bed, she slipped down and
hung in the doorway. Her father sat in his heavy silence, like a
monument. He turned his head slowly.
“Daddy,” she cried from the doorway, and she ran to him sobbing as if
her heart would break. “Daddy—daddy—daddy.”
She crouched on the hearthrug with her arms round him and her face
against him. His body was so big and comfortable. But something hurt
her head intolerably. She sobbed almost with hysteria.
He was silent, with his hand on her shoulder. His heart was bleak. He
was not her father. That beloved image she had broken. Who was he then?
A man put apart with those whose life has no more developments. He was
isolated from her. There was a generation between them, he was old, he
had died out from hot life. A great deal of ash was in his fire, cold
ash. He felt the inevitable coldness, and in bitterness forgot the
fire. He sat in his coldness of age and isolation. He had his own wife.
And he blamed himself, he sneered at himself, for this clinging to the
young, wanting the young to belong to him.
The child who clung to him wanted her child-husband. As was natural.
And from him, Brangwen, she wanted help, so that her life might be
properly fitted out. But love she did not want. Why should there be
love between them, between the stout, middle-aged man and this child?
How could there be anything between them, but mere human willingness to
help each other? He was her guardian, no more. His heart was like ice,
his face cold and expressionless. She could not move him any more than
a statue.
She crept to bed, and cried. But she was going to be married to Will
Brangwen, and then she need not bother any more. Brangwen went to bed
with a hard, cold heart, and cursed himself. He looked at his wife. She
was still his wife. Her dark hair was threaded with grey, her face was
beautiful in its gathering age. She was just fifty. How poignantly he
saw her! And he wanted to cut out some of his own heart, which was
incontinent, and demanded still to share the rapid life of youth. How
he hated himself.
His wife was so poignant and timely. She was still young and naïve,
with some girl’s freshness. But she did not want any more the fight,
the battle, the control, as he, in his incontinence, still did. She was
so natural, and he was ugly, unnatural, in his inability to yield
place. How hideous, this greedy middle-age, which must stand in the way
of life, like a large demon.
What was missing in his life, that, in his ravening soul, he was not
satisfied? He had had that friend at school, his mother, his wife, and
Anna? What had he done? He had failed with his friend, he had been a
poor son; but he had known satisfaction with his wife, let it be
enough; he loathed himself for the state he was in over Anna. Yet he
was not satisfied. It was agony to know it.
Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count
his work, anybody could have done it. What had he known, but the long,
marital embrace with his wife! Curious, that this was what his life
amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would
say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his
arms, and she was still his fulfilment, just the same as ever. And that
was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.
But the bitterness, underneath, that there still remained an
unsatisfied Tom Brangwen, who suffered agony because a girl cared
nothing for him. He loved his sons—he had them also. But it was the
further, the creative life with the girl, he wanted as well. Oh, and he
was ashamed. He trampled himself to extinguish himself.
What weariness! There was no peace, however old one grew! One was never
right, never decent, never master of oneself. It was as if his hope had
been in the girl.
Anna quickly lapsed again into her love for the youth. Will Brangwen
had fixed his marriage for the Saturday before Christmas. And he waited
for her, in his bright, unquestioning fashion, until then. He wanted
her, she was his, he suspended his being till the day should come. The
wedding day, December the twenty-third, had come into being for him as
an absolute thing. He lived in it.
He did not count the days. But like a man who journeys in a ship, he
was suspended till the coming to port.
He worked at his carving, he worked in his office, he came to see her;
all was but a form of waiting, without thought or question.
She was much more alive. She wanted to enjoy courtship. He seemed to
come and go like the wind, without asking why or whither. But she
wanted to enjoy his presence. For her, he was the kernel of life, to
touch him alone was bliss. But for him, she was the essence of life.
She existed as much when he was at his carving in his lodging in
Ilkeston, as when she sat looking at him in the Marsh kitchen. In
himself, he knew her. But his outward faculties seemed suspended. He
did not see her with his eyes, nor hear her with his voice.
And yet he trembled, sometimes into a kind of swoon, holding her in his
arms. They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in
silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her
hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she
possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only
reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid
body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she
touched the centre of reality. And they were together, he and she, at
the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the
central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain
of life flowed.
But to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his
limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only
as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.
Sometimes, in the darkness, a cow coughed. There was, in the darkness,
a slow sound of cud chewing. And it all seemed to flow round them and
upon them as the hot blood flows through the womb, laving the unborn
young.
Sometimes, when it was cold, they stood to be lovers in the stables,
where the air was warm and sharp with ammonia. And during these dark
vigils, he learned to know her, her body against his, they drew nearer
and nearer together, the kisses came more subtly close and fitting. So
when in the thick darkness a horse suddenly scrambled to its feet, with
a dull, thunderous sound, they listened as one person listening, they
knew as one person, they were conscious of the horse.
Tom Brangwen had taken them a cottage at Cossethay, on a twenty-one
years’ lease. Will Brangwen’s eyes lit up as he saw it. It was the
cottage next the church, with dark yew-trees, very black old trees,
along the side of the house and the grassy front garden; a red,
squarish cottage with a low slate roof, and low windows. It had a long
dairy-scullery, a big flagged kitchen, and a low parlour, that went up
one step from the kitchen. There were whitewashed beams across the
ceilings, and odd corners with cupboards. Looking out through the
windows, there was the grassy garden, the procession of black yew trees
down one side, and along the other sides, a red wall with ivy
separating the place from the high-road and the churchyard. The old,
little church, with its small spire on a square tower, seemed to be
looking back at the cottage windows.
“There’ll be no need to have a clock,” said Will Brangwen, peeping out
at the white clock-face on the tower, his neighbour.
At the back of the house was a garden adjoining the paddock, a cowshed
with standing for two cows, pig-cotes and fowl-houses. Will Brangwen
was very happy. Anna was glad to think of being mistress of her own
place.
Tom Brangwen was now the fairy godfather. He was never happy unless he
was buying something. Will Brangwen, with his interest in all
wood-work, was getting the furniture. He was left to buy tables and
round-staved chairs and the dressers, quite ordinary stuff, but such as
was identified with his cottage.
Tom Brangwen, with more particular thought, spied out what he called
handy little things for her. He appeared with a set of new-fangled
cooking-pans, with a special sort of hanging lamp, though the rooms
were so low, with canny little machines for grinding meat or mashing
potatoes or whisking eggs.
Anna took a sharp interest in what he bought, though she was not always
pleased. Some of the little contrivances, which he thought so canny,
left her doubtful. Nevertheless she was always expectant, on market
days there was always a long thrill of anticipation. He arrived with
the first darkness, the copper lamps of his cart glowing. And she ran
to the gate, as he, a dark, burly figure up in the cart, was bending
over his parcels.
“It’s cupboard love as brings you out so sharp,” he said, his voice
resounding in the cold darkness. Nevertheless he was excited. And she,
taking one of the cart lamps, poked and peered among the jumble of
things he had brought, pushing aside the oil or implements he had got
for himself.
She dragged out a pair of small, strong bellows, registered them in her
mind, and then pulled uncertainly at something else. It had a long
handle, and a piece of brown paper round the middle of it, like a
waistcoat.
“What’s this?” she said, poking.
He stopped to look at her. She went to the lamp-light by the horse, and
stood there bent over the new thing, while her hair was like bronze,
her apron white and cheerful. Her fingers plucked busily at the paper.
She dragged forth a little wringer, with clean indiarubber rollers. She
examined it critically, not knowing quite how it worked.
She looked up at him. He stood a shadowy presence beyond the light.
“How does it go?” she asked.
“Why, it’s for pulpin’ turnips,” he replied.
She looked at him. His voice disturbed her.
“Don’t be silly. It’s a little mangle,” she said. “How do you stand it,
though?”
“You screw it on th’ side o’ your wash-tub.” He came and held it out to
her.
“Oh, yes!” she cried, with one of her little skipping movements, which
still came when she was suddenly glad.
And without another thought she ran off into the house, leaving him to
untackle the horse. And when he came into the scullery, he found her
there, with the little wringer fixed on the dolly-tub, turning
blissfully at the handle, and Tilly beside her, exclaiming:
“My word, that’s a natty little thing! That’ll save you luggin’ your
inside out. That’s the latest contraption, that is.”
And Anna turned away at the handle, with great gusto of possession.
Then she let Tilly have a turn.
“It fair runs by itself,” said Tilly, turning on and on. “Your
clothes’ll nip out on to th’ line.”
Chapter V.
WEDDING AT THE MARSH
It was a beautiful sunny day for the wedding, a muddy earth but a
bright sky. They had three cabs and two big closed-in vehicles.
Everybody crowded in the parlour in excitement. Anna was still
upstairs. Her father kept taking a nip of brandy. He was handsome in
his black coat and grey trousers. His voice was hearty but troubled.
His wife came down in dark grey silk with lace, and a touch of
peacock-blue in her bonnet. Her little body was very sure and definite.
Brangwen was thankful she was there, to sustain him among all these
people.
The carriages! The Nottingham Mrs. Brangwen, in silk brocade, stands in
the doorway saying who must go with whom. There is a great bustle. The
front door is opened, and the wedding guests are walking down the
garden path, whilst those still waiting peer through the window, and
the little crowd at the gate gorps and stretches. How funny such
dressed-up people look in the winter sunshine!
They are gone—another lot! There begins to be more room. Anna comes
down blushing and very shy, to be viewed in her white silk and her
veil. Her mother-in-law surveys her objectively, twitches the white
train, arranges the folds of the veil and asserts herself.
Loud exclamations from the window that the bridegroom’s carriage has
just passed.
“Where’s your hat, father, and your gloves?” cries the bride, stamping
her white slipper, her eyes flashing through her veil. He hunts
round—his hair is ruffled. Everybody has gone but the bride and her
father. He is ready—his face very red and daunted. Tilly dithers in the
little porch, waiting to open the door. A waiting woman walks round
Anna, who asks:
“Am I all right?”
She is ready. She bridles herself and looks queenly. She waves her hand
sharply to her father:
“Come here!”
He goes. She puts her hand very lightly on his arm, and holding her
bouquet like a shower, stepping, oh, very graciously, just a little
impatient with her father for being so red in the face, she sweeps
slowly past the fluttering Tilly, and down the path. There are hoarse
shouts at the gate, and all her floating foamy whiteness passes slowly
into the cab.
Her father notices her slim ankle and foot as she steps up: a child’s
foot. His heart is hard with tenderness. But she is in ecstasies with
herself for making such a lovely spectacle. All the way she sat
flamboyant with bliss because it was all so lovely. She looked down
solicitously at her bouquet: white roses and lilies-of-the-valley and
tube-roses and maidenhair fern—very rich and cascade-like.
Her father sat bewildered with all this strangeness, his heart was so
full it felt hard, and he couldn’t think of anything.
The church was decorated for Christmas, dark with evergreens, cold and
snowy with white flowers. He went vaguely down to the altar. How long
was it since he had gone to be married himself? He was not sure whether
he was going to be married now, or what he had come for. He had a
troubled notion that he had to do something or other. He saw his wife’s
bonnet, and wondered why _she_ wasn’t there with him.
They stood before the altar. He was staring up at the east window, that
glowed intensely, a sort of blue purple: it was deep blue glowing, and
some crimson, and little yellow flowers held fast in veins of shadow,
in a heavy web of darkness. How it burned alive in radiance among its
black web.
“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” He felt somebody
touch him. He started. The words still re-echoed in his memory, but
were drawing off.
“Me,” he said hastily.
Anna bent her head and smiled in her veil. How absurd he was.
Brangwen was staring away at the burning blue window at the back of the
altar, and wondering vaguely, with pain, if he ever should get old, if
he ever should feel arrived and established. He was here at Anna’s
wedding. Well, what right had he to feel responsible, like a father? He
was still as unsure and unfixed as when he had married himself. His
wife and he! With a pang of anguish he realized what uncertainties they
both were. He was a man of forty-five. Forty-five! In five more years
fifty. Then sixty—then seventy—then it was finished. My God—and one
still was so unestablished!
How did one grow old—how could one become confident? He wished he felt
older. Why, what difference was there, as far as he felt matured or
completed, between him now and him at his own wedding? He might be
getting married over again—he and his wife. He felt himself tiny, a
little, upright figure on a plain circled round with the immense,
roaring sky: he and his wife, two little, upright figures walking
across this plain, whilst the heavens shimmered and roared about them.
When did one come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There
was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get
old, never die? That was the clue. He exulted strangely, with torture.
He would go on with his wife, he and she like two children camping in
the plains. What was sure but the endless sky? But that was so sure, so
boundless.
Still the royal blue colour burned and blazed and sported itself in the
web of darkness before him, unwearyingly rich and splendid. How rich
and splendid his own life was, red and burning and blazing and sporting
itself in the dark meshes of his body: and his wife, how she glowed and
burned dark within her meshes! Always it was so unfinished and
unformed!
There was a loud noise of the organ. The whole party was trooping to
the vestry. There was a blotted, scrawled book—and that young girl
putting back her veil in her vanity, and laying her hand with the
wedding-ring self-consciously conspicuous, and signing her name proudly
because of the vain spectacle she made:
“Anna Theresa Lensky.”
“Anna Theresa Lensky”—what a vain, independent minx she was! The
bridegroom, slender in his black swallow-tail and grey trousers, solemn
as a young solemn cat, was writing seriously:
“William Brangwen.”
That looked more like it.
“Come and sign, father,” cried the imperious young hussy.
“Thomas Brangwen—clumsy-fist,” he said to himself as he signed.
Then his brother, a big, sallow fellow with black side-whiskers wrote:
“Alfred Brangwen.”
“How many more Brangwens?” said Tom Brangwen, ashamed of the
too-frequent recurrence of his family name.
When they were out again in the sunshine, and he saw the frost hoary
and blue among the long grass under the tomb-stones, the holly-berries
overhead twinkling scarlet as the bells rang, the yew trees hanging
their black, motionless, ragged boughs, everything seemed like a
vision.
The marriage party went across the graveyard to the wall, mounted it by
the little steps, and descended. Oh, a vain white peacock of a bride
perching herself on the top of the wall and giving her hand to the
bridegroom on the other side, to be helped down! The vanity of her
white, slim, daintily-stepping feet, and her arched neck. And the regal
impudence with which she seemed to dismiss them all, the others,
parents and wedding guests, as she went with her young husband.
In the cottage big fires were burning, there were dozens of glasses on
the table, and holly and mistletoe hanging up. The wedding party
crowded in, and Tom Brangwen, becoming roisterous, poured out drinks.
Everybody must drink. The bells were ringing away against the windows.
“Lift your glasses up,” shouted Tom Brangwen from the parlour, “lift
your glasses up, an’ drink to the hearth an’ home—hearth an’ home, an’
may they enjoy it.”
“Night an’ day, an’ may they enjoy it,” shouted Frank Brangwen, in
addition.
“Hammer an’ tongs, and may they enjoy it,” shouted Alfred Brangwen, the
saturnine.
“Fill your glasses up, an’ let’s have it all over again,” shouted Tom
Brangwen.
“Hearth an’ home, an’ may ye enjoy it.”
There was a ragged shout of the company in response.
“Bed an’ blessin’, an’ may ye enjoy it,” shouted Frank Brangwen.
There was a swelling chorus in answer.
“Comin’ and goin’, an’ may ye enjoy it,” shouted the saturnine Alfred
Brangwen, and the men roared by now boldly, and the women said, “Just
hark, now!”
There was a touch of scandal in the air.
Then the party rolled off in the carriages, full speed back to the
Marsh, to a large meal of the high-tea order, which lasted for an hour
and a half. The bride and bridegroom sat at the head of the table, very
prim and shining both of them, wordless, whilst the company raged down
the table.
The Brangwen men had brandy in their tea, and were becoming
unmanageable. The saturnine Alfred had glittering, unseeing eyes, and a
strange, fierce way of laughing that showed his teeth. His wife
glowered at him and jerked her head at him like a snake. He was
oblivious. Frank Brangwen, the butcher, flushed and florid and
handsome, roared echoes to his two brothers. Tom Brangwen, in his solid
fashion, was letting himself go at last.
These three brothers dominated the whole company. Tom Brangwen wanted
to make a speech. For the first time in his life, he must spread
himself wordily.
“Marriage,” he began, his eyes twinkling and yet quite profound, for he
was deeply serious and hugely amused at the same time, “Marriage,” he
said, speaking in the slow, full-mouthed way of the Brangwens, “is what
we’re made for——”
“Let him talk,” said Alfred Brangwen, slowly and inscrutably, “let him
talk.” Mrs. Alfred darted indignant eyes at her husband.
“A man,” continued Tom Brangwen, “enjoys being a man: for what purpose
was he made a man, if not to enjoy it?”
“That a true word,” said Frank, floridly.
“And likewise,” continued Tom Brangwen, “a woman enjoys being a woman:
at least we surmise she does——”
“Oh, don’t you bother——” called a farmer’s wife.
“You may back your life they’d be summisin’.” said Frank’s wife.
“Now,” continued Tom Brangwen, “for a man to be a man, it takes a
woman——”
“It does that,” said a woman grimly.
“And for a woman to be a woman, it takes a man——” continued Tom
Brangwen.
“All speak up, men,” chimed in a feminine voice.
“Therefore we have marriage,” continued Tom Brangwen.
“Hold, hold,” said Alfred Brangwen. “Don’t run us off our legs.”
And in dead silence the glasses were filled. The bride and bridegroom,
two children, sat with intent, shining faces at the head of the table,
abstracted.
“There’s no marriage in heaven,” went on Tom Brangwen; “but on earth
there is marriage.”
“That’s the difference between ’em,” said Alfred Brangwen, mocking.
“Alfred,” said Tom Brangwen, “keep your remarks till afterwards, and
then we’ll thank you for them.—There’s very little else, on earth, but
marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can
save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money,
but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s
something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth
there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it.”
“Just hark you now,” said Frank’s wife.
“Go on, Thomas,” said Alfred sardonically.
“_If_ we’ve got to be Angels,” went on Tom Brangwen, haranguing the
company at large, “and if there is no such thing as a man nor a woman
amongst them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel.”
“It’s the brandy,” said Alfred Brangwen wearily.
“For,” said Tom Brangwen, and the company was listening to the
conundrum, “an Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was
only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a
human being.”
“Decidedly,” said Alfred.
And a laugh went round the table. But Tom Brangwen was inspired.
“An Angel’s got to be more than a human being,” he continued. “So I
say, an Angel is the soul of man and woman in one: they rise united at
the Judgment Day, as one Angel——”
“Praising the Lord,” said Frank.
“Praising the Lord,” repeated Tom.
“And what about the women left over?” asked Alfred, jeering. The
company was getting uneasy.
“That I can’t tell. How do I know as there is anybody left over at the
Judgment Day? Let that be. What I say is, that when a man’s soul and a
woman’s soul unites together—that makes an Angel——”
“I dunno about souls. I know as one plus one makes three, sometimes,”
said Frank. But he had the laugh to himself.
“Bodies and souls, it’s the same,” said Tom.
“And what about your missis, who was married afore you knew her?” asked
Alfred, set on edge by this discourse.
“That I can’t tell you. If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married
soul, and not my single soul. It’ll not be the soul of me when I was a
lad: for I hadn’t a soul as would _make_ an Angel then.”
“I can always remember,” said Frank’s wife, “when our Harold was bad,
he did nothink but see an angel at th’ back o’ th’ lookin’-glass.
‘Look, mother,’ ’e said, ‘at that angel!’ ‘Theer isn’t no angel, my
duck,’ I said, but he wouldn’t have it. I took th’ lookin’-glass off’n
th’ dressin’-table, but it made no difference. He kep’ on sayin’ it was
there. My word, it did give me a turn. I thought for sure as I’d lost
him.”
“I can remember,” said another man, Tom’s sister’s husband, “my mother
gave me a good hidin’ once, for sayin’ I’d got an angel up my nose. She
seed me pokin’, an’ she said: ‘What are you pokin’ at your nose
for—give over.’ ‘There’s an angel up it,’ I said, an’ she fetched me
such a wipe. But there was. We used to call them thistle things
‘angels’ as wafts about. An’ I’d pushed one o’ these up my nose, for
some reason or other.”
“It’s wonderful what children will get up their noses,” said Frank’s
wife. “I c’n remember our Hemmie, she shoved one o’ them bluebell
things out o’ th’ middle of a bluebell, what they call ‘candles’, up
her nose, and oh, we had some work! I’d seen her stickin’ ’em on the
end of her nose, like, but I never thought she’d be so soft as to shove
it right up. She was a gel of eight or more. Oh, my word, we got a
crochet-hook an’ I don’t know what....”
Tom Brangwen’s mood of inspiration began to pass away. He forgot all
about it, and was soon roaring and shouting with the rest. Outside the
wake came, singing the carols. They were invited into the bursting
house. They had two fiddles and a piccolo. There in the parlour they
played carols, and the whole company sang them at the top of its voice.
Only the bride and bridegroom sat with shining eyes and strange, bright
faces, and scarcely sang, or only with just moving lips.
The wake departed, and the guysers came. There was loud applause, and
shouting and excitement as the old mystery play of St. George, in which
every man present had acted as a boy, proceeded, with banging and
thumping of club and dripping pan.
“By Jove, I got a crack once, when I was playin’ Beelzebub,” said Tom
Brangwen, his eyes full of water with laughing. “It knocked all th’
sense out of me as you’d crack an egg. But I tell you, when I come to,
I played Old Johnny Roger with St. George, I did that.”
He was shaking with laughter. Another knock came at the door. There was
a hush.
“It’s th’ cab,” said somebody from the door.
“Walk in,” shouted Tom Brangwen, and a red-faced grinning man entered.
“Now, you two, get yourselves ready an’ off to blanket fair,” shouted
Tom Brangwen. “Strike a daisy, but if you’re not off like a blink o’
lightnin’, you shanna go, you s’ll sleep separate.”
Anna rose silently and went to change her dress. Will Brangwen would
have gone out, but Tilly came with his hat and coat. The youth was
helped on.
“Well, here’s luck, my boy,” shouted his father.
“When th’ fat’s in th’ fire, let it frizzle,” admonished his uncle
Frank.
“Fair and _softly_ does it, fair an’ _softly_ does it,” cried his aunt,
Frank’s wife, contrary.
“You don’t want to fall over yourself,” said his uncle by marriage.
“You’re not a bull at a gate.”
“Let a man have his own road,” said Tom Brangwen testily. “Don’t be so
free of your advice—it’s his wedding this time, not yours.”
“’E don’t want many sign-posts,” said his father. “There’s some roads a
man has to be led, an’ there’s some roads a boss-eyed man can only
follow wi’ one eye shut. But this road can’t be lost by a blind man nor
a boss-eyed man nor a cripple—and he’s neither, thank God.”
“Don’t you be so sure o’ your walkin’ powers,” cried Frank’s wife.
“There’s many a man gets no further than half-way, nor can’t to save
his life, let him live for ever.”
“Why, how do you know?” said Alfred.
“It’s plain enough in th’ looks o’ some,” retorted Lizzie, his
sister-in-law.
The youth stood with a faint, half-hearing smile on his face. He was
tense and abstracted. These things, or anything, scarcely touched him.
Anna came down, in her day dress, very elusive. She kissed everybody,
men and women, Will Brangwen shook hands with everybody, kissed his
mother, who began to cry, and the whole party went surging out to the
cab.
The young couple were shut up, last injunctions shouted at them.
“Drive on,” shouted Tom Brangwen.
The cab rolled off. They saw the light diminish under the ash trees.
Then the whole party, quietened, went indoors.
“They’ll have three good fires burning,” said Tom Brangwen, looking at
his watch. “I told Emma to make ’em up at nine, an’ then leave the door
on th’ latch. It’s only half-past. They’ll have three fires burning,
an’ lamps lighted, an’ Emma will ha’ warmed th’ bed wi’ th’ warmin’
pan. So I s’d think they’ll be all right.”
The party was much quieter. They talked of the young couple.
“She said she didn’t want a servant in,” said Tom Brangwen. “The house
isn’t big enough, she’d always have the creature under her nose.
Emma’ll do what is wanted of her, an’ they’ll be to themselves.”
“It’s best,” said Lizzie, “you’re more free.”
The party talked on slowly. Brangwen looked at his watch.
“Let’s go an’ give ’em a carol,” he said. “We s’ll find th’ fiddles at
the ‘Cock an’ Robin’.”
“Ay, come on,” said Frank.
Alfred rose in silence. The brother-in-law and one of Will’s brothers
rose also.
The five men went out. The night was flashing with stars. Sirius blazed
like a signal at the side of the hill, Orion, stately and magnificent,
was sloping along.
Tom walked with his brother, Alfred. The men’s heels rang on the
ground.
“It’s a fine night,” said Tom.
“Ay,” said Alfred.
“Nice to get out.”
“Ay.”
The brothers walked close together, the bond of blood strong between
them. Tom always felt very much the junior to Alfred.
“It’s a long while since _you_ left home,” he said.
“Ay,” said Alfred. “I thought I was getting a bit oldish—but I’m not.
It’s the things you’ve got as gets worn out, it’s not you yourself.”
“Why, what’s worn out?”
“Most folks as I’ve anything to do with—as has anything to do with me.
They all break down. You’ve got to go on by yourself, if it’s only to
perdition. There’s nobody going alongside even there.”
Tom Brangwen meditated this.
“Maybe you was never broken in,” he said.
“No, I never was,” said Alfred proudly.
And Tom felt his elder brother despised him a little. He winced under
it.
“Everybody’s got a way of their own,” he said, stubbornly. “It’s only a
dog as hasn’t. An’ them as can’t take what they give an’ give what they
take, they must go by themselves, or get a dog as’ll follow ’em.”
“They can do without the dog,” said his brother. And again Tom Brangwen
was humble, thinking his brother was bigger than himself. But if he
was, he was. And if it were finer to go alone, it was: he did not want
to go for all that.
They went over the field, where a thin, keen wind blew round the ball
of the hill, in the starlight. They came to the stile, and to the side
of Anna’s house. The lights were out, only on the blinds of the rooms
downstairs, and of a bedroom upstairs, firelight flickered.
“We’d better leave ’em alone,” said Alfred Brangwen.
“Nay, nay,” said Tom. “We’ll carol ’em, for th’ last time.”
And in a quarter of an hour’s time, eleven silent, rather tipsy men
scrambled over the wall, and into the garden by the yew trees, outside
the windows where faint firelight glowered on the blinds. There came a
shrill sound, two violins and a piccolo shrilling on the frosty air.
“In the fields with their flocks abiding.” A commotion of men’s voices
broke out singing in ragged unison.
Anna Brangwen had started up, listening, when the music began. She was
afraid.
“It’s the wake,” he whispered.
She remained tense, her heart beating heavily, possessed with strange,
strong fear. Then there came the burst of men’s singing, rather uneven.
She strained still, listening.
“It’s Dad,” she said, in a low voice. They were silent, listening.
“And my father,” he said.
She listened still. But she was sure. She sank down again into bed,
into his arms. He held her very close, kissing her. The hymn rambled on
outside, all the men singing their best, having forgotten everything
else under the spell of the fiddles and the tune. The firelight glowed
against the darkness in the room. Anna could hear her father singing
with gusto.
“Aren’t they silly,” she whispered.
And they crept closer, closer together, hearts beating to one another.
And even as the hymn rolled on, they ceased to hear it.
Chapter VI.
ANNA VICTRIX
Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two
took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.
And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen,
and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody
else buried, themselves two blissful survivors, with everything to
squander as they would. At first, he could not get rid of a culpable
sense of licence on his part. Wasn’t there some duty outside, calling
him and he did not come?
It was all very well at night, when the doors were locked and the
darkness drawn round the two of them. Then they were the only
inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest were under the flood. And
being alone in the world, they were a law unto themselves, they could
enjoy and squander and waste like conscienceless gods.
But in the morning, as the carts clanked by, and children shouted down
the lane; as the hucksters came calling their wares, and the church
clock struck eleven, and he and she had not got up yet, even to
breakfast, he could not help feeling guilty, as if he were committing a
breach of the law—ashamed that he was not up and doing.
“Doing what?” she asked. “What is there to do? You will only lounge
about.”
Still, even lounging about was respectable. One was at least in
connection with the world, then. Whereas now, lying so still and
peacefully, while the daylight came obscurely through the drawn blind,
one was severed from the world, one shut oneself off in tacit denial of
the world. And he was troubled.
But it was so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with
her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even
irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming: there seemed no
space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, whilst she
traced his features with her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy,
and he loved her to do it.
But he was strange and unused. So suddenly, everything that had been
before was shed away and gone. One day, he was a bachelor, living with
the world. The next day, he was with her, as remote from the world as
if the two of them were buried like a seed in darkness. Suddenly, like
a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on
to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly
knowledge and experience. He heard it in the huckster’s cries, the
noise of carts, the calling of children. And it was all like the hard,
shed rind, discarded. Inside, in the softness and stillness of the
room, was the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent activity,
absorbed in reality.
Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only
far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the destruction. Here at
the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here
was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it
remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted.
As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or
change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow
wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside
them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal
being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all
movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found
themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for their
moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off,
for ever far off, towards the rim.
Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme centre, down the
circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and further out,
towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had burned and
were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably glad.
Gradually they began to wake up, the noises outside became more real.
They understood and answered the call outside. They counted the strokes
of the bell. And when they counted midday, they understood that it was
midday, in the world, and for themselves also.
It dawned upon her that she was hungry. She had been getting hungrier
for a lifetime. But even yet it was not sufficiently real to rouse her.
A long way off she could hear the words, “I am dying of hunger.” Yet
she lay still, separate, at peace, and the words were unuttered. There
was still another lapse.
And then, quite calmly, even a little surprised, she was in the
present, and was saying:
“I am dying with hunger.”
“So am I,” he said calmly, as if it were of not the slightest
significance. And they relapsed into the warm, golden stillness. And
the minutes flowed unheeded past the window outside.
Then suddenly she stirred against him.
“My dear, I am dying of hunger,” she said.
It was a slight pain to him to be brought to.
“We’ll get up,” he said, unmoving.
And she sank her head on to him again, and they lay still, lapsing.
Half consciously, he heard the clock chime the hour. She did not hear.
“Do get up,” she murmured at length, “and give me something to eat.”
“Yes,” he said, and he put his arms round her, and she lay with her
face on him. They were faintly astonished that they did not move. The
minutes rustled louder at the window.
“Let me go then,” he said.
She lifted her head from him, relinquishingly. With a little breaking
away, he moved out of bed, and was taking his clothes. She stretched
out her hand to him.
“You are so nice,” she said, and he went back for a moment or two.
Then actually he did slip into some clothes, and, looking round quickly
at her, was gone out of the room. She lay translated again into a pale,
clearer peace. As if she were a spirit, she listened to the noise of
him downstairs, as if she were no longer of the material world.
It was half-past one. He looked at the silent kitchen, untouched from
last night, dim with the drawn blind. And he hastened to draw up the
blind, so people should know they were not in bed any later. Well, it
was his own house, it did not matter. Hastily he put wood in the grate
and made a fire. He exulted in himself, like an adventurer on an
undiscovered island. The fire blazed up, he put on the kettle. How
happy he felt! How still and secluded the house was! There were only he
and she in the world.
But when he unbolted the door, and, half-dressed, looked out, he felt
furtive and guilty. The world was there, after all. And he had felt so
secure, as though this house were the Ark in the flood, and all the
rest was drowned. The world was there: and it was afternoon. The
morning had vanished and gone by, the day was growing old. Where was
the bright, fresh morning? He was accused. Was the morning gone, and he
had lain with blinds drawn, let it pass by unnoticed?
He looked again round the chill, grey afternoon. And he himself so soft
and warm and glowing! There were two sprigs of yellow jasmine in the
saucer that covered the milk-jug. He wondered who had been and left the
sign. Taking the jug, he hastily shut the door. Let the day and the
daylight drop out, let it go by unseen. He did not care. What did one
day more or less matter to him. It could fall into oblivion unspent if
it liked, this one course of daylight.
“Somebody has been and found the door locked,” he said when he went
upstairs with the tray. He gave her the two sprigs of jasmine. She
laughed as she sat up in bed, childishly threading the flowers in the
breast of her nightdress. Her brown hair stuck out like a nimbus, all
fierce, round her softly glowing face. Her dark eyes watched the tray
eagerly.
“How good!” she cried, sniffing the cold air. “I’m glad you did a lot.”
And she stretched out her hands eagerly for her plate—“Come back to
bed, quick—it’s cold.” She rubbed her hands together sharply.
He [put off what little clothing he had on, and] sat beside her in the
bed.
“You look like a lion, with your mane sticking out, and your nose
pushed over your food,” he said.
She tinkled with laughter, and gladly ate her breakfast.
The morning was sunk away unseen, the afternoon was steadily going too,
and he was letting it go. One bright transit of daylight gone by
unacknowledged! There was something unmanly, recusant in it. He could
not quite reconcile himself to the fact. He felt he ought to get up, go
out quickly into the daylight, and work or spend himself energetically
in the open air of the afternoon, retrieving what was left to him of
the day.
But he did not go. Well, one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a
lamb. If he had lost this day of his life, he had lost it. He gave it
up. He was not going to count his losses. _She_ didn’t care. _She_
didn’t care in the least. Then why should he? Should he be behind her
in recklessness and independence? She was superb in her indifference.
He wanted to be like her.
She took her responsibilities lightly. When she spilled her tea on the
pillow, she rubbed it carelessly with a handkerchief, and turned over
the pillow. He would have felt guilty. She did not. And it pleased him.
It pleased him very much to see how these things did not matter to her.
When the meal was over, she wiped her mouth on her handkerchief
quickly, satisfied and happy, and settled down on the pillow again,
with her fingers in his close, strange, fur-like hair.
The evening began to fall, the light was half alive, livid. He hid his
face against her.
“I don’t like the twilight,” he said.
“I love it,” she answered.
He hid his face against her, who was warm and like sunlight. She seemed
to have sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed like sunlight
upon him. In her was a more real day than the day could give: so warm
and steady and restoring. He hid his face against her whilst the
twilight fell, whilst she lay staring out with her unseeing dark eyes,
as if she wandered forth untrammelled in the vagueness. The vagueness
gave her scope and set her free.
To him, turned towards her heart-pulse, all was very still and very
warm and very close, like noon-tide. He was glad to know this warm,
full noon. It ripened him and took away his responsibility, some of his
conscience.
They got up when it was quite dark. She hastily twisted her hair into a
knot, and was dressed in a twinkling. Then they went downstairs, drew
to the fire, and sat in silence, saying a few words now and then.
Her father was coming. She bundled the dishes away, flew round and
tidied the room, assumed another character, and again seated herself.
He sat thinking of his carving of Eve. He loved to go over his carving
in his mind, dwelling on every stroke, every line. How he loved it now!
When he went back to his Creation-panel again, he would finish his Eve,
tender and sparkling. It did not satisfy him yet. The Lord should
labour over her in a silent passion of Creation, and Adam should be
tense as if in a dream of immortality, and Eve should take form
glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His own soul
for her, yet she was a radiance.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
He found it difficult to say. His soul became shy when he tried to
communicate it.
“I was thinking my Eve was too hard and lively.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She should be more——,” he made a gesture of infinite
tenderness.
There was a stillness with a little joy. He could not tell her any
more. Why could he not tell her any more? She felt a pang of
disconsolate sadness. But it was nothing. She went to him.
Her father came, and found them both very glowing, like an open flower.
He loved to sit with them. Where there was a perfume of love, anyone
who came must breathe it. They were both very quick and alive, lit up
from the other-world, so that it was quite an experience for them, that
anyone else could exist.
But still it troubled Will Brangwen a little, in his orderly,
conventional mind, that the established rule of things had gone so
utterly. One ought to get up in the morning and wash oneself and be a
decent social being. Instead, the two of them stayed in bed till
nightfall, and then got up, she never washed her face, but sat there
talking to her father as bright and shameless as a daisy opened out of
the dew. Or she got up at ten o’clock, and quite blithely went to bed
again at three, or at half-past four, stripping him naked in the
daylight, and all so gladly and perfectly, oblivious quite of his
qualms. He let her do as she liked with him, and shone with strange
pleasure. She was to dispose of him as she would. He was translated
with gladness to be in her hands. And down went his qualms, his maxims,
his rules, his smaller beliefs, she scattered them like an expert
skittle-player. He was very much astonished and delighted to see them
scatter.
He stood and gazed and grinned with wonder whilst his Tablets of Stone
went bounding and bumping and splintering down the hill, dislodged for
ever. Indeed, it was true as they said, that a man wasn’t born before
he was married. What a change indeed!
He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the
discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the
discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was
as if the surface of the world had been broken away entire: Ilkeston,
streets, church, people, work, rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet
peeled away into unreality, leaving here exposed the inside, the
reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings
and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the
permanent bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was
confounding. Things are not what they seem! When he was a child, he had
thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her skirts and
petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be divested of its
garment, the garment could lie there shed away intact, and one could
stand in a new world, a new earth, naked in a new, naked universe. It
was too astounding and miraculous.
This then was marriage! The old things didn’t matter any more. One got
up at four o’clock, and had broth at tea-time and made toffee in the
middle of the night. One didn’t put on one’s clothes or one did put on
one’s clothes. He still was not quite sure it was not criminal. But it
was a discovery to find one might be so supremely absolved. All that
mattered was that he should love her and she should love him and they
should live kindled to one another, like the Lord in two burning bushes
that were not consumed. And so they lived for the time.
She was less hampered than he, so she came more quickly to her fulness,
and was sooner ready to enjoy again a return to the outside world. She
was going to give a tea-party. His heart sank. He wanted to go on, to
go on as they were. He wanted to have done with the outside world, to
declare it finished for ever. He was anxious with a deep desire and
anxiety that she should stay with him where they were in the timeless
universe of free, perfect limbs and immortal breast, affirming that the
old outward order was finished. The new order was begun to last for
ever, the living life, palpitating from the gleaming core, to action,
without crust or cover or outward lie. But no, he could not keep her.
She wanted the dead world again—she wanted to walk on the outside once
more. She was going to give a tea-party. It made him frightened and
furious and miserable. He was afraid all would be lost that he had so
newly come into: like the youth in the fairy tale, who was king for one
day in the year, and for the rest a beaten herd: like Cinderella also,
at the feast. He was sullen. But she blithely began to make
preparations for her tea-party. His fear was too strong, he was
troubled, he hated her shallow anticipation and joy. Was she not
forfeiting the reality, the one reality, for all that was shallow and
worthless? Wasn’t she carelessly taking off her crown to be an
artificial figure having other artificial women to tea: when she might
have been perfect with him, and kept him perfect, in the land of
intimate connection? Now he must be deposed, his joy must be destroyed,
he must put on the vulgar, shallow death of an outward existence.
He ground his soul in uneasiness and fear. But she rose to a real
outburst of house-work, turning him away as she shoved the furniture
aside to her broom. He stood hanging miserable near. He wanted her
back. Dread, and desire for her to stay with him, and shame at his own
dependence on her drove him to anger. He began to lose his head. The
wonder was going to pass away again. All the love, the magnificent new
order was going to be lost, she would forfeit it all for the outside
things. She would admit the outside world again, she would throw away
the living fruit for the ostensible rind. He began to hate this in her.
Driven by fear of her departure into a state of helplessness, almost of
imbecility, he wandered about the house.
And she, with her skirts kilted up, flew round at her work, absorbed.
“Shake the rug then, if you must hang round,” she said.
And fretting with resentment, he went to shake the rug. She was
blithely unconscious of him. He came back, hanging near to her.
“Can’t you do anything?” she said, as if to a child, impatiently.
“Can’t you do your wood-work?”
“Where shall I do it?” he asked, harsh with pain.
“Anywhere.”
How furious that made him.
“Or go for a walk,” she continued. “Go down to the Marsh. Don’t hang
about as if you were only half there.”
He winced and hated it. He went away to read. Never had his soul felt
so flayed and uncreated.
And soon he must come down again to her. His hovering near her, wanting
her to be with him, the futility of him, the way his hands hung,
irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him blindly and
destructively, he became a mad creature, black and electric with fury.
The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed black and evil, he was
fiendish in his thwarted soul.
There followed two black and ghastly days, when she was set in anguish
against him, and he felt as if he were in a black, violent underworld,
and his wrists quivered murderously. And she resisted him. He seemed a
dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her, hanging on to her, burdening
her. She would give anything to have him removed.
“You need some work to do,” she said. “You ought to be at work. Can’t
you _do_ something?”
His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the
darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained
complete in his own tense, black will. He was now unaware of her. She
did not exist. His dark, passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and
now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own
power. There was a curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his
face. She shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed
grappled upon her.
She retreated before him. She went down to the Marsh, she entered again
the immunity of her parents’ love for her. He remained at Yew Cottage,
black and clinched, his mind dead. He was unable to work at his
wood-carving. He went on working monotonously at the garden, blindly,
like a mole.
As she came home, up the hill, looking away at the town dim and blue on
the hill, her heart relaxed and became yearning. She did not want to
fight him any more. She wanted love—oh, love. Her feet began to hurry.
She wanted to get back to him. Her heart became tight with yearning for
him.
He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of the turf,
laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable workman.
“How nice you’ve made it,” she said, approaching tentatively down the
path.
But he did not heed, he did not hear. His brain was solid and dead.
“Haven’t you made it nice?” she repeated, rather plaintively.
He looked up at her, with that fixed, expressionless face and unseeing
eyes which shocked her, made her go dazed and blind. Then he turned
away. She saw his slender, stooping figure groping. A revulsion came
over her. She went indoors.
As she took off her hat in the bedroom, she found herself weeping
bitterly, with some of the old, anguished, childish desolation. She sat
still and cried on. She did not want him to know. She was afraid of his
hard, evil moments, the head dropped a little, rigidly, in a crouching,
cruel way. She was afraid of him. He seemed to lacerate her sensitive
femaleness. He seemed to hurt her womb, to take pleasure in torturing
her.
He came into the house. The sound of his footsteps in his heavy boots
filled her with horror: a hard, cruel, malignant sound. She was afraid
he would come upstairs. But he did not. She waited apprehensively. He
went out.
Where she was most vulnerable, he hurt her. Oh, where she was delivered
over to him, in her very soft femaleness, he seemed to lacerate her and
desecrate her. She pressed her hands over her womb in anguish, whilst
the tears ran down her face. And why, and why? Why was he like this?
Suddenly she dried her tears. She must get the tea ready. She went
downstairs and set the table. When the meal was ready, she called to
him.
“I’ve mashed the tea, Will, are you coming?”
She herself could hear the sound of tears in her own voice, and she
began to cry again. He did not answer, but went on with his work. She
waited a few minutes, in anguish. Fear came over her, she was
panic-stricken with terror, like a child; and she could not go home
again to her father; she was held by the power in this man who had
taken her.
She turned indoors so that he should not see her tears. She sat down to
table. Presently he came into the scullery. His movements jarred on
her, as she heard them. How horrible was the way he pumped,
exacerbating, so cruel! How she hated to hear him! How he hated her!
How his hatred was like blows upon her! The tears were coming again.
He came in, his face wooden and lifeless, fixed, persistent. He sat
down to tea, his head dropped over his cup, uglily. His hands were red
from the cold water, and there were rims of earth in his nails. He went
on with his tea.
It was his negative insensitiveness to her that she could not bear,
something clayey and ugly. His intelligence was self-absorbed. How
unnatural it was to sit with a self-absorbed creature, like something
negative ensconced opposite one. Nothing could touch him—he could only
absorb things into his own self.
The tears were running down her face. Something startled him, and he
was looking up at her with his hateful, hard, bright eyes, hard and
unchanging as a bird of prey.
“What are you crying for?” came the grating voice.
She winced through her womb. She could not stop crying.
“What are you crying for?” came the question again, in just the same
tone. And still there was silence, with only the sniff of her tears.
His eyes glittered, and as if with malignant desire. She shrank and
became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down. A sort of swoon of
helplessness came over her. She was of another order than he, she had
no defence against him. Against such an influence, she was only
vulnerable, she was given up.
He rose and went out of the house, possessed by the evil spirit. It
tortured him and wracked him, and fought in him. And whilst he worked,
in the deepening twilight, it left him. Suddenly he saw that she was
hurt. He had only seen her triumphant before. Suddenly his heart was
torn with compassion for her. He became alive again, in an anguish of
compassion. He could not bear to think of her tears—he could not bear
it. He wanted to go to her and pour out his heart’s blood to her. He
wanted to give everything to her, all his blood, his life, to the last
dregs, pour everything away to her. He yearned with passionate desire
to offer himself to her, utterly.
The evening star came, and the night. She had not lighted the lamp. His
heart burned with pain and with grief. He trembled to go to her.
And at last he went, hesitating, burdened with a great offering. The
hardness had gone out of him, his body was sensitive, slightly
trembling. His hand was curiously sensitive, shrinking, as he shut the
door. He fixed the latch almost tenderly.
In the kitchen was only the fireglow, he could not see her. He quivered
with dread lest she had gone—he knew not where. In shrinking dread, he
went through to the parlour, to the foot of the stairs.
“Anna,” he called.
There was no answer. He went up the stairs, in dread of the empty
house—the horrible emptiness that made his heart ring with insanity. He
opened the bedroom door, and his heart flashed with certainty that she
had gone, that he was alone.
But he saw her on the bed, lying very still and scarcely noticeable,
with her back to him. He went and put his hand on her shoulder, very
gently, hesitating, in a great fear and self-offering. She did not
move.
He waited. The hand that touched her shoulder hurt him, as if she were
sending it away. He stood dim with pain.
“Anna,” he said.
But still she was motionless, like a curled up, oblivious creature. His
heart beat with strange throes of pain. Then, by a motion under his
hand, he knew she was crying, holding herself hard so that her tears
should not be known. He waited. The tension continued—perhaps she was
not crying—then suddenly relapsed with a sharp catch of a sob. His
heart flamed with love and suffering for her. Kneeling carefully on the
bed, so that his earthy boots should not touch it, he took her in his
arms to comfort her. The sobs gathered in her, she was sobbing
bitterly. But not to him. She was still away from him.
He held her against his breast, whilst she sobbed, withheld from him,
and all his body vibrated against her.
“Don’t cry—don’t cry,” he said, with an odd simplicity. His heart was
calm and numb with a sort of innocence of love, now.
She still sobbed, ignoring him, ignoring that he held her. His lips
were dry.
“Don’t cry, my love,” he said, in the same abstract way. In his breast
his heart burned like a torch, with suffering. He could not bear the
desolateness of her crying. He would have soothed her with his blood.
He heard the church clock chime, as if it touched him, and he waited in
suspense for it to have gone by. It was quiet again.
“My love,” he said to her, bending to touch her wet face with his
mouth. He was afraid to touch her. How wet her face was! His body
trembled as he held her. He loved her till he felt his heart and all
his veins would burst and flood her with his hot, healing blood. He
knew his blood would heal and restore her.
She was becoming quieter. He thanked the God of mercy that at last she
was becoming quieter. His head felt so strange and blazed. Still he
held her close, with trembling arms. His blood seemed very strong,
enveloping her.
And at last she began to draw near to him, she nestled to him. His
limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she
cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of
fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth,
soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins would burst with
anguish of thankfulness, his heart was mad with gratefulness, he could
pour himself out upon her for ever.
When they came to themselves, the night was very dark. Two hours had
gone by. They lay still and warm and weak, like the new-born, together.
And there was a silence almost of the unborn. Only his heart was
weeping happily, after the pain. He did not understand, he had yielded,
given way. There _was_ no understanding. There could be only
acquiescence and submission, and tremulous wonder of consummation.
The next morning, when they woke up, it had snowed. He wondered what
was the strange pallor in the air, and the unusual tang. Snow was on
the grass and the window-sill, it weighed down the black, ragged
branches of the yews, and smoothed the graves in the churchyard.
Soon, it began to snow again, and they were shut in. He was glad, for
then they were immune in a shadowy silence, there was no world, no
time.
The snow lasted for some days. On the Sunday they went to church. They
made a line of footprints across the garden, he left a flat snowprint
of his hand on the wall as he vaulted over, they traced the snow across
the churchyard. For three days they had been immune in a perfect love.
There were very few people in church, and she was glad. She did not
care much for church. She had never questioned any beliefs, and she
was, from habit and custom, a regular attendant at morning service. But
she had ceased to come with any anticipation. To-day, however, in the
strangeness of snow, after such consummation of love, she felt
expectant again, and delighted. She was still in the eternal world.
She used, after she went to the High School, and wanted to be a lady,
wanted to fulfil some mysterious ideal, always to listen to the sermon
and to try to gather suggestions. That was all very well for a while.
The vicar told her to be good in this way and in that. She went away
feeling it was her highest aim to fulfil these injunctions.
But quickly this palled. After a short time, she was not very much
interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was
not just being good, and doing one’s best. No, she wanted something
else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to
be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked
about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or to implicate her
soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.
So that whilst she had an affection for Mr. Loverseed, the vicar, and a
protective sort of feeling for Cossethay church, wanting always to help
it and defend it, it counted very small in her life.
Not but that she was conscious of some unsatisfaction. When her husband
was roused by the thought of the churches, then she became hostile to
the ostensible church, she hated it for not fulfilling anything in her.
The Church told her to be good: very well, she had no idea of
contradicting what it said. The Church talked about her soul, about the
welfare of mankind, as if the saving of her soul lay in her performing
certain acts conducive to the welfare of mankind. Well and good—it was
so, then.
Nevertheless, as she sat in church her face had a pathos and poignancy.
Was this what she had come to hear: how by doing this thing and by not
doing that, she could save her soul? She did not contradict it. But the
pathos of her face gave the lie. There was something else she wanted to
hear, it was something else she asked for from the Church.
But who was _she_ to affirm it? And what was she doing with unsatisfied
desires? She was ashamed. She ignored them and left them out of count
as much as possible, her underneath yearnings. They angered her. She
wanted to be like other people, decently satisfied.
He angered her more than ever. Church had an irresistible attraction
for him. And he paid no more attention to that part of the service
which was Church to her, than if he had been an angel or a fabulous
beast sitting there. He simply paid no heed to the sermon or to the
meaning of the service. There was something thick, dark, dense,
powerful about him that irritated her too deeply for her to speak of
it. The Church teaching in itself meant nothing to him. “And forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us”—it simply
did not touch him. It might have been more sounds, and it would have
acted upon him in the same way. He did not want things to be
intelligible. And he did not care about his trespasses, neither about
the trespasses of his neighbour, when he was in church. Leave that care
for weekdays. When he was in church, he took no more notice of his
daily life. It was weekday stuff. As for the welfare of mankind—he
merely did not realize that there was any such thing: except on
weekdays, when he was good-natured enough. In church, he wanted a dark,
nameless emotion, the emotion of all the great mysteries of passion.
He was not interested in the _thought_ of himself or of her: oh, and
how that irritated her! He ignored the sermon, he ignored the greatness
of mankind, he did not admit the immediate importance of mankind. He
did not care about himself as a human being. He did not attach any
vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among
men. That was just merely the margin to the text. The verity was his
connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being
lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute.
And the great mysterious, illuminated capitals to the text, were his
feelings with the Church.
It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of the Church
the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was intimately mixed
up with the thought of her own self. Indeed, her soul and her own self
were one and the same in her. Whereas he seemed simply to ignore the
fact of his own self, almost to refute it. He had a soul—a dark,
inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in
the gloom and the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free,
like some strange, underground thing, abstract.
He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in conceiving
himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free of her. In a way,
she envied it him, this dark freedom and jubilation of the soul, some
strange entity in him. It fascinated her. Again she hated it. And
again, she despised him, wanted to destroy it in him.
This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside her, not
aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to strange, secret
places the love that sprang in him for her. He sat with a dark-rapt,
half-delighted face, looking at a little stained window. She saw the
ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow heaped along the bottom from the
snow outside, and the familiar yellow figure of the lamb holding the
banner, a little darkened now, but in the murky interior strangely
luminous, pregnant.
She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The lamb,
looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a forepaw, in the
cleft of which was dangerously perched a little flag with a red cross.
Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish shadows. Since she was a
child she had liked this creature, with the same feeling she felt for
the little woolly lambs on green legs that children carried home from
the fair every year. She had always liked these toys, and she had the
same amused, childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always
been uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag did
not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted it, there
was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.
Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the faintest tension
of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the uncomfortable feeling that he
was in correspondence with the creature, the lamb in the window. A cold
wonder came over her—her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,
timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was he
doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in the glass?
Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag. Suddenly
she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the tradition seized
on her, she was transported to another world. And she hated it,
resisted it.
Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And dark,
violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he doing,
sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?
She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick up her
glove, she groped among his feet.
He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would have
pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what was amiss,
what he had been doing.
As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the chill of
antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so angry. But she was
incensed.
“Why do you never listen to the sermon?” she asked, seething with
hostility and violation.
“I do,” he said.
“You don’t—you don’t hear a single word.”
He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There was
something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge.
The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he was like this.
After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the same state
of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to her. Then he went to
the book-shelf and took down books to look at, that she had scarcely
glanced over.
He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old missals, and
then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian, English, French and
German. He had, when he was sixteen, discovered a Roman Catholic
bookshop where he could find such things.
He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not thinking.
He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she said of him later.
She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated her. She
was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic.
It was when she came to pictures of the Pietà that she burst out.
“I do think they’re loathsome,” she cried.
“What?” he said, surprised, abstracted.
“Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be worshipped.”
“You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread,” he said slowly.
“Does it,” she cried. “Then it’s worse. _I_ don’t want to see your
chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it to me.
Can’t you see it’s horrible?”
“It isn’t me, it’s Christ.”
“What if it is, it’s you! And it’s horrible, you wallowing in your own
dead body, and thinking of eating it in the Sacrament.”
“You’ve to take it for what it means.”
“It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and then
worshipped—what else?”
They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof.
“And I think that Lamb in Church,” she said, “is the biggest joke in
the parish——”
She burst into a “Pouf” of ridiculing laughter.
“It might be, to those that see nothing in it,” he said. “You know it’s
the symbol of Christ, of His innocence and sacrifice.”
“Whatever it means, it’s a _lamb,_” she said. “And I like lambs too
much to treat them as if they had to mean something. As for the
Christmas-tree flag—no——”
And again she poufed with mockery.
“It’s because you don’t know anything,” he said violently, harshly.
“Laugh at what you know, not at what you don’t know.”
“What don’t I know?”
“What things mean.”
“And what does it mean?”
He was reluctant to answer her. He found it difficult.
“_What_ does it mean?” she insisted.
“It means the triumph of the Resurrection.”
She hesitated, baffled, a fear came upon her. What were these things?
Something dark and powerful seemed to extend before her. Was it
wonderful after all?
But no—she refused it.
“Whatever it may pretend to mean, what it _is_ is a silly absurd
toy-lamb with a Christmas-tree flag ledged on its paw—and if it wants
to mean anything else, it must look different from that.”
He was in a state of violent irritation against her. Partly he was
ashamed of his love for these things; he hid his passion for them. He
was ashamed of the ecstasy into which he could throw himself with these
symbols. And for a few moments he hated the lamb and the mystic
pictures of the Eucharist, with a violent, ashy hatred. His fire was
put out, she had thrown cold water on it. The whole thing was
distasteful to him, his mouth was full of ashes. He went out cold with
corpse-like anger, leaving her alone. He hated her. He walked through
the white snow, under a sky of lead.
And she wept again, in bitter recurrence of the previous gloom. But her
heart was easy—oh, much more easy.
She was quite willing to make it up with him when he came home again.
He was black and surly, but abated. She had broken a little of
something in him. And at length he was glad to forfeit from his soul
all his symbols, to have her making love to him. He loved it when she
put her head on his knee, and he had not asked her to or wanted her to,
he loved her when she put her arms round him and made bold love to him,
and he did not make love to her. He felt a strong blood in his limbs
again.
And she loved the intent, far look of his eyes when they rested on her:
intent, yet far, not near, not with her. And she wanted to bring them
near. She wanted his eyes to come to hers, to know her. And they would
not. They remained intent, and far, and proud, like a hawk’s naïve and
inhuman as a hawk’s. So she loved him and caressed him and roused him
like a hawk, till he was keen and instant, but without tenderness. He
came to her fierce and hard, like a hawk striking and taking her. He
was no mystic any more, she was his aim and object, his prey. And she
was carried off, and he was satisfied, or satiated at last.
Then immediately she began to retaliate on him. She too was a hawk. If
she imitated the pathetic plover running plaintive to him, that was
part of the game. When he, satisfied, moved with a proud, insolent
slouch of the body and a half-contemptuous drop of the head, unaware of
her, ignoring her very existence, after taking his fill of her and
getting his satisfaction of her, her soul roused, its pinions became
like steel, and she struck at him. When he sat on his perch glancing
sharply round with solitary pride, pride eminent and fierce, she dashed
at him and threw him from his station savagely, she goaded him from his
keen dignity of a male, she harassed him from his unperturbed pride,
till he was mad with rage, his light brown eyes burned with fury, they
saw her now, like flames of anger they flared at her and recognized her
as the enemy.
Very good, she was the enemy, very good. As he prowled round her, she
watched him. As he struck at her, she struck back.
He was angry because she had carelessly pushed away his tools so that
they got rusty.
“Don’t leave them littering in my way, then,” she said.
“I shall leave them where I like,” he cried.
“Then I shall throw them where I like.”
They glowered at each other, he with rage in his hands, she with her
soul fierce with victory. They were very well matched. They would fight
it out.
She turned to her sewing. Immediately the tea-things were cleared away,
she fetched out the stuff, and his soul rose in rage. He hated beyond
measure to hear the shriek of calico as she tore the web sharply, as if
with pleasure. And the run of the sewing-machine gathered a frenzy in
him at last.
“Aren’t you going to stop that row?” he shouted. “Can’t you do it in
the daytime?”
She looked up sharply, hostile from her work.
“No, I can’t do it in the daytime. I have other things to do. Besides,
I like sewing, and you’re not going to stop me doing it.”
Whereupon she turned back to her arranging, fixing, stitching, his
nerves jumped with anger as the sewing-machine started and stuttered
and buzzed.
But she was enjoying herself, she was triumphant and happy as the
darting needle danced ecstatically down a hem, drawing the stuff along
under its vivid stabbing, irresistibly. She made the machine hum. She
stopped it imperiously, her fingers were deft and swift and mistress.
If he sat behind her stiff with impotent rage it only made a trembling
vividness come into her energy. On she worked. At last he went to bed
in a rage, and lay stiff, away from her. And she turned her back on
him. And in the morning they did not speak, except in mere cold
civilities.
And when he came home at night, his heart relenting and growing hot for
love of her, when he was just ready to feel he had been wrong, and when
he was expecting her to feel the same, there she sat at the
sewing-machine, the whole house was covered with clipped calico, the
kettle was not even on the fire.
She started up, affecting concern.
“Is it so late?” she cried.
But his face had gone stiff with rage. He walked through to the
parlour, then he walked back and out of the house again. Her heart
sank. Very swiftly she began to make his tea.
He went black-hearted down the road to Ilkeston. When he was in this
state he never thought. A bolt shot across the doors of his mind and
shut him in, a prisoner. He went back to Ilkeston, and drank a glass of
beer. What was he going to do? He did not want to see anybody.
He would go to Nottingham, to his own town. He went to the station and
took a train. When he got to Nottingham, still he had nowhere to go.
However, it was more agreeable to walk familiar streets. He paced them
with a mad restlessness, as if he were running amok. Then he turned to
a book-shop and found a book on Bamberg Cathedral. Here was a
discovery! here was something for him! He went into a quiet restaurant
to look at his treasure. He lit up with thrills of bliss as he turned
from picture to picture. He had found something at last, in these
carvings. His soul had great satisfaction. Had he not come out to seek,
and had he not found! He was in a passion of fulfilment. These were the
finest carvings, statues, he had ever seen. The book lay in his hands
like a doorway. The world around was only an enclosure, a room. But he
was going away. He lingered over the lovely statues of women. A
marvellous, finely-wrought universe crystallized out around him as he
looked again, at the crowns, the twining hair, the woman-faces. He
liked all the better the unintelligible text of the German. He
preferred things he could not understand with the mind. He loved the
undiscovered and the undiscoverable. He pored over the pictures
intensely. And these were wooden statues, “Holz”—he believed that meant
wood. Wooden statues so shapen to his soul! He was a million times
gladdened. How undiscovered the world was, how it revealed itself to
his soul! What a fine, exciting thing his life was, at his hand! Did
not Bamberg Cathedral make the world his own? He celebrated his
triumphant strength and life and verity, and embraced the vast riches
he was inheriting.
But it was about time to go home. He had better catch a train. All the
time there was a steady bruise at the bottom of his soul, but so steady
as to be forgettable. He caught a train for Ilkeston.
It was ten o’clock as he was mounting the hill to Cossethay, carrying
his limp book on Bamberg Cathedral. He had not yet thought of Anna, not
definitely. The dark finger pressing a bruise controlled him
thoughtlessly.
Anna had started guiltily when he left the house. She had hastened
preparing the tea, hoping he would come back. She had made some toast,
and got all ready. Then he didn’t come. She cried with vexation and
disappointment. Why had he gone? Why couldn’t he come back now? Why was
it such a battle between them? She loved him—she did love him—why
couldn’t he be kinder to her, nicer to her?
She waited in distress—then her mood grew harder. He passed out of her
thoughts. She had considered indignantly, what right he had to
interfere with her sewing? She had indignantly refuted his right to
interfere with her at all. She was not to be interfered with. Was she
not herself, and he the outsider.
Yet a quiver of fear went through her. If he should leave her? She sat
conjuring fears and sufferings, till she wept with very self-pity. She
did not know what she would do if he left her, or if he turned against
her. The thought of it chilled her, made her desolate and hard. And
against him, the stranger, the outsider, the being who wanted to
arrogate authority, she remained steadily fortified. Was she not
herself? How could one who was not of her own kind presume with
authority? She knew she was immutable, unchangeable, she was not afraid
for her own being. She was only afraid of all that was not herself. It
pressed round her, it came to her and took part in her, in form of her
man, this vast, resounding, alien world which was not herself. And he
had so many weapons, he might strike from so many sides.
When he came in at the door, his heart was blazed with pity and
tenderness, she looked so lost and forlorn and young. She glanced up,
afraid. And she was surprised to see him, shining-faced, clear and
beautiful in his movements, as if he were clarified. And a startled
pang of fear, and shame of herself went through her.
They waited for each other to speak.
“Do you want to eat anything?” she said.
“I’ll get it myself,” he answered, not wanting her to serve him. But
she brought out food. And it pleased him she did it for him. He was
again a bright lord.
“I went to Nottingham,” he said mildly.
“To your mother?” she asked, in a flash of contempt.
“No—I didn’t go home.”
“Who did you go to see?”
“I went to see nobody.”
“Then why did you go to Nottingham?”
“I went because I wanted to go.”
He was getting angry that she again rebuffed him when he was so clear
and shining.
“And who did you see?”
“I saw nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“No—who should I see?”
“You saw nobody you knew?”
“No, I didn’t,” he replied irritably.
She believed him, and her mood became cold.
“I bought a book,” he said, handing her the propitiatory volume.
She idly looked at the pictures. Beautiful, the pure women, with their
clear-dropping gowns. Her heart became colder. What did they mean to
_him_?
He sat and waited for her. She bent over the book.
“Aren’t they nice?” he said, his voice roused and glad. Her blood
flushed, but she did not lift her head.
“Yes,” she said. In spite of herself, she was compelled by him. He was
strange, attractive, exerting some power over her.
He came over to her, and touched her delicately. Her heart beat with
wild passion, wild raging passion. But she resisted as yet. It was
always the unknown, always the unknown, and she clung fiercely to her
known self. But the rising flood carried her away.
They loved each other to transport again, passionately and fully.
“Isn’t it more wonderful than ever?” she asked him, radiant like a
newly opened flower, with tears like dew.
He held her closer. He was strange and abstracted.
“It is always more wonderful,” she asseverated, in a glad, child’s
voice, remembering her fear, and not quite cleared of it yet.
So it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between
them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life
spoiled, ruined, desolate and laid waste. The next day it was all
marvellous again, just marvellous. One day she thought she would go mad
from his very presence, the sound of his drinking was detestable to
her. The next day she loved and rejoiced in the way he crossed the
floor, he was sun, moon and stars in one.
She fretted, however, at last, over the lack of stability. When the
perfect hours came back, her heart did not forget that they would pass
away again. She was uneasy. The surety, the surety, the inner surety,
the confidence in the abidingness of love: that was what she wanted.
And that she did not get. She knew also that he had not got it.
Nevertheless it was a marvellous world, she was for the most part lost
in the marvellousness of it. Even her great woes were marvellous to
her.
She could be very happy. And she wanted to be happy. She resented it
when he made her unhappy. Then she could kill him, cast him out. Many
days, she waited for the hour when he would be gone to work. Then the
flow of her life, which he seemed to damn up, was let loose, and she
was free. She was free, she was full of delight. Everything delighted
her. She took up the rug and went to shake it in the garden. Patches of
snow were on the fields, the air was light. She heard the ducks
shouting on the pond, she saw them charge and sail across the water as
if they were setting off on an invasion of the world. She watched the
rough horses, one of which was clipped smooth on the belly, so that he
wore a jacket and long stockings of brown fur, stand kissing each other
in the wintry morning by the church-yard wall. Everything delighted
her, now he was gone, the insulator, the obstruction removed, the world
was all hers, in connection with her.
She was joyfully active. Nothing pleased her more than to hang out the
washing in a high wind that came full-butt over the round of the hill,
tearing the wet garments out of her hands, making flap-flap-flap of the
waving stuff. She laughed and struggled and grew angry. But she loved
her solitary days.
Then he came home at night, and she knitted her brows because of some
endless contest between them. As he stood in the doorway her heart
changed. It steeled itself. The laughter and zest of the day
disappeared from her. She was stiffened.
They fought an unknown battle, unconsciously. Still they were in love
with each other, the passion was there. But the passion was consumed in
a battle. And the deep, fierce unnamed battle went on. Everything
glowed intensely about them, the world had put off its clothes and was
awful, with new, primal nakedness.
Sunday came when the strange spell was cast over her by him. Half she
loved it. She was becoming more like him. All the week-days, there was
a glint of sky and fields, the little church seemed to babble away to
the cottages the morning through. But on Sundays, when he stayed at
home, a deeply-coloured, intense gloom seemed to gather on the face of
the earth, the church seemed to fill itself with shadow, to become big,
a universe to her, there was a burning of blue and ruby, a sound of
worship about her. And when the doors were opened, and she came out
into the world, it was a world new-created, she stepped into the
resurrection of the world, her heart beating to the memory of the
darkness and the Passion.
If, as very often, they went to the Marsh for tea on Sundays, then she
regained another, lighter world, that had never known the gloom and the
stained glass and the ecstasy of chanting. Her husband was obliterated,
she was with her father again, who was so fresh and free and all
daylight. Her husband, with his intensity and his darkness, was
obliterated. She left him, she forgot him, she accepted her father.
Yet, as she went home again with the young man, she put her hand on his
arm tentatively, a little bit ashamed, her hand pleaded that he would
not hold it against her, her recusancy. But he was obscured. He seemed
to become blind, as if he were not there with her.
Then she was afraid. She wanted him. When he was oblivious of her, she
almost went mad with fear. For she had become so vulnerable, so
exposed. She was in touch so intimately. All things about her had
become intimate, she had known them near and lovely, like presences
hovering upon her. What if they should all go hard and separate again,
standing back from her terrible and distinct, and she, having known
them, should be at their mercy?
This frightened her. Always, her husband was to her the unknown to
which she was delivered up. She was a flower that has been tempted
forth into blossom, and has no retreat. He had her nakedness in his
power. And who was he, what was he? A blind thing, a dark force,
without knowledge. She wanted to preserve herself.
Then she gathered him to herself again and was satisfied for a moment.
But as time went on, she began to realize more and more that he did not
alter, that he was something dark, alien to herself. She had thought
him just the bright reflex of herself. As the weeks and months went by
she realized that he was a dark opposite to her, that they were
opposites, not complements.
He did not alter, he remained separately himself, and he seemed to
expect her to be part of himself, the extension of his will. She felt
him trying to gain power over her, without knowing her. What did he
want? Was he going to bully her?
What did she want herself? She answered herself, that she wanted to be
happy, to be natural, like the sunlight and the busy daytime. And, at
the bottom of her soul, she felt he wanted her to be dark, unnatural.
Sometimes, when he seemed like the darkness covering and smothering
her, she revolted almost in horror, and struck at him. She struck at
him, and made him bleed, and he became wicked. Because she dreaded him
and held him in horror, he became wicked, he wanted to destroy. And
then the fight between them was cruel.
She began to tremble. He wanted to impose himself on her. And he began
to shudder. She wanted to desert him, to leave him a prey to the open,
with the unclean dogs of the darkness setting on to devour him. He must
beat her, and make her stay with him. Whereas she fought to keep
herself free of him.
They went their ways now shadowed and stained with blood, feeling the
world far off, unable to give help. Till she began to get tired. After
a certain point, she became impassive, detached utterly from him. He
was always ready to burst out murderously against her. Her soul got up
and left him, she went her way. Nevertheless in her apparent
blitheness, that made his soul black with opposition, she trembled as
if she bled.
And ever and again, the pure love came in sunbeams between them, when
she was like a flower in the sun to him, so beautiful, so shining, so
intensely dear that he could scarcely bear it. Then as if his soul had
six wings of bliss he stood absorbed in praise, feeling the radiance
from the Almighty beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the
upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation.
And ever and again he appeared to her as the dread flame of power.
Sometimes, when he stood in the doorway, his face lit up, he seemed
like an Annunciation to her, her heart beat fast. And she watched him,
suspended. He had a dark, burning being that she dreaded and resisted.
She was subject to him as to the Angel of the Presence. She waited upon
him and heard his will, and she trembled in his service.
Then all this passed away. Then he loved her for her childishness and
for her strangeness to him, for the wonder of her soul which was
different from his soul, and which made him genuine when he would be
false. And she loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, or for
the way he came through a door with his face open and eager. She loved
his ringing, eager voice, and the touch of the unknown about him, his
absolute simplicity.
Yet neither of them was quite satisfied. He felt, somewhere, that she
did not respect him. She only respected him as far as he was related to
herself. For what he was, beyond her, she had no care. She did not care
for what he represented in himself. It is true, he did not know himself
what he represented. But whatever it was she did not really honour it.
She did no service to his work as a lace-designer, nor to himself as
bread-winner. Because he went down to the office and worked every
day—that entitled him to no respect or regard from her, he knew. Rather
she despised him for it. And he almost loved her for this, though at
first it maddened him like an insult.
What was much deeper, she soon came to combat his deepest feelings.
What he thought about life and about society and mankind did not matter
very much to her: he was right enough to be insignificant. This was
again galling to him. She would judge beyond him on these things. But
at length he came to accept her judgments, discovering them as if they
were his own. It was not here the deep trouble lay. The deep root of
his enmity lay in the fact that she jeered at his soul. He was
inarticulate and stupid in thought. But to some things he clung
passionately. He loved the Church. If she tried to get out of him, what
he _believed_, then they were both soon in a white rage.
Did he believe the water turned to wine at Cana? She would drive him to
the thing as a historical fact: so much rain-water—look at it—can it
become grape-juice, wine? For an instant, he saw with the clear eyes of
the mind and said no, his clear mind, answering her for a moment,
rejected the idea. And immediately his whole soul was crying in a mad,
inchoate hatred against this violation of himself. It was true for him.
His mind was extinguished again at once, his blood was up. In his blood
and bones, he wanted the scene, the wedding, the water brought forward
from the firkins as red wine: and Christ saying to His mother: “Woman,
what have I to do with thee?—mine hour is not yet come.”
And then:
“His mother saith unto the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do
it.’”
Brangwen loved it, with his bones and blood he loved it, he could not
let it go. Yet she forced him to let it go. She hated his blind
attachments.
Water, natural water, could it suddenly and unnaturally turn into wine,
depart from its being and at haphazard take on another being? Ah no, he
knew it was wrong.
She became again the palpitating, hostile child, hateful, putting
things to destruction. He became mute and dead. His own being gave him
the lie. He knew it was so: wine was wine, water was water, for ever:
the water had not become wine. The miracle was not a real fact. She
seemed to be destroying him. He went out, dark and destroyed, his soul
running its blood. And he tasted of death. Because his life was formed
in these unquestioned concepts.
She, desolate again as she had been when she was a child, went away and
sobbed. She did not care, she did not care whether the water had turned
to wine or not. Let him believe it if he wanted to. But she knew she
had won. And an ashy desolation came over her.
They were ashenly miserable for some time. Then the life began to come
back. He was nothing if not dogged. He thought again of the chapter of
St. John. There was a great biting pang. “But thou hast kept the good
wine until now.” “The best wine!” The young man’s heart responded in a
craving, in a triumph, although the knowledge that it was not true in
fact bit at him like a weasel in his heart. Which was stronger, the
pain of the denial, or the desire for affirmation? He was stubborn in
spirit, and abode by his desire. But he would not any more affirm the
miracles as true.
Very well, it was not true, the water had not turned into wine. The
water had not turned into wine. But for all that he would live in his
soul as if the water _had_ turned into wine. For truth of fact, it had
not. But for his soul, it had.
“Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn’t,” he said, “it
doesn’t bother me. I take it for what it is.”
“And _what_ is it?” she asked, quickly, hopefully.
“It’s the Bible,” he said.
That answer enraged her, and she despised him. She did not actively
question the Bible herself. But he drove her to contempt.
And yet he did not care about the Bible, the written letter. Although
he could not satisfy her, yet she knew of herself that he had something
real. He was not a dogmatist. He did not believe in _fact_ that the
water turned into wine. He did not want to make a fact out of it.
Indeed, his attitude was without criticism. It was purely individual.
He took that which was of value to him from the Written Word, he added
to his spirit. His mind he let sleep.
And she was bitter against him, that he let his mind sleep. That which
was human, belonged to mankind, he would not exert. He cared only for
himself. He was no Christian. Above all, Christ had asserted the
brotherhood of man.
She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human
knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was
immortal. Such, somewhere, was her belief, quite obscure and
unformulated. She believed in the omnipotence of the human mind.
He, on the other hand, blind as a subterranean thing, just ignored the
human mind and ran after his own dark-souled desires, following his own
tunnelling nose. She felt often she must suffocate. And she fought him
off.
Then he, knowing he was blind, fought madly back again, frantic in
sensual fear. He did foolish things. He asserted himself on his rights,
he arrogated the old position of master of the house.
“You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried.
“Fool!” she answered. “Fool!”
“I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried.
“Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who could put a
dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don’t
I know what a fool you are!”
He knew himself what a fool he was, and was flayed by the knowledge.
Yet he went on trying to steer the ship of their dual life. He asserted
his position as the captain of the ship. And captain and ship bored
her. He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable
domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to
her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility. She felt no
belief in it. She jeered at him as master of the house, master of their
dual life. And he was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame,
how her father had been a man without arrogating any authority.
He had gone on the wrong tack, and he felt it hard to give up the
expedition. There was great surging and shame. Then he yielded. He had
given up the master-of-the-house idea.
There was something he wanted, nevertheless, some form of mastery. Ever
and anon, after his collapses into the petty and the shameful, he rose
up again, and, stubborn in spirit, strong in his power to start afresh,
set out once more in his male pride of being to fulfil the hidden
passion of his spirit.
It began well, but it ended always in war between them, till they were
both driven almost to madness. He said, she did not respect him. She
laughed in hollow scorn of this. For her it was enough that she loved
him.
“Respect what?” she asked.
But he always answered the wrong thing. And though she cudgelled her
brains, she could not come at it.
“Why don’t you go on with your wood-carving?” she said. “Why don’t you
finish your Adam and Eve?”
But she did not care for the Adam and Eve, and he never put another
stroke to it. She jeered at the Eve, saying, “She is like a little
marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and
Eve like a doll.”
“It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she
continued, “when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have,
what arrogance!”
In a rage one day, after trying to work on the board, and failing, so
that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up the whole panel and
put it on the fire. She did not know. He went about for some days very
quiet and subdued after it.
“Where is the Adam and Eve board?” she asked him.
“Burnt.”
She looked at him.
“But your carving?”
“I burned it.”
“When?”
She did not believe him.
“On Friday night.”
“When I was at the Marsh?”
“Yes.”
She said no more.
Then, when he had gone to work, she wept for a whole day, and was much
chastened in spirit. So that a new, fragile flame of love came out of
the ashes of this last pain.
Directly, it occurred to her that she was with child. There was a great
trembling of wonder and anticipation through her soul. She wanted a
child. Not that she loved babies so much, though she was touched by all
young things. But she wanted to bear children. And a certain hunger in
her heart wanted to unite her husband with herself, in a child.
She wanted a son. She felt, a son would be everything. She wanted to
tell her husband. But it was such a trembling, intimate thing to tell
him, and he was at this time hard and unresponsive. So that she went
away and wept. It was such a waste of a beautiful opportunity, such a
frost that nipped in the bud one of the beautiful moments of her life.
She went about heavy and tremulous with her secret, wanting to touch
him, oh, most delicately, and see his face, dark and sensitive, attend
to her news. She waited and waited for him to become gentle and still
towards her. But he was always harsh and he bullied her.
So that the buds shrivelled from her confidence, she was chilled. She
went down to the Marsh.
“Well,” said her father, looking at her and seeing her at the first
glance, “what’s amiss wi’ you now?”
The tears came at the touch of his careful love.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Can’t you hit it off, you two?” he said.
“He’s so obstinate,” she quivered; but her soul was obdurate itself.
“Ay, an’ I know another who’s all that,” said her father.
She was silent.
“You don’t want to make yourselves miserable,” said her father; “all
about nowt.”
“_He_ isn’t miserable,” she said.
“I’ll back my life, if you can do nowt else, you can make him as
miserable as a dog. You’d be a dab hand at that, my lass.”
“_I_ do nothing to make him miserable,” she retorted.
“Oh no—oh no! A packet o’ butterscotch, you are.”
She laughed a little.
“You mustn’t think I _want_ him to be miserable,” she cried. “I don’t.”
“We quite readily believe it,” retorted Brangwen. “Neither do you
intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.”
This made her think. She was rather surprised to find that she did
_not_ intend her husband to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.
Her mother came, and they all sat down to tea, talking casually.
“Remember, child,” said her mother, “that everything is not waiting for
_your_ hand just to take or leave. You mustn’t expect it. Between two
people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you
nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to
be just your way.”
“Ha—nor do I. If I did I should soon find my mistake out. If _I_ put my
hand out to take anything, my hand is very soon bitten, I can tell
you.”
“Then you must mind where you put your hand,” said her father.
Anna was rather indignant that they took the tragedy of her young
married life with such equanimity.
“You love the man right enough,” said her father, wrinkling his
forehead in distress. “That’s all as counts.”
“I _do_ love him, more shame to him,” she cried. “I want to tell
him—I’ve been waiting for four days now to tell him——” her face began
to quiver, the tears came. Her parents watched her in silence. She did
not go on.
“Tell him what?” said her father.
“That we’re going to have an infant,” she sobbed, “and he’s never,
never let me, not once, every time I’ve come to him, he’s been horrid
to me, and I wanted to tell him, I did. And he won’t let me—he’s cruel
to me.”
She sobbed as if her heart would break. Her mother went and comforted
her, put her arms round her, and held her close. Her father sat with a
queer, wrinkled brow, and was rather paler than usual. His heart went
tense with hatred of his son-in-law.
So that, when the tale was sobbed out, and comfort administered and tea
sipped, and something like calm restored to the little circle, the
thought of Will Brangwen’s entry was not pleasantly entertained.
Tilly was set to watch out for him as he passed by on his way home. The
little party at table heard the woman’s servant’s shrill call:
“You’ve got to come in, Will. Anna’s here.”
After a few moments, the youth entered.
“Are you stopping?” he asked in his hard, harsh voice.
He seemed like a blade of destruction standing there. She quivered to
tears.
“Sit you down,” said Tom Brangwen, “an’ take a bit off your length.”
Will Brangwen sat down. He felt something strange in the atmosphere. He
was dark browed, but his eyes had the keen, intent, sharp look, as if
he could only see in the distance; which was a beauty in him, and which
made Anna so angry.
“Why does he always deny me?” she said to herself. “Why is it nothing
to him, what I am?”
And Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth.
“How long are you stopping?” the young husband asked his wife.
“Not very long,” she said.
“Get your tea, lad,” said Tom Brangwen. “Are you itchin’ to be off the
moment you enter?”
They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of
sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping
swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her
wattles made an oriflamme tossed here and there, as she went, her grey
body was like a ghost.
Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame
within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off
things.
“Where was I born, mother?” she asked.
“In London.”
“And was my father”—she spoke of him as if he were merely a strange
name: she could never connect herself with him—“was he dark?”
“He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring. He went
bald, rather bald, when he was quite young,” replied her mother, also
as if telling a tale which was just old imagination.
“Was he good-looking?”
“Yes—he was very good-looking—rather small. I have never seen an
Englishman who looked like him.”
“Why?”
“He was”—the mother made a quick, running movement with her hands—“his
figure was alive and changing—it was never fixed. He was not in the
least steady—like a running stream.”
It flashed over the youth—Anna too was like a running stream. Instantly
he was in love with her again.
Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with fear, fear of
the unknown, when he heard his women speak of their bygone men as of
strangers they had known in passing and had taken leave of again.
In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all their
hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should
they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?
The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the
dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little
church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a
dark blue shadow.
She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out
of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand,
along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of
thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight.
“I think we are going to have an infant, Bill,” she said, from far off.
He trembled, and his fingers tightened on hers.
“Why?” he asked, his heart beating. “You don’t know?”
“I do,” she said.
They continued without saying any more, walking along opposite
horizons, hand in hand across the intervening space, two separate
people. And he trembled as if a wind blew on to him in strong gusts,
out of the unseen. He was afraid. He was afraid to know he was alone.
For she seemed fulfilled and separate and sufficient in her half of the
world. He could not bear to know that he was cut off. Why could he not
be always one with her? It was he who had given her the child. Why
could she not be with him, one with him? Why must he be set in this
separateness, why could she not be with him, close, close, as one with
him? She must be one with him.
He held her fingers tightly in his own. She did not know what he was
thinking. The blaze of light on her heart was too beautiful and
dazzling, from the conception in her womb. She walked glorified, and
the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far-off,
faint noises of the town, were her “Magnificat”.
But he was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before
him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and
made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand
before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked
darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete
him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was
as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he
wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.
But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his
helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him
like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her
conception, and because she was with child by him.
And she was happy in showers of sunshine. She loved her husband, as a
presence, as a grateful condition. But for the moment her need was
fulfilled, and now she wanted only to hold her husband by the hand in
sheer happiness, without taking thought, only being glad.
He had various folios of reproductions, and among them a cheap print
from Fra Angelico’s “Entry of the Blessed into Paradise”. This filled
Anna with bliss. The beautiful, innocent way in which the Blessed held
each other by the hand as they moved towards the radiance, the real,
real, angelic melody, made her weep with happiness. The floweriness,
the beams of light, the linking of hands, was almost too much for her,
too innocent.
Day after day came shining through the door of Paradise, day after day
she entered into the brightness. The child in her shone till she
herself was a beam of sunshine; and how lovely was the sunshine that
loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel
bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole,
where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a
bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the
hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent
on the meadows. She was full of a rich drowsiness and loneliness. How
happy she was, how gorgeous it was to live: to have known herself, her
husband, the passion of love and begetting; and to know that all this
lived and waited and burned on around her, a terrible purifying fire,
through which she had passed for once to come to this peace of golden
radiance, when she was with child, and innocent, and in love with her
husband and with all the many angels hand in hand. She lifted her
throat to the breeze that came across the fields, and she felt it
handling her like sisters fondling her, she drank it in perfume of
cowslips and of apple-blossoms.
And in all the happiness a black shadow, shy, wild, a beast of prey,
roamed and vanished from sight, and like strands of gossamer blown
across her eyes, there was a dread for her.
She was afraid when he came home at night. As yet, her fear never
spoke, the shadow never rushed upon her. He was gentle, humble, he kept
himself withheld. His hands were delicate upon her, and she loved them.
But there ran through her the thrill, crisp as pain, for she felt the
darkness and other-world still in his soft, sheathed hands.
But the summer drifted in with the silence of a miracle, she was almost
always alone. All the while, went on the long, lovely drowsiness, the
maidenblush roses in the garden were all shed, washed away in a pouring
rain, summer drifted into autumn, and the long, vague, golden days
began to close. Crimson clouds fumed about the west, and as night came
on, all the sky was fuming and steaming, and the moon, far above the
swiftness of vapours, was white, bleared, the night was uneasy.
Suddenly the moon would appear at a clear window in the sky, looking
down from far above, like a captive. And Anna did not sleep. There was
a strange, dark tension about her husband.
She became aware that he was trying to force his will upon her,
something, there was something he wanted, as he lay there dark and
tense. And her soul sighed in weariness.
Everything was so vague and lovely, and he wanted to wake her up to the
hard, hostile reality. She drew back in resistance. Still he said
nothing. But she felt his power persisting on her, till she became
aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was
forcing her, he was forcing her. And she wanted so much the joy and the
vagueness and the innocence of her pregnancy. She did not want his
bitter-corrosive love, she did not want it poured into her, to burn
her. Why must she have it? Why, oh, why was he not content, contained?
She sat many hours by the window, in those days when he drove her most
with the black constraint of his will, and she watched the rain falling
on the yew trees. She was not sad, only wistful, blanched. The child
under her heart was a perpetual warmth. And she was sure. The pressure
was only upon her from the outside, her soul had no stripes.
Yet in her heart itself was always this same strain, tense, anxious.
She was not safe, she was always exposed, she was always attacked.
There was a yearning in her for a fulness of peace and blessedness.
What a heavy yearning it was—so heavy.
She knew, vaguely, that all the time he was not satisfied, all the time
he was trying to force something from her. Ah, how she wished she could
succeed with him, in her own way! He was there, so inevitable. She
lived in him also. And how she wanted to be at peace with him, at
peace. She loved him. She would give him love, pure love. With a
strange, rapt look in her face, she awaited his homecoming that night.
Then, when he came, she rose with her hands full of love, as of
flowers, radiant, innocent. A dark spasm crossed his face. As she
watched, her face shining and flower-like with innocent love, his face
grew dark and tense, the cruelty gathered in his brows, his eyes turned
aside, she saw the whites of his eyes as he looked aside from her. She
waited, touching him with her hands. But from his body through her
hands came the bitter-corrosive shock of his passion upon her,
destroying her in blossom. She shrank. She rose from her knees and went
away from him, to preserve herself. And it was great pain to her.
To him also it was agony. He saw the glistening, flower-like love in
her face, and his heart was black because he did not want it. Not
this—not this. He did not want flowery innocence. He was unsatisfied.
The rage and storm of unsatisfaction tormented him ceaselessly. Why had
she not satisfied him? He had satisfied her. She was satisfied, at
peace, innocent round the doors of her own paradise.
And he was unsatisfied, unfulfilled, he raged in torment, wanting,
wanting. It was for her to satisfy him: then let her do it. Let her not
come with flowery handfuls of innocent love. He would throw these aside
and trample the flowers to nothing. He would destroy her flowery,
innocent bliss. Was he not entitled to satisfaction from her, and was
not his heart all raging desire, his soul a black torment of
unfulfilment. Let it be fulfilled in him, then, as it was fulfilled in
her. He had given her her fulfilment. Let her rise up and do her part.
He was cruel to her. But all the time he was ashamed. And being
ashamed, he was more cruel. For he was ashamed that he could not come
to fulfilment without her. And he could not. And she would not heed
him. He was shackled and in darkness of torment.
She beseeched him to work again, to do his wood-carving. But his soul
was too black. He had destroyed his panel of Adam and Eve. He could not
begin again, least of all now, whilst he was in this condition.
For her there was no final release, since he could not be liberated
from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through
the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm.
She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on
him, because he harried her and wanted to destroy her.
She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations.
As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit
was somewhere far off.
She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult
with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced
before the Unknown.
Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with
child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting
her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had
chosen her, to Whom she belonged.
She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul
rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off
her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.
It surprised her, when it was over. She was shrinking and afraid. To
what was she now exposed? She half wanted to tell her husband. Yet she
shrank from him.
All the time she ran on by herself. She liked the story of David, who
danced before the Lord, and uncovered himself exultingly. Why should he
uncover himself to Michal, a common woman? He uncovered himself to the
Lord.
“Thou comest to me with a sword and a spear and a shield, but I come to
thee in the name of the Lord:—for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will
give you into our hands.”
Her heart rang to the words. She walked in her pride. And her battle
was her own Lord’s, her husband was delivered over.
In these days she was oblivious of him. Who was he, to come against
her? No, he was not even the Philistine, the Giant. He was like Saul
proclaiming his own kingship. She laughed in her heart. Who was he,
proclaiming his kingship? She laughed in her heart with pride.
And she had to dance in exultation beyond him. Because he was in the
house, she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man.
On a Saturday afternoon, when she had a fire in the bedroom, again she
took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a
slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer.
She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lord.
She was exalted over him, before the Lord.
She heard him coming up the stairs, and she flinched. She stood with
the firelight on her ankles and feet, naked in the shadowy, late
afternoon, fastening up her hair. He was startled. He stood in the
doorway, his brows black and lowering.
“What are you doing?” he said, gratingly. “You’ll catch a cold.”
And she lifted her hands and danced again, to annul him, the light
glanced on her knees as she made her slow, fine movements down the far
side of the room, across the firelight. He stood away near the door in
blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy
movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn,
pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing
his non-existence, dancing herself to the Lord, to exultation.
He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not
look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was
sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying,
uplifted to the Lord. Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced
exulting before her Lord, and knew no man.
It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was
being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing
consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not
understand. He waited obliterated. Then his eyes became blind to her,
he saw her no more. And through the unseeing veil between them he
called to her, in his jarring voice:
“What are you doing that for?”
“Go away,” she said. “Let me dance by myself.”
“That isn’t dancing,” he said harshly. “What do you want to do that
for?”
“I don’t do it for you,” she said. “You go away.”
Her strange, lifted belly, big with his child! Had he no right to be
there? He felt his presence a violation. Yet he had his right to be
there. He went and sat on the bed.
She stopped dancing, and confronted him, again lifting her slim arms
and twisting at her hair. Her nakedness hurt her, opposed to him.
“I can do as I like in my bedroom,” she cried. “Why do you interfere
with me?”
And she slipped on a dressing-gown and crouched before the fire. He was
more at ease now she was covered up. The vision of her tormented him
all the days of his life, as she had been then, a strange, exalted
thing having no relation to himself.
After this day, the door seemed to shut on his mind. His brow shut and
became impervious. His eyes ceased to see, his hands were suspended.
Within himself his will was coiled like a beast, hidden under the
darkness, but always potent, working.
At first she went on blithely enough with him shut down beside her. But
then his spell began to take hold of her. The dark, seething potency of
him, the power of a creature that lies hidden and exerts its will to
the destruction of the free-running creature, as the tiger lying in the
darkness of the leaves steadily enforces the fall and death of the
light creatures that drink by the waterside in the morning, gradually
began to take effect on her. Though he lay there in his darkness and
did not move, yet she knew he lay waiting for her. She felt his will
fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and
obscure.
She found that, in all her outgoings and her incomings, he prevented
her. Gradually she realized that she was being borne down by him, borne
down by the clinging, heavy weight of him, that he was pulling her down
as a leopard clings to a wild cow and exhausts her and pulls her down.
Gradually she realized that her life, her freedom, was sinking under
the silent grip of his physical will. He wanted her in his power. He
wanted to devour her at leisure, to have her. At length she realized
that her sleep was a long ache and a weariness and exhaustion, because
of his will fastened upon her, as he lay there beside her, during the
night.
She realized it all, and there came a momentous pause, a pause in her
swift running, a moment’s suspension in her life, when she was lost.
Then she turned fiercely on him, and fought him. He was not to do this
to her, it was monstrous. What horrible hold did he want to have over
her body? Why did he want to drag her down, and kill her spirit? Why
did he want to deny her spirit? Why did he deny her spirituality, hold
her for a body only? And was he to claim her carcase?
Some vast, hideous darkness he seemed to represent to her.
“What do you do to me?” she cried. “What beastly thing do you do to me?
You put a horrible pressure on my head, you don’t let me sleep, you
don’t let me live. Every moment of your life you are doing something to
me, something horrible, that destroys me. There is something horrible
in you, something dark and beastly in your will. What do you want of
me? What do you want to do to me?”
All the blood in his body went black and powerful and corrosive as he
heard her. Black and blind with hatred of her he was. He was in a very
black hell, and could not escape.
He hated her for what she said. Did he not give her everything, was she
not everything to him? And the shame was a bitter fire in him, that she
was everything to him, that he had nothing but her. And then that she
should taunt him with it, that he could not escape! The fire went black
in his veins. For try as he might, he could not escape. She was
everything to him, she was his life and his derivation. He depended on
her. If she were taken away, he would collapse as a house from which
the central pillar is removed.
And she hated him, because he depended on her so utterly. He was
horrible to her. She wanted to thrust him off, to set him apart. It was
horrible that he should cleave to her, so close, so close, like leopard
that had leapt on her, and fastened.
He went on from day to day in a blackness of rage and shame and
frustration. How he tortured himself, to be able to get away from her.
But he could not. She was as the rock on which he stood, with deep,
heaving water all round, and he was unable to swim. He _must_ take his
stand on her, he must depend on her.
What had he in life, save her? Nothing. The rest was a great heaving
flood. The terror of the night of heaving, overwhelming flood, which
was his vision of life without her, was too much for him. He clung to
her fiercely and abjectly.
And she beat him off, she beat him off. Where could he turn, like a
swimmer in a dark sea, beaten off from his hold, whither could he turn?
He wanted to leave her, he wanted to be able to leave her. For his
soul’s sake, for his manhood’s sake, he must be able to leave her.
But for what? She was the ark, and the rest of the world was flood. The
only tangible, secure thing was the woman. He could leave her only for
another woman. And where was the other woman, and who was the other
woman? Besides, he would be just in the same state. Another woman would
be woman, the case would be the same.
Why was she the all, the everything, why must he live only through her,
why must he sink if he were detached from her? Why must he cleave to
her in a frenzy as for his very life?
The only other way to leave her was to die. The only straight way to
leave her was to die. His dark, raging soul knew that. But he had no
desire for death.
Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the
hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not.
But supposing he went away, right away, and found work, and had a
lodging again. He could be again as he had been before.
But he knew he could not. A woman, he must have a woman. And having a
woman, he must be free of her. It would be the same position. For he
could not be free of her.
For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet.
Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that
standing? Better give in and drown at once.
And upon what could he stand, save upon a woman? Was he then like the
old man of the seas, impotent to move save upon the back of another
life? Was he impotent, or a cripple, or a defective, or a fragment?
It was black, mad, shameful torture, the frenzy of fear, the frenzy of
desire, and the horrible, grasping back-wash of shame.
What was he afraid of? Why did life, without Anna, seem to him just a
horrible welter, everything jostling in a meaningless, dark, fathomless
flood? Why, if Anna left him even for a week, did he seem to be
clinging like a madman to the edge of reality, and slipping surely,
surely into the flood of unreality that would drown him. This horrible
slipping into unreality drove him mad, his soul screamed with fear and
agony.
Yet she was pushing him off from her, pushing him away, breaking his
fingers from their hold on her, persistently, ruthlessly. He wanted her
to have pity. And sometimes for a moment she had pity. But she always
began again, thrusting him off, into the deep water, into the frenzy
and agony of uncertainty.
She became like a fury to him, without any sense of him. Her eyes were
bright with a cold, unmoving hatred. Then his heart seemed to die in
its last fear. She might push him off into the deeps.
She would not sleep with him any more. She said he destroyed her sleep.
Up started all his frenzy and madness of fear and suffering. She drove
him away. Like a cowed, lurking devil he was driven off, his mind
working cunningly against her, devising evil for her. But she drove him
off. In his moments of intense suffering, she seemed to him
inconceivable, a monster, the principle of cruelty.
However her pity might give way for moments, she was hard and cold as a
jewel. He must be put off from her, she must sleep alone. She made him
a bed in the small room.
And he lay there whipped, his soul whipped almost to death, yet
unchanged. He lay in agony of suffering, thrown back into unreality,
like a man thrown overboard into a sea, to swim till he sinks, because
there is no hold, only a wide, weltering sea.
He did not sleep, save for the white sleep when a thin veil is drawn
over the mind. It was not sleep. He was awake, and he was not awake. He
could not be alone. He needed to be able to put his arms round her. He
could not bear the empty space against his breast, where she used to
be. He could not bear it. He felt as if he were suspended in space,
held there by the grip of his will. If he relaxed his will would fall,
fall through endless space, into the bottomless pit, always falling,
will-less, helpless, non-existent, just dropping to extinction, falling
till the fire of friction had burned out, like a falling star, then
nothing, nothing, complete nothing.
He rose in the morning grey and unreal. And she seemed fond of him
again, she seemed to make up to him a little.
“I slept well,” she said, with her slightly false brightness. “Did
you?”
“All right,” he answered.
He would never tell her.
For three or four nights he lay alone through the white sleep, his will
unchanged, unchanged, still tense, fixed in its grip. Then, as if she
were revived and free to be fond of him again, deluded by his silence
and seeming acquiescence, moved also by pity, she took him back again.
Each night, in spite of all the shame, he had waited with agony for
bedtime, to see if she would shut him out. And each night, as, in her
false brightness, she said Good-night, he felt he must kill her or
himself. But she asked for her kiss, so pathetically, so prettily. So
he kissed her, whilst his heart was ice.
And sometimes he went out. Once he sat for a long time in the church
porch, before going in to bed. It was dark with a wind blowing. He sat
in the church porch and felt some shelter, some security. But it grew
cold, and he must go in to bed.
Then came the night when she said, putting her arms round him and
kissing him fondly:
“Stay with me to-night, will you?”
And he had stayed without demur. But his will had not altered. He would
have her fixed to him.
So that soon she told him again she must be alone.
“I don’t _want_ to send you away. I _want_ to sleep with you. But I
can’t sleep, you don’t let me sleep.”
His blood turned black in his veins.
“What do you mean by such a thing? It’s an arrant lie. _I_ don’t let
you sleep——”
“But you don’t. I sleep so well when I’m alone. And I can’t sleep when
you’re there. You do something to me, you put a pressure on my head.
And I _must_ sleep, now the child is coming.”
“It’s something in yourself,” he replied, “something wrong in you.”
Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the
world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and
repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne.
He went and lay down alone. And at length, after a grey and livid and
ghastly period, he relaxed, something gave way in him. He let go, he
did not care what became of him. Strange and dim he became to himself,
to her, to everybody. A vagueness had come over everything, like a
drowning. And it was an infinite relief to drown, a relief, a great,
great relief.
He would insist no more, he would force her no more. He would force
himself upon her no more. He would let go, relax, lapse, and what would
be, should be.
Yet he wanted her still, he always, always wanted her. In his soul, he
was desolate as a child, he was so helpless. Like a child on its
mother, he depended on her for his living. He knew it, and he knew he
could hardly help it.
Yet he must be able to be alone. He must be able to lie down alongside
the empty space, and let be. He must be able to leave himself to the
flood, to sink or live as might be. For he recognized at length his own
limitation, and the limitation of his power. He had to give in.
There was a stillness, a wanness between them. Half at least of the
battle was over. Sometimes she wept as she went about, her heart was
very heavy. But the child was always warm in her womb.
They were friends again, new, subdued friends. But there was a wanness
between them. They slept together once more, very quietly, and
distinct, not one together as before. And she was intimate with him as
at first. But he was very quiet, and not intimate. He was glad in his
soul, but for the time being he was not alive.
He could sleep with her, and let her be. He could be alone now. He had
just learned what it was to be able to be alone. It was right and
peaceful. She had given him a new, deeper freedom. The world might be a
welter of uncertainty, but he was himself now. He had come into his own
existence. He was born for a second time, born at last unto himself,
out of the vast body of humanity. Now at last he had a separate
identity, he existed alone, even if he were not quite alone. Before he
had only existed in so far as he had relations with another being. Now
he had an absolute self—as well as a relative self.
But it was a very dumb, weak, helpless self, a crawling nursling. He
went about very quiet, and in a way, submissive. He had an unalterable
self at last, free, separate, independent.
She was relieved, she was free of him. She had given him to himself.
She wept sometimes with tiredness and helplessness. But he was a
husband. And she seemed, in the child that was coming, to forget. It
seemed to make her warm and drowsy. She lapsed into a long muse,
indistinct, warm, vague, unwilling to be taken out of her vagueness.
And she rested on him also.
Sometimes she came to him with a strange light in her eyes, poignant,
pathetic, as if she were asking for something. He looked and he could
not understand. She was so beautiful, so visionary, the rays seemed to
go out of his breast to her, like a shining. He was there for her, all
for her. And she would hold his breast, and kiss it, and kiss it,
kneeling beside him, she who was waiting for the hour of her delivery.
And he would lie looking down at his breast, till it seemed that his
breast was not himself, that he had left it lying there. Yet it was
himself also, and beautiful and bright with her kisses. He was glad
with a strange, radiant pain. Whilst she kneeled beside him, and kissed
his breast with a slow, rapt, half-devotional movement.
He knew she wanted something, his heart yearned to give it her. His
heart yearned over her. And as she lifted her face, that was radiant
and rosy as a little cloud, his heart still yearned over her, and, now
from the distance, adored her. She had a flower-like presence which he
adored as he stood far off, a stranger.
The weeks passed on, the time drew near, they were very gentle, and
delicately happy. The insistent, passionate, dark soul, the powerful
unsatisfaction in him seemed stilled and tamed, the lion lay down with
the lamb in him.
She loved him very much indeed, and he waited near her. She was a
precious, remote thing to him at this time, as she waited for her
child. Her soul was glad with an ecstasy because of the coming infant.
She wanted a boy: oh, very much she wanted a boy.
But she seemed so young and so frail. She was indeed only a girl. As
she stood by the fire washing herself—she was proud to wash herself at
this time—and he looked at her, his heart was full of extreme
tenderness for her. Such fine, fine limbs, her slim, round arms like
chasing lights, and her legs so simple and childish, yet so very proud.
Oh, she stood on proud legs, with a lovely reckless balance of her full
belly, and the adorable little roundnesses, and the breasts becoming
important. Above it all, her face was like a rosy cloud shining.
How proud she was, what a lovely proud thing her young body! And she
loved him to put his hand on her ripe fullness, so that he should
thrill also with the stir and the quickening there. He was afraid and
silent, but she flung her arms round his neck with proud, impudent joy.
The pains came on, and Oh—how she cried! She would have him stay with
her. And after her long cries she would look at him, with tears in her
eyes and a sobbing laugh on her face, saying:
“I don’t mind it really.”
It was bad enough. But to her it was never deathly. Even the fierce,
tearing pain was exhilarating. She screamed and suffered, but was all
the time curiously alive and vital. She felt so powerfully alive and in
the hands of such a masterly force of life, that her bottom-most
feeling was one of exhilaration. She knew she was winning, winning, she
was always winning, with each onset of pain she was nearer to victory.
Probably he suffered more than she did. He was not shocked or
horrified. But he was screwed very tight in the vise of suffering.
It was a girl. The second of silence on her face when they said so
showed him she was disappointed. And a great blazing passion of
resentment and protest sprang up in his heart. In that moment he
claimed the child.
But when the milk came, and the infant sucked her breast, she seemed to
be leaping with extravagant bliss.
“It sucks me, it sucks me, it likes me—oh, it loves it!” she cried,
holding the child to her breast with her two hands covering it,
passionately.
And in a few moments, as she became used to her bliss, she looked at
the youth with glowing, unseeing eyes, and said:
“Anna Victrix.”
He went away, trembling, and slept. To her, her pains were the
wound-smart of a victor, she was the prouder.
When she was well again she was very happy. She called the baby Ursula.
Both Anna and her husband felt they must have a name that gave them
private satisfaction. The baby was tawny skinned, it had a curious
downy skin, and wisps of bronze hair, and the yellow grey eyes that
wavered, and then became golden-brown like the father’s. So they called
her Ursula because of the picture of the saint.
It was a rather delicate baby at first, but soon it became stronger,
and was restless as a young eel. Anna was worn out with the day-long
wrestling with its young vigour.
As a little animal, she loved and adored it and was happy. She loved
her husband, she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth, and made much of
him, she said his limbs were beautiful, she was fascinated by the
physical form of him.
And she was indeed Anna Victrix. He could not combat her any more. He
was out in the wilderness, alone with her. Having occasion to go to
London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking of naked, lurking
savages on an island, how these had built up and created the great mass
of Oxford Street or Piccadilly. How had helpless savages, running with
their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up
this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a
world of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man
was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more terrible
than man himself, almost monstrous.
And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that
the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own
real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of
the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only
the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not
mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new,
strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find
clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife.
And what more? What more would be necessary? The great mass of activity
in which mankind was engaged meant nothing to him. By nature, he had no
part in it. What did he live for, then? For Anna only, and for the sake
of living? What did he want on this earth? Anna only, and his children,
and his life with his children and her? Was there no more?
He was attended by a sense of something more, something further, which
gave him absolute being. It was as if now he existed in Eternity, let
Time be what it might. What was there outside? The fabricated world,
that he did not believe in? What should he bring to her, from outside?
Nothing? Was it enough, as it was? He was troubled in his acquiescence.
She was not with him. Yet he scarcely believed in himself, apart from
her, though the whole Infinite was with him. Let the whole world slide
down and over the edge of oblivion, he would stand alone. But he was
unsure of her. And he existed also in her. So he was unsure.
He hovered near to her, never quite able to forget the vague, haunting
uncertainty, that seemed to challenge him, and which he would not hear.
A pang of dread, almost guilt, as of insufficiency, would go over him
as he heard her talking to the baby. She stood before the window, with
the month-old child in her arms, talking in a musical, young sing-song
that he had not heard before, and which rang on his heart like a claim
from the distance, or the voice of another world sounding its claim on
him. He stood near, listening, and his heart surged, surged to rise and
submit. Then it shrank back and stayed aloof. He could not move, a
denial was upon him, as if he could not deny himself. He must, he must
be himself.
“Look at the silly blue-caps, my beauty,” she crooned, holding up the
infant to the window, where shone the white garden, and the blue-tits
scuffling in the snow: “Look at the silly blue-caps, my darling, having
a fight in the snow! Look at them, my bird—beating the snow about with
their wings, and shaking their heads. Oh, aren’t they wicked things,
wicked things! Look at their yellow feathers on the snow there! They’ll
miss them, won’t they, when they’re cold later on.
“Must we tell them to stop, must we say ‘stop it’ to them, my bird? But
they are naughty, naughty! Look at them!” Suddenly her voice broke loud
and fierce, she rapped the pane sharply.
“Stop it,” she cried, “stop it, you little nuisances. Stop it!” She
called louder, and rapped the pane more sharply. Her voice was fierce
and imperative.
“Have more sense,” she cried.
“There, now they’re gone. Where have they gone, the silly things? What
will they say to each other? What will they say, my lambkin? They’ll
forget, won’t they, they’ll forget all about it, out of their silly
little heads, and their blue caps.”
After a moment, she turned her bright face to her husband.
“They were _really_ fighting, they were really fierce with each other!”
she said, her voice keen with excitement and wonder, as if she belonged
to the birds’ world, were identified with the race of birds.
“Ay, they’ll fight, will blue-caps,” he said, glad when she turned to
him with her glow from elsewhere. He came and stood beside her and
looked out at the marks on the snow where the birds had scuffled, and
at the yew trees’ burdened, white and black branches. What was the
appeal it made to him, what was the question of her bright face, what
was the challenge he was called to answer? He did not know. But as he
stood there he felt some responsibility which made him glad, but
uneasy, as if he must put out his own light. And he could not move as
yet.
Anna loved the child very much, oh, very much. Yet still she was not
quite fulfilled. She had a slight expectant feeling, as of a door half
opened. Here she was, safe and still in Cossethay. But she felt as if
she were not in Cossethay at all. She was straining her eyes to
something beyond. And from her Pisgah mount, which she had attained,
what could she see? A faint, gleaming horizon, a long way off, and a
rainbow like an archway, a shadow-door with faintly coloured coping
above it. Must she be moving thither?
Something she had not, something she did not grasp, could not arrive
at. There was something beyond her. But why must she start on the
journey? She stood so safely on the Pisgah mountain.
In the winter, when she rose with the sunrise, and out of the back
windows saw the east flaming yellow and orange above the green, glowing
grass, while the great pear tree in between stood dark and magnificent
as an idol, and under the dark pear tree, the little sheet of water
spread smooth in burnished, yellow light, she said, “It is here”. And
when, at evening, the sunset came in a red glare through the big
opening in the clouds, she said again, “It is beyond”.
Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and
she saw the hope, the promise. Why should she travel any further?
Yet she always asked the question. As the sun went down in his fiery
winter haste, she faced the blazing close of the affair, in which she
had not played her fullest part, and she made her demand still: “What
are you doing, making this big shining commotion? What is it that you
keep so busy about, that you will not let us alone?”
She did not turn to her husband, for him to lead her. He was apart from
her, with her, according to her different conceptions of him. The child
she might hold up, she might toss the child forward into the furnace,
the child might walk there, amid the burning coals and the incandescent
roar of heat, as the three witnesses walked with the angel in the fire.
Soon, she felt sure of her husband. She knew his dark face and the
extent of its passion. She knew his slim, vigorous body, she said it
was hers. Then there was no denying her. She was a rich woman enjoying
her riches.
And soon again she was with child. Which made her satisfied and took
away her discontent. She forgot that she had watched the sun climb up
and pass his way, a magnificent traveller surging forward. She forgot
that the moon had looked through a window of the high, dark night, and
nodded like a magic recognition, signalled to her to follow. Sun and
moon travelled on, and left her, passed her by, a rich woman enjoying
her riches. She should go also. But she could not go, when they called,
because she must stay at home now. With satisfaction she relinquished
the adventure to the unknown. She was bearing her children.
There was another child coming, and Anna lapsed into vague content. If
she were not the wayfarer to the unknown, if she were arrived now,
settled in her builded house, a rich woman, still her doors opened
under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of
the sun and moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo
of journeying.
She was a door and a threshold, she herself. Through her another soul
was coming, to stand upon her as upon the threshold, looking out,
shading its eyes for the direction to take.
Chapter VII.
THE CATHEDRAL
During the first year of her marriage, before Ursula was born, Anna
Brangwen and her husband went to visit her mother’s friend, the Baron
Skrebensky. The latter had kept a slight connection with Anna’s mother,
and had always preserved some officious interest in the young girl,
because she was a pure Pole.
When Baron Skrebensky was about forty years old, his wife died, and
left him raving, disconsolate. Lydia had visited him then, taking Anna
with her. It was when the girl was fourteen years old. Since then she
had not seen him. She remembered him as a small sharp clergyman who
cried and talked and terrified her, whilst her mother was most
strangely consoling, in a foreign language.
The little Baron never quite approved of Anna, because she spoke no
Polish. Still, he considered himself in some way her guardian, on
Lensky’s behalf, and he presented her with some old, heavy Russian
jewellery, the least valuable of his wife’s relics. Then he lapsed out
of the Brangwen’s life again, though he lived only about thirty miles
away.
Three years later came the startling news that he had married a young
English girl of good family. Everybody marvelled. Then came a copy of
“The History of the Parish of Briswell, by Rudolph, Baron Skrebensky,
Vicar of Briswell.” It was a curious book, incoherent, full of
interesting exhumations. It was dedicated: “To my wife, Millicent Maud
Pearse, in whom I embrace the generous spirit of England.”
“If he embraces no more than the spirit of England,” said Tom Brangwen,
“it’s a bad look-out for him.”
But paying a formal visit with his wife, he found the new Baroness a
little, creamy-skinned, insidious thing with red-brown hair and a mouth
that one must always watch, because it curved back continually in an
incomprehensible, strange laugh that exposed her rather prominent
teeth. She was not beautiful, yet Tom Brangwen was immediately under
her spell. She seemed to snuggle like a kitten within his warmth,
whilst she was at the same time elusive and ironical, suggesting the
fine steel of her claws.
The Baron was almost dotingly courteous and attentive to her. She,
almost mockingly, yet quite happy, let him dote. Curious little thing
she was, she had the soft, creamy, elusive beauty of a ferret. Tom
Brangwen was quite at a loss, at her mercy, and she laughed, a little
breathlessly, as if tempted to cruelty. She did put fine torments on
the elderly Baron.
When some months later she bore a son, the Baron Skrebensky was loud
with delight.
Gradually she gathered a circle of acquaintances in the county. For she
was of good family, half Venetian, educated in Dresden. The little
foreign vicar attained to a social status which almost satisfied his
maddened pride.
Therefore the Brangwens were surprised when the invitation came for
Anna and her young husband to pay a visit to Briswell vicarage. For the
Skrebenskys were now moderately well off, Millicent Skrebensky having
some fortune of her own.
Anna took her best clothes, recovered her best high-school manner, and
arrived with her husband. Will Brangwen, ruddy, bright, with long limbs
and a small head, like some uncouth bird, was not changed in the least.
The little Baroness was smiling, showing her teeth. She had a real
charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some
weasel. Anna at once respected her, and was on her guard before her,
instinctively attracted by the strange, childlike surety of the
Baroness, yet mistrusting it, fascinated. The little baron was now
quite white-haired, very brittle. He was wizened and wrinkled, yet
fiery, unsubdued. Anna looked at his lean body, at his small, fine lean
legs and lean hands as he sat talking, and she flushed. She recognized
the quality of the male in him, his lean, concentrated age, his
informed fire, his faculty for sharp, deliberate response. He was so
detached, so purely objective. A woman was thoroughly outside him.
There was no confusion. So he could give that fine, deliberate
response.
He was something separate and interesting; his hard, intrinsic being,
whittled down by age to an essentiality and a directness almost
death-like, cruel, was yet so unswervingly sure in its action, so
distinct in its surety, that she was attracted to him. She watched his
cool, hard, separate fire, fascinated by it. Would she rather have it
than her husband’s diffuse heat, than his blind, hot youth?
She seemed to be breathing high, sharp air, as if she had just come out
of a hot room. These strange Skrebenskys made her aware of another,
freer element, in which each person was detached and isolated. Was not
this her natural element? Was not the close Brangwen life stifling her?
Meanwhile the little baroness, with always a subtle light stirring of
her full, lustrous, hazel eyes, was playing with Will Brangwen. He was
not quick enough to see all her movements. Yet he watched her steadily,
with unchanging, lit-up eyes. She was a strange creature to him. But
she had no power over him. She flushed, and was irritated. Yet she
glanced again and again at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she
despised him. She despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had
nothing for her. Yet it angered her as if she were jealous. He watched
her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. But he
himself was not implicated. He was different in kind. She was all
lambent, biting flames, he was a red fire glowing steadily. She could
get nothing out of him. So she made him flush darkly by assuming a
biting, subtle class-superiority. He flushed, but still he did not
object. He was too different.
Her little boy came in with the nurse. He was a quick, slight child,
with fine perceptiveness, and a cool transitoriness in his interest. At
once he treated Will Brangwen as an outsider. He stayed by Anna for a
moment, acknowledged her, then was gone again, quick, observant,
restless, with a glance of interest at everything.
The father adored him, and spoke to him in Polish. It was queer, the
stiff, aristocratic manner of the father with the child, the distance
in the relationship, the classic fatherhood on the one hand, the filial
subordination on the other. They played together, in their different
degrees very separate, two different beings, differing as it were in
rank rather than in relationship. And the baroness smiled, smiled,
smiled, always smiled, showing her rather protruding teeth, having
always a mysterious attraction and charm.
Anna realized how different her own life might have been, how different
her own living. Her soul stirred, she became as another person. Her
intimacy with her husband passed away, the curious enveloping Brangwen
intimacy, so warm, so close, so stifling, when one seemed always to be
in contact with the other person, like a blood-relation, was annulled.
She denied it, this close relationship with her young husband. He and
she were not one. His heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her,
through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat with
him, till she had not her own self apart. She wanted her own life. He
seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being, his hot life, till
she did not know whether she were herself, or whether she were another
creature, united with him in a world of close blood-intimacy that
closed over her and excluded her from all the cool outside.
She wanted her own, old, sharp self, detached, detached, active but not
absorbed, active for her own part, taking and giving, but never
absorbed. Whereas he wanted this strange absorption with her, which
still she resisted. But she was partly helpless against it. She had
lived so long in Tom Brangwen’s love, beforehand.
From the Skrebensky’s, they went to Will Brangwen’s beloved Lincoln
Cathedral, because it was not far off. He had promised her, that one by
one, they should visit all the cathedrals of England. They began with
Lincoln, which he knew well.
He began to get excited as the time drew near to set off. What was it
that changed him so much? She was almost angry, coming as she did from
the Skrebensky’s. But now he ran on alone. His very breast seemed to
open its doors to watch for the great church brooding over the town.
His soul ran ahead.
When he saw the cathedral in the distance, dark blue lifted watchful in
the sky, his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven, it was the Spirit
hovering like a dove, like an eagle over the earth. He turned his
glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange,
ecstatic grin.
“There she is,” he said.
The “she” irritated her. Why “she”? It was “it”. What was the
cathedral, a big building, a thing of the past, obsolete, to excite him
to such a pitch? She began to stir herself to readiness.
They passed up the steep hill, he eager as a pilgrim arriving at the
shrine. As they came near the precincts, with castle on one side and
cathedral on the other, his veins seemed to break into fiery blossom,
he was transported.
They had passed through the gate, and the great west front was before
them, with all its breadth and ornament.
“It is a false front,” he said, looking at the golden stone and the
twin towers, and loving them just the same. In a little ecstasy he
found himself in the porch, on the brink of the unrevealed. He looked
up to the lovely unfolding of the stone. He was to pass within to the
perfect womb.
Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom was before
him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. His soul
leapt, soared up into the great church. His body stood still, absorbed
by the height. His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it
reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the
hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.
She too was overcome with wonder and awe. She followed him in his
progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life, the coloured
darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day. Here, the very first
dawn was breaking, the very last sunset sinking, and the immemorial
darkness, whereof life’s day would blossom and fall away again,
re-echoed peace and profound immemorial silence.
Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and west, between
dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before
germination, silenced after death. Containing birth and death,
potential with all the noise and transition of life, the cathedral
remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be
radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the
circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom
folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death,
as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the
flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts, the death out
of which it fell, the life into which it has dropped, the immortality
it involves, and the death it will embrace again.
Here in the church, “before” and “after” were folded together, all was
contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his consummation. Out of the
doors of the womb he had come, putting aside the wings of the womb, and
proceeding into the light. Through daylight and day-after-day he had
come, knowledge after knowledge, and experience after experience,
remembering the darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness
after death. Then between—while he had pushed open the doors of the
cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the hush of the
two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the beginning and the end
were one.
Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a
manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal
earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through
the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the
meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close
embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the
timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch,
clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated.
And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this timeless
consummation, where the thrust from earth met the thrust from earth and
the arch was locked on the keystone of ecstasy. This was all, this was
everything. Till he came to himself in the world below. Then again he
gathered himself together, in transit, every jet of him strained and
leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the
unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax
of eternity, the apex of the arch.
She too was overcome, but silenced rather than tuned to the place. She
loved it as a world not quite her own, she resented his transports and
ecstasies. His passion in the cathedral at first awed her, then made
her angry. After all, there was the sky outside, and in here, in this
mysterious half-night, when his soul leapt with the pillars upwards, it
was not to the stars and the crystalline dark space, but to meet and
clasp with the answering impulse of leaping stone, there in the dusk
and secrecy of the roof. The far-off clinching and mating of the
arches, the leap and thrust of the stone, carrying a great roof
overhead, awed and silenced her.
But yet—yet she remembered that the open sky was no blue vault, no dark
dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a space where stars were
wheeling in freedom, with freedom above them always higher.
The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the
knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in,
and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the ultimate confine. His
soul would have liked it to be so: here, here is all, complete,
eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no illusion of time, of night
and day passing by, but only perfectly proportioned space and movement
clinching and renewing, and passion surging its way into great waves to
the altar, recurrence of ecstasy.
Her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the threshold of
Eternity, in reverence and fear and joy. But ever she hung back in the
transit, mistrusting the culmination of the altar. She was not to be
flung forward on the lift and lift of passionate flights, to be cast at
last upon the altar steps as upon the shore of the unknown. There was a
great joy and a verity in it. But even in the dazed swoon of the
cathedral, she claimed another right. The altar was barren, its lights
gone out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying
there. She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the
roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in.
So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept
forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite
in a great mass, triumphant and flinging its own course. She wanted to
get out of this fixed, leaping, forward-travelling movement, to rise
from it as a bird rises with wet, limp feet from the sea, to lift
herself as a bird lifts its breast and thrusts its body from the pulse
and heave of a sea that bears it forward to an unwilling conclusion,
tear herself away like a bird on wings, and in open space where there
is clarity, rise up above the fixed, surcharged motion, a separate
speck that hangs suspended, moves this way and that, seeing and
answering before it sinks again, having chosen or found the direction
in which it shall be carried forward.
And it was as if she must grasp at something, as if her wings were too
weak to lift her straight off the heaving motion. So she caught sight
of the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before
them arrested.
These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral
like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little
imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not
absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things
that had been left out of the great concept of the church. “However
much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in,”
the little faces mocked.
Apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards the altar,
these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate
knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in
triumph of their own very littleness.
“Oh, look!” cried Anna. “Oh, look how adorable, the faces! Look at
her.”
Brangwen looked unwillingly. This was the voice of the serpent in his
Eden. She pointed him to a plump, sly, malicious little face carved in
stone.
“He knew her, the man who carved her,” said Anna. “I’m sure she was his
wife.”
“It isn’t a woman at all, it’s a man,” said Brangwen curtly.
“Do you think so?—No! That isn’t a man. That is no man’s face.”
Her voice sounded rather jeering. He laughed shortly, and went on. But
she would not go forward with him. She loitered about the carvings. And
he could not go forward without her. He waited impatient of this
counteraction. She was spoiling his passionate intercourse with the
cathedral. His brows began to gather.
“Oh, this is good!” she cried again. “Here is the same woman—look!—only
he’s made her cross! Isn’t it lovely! Hasn’t he made her hideous to a
degree?” She laughed with pleasure. “Didn’t he hate her? He must have
been a nice man! Look at her—isn’t it awfully good—just like a shrewish
woman. He must have enjoyed putting her in like that. He got his own
back on her, didn’t he?”
“It’s a man’s face, no woman’s at all—a monk’s—clean shaven,” he said.
She laughed with a pouf! of laughter.
“You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don’t you?” she
mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she laughed with
malicious triumph.
She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion
he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he
could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned.
That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was
become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter—but dead, dead.
His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for
having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he would be
stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand, without one belief in
which to rest.
Yet somewhere in him he responded more deeply to the sly little face
that knew better, than he had done before to the perfect surge of his
cathedral.
Nevertheless for the time being his soul was wretched and homeless, and
he could not bear to think of Anna’s ousting him from his beloved
realities. He wanted his cathedral; he wanted to satisfy his blind
passion. And he could not any more. Something intervened.
They went home again, both of them altered. She had some new reverence
for that which he wanted, he felt that his cathedrals would never again
be to him as they had been. Before, he had thought them absolute. But
now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark,
mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a
sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him
within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless
confusion.
He had felt, before, that could he but go through the great door and
look down the gloom towards the far-off, concluding wonder of the
altar, that then, with the windows suspended around like tablets of
jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. Here the
satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of
the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the
mystic door, through which all and everything must move on to eternity.
But now, somehow, sadly and disillusioned, he realized that the doorway
was no doorway. It was too narrow, it was false. Outside the cathedral
were many flying spirits that could never be sifted through the
jewelled gloom. He had lost his absolute.
He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the
cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He
crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to
work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous
and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did
not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the
day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the
Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple,
till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the
herbs.
Still he loved the Church. As a symbol, he loved it. He tended it for
what it tried to represent, rather than for that which it did
represent. Still he loved it. The little church across his garden-wall
drew him, he gave it loving attention. But he went to take charge of
it, to preserve it. It was as an old, sacred thing to him. He looked
after the stone and woodwork, mending the organ and restoring a piece
of broken carving, repairing the church furniture. Later, he became
choir-master also.
His life was shifting its centre, becoming more superficial. He had
failed to become really articulate, failed to find real expression. He
had to continue in the old form. But in spirit, he was uncreated.
Anna was absorbed in the child now, she left her husband to take his
own way. She was willing now to postpone all adventure into unknown
realities. She had the child, her palpable and immediate future was the
child. If her soul had found no utterance, her womb had.
The church that neighboured with his house became very intimate and
dear to him. He cherished it, he had it entirely in his charge. If he
could find no new activity, he would be happy cherishing the old, dear
form of worship. He knew this little, whitewashed church. In its
shadowy atmosphere he sank back into being. He liked to sink himself in
its hush as a stone sinks into water.
He went across his garden, mounted the wall by the little steps, and
entered the hush and peace of the church. As the heavy door clanged to
behind him, his feet re-echoed in the aisle, his heart re-echoed with a
little passion of tenderness and mystic peace. He was also slightly
ashamed, like a man who has failed, who lapses back for his fulfilment.
He loved to light the candles at the organ, and sitting there alone in
the little glow, practice the hymns and chants for the service. The
whitewashed arches retreated into darkness, the sound of the organ and
the organ-pedals died away upon the unalterable stillness of the
church, there were faint, ghostly noises in the tower, and then the
music swelled out again, loudly, triumphantly.
He ceased to fret about his life. He relaxed his will, and let
everything go. What was between him and his wife was a great thing, if
it was not everything. She had conquered, really. Let him wait, and
abide, wait and abide. She and the baby and himself, they were one. The
organ rang out his protestation. His soul lay in the darkness as he
pressed the keys of the organ.
To Anna, the baby was a complete bliss and fulfilment. Her desires sank
into abeyance, her soul was in bliss over the baby. It was rather a
delicate child, she had trouble to rear it. She never for a moment
thought it would die. It was a delicate infant, therefore it behoved
her to make it strong. She threw herself into the labour, the child was
everything. Her imagination was all occupied here. She was a mother. It
was enough to handle the new little limbs, the new little body, hear
the new little voice crying in the stillness. All the future rang to
her out of the sound of the baby’s crying and cooing, she balanced the
coming years of life in her hands, as she nursed the child. The
passionate sense of fulfilment, of the future germinated in her, made
her vivid and powerful. All the future was in her hands, in the hands
of the woman. And before this baby was ten months old, she was again
with child. She seemed to be in the fecund of storm life, every moment
was full and busy with productiveness to her. She felt like the earth,
the mother of everything.
Brangwen occupied himself with the church, he played the organ, he
trained the choir-boys, he taught a Sunday-school class of youths. He
was happy enough. There was an eager, yearning kind of happiness in him
as he taught the boys on Sundays. He was all the time exciting himself
with the proximity of some secret that he had not yet fathomed.
In the house, he served his wife and the little matriarchy. She loved
him because he was the father of her children. And she always had a
physical passion for him. So he gave up trying to have the spiritual
superiority and control, or even her respect for his conscious or
public life. He lived simply by her physical love for him. And he
served the little matriarchy, nursing the child and helping with the
housework, indifferent any more of his own dignity and importance. But
his abandoning of claims, his living isolated upon his own interest,
made him seem unreal, unimportant.
Anna was not publicly proud of him. But very soon she learned to be
indifferent to public life. He was not what is called a manly man: he
did not drink or smoke or arrogate importance. But he was her man, and
his very indifference to all claims of manliness set her supreme in her
own world with him. Physically, she loved him and he satisfied her. He
went alone and subsidiary always. At first it had irritated her, the
outer world existed so little to him. Looking at him with outside eyes,
she was inclined to sneer at him. But her sneer changed to a sort of
respect. She respected him, that he could serve her so simply and
completely. Above all, she loved to bear his children. She loved to be
the source of children.
She could not understand him, his strange, dark rages and his devotion
to the church. It was the church building he cared for; and yet his
soul was passionate for something. He laboured cleaning the stonework,
repairing the woodwork, restoring the organ, and making the singing as
perfect as possible. To keep the church fabric and the church-ritual
intact was his business; to have the intimate sacred building utterly
in his own hands, and to make the form of service complete. There was a
little bright anguish and tension on his face, and in his intent
movements. He was like a lover who knows he is betrayed, but who still
loves, whose love is only the more intense. The church was false, but
he served it the more attentively.
During the day, at his work in the office, he kept himself suspended.
He did not exist. He worked automatically till it was time to go home.
He loved with a hot heart the dark-haired little Ursula, and he waited
for the child to come to consciousness. Now the mother monopolized the
baby. But his heart waited in its darkness. His hour would come.
In the long run, he learned to submit to Anna. She forced him to the
spirit of her laws, whilst leaving him the letter of his own. She
combated in him his devils. She suffered very much from his
inexplicable and incalculable dark rages, when a blackness filled him,
and a black wind seemed to sweep out of existence everything that had
to do with him. She could feel herself, everything, being annihilated
by him.
At first she fought him. At night, in this state, he would kneel down
to say his prayers. She looked at his crouching figure.
“Why are you kneeling there, pretending to pray?” she said, harshly.
“Do you think anybody can pray, when they are in the vile temper you
are in?”
He remained crouching by the beside, motionless.
“It’s horrible,” she continued, “and such a pretence! What do you
pretend you are saying? Who do you pretend you are praying to?”
He still remained motionless, seething with inchoate rage, when his
whole nature seemed to disintegrate. He seemed to live with a strain
upon himself, and occasionally came these dark, chaotic rages, the lust
for destruction. She then fought with him, and their fights were
horrible, murderous. And then the passion between them came just as
black and awful.
But little by little, as she learned to love him better, she would put
herself aside, and when she felt one of his fits upon him, would ignore
him, successfully leave him in his world, whilst she remained in her
own. He had a black struggle with himself, to come back to her. For at
last he learned that he would be in hell until he came back to her. So
he struggled to submit to her, and she was afraid of the ugly strain in
his eyes. She made love to him, and took him. Then he was grateful to
her love, humble.
He made himself a woodwork shed, in which to restore things which were
destroyed in the church. So he had plenty to do: his wife, his child,
the church, the woodwork, and his wage-earning, all occupying him. If
only there were not some limit to him, some darkness across his eyes!
He had to give in to it at last himself. He must submit to his own
inadequacy, aware of some limit to himself, of [something unformed in]
his own black, violent temper, and to reckon with it. But as she was
more gentle with him, it became quieter.
As he sat sometimes very still, with a bright, vacant face, Anna could
see the suffering among the brightness. He was aware of some limit to
himself, of something unformed in his very being, of some buds which
were not ripe in him, some folded centres of darkness which would never
develop and unfold whilst he was alive in the body. He was unready for
fulfilment. Something undeveloped in him limited him, there was a
darkness in him which he _could_ not unfold, which would never unfold
in him.
Chapter VIII.
THE CHILD
From the first, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong
emotion he dared scarcely acknowledge, it was so strong and came out of
the dark of him. When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him,
because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself.
Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?
He had the infant in his arms, he walked backwards and forwards
troubled by the crying of his own flesh and blood. This was his own
flesh and blood crying! His soul rose against the voice suddenly
breaking out from him, from the distances in him.
Sometimes in the night, the child cried and cried, when the night was
heavy and sleep oppressed him. And half asleep, he stretched out his
hand to put it over the baby’s face to stop the crying. But something
arrested his hand: the very inhumanness of the intolerable, continuous
crying arrested him. It was so impersonal, without cause or object. Yet
he echoed to it directly, his soul answered its madness. It filled him
with terror, almost with frenzy.
He learned to acquiesce to this, to submit to the awful, obliterated
sources which were the origin of his living tissue. He was not what he
conceived himself to be! Then he was what he was, unknown, potent,
dark.
He became accustomed to the child, he knew how to lift and balance the
little body. The baby had a beautiful, rounded head that moved him
passionately. He would have fought to the last drop to defend that
exquisite, perfect round head.
He learned to know the little hands and feet, the strange, unseeing,
golden-brown eyes, the mouth that opened only to cry, or to suck, or to
show a queer, toothless laugh. He could almost understand even the
dangling legs, which at first had created in him a feeling of aversion.
They could kick in their queer little way, they had their own softness.
One evening, suddenly, he saw the tiny, living thing rolling naked in
the mother’s lap, and he was sick, it was so utterly helpless and
vulnerable and extraneous; in a world of hard surfaces and varying
altitudes, it lay vulnerable and naked at every point. Yet it was quite
blithe. And yet, in its blind, awful crying, was there not the blind,
far-off terror of its own vulnerable nakedness, the terror of being so
utterly delivered over, helpless at every point. He could not bear to
hear it crying. His heart strained and stood on guard against the whole
universe.
But he waited for the dread of these days to pass; he saw the joy
coming. He saw the lovely, creamy, cool little ear of the baby, a bit
of dark hair rubbed to a bronze floss, like bronze-dust. And he waited,
for the child to become his, to look at him and answer him.
It had a separate being, but it was his own child. His flesh and blood
vibrated to it. He caught the baby to his breast with his passionate,
clapping laugh. And the infant knew him.
As the newly-opened, newly-dawned eyes looked at him, he wanted them to
perceive him, to recognize him. Then he was verified. The child knew
him, a queer contortion of laughter came on its face for him. He caught
it to his breast, clapping with a triumphant laugh.
The golden-brown eyes of the child gradually lit up and dilated at the
sight of the dark-glowing face of the youth. It knew its mother better,
it wanted its mother more. But the brightest, sharpest little ecstasy
was for the father.
It began to be strong, to move vigorously and freely, to make sounds
like words. It was a baby girl now. Already it knew his strong hands,
it exulted in his strong clasp, it laughed and crowed when he played
with it.
And his heart grew red-hot with passionate feeling for the child. She
was not much more than a year old when the second baby was born. Then
he took Ursula for his own. She his first little girl. He had set his
heart on her.
The second had dark blue eyes and a fair skin: it was more a Brangwen,
people said. The hair was fair. But they forgot Anna’s stiff blonde
fleece of childhood. They called the newcomer Gudrun.
This time, Anna was stronger, and not so eager. She did not mind that
the baby was not a boy. It was enough that she had milk and could
suckle her child: Oh, oh, the bliss of the little life sucking the milk
of her body! Oh, oh, oh the bliss, as the infant grew stronger, of the
two tiny hands clutching, catching blindly yet passionately at her
breast, of the tiny mouth seeking her in blind, sure, vital knowledge,
of the sudden consummate peace as the little body sank, the mouth and
throat sucking, sucking, sucking, drinking life from her to make a new
life, almost sobbing with passionate joy of receiving its own
existence, the tiny hands clutching frantically as the nipple was drawn
back, not to be gainsaid. This was enough for Anna. She seemed to pass
off into a kind of rapture of motherhood, her rapture of motherhood was
everything.
So that the father had the elder baby, the weaned child, the
golden-brown, wondering vivid eyes of the little Ursula were for him,
who had waited behind the mother till the need was for him. The mother
felt a sharp stab of jealousy. But she was still more absorbed in the
tiny baby. It was entirely hers, its need was direct upon her.
So Ursula became the child of her father’s heart. She was the little
blossom, he was the sun. He was patient, energetic, inventive for her.
He taught her all the funny little things, he filled her and roused her
to her fullest tiny measure. She answered him with her extravagant
infant’s laughter and her call of delight.
Now there were two babies, a woman came in to do the housework. Anna
was wholly nurse. Two babies were not too much for her. But she hated
any form of work, now her children had come, except the charge of them.
When Ursula toddled about, she was an absorbed, busy child, always
amusing herself, needing not much attention from other people. At
evening, towards six o’clock, Anna very often went across the lane to
the stile, lifted Ursula over into the field, with a: “Go and meet
Daddy.” Then Brangwen, coming up the steep round of the hill, would see
before him on the brow of the path a tiny, tottering, windblown little
mite with a dark head, who, as soon as she saw him, would come running
in tiny, wild, windmill fashion, lifting her arms up and down to him,
down the steep hill. His heart leapt up, he ran his fastest to her, to
catch her, because he knew she would fall. She came fluttering on,
wildly, with her little limbs flying. And he was glad when he caught
her up in his arms. Once she fell as she came flying to him, he saw her
pitch forward suddenly as she was running with her hands lifted to him;
and when he picked her up, her mouth was bleeding. He could never bear
to think of it, he always wanted to cry, even when he was an old man
and she had become a stranger to him. How he loved that little
Ursula!—his heart had been sharply seared for her, when he was a youth,
first married.
When she was a little older, he would see her recklessly climbing over
the bars of the stile, in her red pinafore, swinging in peril and
tumbling over, picking herself up and flitting towards him. Sometimes
she liked to ride on his shoulder, sometimes she preferred to walk with
his hand, sometimes she would fling her arms round his legs for a
moment, then race free again, whilst he went shouting and calling to
her, a child along with her. He was still only a tall, thin, unsettled
lad of twenty-two.
It was he who had made her her cradle, her little chair, her little
stool, her high chair. It was he who would swing her up to table or who
would make for her a doll out of an old table-leg, whilst she watched
him, saying:
“Make her eyes, Daddy, make her eyes!”
And he made her eyes with his knife.
She was very fond of adorning herself, so he would tie a piece of
cotton round her ear, and hang a blue bead on it underneath for an
ear-ring. The ear-rings varied with a red bead, and a golden bead, and
a little pearl bead. And as he came home at night, seeing her bridling
and looking very self-conscious, he took notice and said:
“So you’re wearing your best golden and pearl ear-rings, to-day?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose you’ve been to see the queen?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Oh, and what had she to say?”
“She said—she said—‘You won’t dirty your nice white frock.’”
He gave her the nicest bits from his plate, putting them into her red,
moist mouth. And he would make on a piece of bread-and-butter a bird,
out of jam: which she ate with extraordinary relish.
After the tea-things were washed up, the woman went away, leaving the
family free. Usually Brangwen helped in the bathing of the children. He
held long discussions with his child as she sat on his knee and he
unfastened her clothes. And he seemed to be talking really of momentous
things, deep moralities. Then suddenly she ceased to hear, having
caught sight of a glassie rolled into a corner. She slipped away, and
was in no hurry to return.
“Come back here,” he said, waiting. She became absorbed, taking no
notice.
“Come on,” he repeated, with a touch of command.
An excited little chuckle came from her, but she pretended to be
absorbed.
“Do you hear, Milady?”
She turned with a fleeting, exulting laugh. He rushed on her, and swept
her up.
“Who was it that didn’t come!” he said, rolling her between his strong
hands, tickling her. And she laughed heartily, heartily. She loved him
that he compelled her with his strength and decision. He was
all-powerful, the tower of strength which rose out of her sight.
When the children were in bed, sometimes Anna and he sat and talked,
desultorily, both of them idle. He read very little. Anything he was
drawn to read became a burning reality to him, another scene outside
his window. Whereas Anna skimmed through a book to see what happened,
then she had enough.
Therefore they would often sit together, talking desultorily. What was
really between them they could not utter. Their words were only
accidents in the mutual silence. When they talked, they gossiped. She
did not care for sewing.
She had a beautiful way of sitting musing, gratefully, as if her heart
were lit up. Sometimes she would turn to him, laughing, to tell him
some little thing that had happened during the day. Then he would
laugh, they would talk awhile, before the vital, physical silence was
between them again.
She was thin but full of colour and life. She was perfectly happy to do
just nothing, only to sit with a curious, languid dignity, so careless
as to be almost regal, so utterly indifferent, so confident. The bond
between them was undefinable, but very strong. It kept everyone else at
a distance.
His face never changed whilst she knew him, it only became more
intense. It was ruddy and dark in its abstraction, not very human, it
had a strong, intent brightness. Sometimes, when his eyes met hers, a
yellow flash from them caused a darkness to swoon over her
consciousness, electric, and a slight strange laugh came on his face.
Her eyes would turn languidly, then close, as if hypnotized. And they
lapsed into the same potent darkness. He had the quality of a young
black cat, intent, unnoticeable, and yet his presence gradually made
itself felt, stealthily and powerfully took hold of her. He called, not
to her, but to something in her, which responded subtly, out of her
unconscious darkness.
So they were together in a darkness, passionate, electric, for ever
haunting the back of the common day, never in the light. In the light,
he seemed to sleep, unknowing. Only she knew him when the darkness set
him free, and he could see with his gold-glowing eyes his intention and
his desires in the dark. Then she was in a spell, then she answered his
harsh, penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke
up, electric, bristling with an unknown, overwhelming insinuation.
By now they knew each other; she was the daytime, the daylight, he was
the shadow, put aside, but in the darkness potent with an overwhelming
voluptuousness.
She learned not to dread and to hate him, but to fill herself with him,
to give herself to his black, sensual power, that was hidden all the
daytime. And the curious rolling of the eyes, as if she were lapsing in
a trance away from her ordinary consciousness became habitual with her,
when something threatened and opposed her in life, the conscious life.
So they remained as separate in the light, and in the thick darkness,
married. He supported her daytime authority, kept it inviolable at
last. And she, in all the darkness, belonged to him, to his close,
insinuating, hypnotic familiarity.
All his daytime activity, all his public life, was a kind of sleep. She
wanted to be free, to belong to the day. And he ran avoiding the day in
work. After tea, he went to the shed to his carpentry or his
woodcarving. He was restoring the patched, degraded pulpit to its
original form.
But he loved to have the child near him, playing by his feet. She was a
piece of light that really belonged to him, that played within his
darkness. He left the shed door on the latch. And when, with his second
sense of another presence, he knew she was coming, he was satisfied, he
was at rest. When he was alone with her, he did not want to take
notice, to talk. He wanted to live unthinking, with her presence
flickering upon him.
He always went in silence. The child would push open the shed door, and
see him working by lamplight, his sleeves rolled back. His clothes hung
about him, carelessly, like mere wrapping. Inside, his body was
concentrated with a flexible, charged power all of its own, isolated.
From when she was a tiny child Ursula could remember his forearm, with
its fine black hairs and its electric flexibility, working at the bench
through swift, unnoticeable movements, always ambushed in a sort of
silence.
She hung a moment in the door of the shed, waiting for him to notice
her. He turned, his black, curved eyebrows arching slightly.
“Hullo, Twittermiss!”
And he closed the door behind her. Then the child was happy in the shed
that smelled of sweet wood and resounded to the noise of the plane or
the hammer or the saw, yet was charged with the silence of the worker.
She played on, intent and absorbed, among the shavings and the little
nogs of wood. She never touched him: his feet and legs were near, she
did not approach them.
She liked to flit out after him when he was going to church at night.
If he were going to be alone, he swung her over the wall, and let her
come.
Again she was transported when the door was shut behind them, and they
two inherited the big, pale, void place. She would watch him as he lit
the organ candles, wait whilst he began his practicing his tunes, then
she ran foraging here and there, like a kitten playing by herself in
the darkness with eyes dilated. The ropes hung vaguely, twining on the
floor, from the bells in the tower, and Ursula always wanted the
fluffy, red-and-white, or blue-and-white rope-grips. But they were
above her.
Sometimes her mother came to claim her. Then the child was seized with
resentment. She passionately resented her mother’s superficial
authority. She wanted to assert her own detachment.
He, however, also gave her occasional cruel shocks. He let her play
about in the church, she rifled foot-stools and hymn-books and
cushions, like a bee among flowers, whilst the organ echoed away. This
continued for some weeks. Then the charwoman worked herself up into a
frenzy of rage, to dare to attack Brangwen, and one day descended on
him like a harpy. He wilted away, and wanted to break the old beast’s
neck.
Instead he came glowering in fury to the house, and turned on Ursula.
“Why, you tiresome little monkey, can’t you even come to church without
pulling the place to bits?”
His voice was harsh and cat-like, he was blind to the child. She shrank
away in childish anguish and dread. What was it, what awful thing was
it?
The mother turned with her calm, almost superb manner.
“What has she done, then?”
“Done? She shall go in the church no more, pulling and littering and
destroying.”
The wife slowly rolled her eyes and lowered her eyelids.
“What has she destroyed, then?”
He did not know.
“I’ve just had Mrs. Wilkinson at me,” he cried, “with a list of things
she’s done.”
Ursula withered under the contempt and anger of the “she”, as he spoke
of her.
“Send Mrs. Wilkinson here to me with a list of the things she’s done,”
said Anna. “I am the one to hear that.”
“It’s not the things the child has done,” continued the mother, “that
have put you out so much, it’s because you can’t bear being spoken to
by that old woman. But you haven’t the courage to turn on her when she
attacks you, you bring your rage here.”
He relapsed into silence. Ursula knew that he was wrong. In the
outside, upper world, he was wrong. Already came over the child the
cold sense of the impersonal world. There she knew her mother was
right. But still her heart clamoured after her father, for him to be
right, in his dark, sensuous underworld. But he was angry, and went his
way in blackness and brutal silence again.
The child ran about absorbed in life, quiet, full of amusement. She did
not notice things, nor changes nor alterations. One day she would find
daisies in the grass, another day, apple-blossoms would be sprinkled
white on the ground, and she would run among it, for pleasure because
it was there. Yet again birds would be pecking at the cherries, her
father would throw cherries down from the tree all round her on the
garden. Then the fields were full of hay.
She did not remember what had been nor what would be, the outside
things were there each day. She was always herself, the world outside
was accidental. Even her mother was accidental to her: a condition that
happened to endure.
Only her father occupied any permanent position in the childish
consciousness. When he came back she remembered vaguely how he had gone
away, when he went away she knew vaguely that she must wait for his
coming back. Whereas her mother, returning from an outing, merely
became present, there was no reason for connecting her with some
previous departure.
The return or the departure of the father was the one event which the
child remembered. When he came, something woke up in her, some
yearning. She knew when he was out of joint or irritable or tired: then
she was uneasy, she could not rest.
When he was in the house, the child felt full and warm, rich like a
creature in the sunshine. When he was gone, she was vague, forgetful.
When he scolded her even, she was often more aware of him than of
herself. He was her strength and her greater self.
Ursula was three years old when another baby girl was born. Then the
two small sisters were much together, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun was a
quiet child who played for hours alone, absorbed in her fancies. She
was brown-haired, fair-skinned, strangely placid, almost passive. Yet
her will was indomitable, once set. From the first she followed
Ursula’s lead. Yet she was a thing to herself, so that to watch the two
together was strange. They were like two young animals playing together
but not taking real notice of each other. Gudrun was the mother’s
favourite—except that Anna always lived in her latest baby.
The burden of so many lives depending on him wore the youth down. He
had his work in the office, which was done purely by effort of will: he
had his barren passion for the church; he had three young children.
Also at this time his health was not good. So he was haggard and
irritable, often a pest in the house. Then he was told to go to his
woodwork, or to the church.
Between him and the little Ursula there came into being a strange
alliance. They were aware of each other. He knew the child was always
on his side. But in his consciousness he counted it for nothing. She
was always for him. He took it for granted. Yet his life was based on
her, even whilst she was a tiny child, on her support and her accord.
Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often
harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood. She seemed
to exist in her own violent fruitfulness, and it was as if the sun
shone tropically on her. Her colour was bright, her eyes full of a
fecund gloom, her brown hair tumbled loosely over her ears. She had a
look of richness. No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her. The
outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.
Whereas when, at twenty-six, he found himself father of four children,
with a wife who lived intrinsically like the ruddiest lilies of the
field, he let the weight of responsibility press on him and drag him.
It was then that his child Ursula strove to be with him. She was with
him, even as a baby of four, when he was irritable and shouted and made
the household unhappy. She suffered from his shouting, but somehow it
was not really him. She wanted it to be over, she wanted to resume her
normal connection with him. When he was disagreeable, the child echoed
to the crying of some need in him, and she responded blindly. Her heart
followed him as if he had some tie with her, and some love which he
could not deliver. Her heart followed him persistently, in its love.
But there was the dim, childish sense of her own smallness and
inadequacy, a fatal sense of worthlessness. She could not do anything,
she was not enough. She could not be important to him. This knowledge
deadened her from the first.
Still she set towards him like a quivering needle. All her life was
directed by her awareness of him, her wakefulness to his being. And she
was against her mother.
Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up. But for him,
she might have gone on like the other children, Gudrun and Theresa and
Catherine, one with the flowers and insects and playthings, having no
existence apart from the concrete object of her attention. But her
father came too near to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of
his breast woke her up almost in pain from the transient
unconsciousness of childhood. Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before
she knew how to see. She was wakened too soon. Too soon the call had
come to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close
to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into wakefulness by
the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping her to his body for
love and for fulfilment, asking as a magnet must always ask. From her
the response had struggled dimly, vaguely into being.
The children were dressed roughly for the country. When she was little,
Ursula pattered about in little wooden clogs, a blue overall over her
thick red dress, a red shawl crossed on her breast and tied behind
again. So she ran with her father to the garden.
The household rose early. He was out digging by six o’clock in the
morning, he went to his work at half-past eight. And Ursula was usually
in the garden with him, though not near at hand.
At Eastertime one year, she helped him to set potatoes. It was the
first time she had ever helped him. The occasion remained as a picture,
one of her earliest memories. They had gone out soon after dawn. A cold
wind was blowing. He had his old trousers tucked into his boots, he
wore no coat nor waistcoat, his shirt-sleeves fluttered in the wind,
his face was ruddy and intent, in a kind of sleep. When he was at work
he neither heard nor saw. A long, thin man, looking still a youth, with
a line of black moustache above his thick mouth, and his fine hair
blown on his forehead, he worked away at the earth in the grey first
light, alone. His solitariness drew the child like a spell.
The wind came chill over the dark-green fields. Ursula ran up and
watched him push the setting-peg in at one side of his ready earth,
stride across, and push it in the other side, pulling the line taut and
clear upon the clods intervening. Then with a sharp cutting noise the
bright spade came towards her, cutting a grip into the new, soft earth.
He struck his spade upright and straightened himself.
“Do you want to help me?” he said.
She looked up at him from out of her little woollen bonnet.
“Ay,” he said, “you can put some taters in for me. Look—like that—these
little sprits standing up—so much apart, you see.”
And stooping down he quickly, surely placed the spritted potatoes in
the soft grip, where they rested separate and pathetic on the heavy
cold earth.
He gave her a little basket of potatoes, and strode himself to the
other end of the line. She saw him stooping, working towards her. She
was excited, and unused. She put in one potato, then rearranged it, to
make it sit nicely. Some of the sprits were broken, and she was afraid.
The responsibility excited her like a string tying her up. She could
not help looking with dread at the string buried under the heaped-back
soil. Her father was working nearer, stooping, working nearer. She was
overcome by her responsibility. She put potatoes quickly into the cold
earth.
He came near.
“Not so close,” he said, stooping over her potatoes, taking some out
and rearranging the others. She stood by with the painful terrified
helplessness of childhood. He was so unseeing and confident, she wanted
to do the thing and yet she could not. She stood by looking on, her
little blue overall fluttering in the wind, the red woollen ends of her
shawl blowing gustily. Then he went down the row, relentlessly, turning
the potatoes in with his sharp spade-cuts. He took no notice of her,
only worked on. He had another world from hers.
She stood helplessly stranded on his world. He continued his work. She
knew she could not help him. A little bit forlorn, at last she turned
away, and ran down the garden, away from him, as fast as she could go
away from him, to forget him and his work.
He missed her presence, her face in her red woollen bonnet, her blue
overall fluttering. She ran to where a little water ran trickling
between grass and stones. That she loved.
When he came by he said to her:
“You didn’t help me much.”
The child looked at him dumbly. Already her heart was heavy because of
her own disappointment. Her mouth was dumb and pathetic. But he did not
notice, he went his way.
And she played on, because of her disappointment persisting even the
more in her play. She dreaded work, because she could not do it as he
did it. She was conscious of the great breach between them. She knew
she had no power. The grown-up power to work deliberately was a mystery
to her.
He would smash into her sensitive child’s world destructively. Her
mother was lenient, careless. The children played about as they would
all day. Ursula was thoughtless—why should she remember things? If
across the garden she saw the hedge had budded, and if she wanted these
greeny-pink, tiny buds for bread-and-cheese, to play at teaparty with,
over she went for them.
Then suddenly, perhaps the next day, her soul would almost start out of
her body as her father turned on her, shouting:
“Who’s been tramplin’ an’ dancin’ across where I’ve just sowed seed? I
know it’s you, nuisance! Can you find nowhere else to walk, but just
over my seed beds? But it’s like you, that is—no heed but to follow
your own greedy nose.”
It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging lines of
deep little foot-prints across his work. The child was infinitely more
shocked. Her vulnerable little soul was flayed and trampled. _Why_ were
the foot-prints there? She had not wanted to make them. She stood
dazzled with pain and shame and unreality.
Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became shut off and
senseless, a little fixed creature whose soul had gone hard and
unresponsive. The sense of her own unreality hardened her like a frost.
She cared no longer.
And the sight of her face, shut and superior with self-asserting
indifference, made a flame of rage go over him. He wanted to break her.
“I’ll break your obstinate little face,” he said, through shut teeth,
lifting his hand.
The child did not alter in the least. The look of indifference,
complete glancing indifference, as if nothing but herself existed to
her, remained fixed.
Yet far away in her, the sobs were tearing her soul. And when he had
gone, she would go and creep under the parlour sofa, and lie clinched
in the silent, hidden misery of childhood.
When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather stiffly to
play. She willed to forget. She cut off her childish soul from memory,
so that the pain, and the insult should not be real. She asserted
herself only. There was not nothing in the world but her own self. So
very soon, she came to believe in the outward malevolence that was
against her. And very early, she learned that even her adored father
was part of this malevolence. And very early she learned to harden her
soul in resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden
herself upon her own being.
She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave those who
had made her guilty. If he had said to her, “Why, Ursula, did you
trample my carefully-made bed?” that would have hurt her to the quick,
and she would have done anything for him. But she was always tormented
by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must
she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It
was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption. And when
he bullied her, she became hard, cut herself off from all connection,
lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.
As she grew older, five, six, seven, the connection between her and her
father was even stronger. Yet it was always straining to break. She was
always relapsing on her own violent will into her own separate world of
herself. This made him grind his teeth with bitterness, for he still
wanted her. But she could harden herself into her own self’s universe,
impregnable.
He was very fond of swimming, and in warm weather would take her down
to the canal, to a silent place, or to a big pond or reservoir, to
bathe. He would take her on his back as he went swimming, and she clung
close, feeling his strong movement under her, so strong, as if it would
uphold all the world. Then he taught her to swim.
She was a fearless little thing, when he dared her. And he had a
curious craving to frighten her, to see what she would do with him. He
said, would she ride on his back whilst he jumped off the canal bridge
down into the water beneath.
She would. He loved to feel the naked child clinging on to his
shoulders. There was a curious fight between their two wills. He
mounted the parapet of the canal bridge. The water was a long way down.
But the child had a deliberate will set upon his. She held herself
fixed to him.
He leapt, and down they went. The crash of the water as they went under
struck through the child’s small body, with a sort of unconsciousness.
But she remained fixed. And when they came up again, and when they went
to the bank, and when they sat on the grass side by side, he laughed,
and said it was fine. And the dark-dilated eyes of the child looked at
him wonderingly, darkly, wondering from the shock, yet reserved and
unfathomable, so he laughed almost with a sob.
In a moment she was clinging safely on his back again, and he was
swimming in deep water. She was used to his nakedness, and to her
mother’s nakedness, ever since she was born. They were clinging to each
other, and making up to each other for the strange blow that had been
struck at them. Yet still, on other days, he would leap again with her
from the bridge, daringly, almost wickedly. Till at length, as he
leapt, once, she dropped forward on to his head, and nearly broke his
neck, so that they fell into the water in a heap, and fought for a few
moments with death. He saved her, and sat on the bank, quivering. But
his eyes were full of the blackness of death. It was as if death had
cut between their two lives, and separated them.
Still they were not separate. There was this curious taunting intimacy
between them. When the fair came, she wanted to go in the swingboats.
He took her, and, standing up in the boat, holding on to the irons,
began to drive higher, perilously higher. The child clung fast on her
seat.
“Do you want to go any higher?” he said to her, and she laughed with
her mouth, her eyes wide and dilated. They were rushing through the
air.
“Yes,” she said, feeling as if she would turn into vapour, lose hold of
everything, and melt away. The boat swung far up, then down like a
stone, only to be caught sickeningly up again.
“Any higher?” he called, looking at her over his shoulder, his face
evil and beautiful to her.
She laughed with white lips.
He sent the swingboat sweeping through the air in a great semi-circle,
till it jerked and swayed at the high horizontal. The child clung on,
pale, her eyes fixed on him. People below were calling. The jerk at the
top had almost shaken them both out. He had done what he could—and he
was attracting censure. He sat down, and let the swingboat swing itself
out.
People in the crowd cried shame on him as he came out of the swingboat.
He laughed. The child clung to his hand, pale and mute. In a while she
was violently sick. He gave her lemonade, and she gulped a little.
“Don’t tell your mother you’ve been sick,” he said. There was no need
to ask that. When she got home, the child crept away under the parlour
sofa, like a sick little animal, and was a long time before she crawled
out.
But Anna got to know of this escapade, and was passionately angry and
contemptuous of him. His golden-brown eyes glittered, he had a strange,
cruel little smile. And as the child watched him, for the first time in
her life a disillusion came over her, something cold and isolating. She
went over to her mother. Her soul was dead towards him. It made her
sick.
Still she forgot and continued to love him, but ever more coldly. He
was at this time, when he was about twenty-eight years old, strange and
violent in his being, sensual. He acquired some power over Anna, over
everybody he came into contact with.
After a long bout of hostility, Anna at last closed with him. She had
now four children, all girls. For seven years she had been absorbed in
wifehood and motherhood. For years he had gone on beside her, never
really encroaching upon her. Then gradually another self seemed to
assert its being within him. He was still silent and separate. But she
could feel him all the while coming near upon her, as if his breast and
his body were threatening her, and he was always coming closer.
Gradually he became indifferent of responsibility. He would do what
pleased him, and no more.
He began to go away from home. He went to Nottingham on Saturdays,
always alone, to the football match and to the music-hall, and all the
time he was watching, in readiness. He never cared to drink. But with
his hard, golden-brown eyes, so keen seeing with their tiny black
pupils, he watched all the people, everything that happened, and he
waited.
In the Empire one evening he sat next to two girls. He was aware of the
one beside him. She was rather small, common, with a fresh complexion
and an upper lip that lifted from her teeth, so that, when she was not
conscious, her mouth was slightly open and her lips pressed outwards in
a kind of blind appeal. She was strongly aware of the man next to her,
so that all her body was still, very still. Her face watched the stage.
Her arms went down into her lap, very self-conscious and still.
A gleam lit up in him: should he begin with her? Should he begin with
her to live the other, the unadmitted life of his desire? Why not? He
had always been so good. Save for his wife, he was a virgin. And why,
when all women were different? Why, when he would only live once? He
wanted the other life. His own life was barren, not enough. He wanted
the other.
Her open mouth, showing the small, irregular, white teeth, appealed to
him. It was open and ready. It was so vulnerable. Why should he not go
in and enjoy what was there? The slim arm that went down so still and
motionless to the lap, it was pretty. She would be small, he would be
able almost to hold her in his two hands. She would be small, almost
like a child, and pretty. Her childishness whetted him keenly. She
would he helpless between his hands.
“That was the best turn we’ve had,” he said to her, leaning over as he
clapped his hands. He felt strong and unshakeable in himself, set over
against all the world. His soul was keen and watchful, glittering with
a kind of amusement. He was perfectly self-contained. He was himself,
the absolute, the rest of the world was the object that should
contribute to his being.
The girl started, turned round, her eyes lit up with an almost painful
flash of a smile, the colour came deeply in her cheeks.
“Yes, it was,” she said, quite meaninglessly, and she covered her
rather prominent teeth with her lips. Then she sat looking straight
before her, seeing nothing, only conscious of the colour burning in her
cheeks.
It pricked him with a pleasant sensation. His veins and his nerves
attended to her, she was so young and palpitating.
“It’s not such a good programme as last week’s,” he said.
Again she half turned her face to him, and her clear, bright eyes,
bright like shallow water, filled with light, frightened, yet
involuntarily lighting and shaking with response.
“Oh, isn’t it! I wasn’t able to come last week.”
He noted the common accent. It pleased him. He knew what class she came
of. Probably she was a warehouse-lass. He was glad she was a common
girl.
He proceeded to tell her about the last week’s programme. She answered
at random, very confusedly. The colour burned in her cheek. Yet she
always answered him. The girl on the other side sat remotely, obviously
silent. He ignored her. All his address was for his own girl, with her
bright, shallow eyes and her vulnerably opened mouth.
The talk went on, meaningless and random on her part, quite deliberate
and purposive on his. It was a pleasure to him to make this
conversation, an activity pleasant as a fine game of chance and skill.
He was very quiet and pleasant-humoured, but so full of strength. She
fluttered beside his steady pressure of warmth and his surety.
He saw the performance drawing to a close. His senses were alert and
wilful. He would press his advantages. He followed her and her plain
friend down the stairs to the street. It was raining.
“It’s a nasty night,” he said. “Shall you come and have a drink of
something—a cup of coffee—it’s early yet.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, looking away into the night.
“I wish you would,” he said, putting himself as it were at her mercy.
There was a moment’s pause.
“Come to Rollins?” he said.
“No—not there.”
“To Carson’s, then?”
There was a silence. The other girl hung on. The man was the centre of
positive force.
“Will your friend come as well?”
There was another moment of silence, while the other girl felt her
ground.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve promised to meet a friend.”
“Another time, then?” he said.
“Oh, thanks,” she replied, very awkward.
“Good night,” he said.
“See you later,” said his girl to her friend.
“Where?” said the friend.
“You know, Gertie,” replied his girl.
“All right, Jennie.”
The friend was gone into the darkness. He turned with his girl to the
tea-shop. They talked all the time. He made his sentences in sheer,
almost muscular pleasure of exercising himself with her. He was looking
at her all the time, perceiving her, appreciating her, finding her out,
gratifying himself with her. He could see distinct attractions in her;
her eyebrows, with their particular curve, gave him keen aesthetic
pleasure. Later on he would see her bright, pellucid eyes, like shallow
water, and know those. And there remained the open, exposed mouth, red
and vulnerable. That he reserved as yet. And all the while his eyes
were on the girl, estimating and handling with pleasure her young
softness. About the girl herself, who or what she was, he cared
nothing, he was quite unaware that she was anybody. She was just the
sensual object of his attention.
“Shall we go, then?” he said.
She rose in silence, as if acting without a mind, merely physically. He
seemed to hold her in his will. Outside it was still raining.
“Let’s have a walk,” he said. “I don’t mind the rain, do you?”
“No, I don’t mind it,” she said.
He was alert in every sense and fibre, and yet quite sure and steady,
and lit up, as if transfused. He had a free sensation of walking in his
own darkness, not in anybody else’s world at all. He was purely a world
to himself, he had nothing to do with any general consciousness. Just
his own senses were supreme. All the rest was external, insignificant,
leaving him alone with this girl whom he wanted to absorb, whose
properties he wanted to absorb into his own senses. He did not care
about her, except that he wanted to overcome her resistance, to have
her in his power, fully and exhaustively to enjoy her.
They turned into the dark streets. He held her umbrella over her, and
put his arm round her. She walked as if she were unaware. But
gradually, as he walked, he drew her a little closer, into the movement
of his side and hip. She fitted in there very well. It was a real good
fit, to walk with her like this. It made him exquisitely aware of his
own muscular self. And his hand that grasped her side felt one curve of
her, and it seemed like a new creation to him, a reality, an absolute,
an existing tangible beauty of the absolute. It was like a star.
Everything in him was absorbed in the sensual delight of this one
small, firm curve in her body, that his hand, and his whole being, had
lighted upon.
He led her into the Park, where it was almost dark. He noticed a corner
between two walls, under a great overhanging bush of ivy.
“Let us stand here a minute,” he said.
He put down the umbrella, and followed her into the corner, retreating
out of the rain. He needed no eyes to see. All he wanted was to know
through touch. She was like a piece of palpable darkness. He found her
in the darkness, put his arms round her and his hands upon her. She was
silent and inscrutable. But he did not want to know anything about her,
he only wanted to discover her. And through her clothing, what absolute
beauty he touched.
“Take your hat off,” he said.
Silently, obediently, she shook off her hat and gave herself to his
arms again. He liked her—he liked the feel of her—he wanted to know her
more closely. He let his fingers subtly seek out her cheek and neck.
What amazing beauty and pleasure, in the dark! His fingers had often
touched Anna on the face and neck like that. What matter! It was one
man who touched Anna, another who now touched this girl. He liked best
his new self. He was given over altogether to the sensuous knowledge of
this woman, and every moment he seemed to be touching absolute beauty,
something beyond knowledge.
Very close, marvelling and exceedingly joyful in their discoveries, his
hands pressed upon her, so subtly, so seekingly, so finely and
desirously searching her out, that she too was almost swooning in the
absolute of sensual knowledge. In utter sensual delight she clenched
her knees, her thighs, her loins together! It was an added beauty to
him.
But he was patiently working for her relaxation, patiently, his whole
being fixed in the smile of latent gratification, his whole body
electric with a subtle, powerful, reducing force upon her. So he came
at length to kiss her, and she was almost betrayed by his insidious
kiss. Her open mouth was too helpless and unguarded. He knew this, and
his first kiss was very gentle, and soft, and assuring, so assuring. So
that her soft, defenseless mouth became assured, even bold, seeking
upon his mouth. And he answered her gradually, gradually, his soft kiss
sinking in softly, softly, but ever more heavily, more heavily yet,
till it was too heavy for her to meet, and she began to sink under it.
She was sinking, sinking, his smile of latent gratification was
becoming more tense, he was sure of her. He let the whole force of his
will sink upon her to sweep her away. But it was too great a shock for
her. With a sudden horrible movement she ruptured the state that
contained them both.
“Don’t—don’t!”
It was a rather horrible cry that seemed to come out of her, not to
belong to her. It was some strange agony of terror crying out the
words. There was something vibrating and beside herself in the noise.
His nerves ripped like silk.
“What’s the matter?” he said, as if calmly. “What’s the matter?”
She came back to him, but trembling, reservedly this time.
Her cry had given him gratification. But he knew he had been too sudden
for her. He was now careful. For a while he merely sheltered her. Also
there had broken a flaw into his perfect will. He wanted to persist, to
begin again, to lead up to the point where he had let himself go on
her, and then manage more carefully, successfully. So far she had won.
And the battle was not over yet. But another voice woke in him and
prompted him to let her go—let her go in contempt.
He sheltered her, and soothed her, and caressed her, and kissed her,
and again began to come nearer, nearer. He gathered himself together.
Even if he did not take her, he would make her relax, he would fuse
away her resistance. So softly, softly, with infinite caressiveness he
kissed her, and the whole of his being seemed to fondle her. Till, at
the verge, swooning at the breaking point, there came from her a
beaten, inarticulate, moaning cry:
“Don’t—oh, don’t!”
His veins fused with extreme voluptuousness. For a moment he almost
lost control of himself, and continued automatically. But there was a
moment of inaction, of cold suspension. He was not going to take her.
He drew her to him and soothed her, and caressed her. But the pure zest
had gone. She struggled to herself and realized he was not going to
take her. And then, at the very last moment, when his fondling had come
near again, his hot living desire despising her, against his cold
sensual desire, she broke violently away from him.
“Don’t,” she cried, harsh now with hatred, and she flung her hand
across and hit him violently. “Keep off of me.”
His blood stood still for a moment. Then the smile came again within
him, steady, cruel.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he said, with suave irony. “Nobody’s going to
hurt you.”
“I know what _you_ want,” she said.
“_I_ know what I want,” he said. “What’s the odds?”
“Well, you’re not going to have it off _me._”
“Aren’t I? Well, then I’m not. It’s no use crying about it, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said the girl, rather disconcerted by his irony.
“But there’s no need to have a row about it. We can kiss good night
just the same, can’t we?”
She was silent in the darkness.
“Or do you want your hat and umbrella to go home this minute?”
Still she was silent. He watched her dark figure as she stood there on
the edge of the faint darkness, and he waited.
“Come and say good night nicely, if we’re going to say it,” he said.
Still she did not stir. He put his hand out and drew her into the
darkness again.
“It’s warmer in here,” he said; “a lot cosier.”
His will had not yet relaxed from her. The moment of hatred exhilarated
him.
“I’m going now,” she muttered, as he closed his hand over her.
“See how well you fit your place,” he said, as he drew her to her
previous position, close upon him. “What do you want to leave it for?”
And gradually the intoxication invaded him again, the zest came back.
After all, why should he not take her?
But she did not yield to him entirely.
“Are you a married man?” she asked at length.
“What if I am?” he said.
She did not answer.
“I don’t ask you whether _you’re_ married or not,” he said.
“You know jolly well I’m _not,”_ she answered hotly. Oh, if she could
only break away from him, if only she need not yield to him.
At length her will became cold against him. She had escaped. But she
hated him for her escape more than for her danger. Did he despise her
so coldly? And she was in torture of adherence to him still.
“Shall I see you next week—next Saturday?” he said, as they returned to
the town. She did not answer.
“Come to the Empire with me—you and Gertie,” he said.
“I should look well, going with a married man,” she said.
“I’m no less of a man for being married, am I?” he said.
“Oh, it’s a different matter altogether with a married man,” she said,
in a ready-made speech that showed her chagrin.
“How’s that?” he asked.
But she would not enlighten him. Yet she promised, without promising,
to be at the meeting-place next Saturday evening.
So he left her. He did not know her name. He caught a train and went
home.
It was the last train, he was very late. He was not home till midnight.
But he was quite indifferent. He had no real relation with his home,
not this man which he now was. Anna was sitting up for him. She saw the
queer, absolved look on his face, a sort of latent, almost sinister
smile, as if he were absolved from his “good” ties.
“Where have you been?” she asked, puzzled, interested.
“To the Empire.”
“Who with?”
“By myself. I came home with Tom Cooper.”
She looked at him, and wondered what he had been doing. She was
indifferent as to whether he lied or not.
“You have come home very strange,” she said. And there was an
appreciative inflexion in the speech.
He was not affected. As for his humble, good self, he was absolved from
it. He sat down and ate heartily. He was not tired. He seemed to take
no notice of her.
For Anna the moment was critical. She kept herself aloof, and watched
him. He talked to her, but with a little indifference, since he was
scarcely aware of her. So, then she did not affect him. Here was a new
turn of affairs! He was rather attractive, nevertheless. She liked him
better than the ordinary mute, half-effaced, half-subdued man she
usually knew him to be. So, he was blossoming out into his real self!
It piqued her. Very good, let him blossom! She liked a new turn of
affairs. He was a strange man come home to her. Glancing at him, she
saw she could not reduce him to what he had been before. In an instant
she gave it up. Yet not without a pang of rage, which would insist on
their old, beloved love, their old, accustomed intimacy and her old,
established supremacy. She almost rose up to fight for them. And
looking at him, and remembering his father, she was wary. This was the
new turn of affairs!
Very good, if she could not influence him in the old way, she would be
level with him in the new. Her old defiant hostility came up. Very
good, she too was out on her own adventure. Her voice, her manner
changed, she was ready for the game. Something was liberated in her.
She liked him. She liked this strange man come home to her. He was very
welcome, indeed! She was very glad to welcome a stranger. She had been
bored by the old husband. To his latent, cruel smile she replied with
brilliant challenge. He expected her to keep the moral fortress. Not
she! It was much too dull a part. She challenged him back with a sort
of radiance, very bright and free, opposite to him. He looked at her,
and his eyes glinted. She too was out in the field.
His senses pricked up and keenly attended to her. She laughed,
perfectly indifferent and loose as he was. He came towards her. She
neither rejected him nor responded to him. In a kind of radiance,
superb in her inscrutability, she laughed before him. She too could
throw everything overboard, love, intimacy, responsibility. What were
her four children to her now? What did it matter that this man was the
father of her four children?
He was the sensual male seeking his pleasure, she was the female ready
to take hers: but in her own way. A man could turn into a free lance:
so then could a woman. She adhered as little as he to the moral world.
All that had gone before was nothing to her. She was another woman,
under the instance of a strange man. He was a stranger to her, seeking
his own ends. Very good. She wanted to see what this stranger would do
now, what he was.
She laughed, and kept him at arm’s length, whilst apparently ignoring
him. She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a
stranger to her.
And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her.
The little creature in Nottingham had but been leading up to this. They
abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking
gratification pure and simple.
Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger,
as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other
half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch
as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and
desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of
the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a
passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a
kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties,
the separate, several beauties of her body.
He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that
which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her.
There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the
maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant
gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store,
a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There
was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity.
He lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some time—it
was a duel: no love, no words, no kisses even, only the maddening
perception of beauty consummate, absolute through touch. He wanted to
touch her, to discover her, maddeningly he wanted to know her. Yet he
must not hurry, or he missed everything. He must enjoy one beauty at a
time. And the multitudinous beauties of her body, the many little
rapturous places, sent him mad with delight, and with desire to be able
to know more, to have strength to know more. For all was there.
He would say during the daytime:
“To-night I shall know the little hollow under her ankle, where the
blue vein crosses.” And the thought of it, and the desire for it, made
a thick darkness of anticipation.
He would go all the day waiting for the night to come, when he could
give himself to the enjoyment of some luxurious absolute of beauty in
her. The thought of the hidden resources of her, the undiscovered
beauties and ecstatic places of delight in her body, waiting, only
waiting for him to discover them, sent him slightly insane. He was
obsessed. If he did not discover and make known to himself these
delights, they might be lost for ever. He wished he had a hundred men’s
energies, with which to enjoy her. [He wished he were a cat, to lick
her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in
her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.]
And she, separate, with a strange, dangerous, glistening look in her
eyes received all his activities upon her as if they were expected by
her, and provoked him when he was quiet to more, till sometimes he was
ready to perish for sheer inability to be satisfied of her, inability
to have had enough of her.
Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the
darkness and death of their own sensual activities. Sometimes he felt
he was going mad with a sense of Absolute Beauty, perceived by him in
her through his senses. It was something too much for him. And in
everything, was this same, almost sinister, terrifying beauty. But in
the revelations of her body through contact with his body, was the
ultimate beauty, to know which was almost death in itself, and yet for
the knowledge of which he would have undergone endless torture. He
would have forfeited anything, anything, rather than forego his right
even to the instep of her foot, and the place from which the toes
radiated out, the little, miraculous white plain from which ran the
little hillocks of the toes, and the folded, dimpling hollows between
the toes. He felt he would have died rather than forfeit this.
This was what their love had become, a sensuality violent and extreme
as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness of love. It was
all the lust and the infinite, maddening intoxication of the sense, a
passion of death.
He had always, all his life, had a secret dread of Absolute Beauty. It
had always been like a fetish to him, something to fear, really. For it
was immoral and against mankind. So he had turned to the Gothic form,
which always asserted the broken desire of mankind in its pointed
arches, escaping the rolling, absolute beauty of the round arch.
But now he had given way, and with infinite sensual violence gave
himself to the realization of this supreme, immoral, Absolute Beauty,
in the body of woman. It seemed to him, that it came to being in the
body of woman, under his touch. Under his touch, even under his sight,
it was there. But when he neither saw nor touched the perfect place, it
was not perfect, it was not there. And he must make it exist.
But still the thing terrified him. Awful and threatening it was,
dangerous to a degree, even whilst he gave himself to it. It was pure
darkness, also. All the shameful things of the body revealed themselves
to him now with a sort of sinister, tropical beauty. All the shameful,
natural and unnatural acts of sensual voluptuousness which he and the
woman partook of together, created together, they had their heavy
beauty and their delight. Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme
delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid.
Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.
They accepted shame, and were one with it in their most unlicensed
pleasures. It was incorporated. It was a bud that blossomed into beauty
and heavy, fundamental gratification.
Their outward life went on much the same, but the inward life was
revolutionized. The children became less important, the parents were
absorbed in their own living.
And gradually, Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the
outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that
it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest
to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give
him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now
created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of
purposive mankind.
At this time Education was in the forefront as a subject of interest.
There was the talk of new Swedish methods, of handwork instruction, and
so on. Brangwen embraced sincerely the idea of handwork in schools. For
the first time, he began to take real interest in a public affair. He
had at length, from his profound sensual activity, developed a real
purposive self.
There was talk of night-schools, and of handicraft classes. He wanted
to start a woodwork class in Cossethay, to teach carpentry and joinery
and wood-carving to the village boys, two nights a week. This seemed to
him a supremely desirable thing to be doing. His pay would be very
little—and when he had it, he spent it all on extra wood and tools. But
he was very happy and keen in his new public spirit.
He started his night-classes in woodwork when he was thirty years old.
By this time he had five children, the last a boy. But boy or girl
mattered very little to him. He had a natural blood-affection for his
children, and he liked them as they turned up: boys or girls. Only he
was fondest of Ursula. Somehow, she seemed to be at the back of his new
night-school venture.
The house by the yew trees was in connection with the great human
endeavour at last. It gained a new vigour thereby.
To Ursula, a child of eight, the increase in magic was considerable.
She heard all the talk, she saw the parish room fitted up as a
workshop. The parish room was a high, stone, barn-like, ecclesiastical
building standing away by itself in the Brangwens’ second garden,
across the lane. She was always attracted by its age and its stranded
obsoleteness. Now she watched preparations made, she sat on the flight
of stone steps that came down from the porch to the garden, and heard
her father and the vicar talking and planning and working. Then an
inspector came, a very strange man, and stayed talking with her father
all one evening. Everything was settled, and twelve boys enrolled their
names. It was very exciting.
But to Ursula, everything her father did was magic. Whether he came
from Ilkeston with news of the town, whether he went across to the
church with his music or his tools on a sunny evening, whether he sat
in his white surplice at the organ on Sundays, leading the singing with
his strong tenor voice, or whether he were in the workshop with the
boys, he was always a centre of magic and fascination to her, his
voice, sounding out in command, cheerful, laconic, had always a twang
in it that sent a thrill over her blood, and hypnotized her. She seemed
to run in the shadow of some dark, potent secret of which she would
not, of whose existence even she dared not become conscious, it cast
such a spell over her, and so darkened her mind.
Chapter IX.
THE MARSH AND THE FLOOD
There was always regular connection between the Yew Cottage and the
Marsh, yet the two households remained separate, distinct.
After Anna’s marriage, the Marsh became the home of the two boys, Tom
and Fred. Tom was a rather short, good-looking youth, with crisp black
hair and long black eyelashes and soft, dark, possessed eyes. He had a
quick intelligence. From the High School he went to London to study. He
had an instinct for attracting people of character and energy. He gave
place entirely to the other person, and at the same time kept himself
independent. He scarcely existed except through other people. When he
was alone he was unresolved. When he was with another man, he seemed to
add himself to the other, make the other bigger than life size. So that
a few people loved him and attained a sort of fulfilment in him. He
carefully chose these few.
He had a subtle, quick, critical intelligence, a mind that was like a
scale or balance. There was something of a woman in all this.
In London he had been the favourite pupil of an engineer, a clever man,
who became well-known at the time when Tom Brangwen had just finished
his studies. Through this master the youth kept acquaintance with
various individual, outstanding characters. He never asserted himself.
He seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a
presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while
still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and
mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and
perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how
to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides,
he was very good-looking, of medium stature, but beautifully
proportioned, dark, with fine colouring, always perfectly healthy.
His father allowed him a liberal pocket-money, besides which he had a
sort of post as assistant to his chief. Then from time to time the
young man appeared at the Marsh, curiously attractive, well-dressed,
reserved, having by nature a subtle, refined manner. And he set the
change in the farm.
Fred, the younger brother, was a Brangwen, large-boned, blue-eyed,
English. He was his father’s very son, the two men, father and son,
were supremely at ease with one another. Fred was succeeding to the
farm.
Between the elder brother and the younger existed an almost passionate
love. Tom watched over Fred with a woman’s poignant attention and
self-less care. Fred looked up to Tom as to something miraculous, that
which he himself would aspire to be, were he great also.
So that after Anna’s departure, the Marsh began to take on a new tone.
The boys were gentlemen; Tom had a rare nature and had risen high. Fred
was sensitive and fond of reading, he pondered Ruskin and then the
Agnostic writings. Like all the Brangwens, he was very much a thing to
himself, though fond of people, and indulgent to them, having an
exaggerated respect for them.
There was a rather uneasy friendship between him and one of the young
Hardys at the Hall. The two households were different, yet the young
men met on shy terms of equality.
It was young Tom Brangwen, with his dark lashes and beautiful
colouring, his soft, inscrutable nature, his strange repose and his
informed air, added to his position in London, who seemed to emphasize
the superior foreign element in the Marsh. When he appeared, perfectly
dressed, as if soft and affable, and yet quite removed from everybody,
he created an uneasiness in people, he was reserved in the minds of the
Cossethay and Ilkeston acquaintances to a different, remote world.
He and his mother had a kind of affinity. The affection between them
was of a mute, distant character, but radical. His father was always
uneasy and slightly deferential to his eldest son. Tom also formed the
link that kept the Marsh in real connection with the Skrebenskys, now
quite important people in their own district.
So a change in tone came over the Marsh. Tom Brangwen the father, as he
grew older, seemed to mature into a gentleman-farmer. His figure lent
itself: burly and handsome. His face remained fresh and his blue eyes
as full of light, his thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a
silky whiteness. It was his custom to laugh a great deal, in his
acquiescent, wilful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had
taken the line of easy, good-humoured acceptance. He was not
responsible for the frame of things. Yet he was afraid of the unknown
in life.
He was fairly well-off. His wife was there with him, a different being
from himself, yet somewhere vitally connected with him:—who was he to
understand where and how? His two sons were gentlemen. They were men
distinct from himself, they had separate beings of their own, yet they
were connected with himself. It was all adventurous and puzzling. Yet
one remained vital within one’s own existence, whatever the off-shoots.
So, handsome and puzzled, he laughed and stuck to himself as the only
thing he could stick to. His youngness and the wonder remained almost
the same in him. He became indolent, he developed a luxuriant ease.
Fred did most of the farm-work, the father saw to the more important
transactions. He drove a good mare, and sometimes he rode his cob. He
drank in the hotels and the inns with better-class farmers and
proprietors, he had well-to-do acquaintances among men. But one class
suited him no better than another.
His wife, as ever, had no acquaintances. Her hair was threaded now with
grey, her face grew older in form without changing in expression. She
seemed the same as when she had come to the Marsh twenty-five years
ago, save that her health was more fragile. She seemed always to haunt
the Marsh rather than to live there. She was never part of the life.
Something she represented was alien there, she remained a stranger
within the gates, in some ways fixed and impervious, in some ways
curiously refining. She caused the separateness and individuality of
all the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household.
When young Tom Brangwen was twenty-three years old there was some
breach between him and his chief which was never explained, and he went
away to Italy, then to America. He came home for a while, then went to
Germany; always the same good-looking, carefully-dressed, attractive
young man, in perfect health, yet somehow outside of everything. In his
dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and
pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.
To Ursula he was a romantic, alluring figure. He had a grace of
bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such as
Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a long slim
mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and exquisite; or he
sent her a little necklace of rough stones, amethyst and opal and
brilliants and garnet. He spoke other languages easily and fluently,
his nature was curiously gracious and insinuating. With all that, he
was undefinably an outsider. He belonged to nowhere, to no society.
Anna Brangwen had left her intimacy with her father undeveloped since
the time of her marriage. At her marriage it had been abandoned. He and
she had drawn a reserve between them. Anna went more to her mother.
Then suddenly the father died.
It happened one springtime when Ursula was about eight years old, he,
Tom Brangwen, drove off on a Saturday morning to the market in
Nottingham, saying he might not be back till late, as there was a
special show and then a meeting he had to attend. His family understood
that he would enjoy himself.
The season had been rainy and dreary. In the evening it was pouring
with rain. Fred Brangwen, unsettled, uneasy, did not go out, as was his
wont. He smoked and read and fidgeted, hearing always the trickling of
water outside. This wet, black night seemed to cut him off and make him
unsettled, aware of himself, aware that he wanted something else, aware
that he was scarcely living. There seemed to him to be no root to his
life, no place for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad.
But his instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem.
He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not know how
to get it.
Tilly, an old woman now, came in saying that the labourers who had been
suppering up said the yard and everywhere was just a slew of water. He
heard in indifference. But he hated a desolate, raw wetness in the
world. He would leave the Marsh.
His mother was in bed. At last he shut his book, his mind was blank, he
walked upstairs intoxicated with depression and anger, and, intoxicated
with depression and anger, locked himself into sleep.
Tilly set slippers before the kitchen fire, and she also went to bed,
leaving the door unlocked. Then the farm was in darkness, in the rain.
At eleven o’clock it was still raining. Tom Brangwen stood in the yard
of the “Angel”, Nottingham, and buttoned his coat.
“Oh, well,” he said cheerfully, “it’s rained on me before. Put ’er in,
Jack, my lad, put her in—Tha’rt a rare old cock, Jacky-boy, wi’ a belly
on thee as does credit to thy drink, if not to thy corn. Co’ up lass,
let’s get off ter th’ old homestead. Oh, my heart, what a wetness in
the night! There’ll be no volcanoes after this. Hey, Jack, my beautiful
young slender feller, which of us is Noah? It seems as though the
water-works is bursted. Ducks and ayquatic fowl ’ll be king o’ the
castle at this rate—dove an’ olive branch an’ all. Stand up then, gel,
stand up, we’re not stoppin’ here all night, even if you thought we
was. I’m dashed if the jumping rain wouldn’t make anybody think they
was drunk. Hey, Jack—does rain-water wash the sense in, or does it wash
it out?” And he laughed to himself at the joke.
He was always ashamed when he had to drive after he had been drinking,
always apologetic to the horse. His apologetic frame made him
facetious. He was aware of his inability to walk quite straight.
Nevertheless his will kept stiff and attentive, in all his fuddleness.
He mounted and bowled off through the gates of the innyard. The mare
went well, he sat fixed, the rain beating on his face. His heavy body
rode motionless in a kind of sleep, one centre of attention was kept
fitfully burning, the rest was dark. He concentrated his last attention
on the fact of driving along the road he knew so well. He knew it so
well, he watched for it attentively, with an effort of will.
He talked aloud to himself, sententious in his anxiety, as if he were
perfectly sober, whilst the mare bowled along and the rain beat on him.
He watched the rain before the gig-lamps, the faint gleaming of the
shadowy horse’s body, the passing of the dark hedges.
“It’s not a fit night to turn a dog out,” he said to himself, aloud.
“It’s high time as it did a bit of clearing up, I’ll be damned if it
isn’t. It was a lot of use putting those ten loads of cinders on th’
road. They’ll be washed to kingdom-come if it doesn’t alter. Well, it’s
our Fred’s look-out, if they are. He’s top-sawyer as far as those
things go. I don’t see why I should concern myself. They can wash to
kingdom-come and back again for what I care. I suppose they would be
washed back again some day. That’s how things are. Th’ rain tumbles
down just to mount up in clouds again. So they say. There’s no more
water on the earth than there was in the year naught. That’s the story,
my boy, if you understand it. There’s no more to-day than there was a
thousand years ago—nor no less either. You can’t wear water out. No, my
boy: it’ll give you the go-by. Try to wear it out, and it takes its
hook into vapour, it has its fingers at its nose to you. It turns into
cloud and falleth as rain on the just and unjust. I wonder if I’m the
just or the unjust.”
He started awake as the trap lurched deep into a rut. And he wakened to
the point in his journey. He had travelled some distance since he was
last conscious.
But at length he reached the gate, and stumbled heavily down, reeling,
gripping fast to the trap. He descended into several inches of water.
“Be damned!” he said angrily. “Be damned to the miserable slop.”
And he led the horse washing through the gate. He was quite drunk now,
moving blindly, in habit. Everywhere there was water underfoot.
The raised causeway of the house and the farm-stead was dry, however.
But there was a curious roar in the night which seemed to be made in
the darkness of his own intoxication. Reeling, blinded, almost without
consciousness he carried his parcels and the rug and cushions into the
house, dropped them, and went out to put up the horse.
Now he was at home, he was a sleep-walker, waiting only for the moment
of activity to stop. Very deliberately and carefully, he led the horse
down the slope to the cart-shed. She shied and backed.
“Why, wha’s amiss?” he hiccupped, plodding steadily on. And he was
again in a wash of water, the horse splashed up water as he went. It
was thickly dark, save for the gig-lamps, and they lit on a rippling
surface of water.
“Well, that’s a knock-out,” he said, as he came to the cart-shed, and
was wading in six inches of water. But everything seemed to him
amusing. He laughed to think of six inches of water being in the
cart-shed.
He backed in the mare. She was restive. He laughed at the fun of
untackling the mare with a lot of water washing round his feet. He
laughed because it upset her. “What’s amiss, what’s amiss, a drop o’
water won’t hurt you!” As soon as he had undone the traces, she walked
quickly away.
He hung up the shafts and took the gig-lamp. As he came out of the
familiar jumble of shafts and wheels in the shed, the water, in little
waves, came washing strongly against his legs. He staggered and almost
fell.
“Well, what the deuce!” he said, staring round at the running water in
the black, watery night.
He went to meet the running flood, sinking deeper and deeper. His soul
was full of great astonishment. He _had_ to go and look where it came
from, though the ground was going from under his feet. He went on, down
towards the pond, shakily. He rather enjoyed it. He was knee-deep, and
the water was pulling heavily. He stumbled, reeled sickeningly.
Fear took hold of him. Gripping tightly to the lamp, he reeled, and
looked round. The water was carrying his feet away, he was dizzy. He
did not know which way to turn. The water was whirling, whirling, the
whole black night was swooping in rings. He swayed uncertainly at the
centre of all the attack, reeling in dismay. In his soul, he knew he
would fall.
As he staggered something in the water struck his legs, and he fell.
Instantly he was in the turmoil of suffocation. He fought in a black
horror of suffocation, fighting, wrestling, but always borne down,
borne inevitably down. Still he wrestled and fought to get himself
free, in the unutterable struggle of suffocation, but he always fell
again deeper. Something struck his head, a great wonder of anguish went
over him, then the blackness covered him entirely.
In the utter darkness, the unconscious, drowning body was rolled along,
the waters pouring, washing, filling in the place. The cattle woke up
and rose to their feet, the dog began to yelp. And the unconscious,
drowning body was washed along in the black, swirling darkness,
passively.
Mrs. Brangwen woke up and listened. With preternaturally sharp senses
she heard the movement of all the darkness that swirled outside. For a
moment she lay still. Then she went to the window. She heard the sharp
rain, and the deep running of water. She knew her husband was outside.
“Fred,” she called, “Fred!”
Away in the night was a hoarse, brutal roar of a mass of water rushing
downwards.
She went downstairs. She could not understand the multiplied running of
water. Stepping down the step into the kitchen, she put her foot into
water. The kitchen was flooded. Where did it come from? She could not
understand.
Water was running in out of the scullery. She paddled through barefoot,
to see. Water was bubbling fiercely under the outer door. She was
afraid. Then something washed against her, something twined under her
foot. It was the riding whip. On the table were the rug and the cushion
and the parcel from the gig.
He had come home.
“Tom!” she called, afraid of her own voice.
She opened the door. Water ran in with a horrid sound. Everywhere was
moving water, a sound of waters.
“Tom!” she cried, standing in her nightdress with the candle, calling
into the darkness and the flood out of the doorway.
“Tom! Tom!”
And she listened. Fred appeared behind her, in trousers and shirt.
“Where is he?” he asked.
He looked at the flood, then at his mother. She seemed small and
uncanny, elvish, in her nightdress.
“Go upstairs,” he said. “He’ll be in th’ stable.”
“To—om! To—om!” cried the elderly woman, with a long, unnatural,
penetrating call that chilled her son to the marrow. He quickly pulled
on his boots and his coat.
“Go upstairs, mother,” he said; “I’ll go an’ see where he is.”
“To—om! To—o—om!” rang out the shrill, unearthly cry of the small
woman. There was only the noise of water and the mooing of uneasy
cattle, and the long yelping of the dog, clamouring in the darkness.
Fred Brangwen splashed out into the flood with a lantern. His mother
stood on a chair in the doorway, watching him go. It was all water,
water, running, flashing under the lantern.
“Tom! Tom! To—o—om!” came her long, unnatural cry, ringing over the
night. It made her son feel cold in his soul.
And the unconscious, drowning body of the father rolled on below the
house, driven by the black water towards the high-road.
Tilly appeared, a skirt over her nightdress. She saw her mistress
clinging on the top of a chair in the open doorway, a candle burning on
the table.
“God’s sake!” cried the old serving-woman. “The cut’s burst. That
embankment’s broke down. Whativer are we goin’ to do!”
Mrs. Brangwen watched her son, and the lantern, go along the upper
causeway to the stable. Then she saw the dark figure of a horse: then
her son hung the lamp in the stable, and the light shone out faintly on
him as he untackled the mare. The mother saw the soft blazed face of
the horse thrust forward into the stable-door. The stables were still
above the flood. But the water flowed strongly into the house.
“It’s getting higher,” said Tilly. “Hasn’t master come in?”
Mrs. Brangwen did not hear.
“Isn’t he the—ere?” she called, in her far-reaching, terrifying voice.
“No,” came the short answer out of the night.
“Go and loo—ok for him.”
His mother’s voice nearly drove the youth mad.
He put the halter on the horse and shut the stable door. He came
splashing back through the water, the lantern swinging.
The unconscious, drowning body was pushed past the house in the deepest
current. Fred Brangwen came to his mother.
“I’ll go to th’ cart-shed,” he said.
“To—om, To—o—om!” rang out the strong, inhuman cry. Fred Brangwen’s
blood froze, his heart was very angry. He gripped his veins in a
frenzy. Why was she yelling like this? He could not bear the sight of
her, perched on a chair in her white nightdress in the doorway, elvish
and horrible.
“He’s taken the mare out of the trap, so he’s all right,” he said,
growling, pretending to be normal.
But as he descended to the cart-shed, he sank into a foot of water. He
heard the rushing in the distance, he knew the canal had broken down.
The water was running deeper.
The trap was there all right, but no signs of his father. The young man
waded down to the pond. The water rose above his knees, it swirled and
forced him. He drew back.
“Is he the—e—ere?” came the maddening cry of the mother.
“No,” was the sharp answer.
“To—om—To—o—om!” came the piercing, free, unearthly call. It seemed
high and supernatural, almost pure. Fred Brangwen hated it. It nearly
drove him mad. So awfully it sang out, almost like a song.
The water was flowing fuller into the house.
“You’d better go up to Beeby’s and bring him and Arthur down, and tell
Mrs. Beeby to fetch Wilkinson,” said Fred to Tilly. He forced his
mother to go upstairs.
“I know your father is drowned,” she said, in a curious dismay.
The flood rose through the night, till it washed the kettle off the hob
in the kitchen. Mrs. Brangwen sat alone at a window upstairs. She
called no more. The men were busy with the pigs and the cattle. They
were coming with a boat for her.
Towards morning the rain ceased, the stars came out over the noise and
the terrifying clucking and trickling of the water. Then there was a
pallor in the east, the light began to come. In the ruddy light of the
dawn she saw the waters spreading out, moving sluggishly, the buildings
rising out of a waste of water. Birds began to sing, drowsily, and as
if slightly hoarse with the dawn. It grew brighter. Up the second field
was the great, raw gap in the canal embankment.
Mrs. Brangwen went from window to window, watching the flood. Somebody
had brought a little boat. The light grew stronger, the red gleam was
gone off the flood-waters, day took place. Mrs. Brangwen went from the
front of the house to the back, looking out, intent and unrelaxing, on
the pallid morning of spring.
She saw a glimpse of her husband’s buff coat in the floods, as the
water rolled the body against the garden hedge. She called to the men
in the boat. She was glad he was found. They dragged him out of the
hedge. They could not lift him into the boat. Fred Brangwen jumped into
the water, up to his waist, and half carried the body of his father
through the flood to the road. Hay and twigs and dirt were in the beard
and hair. The youth pushed through the water crying loudly without
tears, like a stricken animal. The mother at the window cried, making
no trouble.
The doctor came. But the body was dead. They carried it up to
Cossethay, to Anna’s house.
When Anna Brangwen heard the news, she pressed back her head and rolled
her eyes, as if something were reaching forward to bite at her throat.
She pressed back her head, her mind was driven back to sleep. Since she
had married and become a mother, the girl she had been was forgotten.
Now, the shock threatened to break in upon her and sweep away all her
intervening life, make her as a girl of eighteen again, loving her
father. So she pressed back, away from the shock, she clung to her
present life.
It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet clothes,
his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as he came from market, yet all
sodden and inert, that the shock really broke into her, and she was
terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he was, who had been to her the
image of power and strong life.
Almost in horror, she began to take the wet things from him, to pull
off him the incongruous market-clothes of a well-to-do farmer. The
children were sent away to the Vicarage, the dead body lay on the
parlour floor, Anna quickly began to undress him, laid his fob and
seals in a wet heap on the table. Her husband and the woman helped her.
They cleared and washed the body, and laid it on the bed.
There, it looked still and grand. He was perfectly calm in death, and,
now he was laid in line, inviolable, unapproachable. To Anna, he was
the majesty of the inaccessible male, the majesty of death. It made her
still and awe-stricken, almost glad.
Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the impressive,
inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing death. He was
beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line with the infinite.
What had she to do with him? He was a majestic Abstraction, made
visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute. And who could lay claim
to him, who could speak of him, of the him who was revealed in the
stripped moment of transit from life into death? Neither the living nor
the dead could claim him, he was both the one and the other,
inviolable, inaccessibly himself.
“I shared life with you, I belong in my own way to eternity,” said
Lydia Brangwen, her heart cold, knowing her own singleness.
“I did not know you in life. You are beyond me, supreme now in death,”
said Anna Brangwen, awe-stricken, almost glad.
It was the sons who could not bear it. Fred Brangwen went about with a
set, blanched face and shut hands, his heart full of hatred and rage
for what had been done to his father, bleeding also with desire to have
his father again, to see him, to hear him again. He could not bear it.
Tom Brangwen only arrived on the day of the funeral. He was quiet and
controlled as ever. He kissed his mother, who was still dark-faced,
inscrutable, he shook hands with his brother without looking at him, he
saw the great coffin with its black handles. He even read the
name-plate, “Tom Brangwen, of the Marsh Farm. Born ——. Died ——.”
The good-looking, still face of the young man crinkled up for a moment
in a terrible grimace, then resumed its stillness. The coffin was
carried round to the church, the funeral bell tanged at intervals, the
mourners carried their wreaths of white flowers. The mother, the Polish
woman, went with dark, abstract face, on her son’s arm. He was
good-looking as ever, his face perfectly motionless and somehow
pleasant. Fred walked with Anna, she strange and winsome, he with a
face like wood, stiff, unyielding.
Only afterwards Ursula, flitting between the currant bushes down the
garden, saw her Uncle Tom standing in his black clothes, erect and
fashionable, but his fists lifted, and his face distorted, his lips
curled back from his teeth in a horrible grin, like an animal which
grimaces with torment, whilst his body panted quick, like a panting
dog’s. He was facing the open distance, panting, and holding still,
then panting rapidly again, but his face never changing from its almost
bestial look of torture, the teeth all showing, the nose wrinkled up,
the eyes, unseeing, fixed.
Terrified, Ursula slipped away. And when her Uncle Tom was in the house
again, grave and very quiet, so that he seemed almost to affect
gravity, to pretend grief, she watched his still, handsome face,
imagining it again in its distortion. But she saw the nose was rather
thick, rather Russian, under its transparent skin, she remembered the
teeth under the carefully cut moustache were small and sharp and
spaced. She could see him, in all his elegant demeanour, bestial,
almost corrupt. And she was frightened. She never forgot to look for
the bestial, frightening side of him, after this.
He said “Good-bye” to his mother and went away at once. Ursula almost
shrank from his kiss, now. She wanted it, nevertheless, and the little
revulsion as well.
At the funeral, and after the funeral, Will Brangwen was madly in love
with his wife. The death had shaken him. But death and all seemed to
gather in him into a mad, over-whelming passion for his wife. She
seemed so strange and winsome. He was almost beside himself with desire
for her.
And she took him, she seemed ready for him, she wanted him.
The grandmother stayed a while at the Yew Cottage, till the Marsh was
restored. Then she returned to her own rooms, quiet, and it seemed,
wanting nothing. Fred threw himself into the work of restoring the
farm. That his father was killed there, seemed to make it only the more
intimate and the more inevitably his own place.
There was a saying that the Brangwens always died a violent death. To
them all, except perhaps Tom, it seemed almost natural. Yet Fred went
about obstinate, his heart fixed. He could never forgive the Unknown
this murder of his father.
After the death of the father, the Marsh was very quiet. Mrs. Brangwen
was unsettled. She could not sit all the evening peacefully, as she
could before, and during the day she was always rising to her feet and
hesitating, as if she must go somewhere, and were not quite sure
whither.
She was seen loitering about the garden, in her little woollen jacket.
She was often driven out in the gig, sitting beside her son and
watching the countryside or the streets of the town, with a childish,
candid, uncanny face, as if it all were strange to her.
The children, Ursula and Gudrun and Theresa went by the garden gate on
their way to school. The grandmother would have them call in each time
they passed, she would have them come to the Marsh for dinner. She
wanted children about her.
Of her sons, she was almost afraid. She could see the sombre passion
and desire and dissatisfaction in them, and she wanted not to see it
any more. Even Fred, with his blue eyes and his heavy jaw, troubled
her. There was no peace. He wanted something, he wanted love, passion,
and he could not find them. But why must he trouble her? Why must he
come to her with his seething and suffering and dissatisfactions? She
was too old.
Tom was more restrained, reserved. He kept his body very still. But he
troubled her even more. She could not but see the black depths of
disintegration in his eyes, the sudden glance upon her, as if she could
save him, as if he would reveal himself.
And how could age save youth? Youth must go to youth. Always the storm!
Could she not lie in peace, these years, in the quiet, apart from life?
No, always the swell must heave upon her and break against the
barriers. Always she must be embroiled in the seethe and rage and
passion, endless, endless, going on for ever. And she wanted to draw
away. She wanted at last her own innocence and peace. She did not want
her sons to force upon her any more the old brutal story of desire and
offerings and deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women.
She wanted to be beyond it all, to know the peace and innocence of age.
She had never been a woman to work much. So that now she would stand
often at the garden-gate, watching the scant world go by. And the sight
of children pleased her, made her happy. She had usually an apple or a
few sweets in her pocket. She liked children to smile at her.
She never went to her husband’s grave. She spoke of him simply, as if
he were alive. Sometimes the tears would run down her face, in helpless
sadness. Then she recovered, and was herself again, happy.
On wet days, she stayed in bed. Her bedroom was her city of refuge,
where she could lie down and muse and muse. Sometimes Fred would read
to her. But that did not mean much. She had so many dreams to dream
over, such an unsifted store. She wanted time.
Her chief friend at this period was Ursula. The little girl and the
musing, fragile woman of sixty seemed to understand the same language.
At Cossethay all was activity and passion, everything moved upon poles
of passion. Then there were four children younger than Ursula, a throng
of babies, all the time many lives beating against each other.
So that for the eldest child, the peace of the grandmother’s bedroom
was exquisite. Here Ursula came as to a hushed, paradisal land, here
her own existence became simple and exquisite to her as if she were a
flower.
Always on Saturdays she came down to the Marsh, and always clutching a
little offering, either a little mat made of strips of coloured, woven
paper, or a tiny basket made in the kindergarten lesson, or a little
crayon drawing of a bird.
When she appeared in the doorway, Tilly, ancient but still in
authority, would crane her skinny neck to see who it was.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said. “I thought we should be seein’ you. My
word, that’s a bobby-dazzlin’ posy you’ve brought!”
It was curious how Tilly preserved the spirit of Tom Brangwen, who was
dead, in the Marsh. Ursula always connected her with her grandfather.
This day the child had brought a tight little nosegay of pinks, white
ones, with a rim of pink ones. She was very proud of it, and very shy
because of her pride.
“Your gran’mother’s in her bed. Wipe your shoes well if you’re goin’
up, and don’t go burstin’ in on her like a skyrocket. My word, but
that’s a fine posy! Did you do it all by yourself, an’ all?”
Tilly stealthily ushered her into the bedroom. The child entered with a
strange, dragging hesitation characteristic of her when she was moved.
Her grandmother was sitting up in bed, wearing a little grey woollen
jacket.
The child hesitated in silence near the bed, clutching the nosegay in
front of her. Her childish eyes were shining. The grandmother’s grey
eyes shone with a similar light.
“How pretty!” she said. “How pretty you have made them! What a darling
little bunch.”
Ursula, glowing, thrust them into her grandmother’s hand, saying, “I
made them you.”
“That is how the peasants tied them at home,” said the grandmother,
pushing the pinks with her fingers, and smelling them. “Just such tight
little bunches! And they make wreaths for their hair—they weave the
stalks. Then they go round with wreaths in their hair, and wearing
their best aprons.”
Ursula immediately imagined herself in this story-land.
“Did you used to have a wreath in your hair, grandmother?”
“When I was a little girl, I had golden hair, something like Katie’s.
Then I used to have a wreath of little blue flowers, oh, so blue, that
come when the snow is gone. Andrey, the coachman, used to bring me the
very first.”
They talked, and then Tilly brought the tea-tray, set for two. Ursula
had a special green and gold cup kept for herself at the Marsh. There
was thin bread and butter, and cress for tea. It was all special and
wonderful. She ate very daintily, with little fastidious bites.
“Why do you have two wedding-rings, grandmother?—Must you?” asked the
child, noticing her grandmother’s ivory coloured hand with blue veins,
above the tray.
“If I had two husbands, child.”
Ursula pondered a moment.
“Then you must wear both rings together?”
“Yes.”
“Which was my grandfather’s ring?”
The woman hesitated.
“This grandfather whom you knew? This was his ring, the red one. The
yellow one was your other grandfather’s whom you never knew.”
Ursula looked interestedly at the two rings on the proffered finger.
“Where did he buy it you?” she asked.
“This one? In Warsaw, I think.”
“You didn’t know my own grandfather then?”
“Not this grandfather.”
Ursula pondered this fascinating intelligence.
“Did he have white whiskers as well?”
“No, his beard was dark. You have his brows, I think.”
Ursula ceased and became self-conscious. She at once identified herself
with her Polish grandfather.
“And did he have brown eyes?”
“Yes, dark eyes. He was a clever man, as quick as a lion. He was never
still.”
Lydia still resented Lensky. When she thought of him, she was always
younger than he, she was always twenty, or twenty-five, and under his
domination. He incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a
person herself, as if she were just his aide-de-camp, or part of his
baggage, or one among his surgical appliances. She still resented it.
And he was always only thirty: he had died when he was thirty-four. She
did not feel sorry for him. He was older than she. Yet she still ached
in the thought of those days.
“Did you like my first grandfather best?” asked Ursula.
“I liked them both,” said the grandmother.
And, thinking, she became again Lensky’s girl-bride. He was of good
family, of better family even than her own, for she was half German.
She was a young girl in a house of insecure fortune. And he, an
intellectual, a clever surgeon and physician, had loved her. How she
had looked up to him! She remembered her first transports when he
talked to her, the important young man with the severe black beard. He
had seemed so wonderful, such an authority. After her own lax
household, his gravity and confident, hard authority seemed almost
God-like to her. For she had never known it in her life, all her
surroundings had been loose, lax, disordered, a welter.
“Miss Lydia, will you marry me?” he had said to her in German, in his
grave, yet tremulous voice. She had been afraid of his dark eyes upon
her. They did not see her, they were fixed upon her. And he was hard,
confident. She thrilled with the excitement of it, and accepted. During
the courtship, his kisses were a wonder to her. She always thought
about them, and wondered over them. She never wanted to kiss him back.
In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the
kisses she had received.
She had never quite recovered from her prostration of the first days,
or nights, of marriage. He had taken her to Vienna, and she was utterly
alone with him, utterly alone in another world, everything, everything
foreign, even he foreign to her. Then came the real marriage, passion
came to her, and she became his slave, he was her lord, her lord. She
was the girl-bride, the slave, she kissed his feet, she had thought it
an honour to touch his body, to unfasten his boots. For two years, she
had gone on as his slave, crouching at his feet, embracing his knees.
Children had come, he had followed his ideas. She was there for him,
just to keep him in condition. She was to him one of the baser or
material conditions necessary for his welfare in prosecuting his ideas,
of nationalism, of liberty, of science.
But gradually, at twenty-three, twenty-four, she began to realize that
she too might consider these ideas. By his acceptance of her
self-subordination, he exhausted the feeling in her. There were those
of his associates who would discuss the ideas with her, though he did
not wish to do so himself. She adventured into the minds of other men.
His, then, was not the only male mind! She did not exist, then, just as
his attribute! She began to perceive the attention of other men. An
excitement came over her. She remembered now the men who had paid her
court, when she was married, in Warsaw.
Then the rebellion broke out, and she was inspired too. She would go as
a nurse at her husband’s side. He worked like a lion, he wore his life
out. And she followed him helplessly. But she disbelieved in him. He
was so separate, he ignored so much. He counted too much on himself.
His work, his ideas,—did nothing else matter?
Then the children were dead, and for her, everything became remote. He
became remote. She saw him, she saw him go white when he heard the
news, then frown, as if he thought, “_Why_ have they died now, when I
have no time to grieve?”
“He has no time to grieve,” she had said, in her remote, awful soul.
“He has no time. It is so important, what he does! He is then so
self-important, this half-frenzied man! Nothing matters, but this work
of rebellion! He has not time to grieve, nor to think of his children!
He had not time even to beget them, really.”
She had let him go on alone. But, in the chaos, she had worked by his
side again. And out of the chaos, she had fled with him to London.
He was a broken, cold man. He had no affection for her, nor for anyone.
He had failed in _his_ work, so everything had failed. He stiffened,
and died.
She could not subscribe. He had failed, everything had failed, yet
behind the failure was the unyielding passion of life. The individual
effort might fail, but not the human joy. She belonged to the human
joy.
He died and went his way, but not before there was another child. And
this little Ursula was his grandchild. She was glad of it. For she
still honoured him, though he had been mistaken.
She, Lydia Brangwen, was sorry for him now. He was dead—he had scarcely
lived. He had never known her. He had lain with her, but he had never
known her. He had never received what she could give him. He had gone
away from her empty. So, he had never lived. So, he had died and passed
away. Yet there had been strength and power in him.
She could scarcely forgive him that he had never lived. If it were not
for Anna, and for this little Ursula, who had his brows, there would be
no more left of him than of a broken vessel thrown away, and just
remembered.
Tom Brangwen had served her. He had come to her, and taken from her. He
had died and gone his way into death. But he had made himself immortal
in his knowledge with her. So she had her place here, in life, and in
immortality. For he had taken his knowledge of her into death, so that
she had her place in death. “In my father’s house are many mansions.”
She loved both her husbands. To one she had been a naked little
girl-bride, running to serve him. The other she loved out of
fulfilment, because he was good and had given her being, because he had
served her honourably, and become her man, one with her.
She was established in this stretch of life, she had come to herself.
During her first marriage, she had not existed, except through him, he
was the substance and she the shadow running at his feet. She was very
glad she had come to her own self. She was grateful to Brangwen. She
reached out to him in gratitude, into death.
In her heart she felt a vague tenderness and pity for her first
husband, who had been her lord. He was so wrong when he died. She could
not bear it, that he had never lived, never really become himself. And
he had been her lord! Strange, it all had been! Why had he been her
lord? He seemed now so far off, so without bearing on her.
“Which did you, grandmother?”
“What?”
“Like best.”
“I liked them both. I married the first when I was quite a girl. Then I
loved your grandfather when I was a woman. There is a difference.”
They were silent for a time.
“Did you cry when my first grandfather died?” the child asked.
Lydia Brangwen rocked herself on the bed, thinking aloud.
“When we came to England, he hardly ever spoke, he was too much
concerned to take any notice of anybody. He grew thinner and thinner,
till his cheeks were hollow and his mouth stuck out. He wasn’t handsome
any more. I knew he couldn’t bear being beaten, I thought everything
was lost in the world. Only I had your mother a baby, it was no use my
dying.
“He looked at me with his black eyes, almost as if he hated me, when he
was ill, and said, ‘It only wanted this. It only wanted that I should
leave you and a young child to starve in this London.’ I told him we
should not starve. But I was young, and foolish, and frightened, which
he knew.
“He was bitter, and he never gave way. He lay beating his brains, to
see what he could do. ‘I don’t know what you will do,’ he said. ‘I am
no good, I am a failure from beginning to end. I cannot even provide
for my wife and child!’
“But you see, it was not for him to provide for us. My life went on,
though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.
“I ought to have known, I ought to have been able to say to him: ‘Don’t
be so bitter, don’t die because this has failed. You are not the
beginning and the end.’ But I was too young, he had never let me become
myself, I thought he was truly the beginning and the end. So I let him
take all upon himself. Yet all did not depend on him. Life must go on,
and I must marry your grandfather, and have your Uncle Tom, and your
Uncle Fred. We cannot take so much upon ourselves.”
The child’s heart beat fast as she listened to these things. She could
not understand, but she seemed to feel far-off things. It gave her a
deep, joyous thrill, to know she hailed from far off, from Poland, and
that dark-bearded impressive man. Strange, her antecedents were, and
she felt fate on either side of her terrible.
Almost every day, Ursula saw her grandmother, and every time, they
talked together. Till the grandmother’s sayings and stories, told in
the complete hush of the Marsh bedroom, accumulated with mystic
significance, and became a sort of Bible to the child.
And Ursula asked her deepest childish questions of her grandmother.
“Will somebody love me, grandmother?”
“Many people love you, child. We all love you.”
“But when I am grown up, will somebody love me?”
“Yes, some man will love you, child, because it’s your nature. And I
hope it will be somebody who will love you for what you are, and not
for what he wants of you. But we have a right to what we want.”
Ursula was frightened, hearing these things. Her heart sank, she felt
she had no ground under her feet. She clung to her grandmother. Here
was peace and security. Here, from her grandmother’s peaceful room, the
door opened on to the greater space, the past, which was so big, that
all it contained seemed tiny, loves and births and deaths, tiny units
and features within a vast horizon. That was a great relief, to know
the tiny importance of the individual, within the great past.
Chapter X.
THE WIDENING CIRCLE
It was very burdensome to Ursula, that she was the eldest of the
family. By the time she was eleven, she had to take to school Gudrun
and Theresa and Catherine. The boy, William, always called Billy, so
that he should not be confused with his father, was a lovable, rather
delicate child of three, so he stayed at home as yet. There was another
baby girl, called Cassandra.
The children went for a time to the little church school just near the
Marsh. It was the only place within reach, and being so small, Mrs.
Brangwen felt safe in sending her children there, though the village
boys did nickname Ursula “Urtler”, and Gudrun “Good-runner”, and
Theresa “Tea-pot”.
Gudrun and Ursula were co-mates. The second child, with her long,
sleepy body and her endless chain of fancies, would have nothing to do
with realities. She was not for them, she was for her own fancies.
Ursula was the one for realities. So Gudrun left all such to her elder
sister, and trusted in her implicitly, indifferently. Ursula had a
great tenderness for her co-mate sister.
It was no good trying to make Gudrun responsible. She floated along
like a fish in the sea, perfect within the medium of her own difference
and being. Other existence did not trouble her. Only she believed in
Ursula, and trusted to Ursula.
The eldest child was very much fretted by her responsibility for the
other young ones. Especially Theresa, a sturdy, bold-eyed thing, had a
faculty for warfare.
“Our Ursula, Billy Pillins has lugged my hair.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said nothing.”
Then the Brangwen girls were in for a feud with the Pillinses, or
Phillipses.
“You won’t pull my hair again, Billy Pillins,” said Theresa, walking
with her sisters, and looking superbly at the freckled, red-haired boy.
“Why shan’t I?” retorted Billy Pillins.
“You won’t because you dursn’t,” said the tiresome Theresa.
“You come here, then, Tea-pot, an’ see if I dursna.”
Up marched Tea-pot, and immediately Billy Pillins lugged her black,
snaky locks. In a rage she flew at him. Immediately in rushed Ursula
and Gudrun, and little Katie, in clashed the other Phillipses, Clem and
Walter, and Eddie Anthony. Then there was a fray. The Brangwen girls
were well-grown and stronger than many boys. But for pinafores and long
hair, they would have carried easy victories. They went home, however,
with hair lugged and pinafores torn. It was a joy to the Phillips boys
to rip the pinafores of the Brangwen girls.
Then there was an outcry. Mrs. Brangwen _would not_ have it; no, she
would not. All her innate dignity and standoffishness rose up. Then
there was the vicar lecturing the school. “It was a sad thing that the
boys of Cossethay could not behave more like gentlemen to the girls of
Cossethay. Indeed, what kind of boy was it that should set upon a girl,
and kick her, and beat her, and tear her pinafore? That boy deserved
severe castigation, and the name of _coward,_ for no boy who was not a
_coward_—etc., etc.”
Meanwhile much hang-dog fury in the Pillinses’ hearts, much virtue in
the Brangwen girls’, particularly in Theresa’s. And the feud continued,
with periods of extraordinary amity, when Ursula was Clem Phillips’s
sweetheart, and Gudrun was Walter’s, and Theresa was Billy’s, and even
the tiny Katie had to be Eddie Ant’ny’s sweetheart. There was the
closest union. At every possible moment the little gang of Brangwens
and Phillipses flew together. Yet neither Ursula nor Gudrun would have
any real intimacy with the Phillips boys. It was a sort of fiction to
them, this alliance and this dubbing of sweethearts.
Again Mrs. Brangwen rose up.
“Ursula, I will _not_ have you raking the roads with lads, so I tell
you. Now stop it, and the rest will stop it.”
How Ursula _hated_ always to represent the little Brangwen club. She
could never be herself, no, she was always
Ursula-Gudrun-Theresa-Catherine—and later even Billy was added on to
her. Moreover, she did not want the Phillipses either. She was out of
taste with them.
However, the Brangwen-Pillins coalition readily broke down, owing to
the unfair superiority of the Brangwens. The Brangwens were rich. They
had free access to the Marsh Farm. The school teachers were almost
respectful to the girls, the vicar spoke to them on equal terms. The
Brangwen girls presumed, they tossed their heads.
“_You’re_ not ivrybody, Urtler Brangwin, ugly-mug,” said Clem Phillips,
his face going very red.
“I’m better than you, for all that,” retorted Urtler.
“You _think_ you are—wi’ a face like that—Ugly Mug,—Urtler Brangwin,”
he began to jeer, trying to set all the others in cry against her. Then
there was hostility again. How she _hated_ their jeering. She became
cold against the Phillipses. Ursula was very proud in her family. The
Brangwen girls had all a curious blind dignity, even a kind of nobility
in their bearing. By some result of breed and upbringing, they seemed
to rush along their own lives without caring that they existed to other
people. Never from the start did it occur to Ursula that other people
might hold a low opinion of her. She thought that whosoever knew her,
knew she was enough and accepted her as such. She thought it was a
world of people like herself. She suffered bitterly if she were forced
to have a low opinion of any person, and she never forgave that person.
This was maddening to many little people. All their lives, the
Brangwens were meeting folk who tried to pull them down to make them
seem little. Curiously, the mother was aware of what would happen, and
was always ready to give her children the advantage of the move.
When Ursula was twelve, and the common school and the companionship of
the village children, niggardly and begrudging, was beginning to affect
her, Anna sent her with Gudrun to the Grammar School in Nottingham.
This was a great release for Ursula. She had a passionate craving to
escape from the belittling circumstances of life, the little
jealousies, the little differences, the little meannesses. It was a
torture to her that the Phillipses were poorer and meaner than herself,
that they used mean little reservations, took petty little advantages.
She wanted to be with her equals: but not by diminishing herself. She
_did_ want Clem Phillips to be her equal. But by some puzzling, painful
fate or other, when he was really there with her, he produced in her a
tight feeling in the head. She wanted to beat her forehead, to escape.
Then she found that the way to escape was easy. One departed from the
whole circumstance. One went away to the Grammar School, and left the
little school, the meagre teachers, the Phillipses whom she had tried
to love but who had made her fail, and whom she could not forgive. She
had an instinctive fear of petty people, as a deer is afraid of dogs.
Because she was blind, she could not calculate nor estimate people. She
must think that everybody was just like herself.
She measured by the standard of her own people: her father and mother,
her grandmother, her uncles. Her beloved father, so utterly simple in
his demeanour, yet with his strong, dark soul fixed like a root in
unexpressed depths that fascinated and terrified her: her mother, so
strangely free of all money and convention and fear, entirely
indifferent to the world, standing by herself, without connection: her
grandmother, who had come from so far and was centred in so wide an
horizon: people must come up to these standards before they could be
Ursula’s people.
So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary
of Cossethay, where only limited people lived. Outside, was all
vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she would love.
Going to school by train, she must leave home at a quarter to eight in
the morning, and she did not arrive again till half-past five at
evening. Of this she was glad, for the house was small and overful. It
was a storm of movement, whence there had been no escape. She hated so
much being in charge.
The house was a storm of movement. The children were healthy and
turbulent, the mother only wanted their animal well-being. To Ursula,
as she grew a little older, it became a nightmare. When she saw, later,
a Rubens picture with storms of naked babies, and found this was called
“Fecundity”, she shuddered, and the world became abhorrent to her. She
knew as a child what it was to live amidst storms of babies, in the
heat and swelter of fecundity. And as a child, she was against her
mother, passionately against her mother, she craved for some
spirituality and stateliness.
In bad weather, home was a bedlam. Children dashed in and out of the
rain, to the puddles under the dismal yew trees, across the wet
flagstones of the kitchen, whilst the cleaning-woman grumbled and
scolded; children were swarming on the sofa, children were kicking the
piano in the parlour, to make it sound like a beehive, children were
rolling on the hearthrug, legs in air, pulling a book in two between
them, children, fiendish, ubiquitous, were stealing upstairs to find
out where our Ursula was, whispering at bedroom doors, hanging on the
latch, calling mysteriously, “Ursula! Ursula!” to the girl who had
locked herself in to read. And it was hopeless. The locked door excited
their sense of mystery, she had to open to dispel the lure. These
children hung on to her with round-eyed excited questions.
The mother flourished amid all this.
“Better have them noisy than ill,” she said.
But the growing girls, in turn, suffered bitterly. Ursula was just
coming to the stage when Andersen and Grimm were being left behind for
the “Idylls of the King” and romantic love-stories.
“Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,
Elaine the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber in a tower to the east
Guarded the sacred shield of Launcelot.”
How she loved it! How she leaned in her bedroom window with her black,
rough hair on her shoulders, and her warm face all rapt, and gazed
across at the churchyard and the little church, which was a turreted
castle, whence Launcelot would ride just now, would wave to her as he
rode by, his scarlet cloak passing behind the dark yew trees and
between the open space: whilst she, ah, she, would remain the lonely
maid high up and isolated in the tower, polishing the terrible shield,
weaving it a covering with a true device, and waiting, waiting, always
remote and high.
At which point there would be a faint scuffle on the stairs, a
light-pitched whispering outside the door, and a creaking of the latch:
then Billy, excited, whispering:
“It’s locked—it’s locked.”
Then the knocking, kicking at the door with childish knees, and the
urgent, childish:
“Ursula—our Ursula? Ursula? Eh, our Ursula?”
No reply.
“Ursula! Eh—our Ursula?” the name was shouted now. Still no answer.
“Mother, she won’t answer,” came the yell. “She’s dead.”
“Go away—I’m not dead. What do you want?” came the angry voice of the
girl.
“Open the door, our Ursula,” came the complaining cry. It was all over.
She must open the door. She heard the screech of the bucket downstairs
dragged across the flagstones as the woman washed the kitchen floor.
And the children were prowling in the bedroom, asking:
“What were you doing? What had you locked the door for?” Then she
discovered the key of the parish room, and betook herself there, and
sat on some sacks with her books. There began another dream.
She was the only daughter of the old lord, she was gifted with magic.
Day followed day of rapt silence, whilst she wandered ghost-like in the
hushed, ancient mansion, or flitted along the sleeping terraces.
Here a grave grief attacked her: that her hair was dark. She _must_
have fair hair and a white skin. She was rather bitter about her black
mane.
Never mind, she would dye it when she grew up, or bleach it in the sun,
till it was bleached fair. Meanwhile she wore a fair white coif of pure
Venetian lace.
She flitted silently along the terraces, where jewelled lizards basked
upon the stone, and did not move when her shadow fell upon them. In the
utter stillness she heard the tinkle of the fountain, and smelled the
roses whose blossoms hung rich and motionless. So she drifted, drifted
on the wistful feet of beauty, past the water and the swans, to the
noble park, where, underneath a great oak, a doe all dappled lay with
her four fine feet together, her fawn nestling sun-coloured beside her.
Oh, and this doe was her familiar. It would talk to her, because she
was a magician, it would tell her stories as if the sunshine spoke.
Then one day, she left the door of the parish room unlocked, careless
and unheeding as she always was; the children found their way in, Katie
cut her finger and howled, Billy hacked notches in the fine chisels,
and did much damage. There was a great commotion.
The crossness of the mother was soon finished. Ursula locked up the
room again, and considered all was over. Then her father came in with
the notched tools, his forehead knotted.
“Who the deuce opened the door?” he cried in anger.
“It was Ursula who opened the door,” said her mother. He had a duster
in his hand. He turned and flapped the cloth hard across the girl’s
face. The cloth stung, for a moment the girl was as if stunned. Then
she remained motionless, her face closed and stubborn. But her heart
was blazing. In spite of herself the tears surged higher, in spite of
her they surged higher.
In spite of her, her face broke, she made a curious gulping grimace,
and the tears were falling. So she went away, desolate. But her blazing
heart was fierce and unyielding. He watched her go, and a pleasurable
pain filled him, a sense of triumph and easy power, followed
immediately by acute pity.
“I’m sure that was unnecessary—to hit the girl across the face,” said
the mother coldly.
“A flip with the duster won’t hurt her,” he said.
“Nor will it do her any good.”
For days, for weeks, Ursula’s heart burned from this rebuff. She felt
so cruelly vulnerable. Did he not know how vulnerable she was, how
exposed and wincing? He, of all people, knew. And he wanted to do this
to her. He wanted to hurt her right through her closest sensitiveness,
he wanted to treat her with shame, to maim her with insult.
Her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted. She did not
forget, she did not forget, she never forgot. When she returned to her
love for her father, the seed of mistrust and defiance burned
unquenched, though covered up far from sight. She no longer belonged to
him unquestioned. Slowly, slowly, the fire of mistrust and defiance
burned in her, burned away her connection with him.
She ran a good deal alone, having a passion for all moving, active
things. She loved the little brooks. Wherever she found a little
running water, she was happy. It seemed to make her run and sing in
spirit along with it. She could sit for hours by a brook or stream, on
the roots of the alders, and watch the water hasten dancing over the
stones, or among the twigs of a fallen branch. Sometimes, little fish
vanished before they had become real, like hallucinations, sometimes
wagtails ran by the water’s brink, sometimes other little birds came to
drink. She saw a kingfisher darting blue—and then she was very happy.
The kingfisher was the key to the magic world: he was witness of the
border of enchantment.
But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of her life:
the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in an outer world;
the illusion of her grandmother, of realities so shadowy and far-off
that they became as mystic symbols:—peasant-girls with wreaths of blue
flowers in their hair, the sledges and the depths of winter; the
dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then the
multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly a princess
of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she was not really
this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her reading: out of the
multicoloured illusion of this her life, she must move on, to the
Grammar School in Nottingham.
She was shy, and she suffered. For one thing, she bit her nails, and
had a cruel consciousness in her finger-tips, a shame, an exposure. Out
of all proportion, this shame haunted her. She spent hours of torture,
conjuring how she might keep her gloves on: if she might say her hands
were scalded, if she might seem to forget to take off her gloves.
For she was going to inherit her own estate, when she went to the High
School. There, each girl was a lady. There, she was going to walk among
free souls, her co-mates and her equals, and all petty things would be
put away. Ah, if only she did not bite her nails! If only she had not
this blemish! She wanted so much to be perfect—without spot or blemish,
living the high, noble life.
It was a grief to her that her father made such a poor introduction. He
was brief as ever, like a boy saying his errand, and his clothes looked
ill-fitting and casual. Whereas Ursula would have liked robes and a
ceremonial of introduction to this, her new estate.
She made a new illusion of school. Miss Grey, the headmistress, had a
certain silvery, school-mistressy beauty of character. The school
itself had been a gentleman’s house. Dark, sombre lawns separated it
from the dark, select avenue. But its rooms were large and of good
appearance, and from the back, one looked over lawns and shrubbery,
over the trees and the grassy slope of the Arboretum, to the town which
heaped the hollow with its roofs and cupolas and its shadows.
So Ursula seated herself upon the hill of learning, looking down on the
smoke and confusion and the manufacturing, engrossed activity of the
town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar School, she fancied the
air was finer, beyond the factory smoke. She wanted to learn Latin and
Greek and French and mathematics. She trembled like a postulant when
she wrote the Greek alphabet for the first time.
She was upon another hill-slope, whose summit she had not scaled. There
was always the marvellous eagerness in her heart, to climb and to see
beyond. A Latin verb was virgin soil to her: she sniffed a new odour in
it; it meant something, though she did not know what it meant. But she
gathered it up: it was significant. When she knew that:
x2 – y2 = (x + y) (x – y)
then she felt that she had grasped something, that she was liberated
into an intoxicating air, rare and unconditioned. And she was very glad
as she wrote her French exercise:
“_J’ai donné le pain à mon petit frère_.”
In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her heart,
exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never forgot her
brown “Longman’s First French Grammar”, nor her “Via Latina” with its
red edges, nor her little grey Algebra book. There was always a magic
in them.
At learning she was quick, intelligent, instinctive, but she was not
“thorough”. If a thing did not come to her instinctively, she could not
learn it. And then, her mad rage of loathing for all lessons, her
bitter contempt of all teachers and schoolmistresses, her recoil to a
fierce, animal arrogance made her detestable.
She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her revolts: there
was no law for her, nor any rule. She existed for herself alone. Then
ensued a long struggle with everybody, in which she broke down at last,
when she had run the full length of her resistance, and sobbed her
heart out, desolate; and afterwards, in a chastened, washed-out,
bodiless state, she received the understanding that would not come
before, and went her way sadder and wiser.
Ursula and Gudrun went to school together. Gudrun was a shy, quiet,
wild creature, a thin slip of a thing hanging back from notice or
twisting past to disappear into her own world again. She seemed to
avoid all contact, instinctively, and pursued her own intent way,
pursuing half-formed fancies that had no relation to anyone else.
She was not clever at all. She thought Ursula clever enough for two.
Ursula understood, so why should she, Gudrun, bother herself? The
younger girl lived her religious, responsible life in her sister, by
proxy. For herself, she was indifferent and intent as a wild animal,
and as irresponsible.
When she found herself at the bottom of the class, she laughed, lazily,
and was content, saying she was safe now. She did not mind her father’s
chagrin nor her mother’s tinge of mortification.
“What do I pay for you to go to Nottingham for?” her father asked,
exasperated.
“Well, Dad, you know you needn’t pay for me,” she replied, nonchalant.
“I’m ready to stop at home.”
She was happy at home, Ursula was not. Slim and unwilling abroad,
Gudrun was easy in her own house as a wild thing in its lair. Whereas
Ursula, attentive and keen abroad, at home was reluctant, uneasy,
unwilling to be herself, or unable.
Nevertheless Sunday remained the maximum day of the week for both.
Ursula turned passionately to it, to the sense of eternal security it
gave. She suffered anguish of fears during the week-days, for she felt
strong powers that would not recognize her. There was upon her always a
fear and a dislike of authority. She felt she could always do as she
wanted if she managed to avoid a battle with Authority and the
authorised Powers. But if she gave herself away, she would be lost,
destroyed. There was always the menace against her.
This strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to
seize hold upon her this feeling of the grudging power of the mob lying
in wait for her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest
influences of her life. Wherever she was, at school, among friends, in
the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made
herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was, for fear that her
undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish
resentment of the commonplace, the average Self.
She was fairly safe at school, now. She knew how to take her place
there, and how much of herself to reserve. But she was free only on
Sundays. When she was but a girl of fourteen, she began to feel a
resentment growing against her in her own home. She knew she was the
disturbing influence there. But as yet, on Sundays, she was free,
really free, free to be herself, without fear or misgiving.
Even at its stormiest, Sunday was a blessed day. Ursula woke to it with
a feeling of immense relief. She wondered why her heart was so light.
Then she remembered it was Sunday. A gladness seemed to burst out
around her, a feeling of great freedom. The whole world was for
twenty-four hours revoked, put back. Only the Sunday world existed.
She loved the very confusion of the household. It was lucky if the
children slept till seven o’clock. Usually, soon after six, a chirp was
heard, a voice, an excited chirrup began, announcing the creation of a
new day, there was a thudding of quick little feet, and the children
were up and about, scampering in their shirts, with pink legs and
glistening, flossy hair all clean from the Saturday’s night bathing,
their souls excited by their bodies’ cleanliness.
As the house began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean children, one
of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and slatternly, with her
thick, dark hair loosely coiled and slipping over one ear, or the
father, warm and comfortable, with ruffled black hair and shirt
unbuttoned at the neck.
Then the girls upstairs heard the continual:
“Now then, Billy, what are you up to?” in the father’s strong,
vibrating voice: or the mother’s dignified:
“I have said, Cassie, I will not have it.”
It was amazing how the father’s voice could ring out like a gong,
without his being in the least moved, and how the mother could speak
like a queen holding an audience, though her blouse was sticking out
all round and her hair was not fastened up and the children were
yelling a pandemonium.
Gradually breakfast was produced, and the elder girls came down into
the babel, whilst half-naked children flitted round like the wrong ends
of cherubs, as Gudrun said, watching the bare little legs and the
chubby tails appearing and disappearing.
Gradually the young ones were captured, and nightdresses finally
removed, ready for the clean Sunday shirt. But before the Sunday shirt
was slipped over the fleecy head, away darted the naked body, to wallow
in the sheepskin which formed the parlour rug, whilst the mother walked
after, protesting sharply, holding the shirt like a noose, and the
father’s bronze voice rang out, and the naked child wallowing on its
back in the deep sheepskin announced gleefully:
“I’m bading in the sea, mother.”
“Why should I walk after you with your shirt?” said the mother. “Get up
now.”
“I’m bading in the sea, mother,” repeated the wallowing, naked figure.
“We say bathing, not bading,” said the mother, with her strange,
indifferent dignity. “I am waiting here with your shirt.”
At length shirts were on, and stockings were paired, and little
trousers buttoned and little petticoats tied behind. The besetting
cowardice of the family was its shirking of the garter question.
“Where are your garters, Cassie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, look for them.”
But not one of the elder Brangwens would really face the situation.
After Cassie had grovelled under all the furniture and blacked up all
her Sunday cleanliness, to the infinite grief of everybody, the garter
was forgotten in the new washing of the young face and hands.
Later, Ursula would be indignant to see Miss Cassie marching into
church from Sunday school with her stocking sluthered down to her
ankle, and a grubby knee showing.
“It’s disgraceful!” cried Ursula at dinner. “People will think we’re
pigs, and the children are never washed.”
“Never mind what people think,” said the mother superbly. “I see that
the child is bathed properly, and if I satisfy myself I satisfy
everybody. She can’t keep her stocking up and no garter, and it isn’t
the child’s fault she was let to go without one.”
The garter trouble continued in varying degrees, but till each child
wore long skirts or long trousers, it was not removed.
On this day of decorum, the Brangwen family went to church by the
high-road, making a detour outside all the garden-hedge, rather than
climb the wall into the churchyard. There was no law of this, from the
parents. The children themselves were the wardens of the Sabbath
decency, very jealous and instant with each other.
It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the house was
really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing like a strange
bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading and tale-telling and
quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were allowed. Out of doors, all
playing was to be carried on unobtrusively. If there were noise,
yelling or shouting, then some fierce spirit woke up in the father and
the elder children, so that the younger were subdued, afraid of being
excommunicated.
The children themselves preserved the Sabbath. If Ursula in her vanity
sang:
“Il était un’ bergère
Et ron-ron-ron petit patapon,”
Theresa was sure to cry:
“_That’s_ not a Sunday song, our Ursula.”
“You don’t know,” replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she wavered.
And her song faded down before she came to the end.
Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very precious to
her. She found herself in a strange, undefined place, where her spirit
could wander in dreams, unassailed.
The white-robed spirit of Christ passed between olive trees. It was a
vision, not a reality. And she herself partook of the visionary being.
There was the voice in the night calling, “Samuel, Samuel!” And still
the voice called in the night. But not this night, nor last night, but
in the unfathomed night of Sunday, of the Sabbath silence.
There was Sin, the serpent, in whom was also wisdom. There was Judas
with the money and the kiss.
But there was no _actual_ Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa across the
face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the everlasting. It was
misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from Sunday school, he was bad, he
was wicked, but he was not a Sinner.
Sin was absolute and everlasting: wickedness and badness were temporary
and relative. When Billy, catching up the local jargon, called Cassie a
“sinner”, everybody detested him. Yet when there came to the Marsh a
flippetty-floppetty foxhound puppy, he was mischievously christened
“Sinner”.
The Brangwens shrank from applying their religion to their own
immediate actions. They wanted the sense of the eternal and immortal,
not a list of rules for everyday conduct. Therefore they were
badly-behaved children, headstrong and arrogant, though their feelings
were generous. They had, moreover—intolerable to their ordinary
neighbours—a proud gesture, that did not fit with the jealous idea of
the democratic Christian. So that they were always extraordinary,
outside of the ordinary.
How bitterly Ursula resented her first acquaintance with evangelical
teachings. She got a peculiar thrill from the application of salvation
to her own personal case. “Jesus died for me, He suffered for me.”
There was a pride and a thrill in it, followed almost immediately by a
sense of dreariness. Jesus with holes in His hands and feet: it was
distasteful to her. The shadowy Jesus with the Stigmata: that was her
own vision. But Jesus the actual man, talking with teeth and lips,
telling one to put one’s finger into His wounds, like a villager
gloating in his sores, repelled her. She was enemy of those who
insisted on the humanity of Christ. If He were just a man, living in
ordinary human life, then she was indifferent.
But it was the jealousy of vulgar people which must insist on the
humanity of Christ. It was the vulgar mind which would allow nothing
extra-human, nothing beyond itself to exist. It was the dirty,
desecrating hands of the revivalists which wanted to drag Jesus into
this everyday life, to dress Jesus up in trousers and frock-coat, to
compel Him to a vulgar equality of footing. It was the impudent
suburban soul which would ask, “What would Jesus do, if he were in my
shoes?”
Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If any one, it was the
mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of the vulgar
clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She never really
subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen’s mystical passion.
But Ursula was with her father. As she became adolescent, thirteen,
fourteen, she set more and more against her mother’s practical
indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous, almost wicked in
her mother’s attitude. What did Anna Brangwen, in these years, care for
God or Jesus or Angels? She was the immediate life of to-day. Children
were still being born to her, she was throng with all the little
activities of her family. And almost instinctively she resented her
husband’s slavish service to the Church, his dark, subject hankering to
worship an unseen God. What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man
had a young family that needed fettling for? Let him attend to the
immediate concerns of his life, not go projecting himself towards the
ultimate.
But Ursula was all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt against
babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another world, He was
not of this world. He did not thrust His hands under her face and,
pointing to His wounds, say:
“Look, Ursula Brangwen, I got these for your sake. Now do as you’re
told.”
To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the distance, like a
white moon at sunset, a crescent moon beckoning as it follows the sun,
out of our ken. Sometimes dark clouds standing very far off, pricking
up into a clear yellow band of sunset, of a winter evening, reminded
her of Calvary, sometimes the full moon rising blood-red upon the hill
terrified her with the knowledge that Christ was now dead, hanging
heavy and dead upon the Cross.
On Sundays, this visionary world came to pass. She heard the long hush,
she knew the marriage of dark and light was taking place. In church,
the Voice sounded, re-echoing not from this world, as if the Church
itself were a shell that still spoke the language of creation.
“The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they
took them wives of all which they chose.
“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with Man, for
that he also is flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty
years.
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that,
when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare
children unto them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men
of renown.”
Over this Ursula was stirred as by a call from far off. In those days,
would not the Sons of God have found her fair, would she not have been
taken to wife by one of the Sons of God? It was a dream that frightened
her, for she could not understand it.
Who were the sons of God? Was not Jesus the only begotten Son? Was not
Adam the only man created from God? Yet there were men not begotten by
Adam. Who were these, and whence did they come? They too must derive
from God. Had God many offspring, besides Adam and besides Jesus,
children whose origin the children of Adam cannot recognize? And
perhaps these children, these sons of God, had known no expulsion, no
ignominy of the fall.
These came on free feet to the daughters of men, and saw they were
fair, and took them to wife, so that the women conceived and brought
forth men of renown. This was a genuine fate. She moved about in the
essential days, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men.
Nor would any comparison of myths destroy her passion in the knowledge.
Jove had become a bull, or a man, in order to love a mortal woman. He
had begotten in her a giant, a hero.
Very good, so he had, in Greece. For herself, she was no Grecian woman.
Not Jove nor Pan nor any of those gods, not even Bacchus nor Apollo,
could come to her. But the Sons of God who took to wife the daughters
of men, these were such as should take her to wife.
She clung to the secret hope, the aspiration. She lived a dual life,
one where the facts of daily life encompassed everything, being legion,
and the other wherein the facts of daily life were superseded by the
eternal truth. So utterly did she desire the Sons of God should come to
the daughters of men; and she believed more in her desire and its
fulfilment than in the obvious facts of life. The fact that a man was a
man, did not state his descent from Adam, did not exclude that he was
also one of the unhistoried, unaccountable Sons of God. As yet, she was
confused, but not denied.
Again she heard the Voice:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter into heaven.”
But it was explained, the needle’s eye was a little gateway for foot
passengers, through which the great, humped camel with his load could
not possibly squeeze himself: or perhaps at a great risk, if he were a
little camel, he might get through. For one could not absolutely
exclude the rich man from heaven, said the Sunday school teachers.
It pleased her also to know, that in the East one must use hyperbole,
or else remain unheard; because the Eastern man must see a thing
swelling to fill all heaven, or dwindled to a mere nothing, before he
is suitably impressed. She immediately sympathized with this Eastern
mind.
Yet the words continued to have a meaning that was untouched either by
the knowledge of gateways or hyperboles. The historical, or local, or
psychological interest in the words was another thing. There remained
unaltered the inexplicable value of the saying. What was this relation
between a needle’s eye, a rich man, and heaven? What sort of a needle’s
eye, what sort of a rich man, what sort of heaven? Who knows? It means
the Absolute World, and can never be more than half interpreted in
terms of the relative world.
But must one apply the speech literally? Was her father a rich man?
Couldn’t he get to heaven? Or was he only a half-rich man? Or was he
merely a poor man? At any rate, unless he gave everything away to the
poor, he would find it much harder to get to heaven. The needle’s eye
would be too tight for him. She almost wished he were penniless poor.
If one were coming to the base of it, any man was rich who was not as
poor as the poorest.
She had her qualms, when in imagination she saw her father giving away
their piano and the two cows, and the capital at the bank, to the
labourers of the district, so that they, the Brangwens, should be as
poor as the Wherrys. And she did not want it. She was impatient.
“Very well,” she thought, “we’ll forego that heaven, that’s all—at any
rate the needle’s eye sort.” And she dismissed the problem. She was not
going to be as poor as the Wherrys, not for all the sayings on
earth—the miserable squalid Wherrys.
So she reverted to the non-literal application of the scriptures. Her
father very rarely read, but he had collected many books of
reproductions, and he would sit and look at these, curiously intent,
like a child, yet with a passion that was not childish. He loved the
early Italian painters, but particularly Giotto and Fra Angelico and
Filippo Lippi. The great compositions cast a spell over him. How many
times had he turned to Raphael’s “Dispute of the Sacrament” or Fra
Angelico’s “Last Judgment” or the beautiful, complicated renderings of
the Adoration of the Magi, and always, each time, he received the same
gradual fulfilment of delight. It had to do with the establishment of a
whole mystical, architectural conception which used the human figure as
a unit. Sometimes he had to hurry home, and go to the Fra Angelico
“Last Judgment”. The pathway of open graves, the huddled earth on
either side, the seemly heaven arranged above, the singing process to
paradise on the one hand, the stuttering descent to hell on the other,
completed and satisfied him. He did not care whether or not he believed
in devils or angels. The whole conception gave him the deepest
satisfaction, and he wanted nothing more.
Ursula, accustomed to these pictures from her childhood, hunted out
their detail. She adored Fra Angelico’s flowers and light and angels,
she liked the demons and enjoyed the hell. But the representation of
the encircled God, surrounded by all the angels on high, suddenly bored
her. The figure of the Most High bored her, and roused her resentment.
Was this the culmination and the meaning of it all, this draped, null
figure? The angels were so lovely, and the light so beautiful. And only
for this, to surround such a banality for God!
She was dissatisfied, but not fit as yet to criticize. There was yet so
much to wonder over. Winter came, pine branches were torn down in the
snow, the green pine needles looked rich upon the ground. There was the
wonderful, starry, straight track of a pheasant’s footsteps across the
snow imprinted so clear; there was the lobbing mark of the rabbit, two
holes abreast, two holes following behind; the hare shoved deeper
shafts, slanting, and his two hind feet came down together and made one
large pit; the cat podded little holes, and birds made a lacy pattern.
Gradually there gathered the feeling of expectation. Christmas was
coming. In the shed, at nights, a secret candle was burning, a sound of
veiled voices was heard. The boys were learning the old mystery play of
St. George and Beelzebub. Twice a week, by lamplight, there was choir
practice in the church, for the learning of old carols Brangwen wanted
to hear. The girls went to these practices. Everywhere was a sense of
mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.
The time came near, the girls were decorating the church, with cold
fingers binding holly and fir and yew about the pillars, till a new
spirit was in the church, the stone broke out into dark, rich leaf, the
arches put forth their buds, and cold flowers rose to blossom in the
dim, mystic atmosphere. Ursula must weave mistletoe over the door, and
over the screen, and hang a silver dove from a sprig of yew, till dusk
came down, and the church was like a grove.
In the cow-shed the boys were blacking their faces for a
dress-rehearsal; the turkey hung dead, with opened, speckled wings, in
the dairy. The time was come to make pies, in readiness.
The expectation grew more tense. The star was risen into the sky, the
songs, the carols were ready to hail it. The star was the sign in the
sky. Earth too should give a sign. As evening drew on, hearts beat fast
with anticipation, hands were full of ready gifts. There were the
tremulously expectant words of the church service, the night was past
and the morning was come, the gifts were given and received, joy and
peace made a flapping of wings in each heart, there was a great burst
of carols, the Peace of the World had dawned, strife had passed away,
every hand was linked in hand, every heart was singing.
It was bitter, though, that Christmas Day, as it drew on to evening,
and night, became a sort of bank holiday, flat and stale. The morning
was so wonderful, but in the afternoon and evening the ecstasy perished
like a nipped thing, like a bud in a false spring. Alas, that Christmas
was only a domestic feast, a feast of sweetmeats and toys! Why did not
the grown-ups also change their everyday hearts, and give way to
ecstasy? Where was the ecstasy?
How passionately the Brangwens craved for it, the ecstasy. The father
was troubled, dark-faced and disconsolate, on Christmas night, because
the passion was not there, because the day was become as every day, and
hearts were not aflame. Upon the mother was a kind of absentness, as
ever, as if she were exiled for all her life. Where was the fiery heart
of joy, now the coming was fulfilled; where was the star, the Magi’s
transport, the thrill of new being that shook the earth?
Still it was there, even if it were faint and inadequate. The cycle of
creation still wheeled in the Church year. After Christmas, the ecstasy
slowly sank and changed. Sunday followed Sunday, trailing a fine
movement, a finely developed transformation over the heart of the
family. The heart that was big with joy, that had seen the star and had
followed to the inner walls of the Nativity, that there had swooned in
the great light, must now feel the light slowly withdrawing, a shadow
falling, darkening. The chill crept in, silence came over the earth,
and then all was darkness. The veil of the temple was rent, each heart
gave up the ghost, and sank dead.
They moved quietly, a little wanness on the lips of the children, at
Good Friday, feeling the shadow upon their hearts. Then, pale with a
deathly scent, came the lilies of resurrection, that shone coldly till
the Comforter was given.
But why the memory of the wounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with
healed hands and feet, sound and strong and glad? Surely the passage of
the cross and the tomb was forgotten? But no—always the memory of the
wounds, always the smell of grave-clothes? A small thing was
Resurrection, compared with the Cross and the death, in this cycle.
So the children lived the year of christianity, the epic of the soul of
mankind. Year by year the inner, unknown drama went on in them, their
hearts were born and came to fulness, suffered on the cross, gave up
the ghost, and rose again to unnumbered days, untired, having at least
this rhythm of eternity in a ragged, inconsequential life.
But it was becoming a mechanical action now, this drama: birth at
Christmas for death at Good Friday. On Easter Sunday the life-drama was
as good as finished. For the Resurrection was shadowy and overcome by
the shadow of death, the Ascension was scarce noticed, a mere
confirmation of death.
What was the hope and the fulfilment? Nay, was it all only a useless
after-death, a wan, bodiless after-death? Alas, and alas for the
passion of the human heart, that must die so long before the body was
dead.
For from the grave, after the passion and the trial of anguish, the
body rose torn and chill and colourless. Did not Christ say, “Mary!”
and when she turned with outstretched hands to him, did he not hasten
to add, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.”
Then how could the hands rejoice, or the heart be glad, seeing
themselves repulsed. Alas, for the resurrection of the dead body! Alas,
for the wavering, glimmering appearance of the risen Christ. Alas, for
the Ascension into heaven, which is a shadow within death, a complete
passing away.
Alas, that so soon the drama is over; that life is ended at
thirty-three; that the half of the year of the soul is cold and
historiless! Alas, that a risen Christ has no place with us! Alas, that
the memory of the passion of Sorrow and Death and the Grave holds
triumph over the pale fact of Resurrection!
But why? Why shall I not rise with my body whole and perfect, shining
with strong life? Why, when Mary says: Rabboni, shall I not take her in
my arms and kiss her and hold her to my breast? Why is the risen body
deadly, and abhorrent with wounds?
The Resurrection is to life, not to death. Shall I not see those who
have risen again walk here among men perfect in body and spirit, whole
and glad in the flesh, living in the flesh, loving in the flesh,
begetting children in the flesh, arrived at last to wholeness, perfect
without scar or blemish, healthy without fear of ill health? Is this
not the period of manhood and of joy and fulfilment, after the
Resurrection? Who shall be shadowed by Death and the Cross, being
risen, and who shall fear the mystic, perfect flesh that belongs to
heaven?
Can I not, then, walk this earth in gladness, being risen from sorrow?
Can I not eat with my brother happily, and with joy kiss my beloved,
after my resurrection, celebrate my marriage in the flesh with
feastings, go about my business eagerly, in the joy of my fellows? Is
heaven impatient for me, and bitter against this earth, that I should
hurry off, or that I should linger pale and untouched? Is the flesh
which was crucified become as poison to the crowds in the street, or is
it as a strong gladness and hope to them, as the first flower
blossoming out of the earth’s humus?
Chapter XI.
FIRST LOVE
As Ursula passed from girlhood towards womanhood, gradually the cloud
of self-responsibility gathered upon her. She became aware of herself,
that she was a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated
obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must become something. And
she was afraid, troubled. Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one
inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered
life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make
something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to
take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how
stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of
one’s own life.
The religion which had been another world for her, a glorious sort of
play-world, where she lived, climbing the tree with the short-statured
man, walking shakily on the sea like the disciple, breaking the bread
into five thousand portions, like the Lord, giving a great picnic to
five thousand people, now fell away from reality, and became a tale, a
myth, an illusion, which, however much one might assert it to be true
an historical fact, one knew was not true—at least, for this
present—day life of ours. There could, within the limits of this life
we know, be no Feeding of the Five Thousand. And the girl had come to
the point where she held that that which one cannot experience in daily
life is not true for oneself.
So, the old duality of life, wherein there had been a weekday world of
people and trains and duties and reports, and besides that a Sunday
world of absolute truth and living mystery, of walking upon the waters
and being blinded by the face of the Lord, of following the pillar of
cloud across the desert and watching the bush that crackled yet did not
burn away, this old, unquestioned duality suddenly was found to be
broken apart. The weekday world had triumphed over the Sunday world.
The Sunday world was not real, or at least, not actual. And one lived
by action.
Only the weekday world mattered. She herself, Ursula Brangwen, must
know how to take the weekday life. Her body must be a weekday body,
held in the world’s estimate. Her soul must have a weekday value, known
according to the world’s knowledge.
Well, then, there was a weekday life to live, of action and deeds. And
so there was a necessity to choose one’s action and one’s deeds. One
was responsible to the world for what one did.
Nay, one was more than responsible to the world. One was responsible to
oneself. There was some puzzling, tormenting residue of the Sunday
world within her, some persistent Sunday self, which insisted upon a
relationship with the now shed-away vision world. How could one keep up
a relationship with that which one denied? Her task was now to learn
the week-day life.
How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become
oneself? One was not oneself, one was merely a half-stated question.
How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of
oneself, when one was merely an unfixed something—nothing, blowing
about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated.
She turned to the visions, which had spoken far-off words that ran
along the blood like ripples of an unseen wind, she heard the words
again, she denied the vision, for she must be a weekday person, to whom
visions were not true, and she demanded only the weekday meaning of the
words.
There _were_ words spoken by the vision: and words must have a weekday
meaning, since words were weekday stuff. Let them speak now: let them
bespeak themselves in weekday terms. The vision should translate itself
into weekday terms.
“Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor,” she heard on Sunday
morning. That was plain enough, plain enough for Monday morning too. As
she went down the hill to the station, going to school, she took the
saying with her.
“Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.”
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush
and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little
necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys: the unlovely
uncombed Wherrys, who were the “poor” to her? She did not.
She walked this Monday morning on the verge of misery. For she did want
to do what was right. And she didn’t want to do what the gospels said.
She didn’t want to be poor—really poor. The thought was a horror to
her: to live like the Wherrys, so ugly, to be at the mercy of
everybody.
“Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.”
One could not do it in real life. How dreary and hopeless it made her!
Nor could one turn the other cheek. Theresa slapped Ursula on the face.
Ursula, in a mood of Christian humility, silently presented the other
side of her face. Which Theresa, in exasperation at the challenge, also
hit. Whereupon Ursula, with boiling heart, went meekly away.
But anger, and deep, writhing shame tortured her, so she was not easy
till she had again quarrelled with Theresa and had almost shaken her
sister’s head off.
“That’ll teach _you,”_ she said, grimly.
And she went away, unchristian but clean.
There was something unclean and degrading about this humble side of
Christianity. Ursula suddenly revolted to the other extreme.
“I hate the Wherrys, and I wish they were dead. Why does my father
leave us in the lurch like this, making us be poor and insignificant?
Why is he not more? If we had a father as he ought to be, he would be
Earl William Brangwen, and I should be the Lady Ursula? What right have
_I_ to be poor? crawling along the lane like vermin? If I had my rights
I should be seated on horseback in a green riding-habit, and my groom
would be behind me. And I should stop at the gates of the cottages, and
enquire of the cottage woman who came out with a child in her arms, how
did her husband, who had hurt his foot. And I would pat the flaxen head
of the child, stooping from my horse, and I would give her a shilling
from my purse, and order nourishing food to be sent from the hall to
the cottage.”
So she rode in her pride. And sometimes, she dashed into flames to
rescue a forgotten child; or she dived into the canal locks and
supported a boy who was seized with cramp; or she swept up a toddling
infant from the feet of a runaway horse: always imaginatively, of
course.
But in the end there returned the poignant yearning from the Sunday
world. As she went down in the morning from Cossethay and saw Ilkeston
smoking blue and tender upon its hill, then her heart surged with
far-off words:
“Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem—how often would I have gathered thy children
together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would
not—”
The passion rose in her for Christ, for the gathering under the wings
of security and warmth. But how did it apply to the weekday world? What
could it mean, but that Christ should clasp her to his breast, as a
mother clasps her child? And oh, for Christ, for him who could hold her
to his breast and lose her there. Oh, for the breast of man, where she
should have refuge and bliss for ever! All her senses quivered with
passionate yearning.
Vaguely she knew that Christ meant something else: that in the
vision-world He spoke of Jerusalem, something that did not exist in the
everyday world. It was not houses and factories He would hold in His
bosom: nor householders nor factory-workers nor poor people: but
something that had no part in the weekday world, nor seen nor touched
with weekday hands and eyes.
Yet she _must_ have it in weekday terms—she must. For all her life was
a weekday life, now, this was the whole. So he must gather her body to
his breast, that was strong with a broad bone, and which sounded with
the beating of the heart, and which was warm with the life of which she
partook, the life of the running blood.
So she craved for the breast of the Son of Man, to lie there. And she
was ashamed in her soul, ashamed. For whereas Christ spoke for the
Vision to answer, she answered from the weekday fact. It was a
betrayal, a transference of meaning, from the vision world, to the
matter-of-fact world. So she was ashamed of her religious ecstasy, and
dreaded lest any one should see it.
Early in the year, when the lambs came, and shelters were built of
straw, and on her uncle’s farm the men sat at night with a lantern and
a dog, then again there swept over her this passionate confusion
between the vision world and the weekday world. Again she felt Jesus in
the countryside. Ah, he would lift up the lambs in his arms! Ah, and
she was the lamb. Again, in the morning, going down the lane, she heard
the ewe call, and the lambs came running, shaking and twinkling with
new-born bliss. And she saw them stooping, nuzzling, groping to the
udder, to find the teats, whilst the mother turned her head gravely and
sniffed her own. And they were sucking, vibrating with bliss on their
little, long legs, their throats stretched up, their new bodies
quivering to the stream of blood-warm, loving milk.
Oh, and the bliss, the bliss! She could scarcely tear herself away to
go to school. The little noses nuzzling at the udder, the little bodies
so glad and sure, the little black legs, crooked, the mother standing
still, yielding herself to their quivering attraction—then the mother
walked calmly away.
Jesus—the vision world—the everyday world—all mixed inextricably in a
confusion of pain and bliss. It was almost agony, the confusion, the
inextricability. Jesus, the vision, speaking to her, who was
non-visionary! And she would take his words of the spirit and make them
to pander to her own carnality.
This was a shame to her. The confusing of the spirit world with the
material world, in her own soul, degraded her. She answered the call of
the spirit in terms of immediate, everyday desire.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give
you rest.”
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning
to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really, and lay her head
on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a
child!
All the time she walked in a confused heat of religious yearning. She
wanted Jesus to love her deliciously, to take her sensuous offering, to
give her sensuous response. For weeks she went in a muse of enjoyment.
And all the time she knew underneath that she was playing false,
accepting the passion of Jesus for her own physical satisfaction. But
she was in such a daze, such a tangle. How could she get free?
She hated herself, she wanted to trample on herself, destroy herself.
How could one become free? She hated religion, because it lent itself
to her confusion. She abused everything. She wanted to become hard,
indifferent, brutally callous to everything but just the immediate
need, the immediate satisfaction. To have a yearning towards Jesus,
only that she might use him to pander to her own soft sensation, use
him as a means of reacting upon herself, maddened her in the end. There
was then no Jesus, no sentimentality. With all the bitter hatred of
helplessness she hated sentimentality.
At this period came the young Skrebensky. She was nearly sixteen years
old, a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent, yet lapsing into
unreserved expansiveness now and then, when she seemed to give away her
whole soul, but when in fact she only made another counterfeit of her
soul for outward presentation. She was sensitive in the extreme, always
tortured, always affecting a callous indifference to screen herself.
She was at this time a nuisance on the face of the earth, with her
spasmodic passion and her slumberous torment. She seemed to go with all
her soul in her hands, yearning, to the other person. Yet all the
while, deep at the bottom of her was a childish antagonism of distrust.
She thought she loved everybody and believed in everybody. But because
she could not love herself nor believe in herself, she mistrusted
everybody with the mistrust of a serpent or a captured bird. Her starts
of revulsion and hatred were more inevitable than her impulses of love.
So she wrestled through her dark days of confusion, soulless,
uncreated, unformed.
One evening, as she was studying in the parlour, her head buried in her
hands, she heard new voices in the kitchen speaking. At once, from its
apathy, her excitable spirit started and strained to listen. It seemed
to crouch, to lurk under cover, tense, glaring forth unwilling to be
seen.
There were two strange men’s voices, one soft and candid, veiled with
soft candour, the other veiled with easy mobility, running quickly.
Ursula sat quite tense, shocked out of her studies, lost. She listened
all the time to the sound of the voices, scarcely heeding the words.
The first speaker was her Uncle Tom. She knew the naïve candour
covering the girding and savage misery of his soul. Who was the other
speaker? Whose voice ran on so easy, yet with an inflamed pulse? It
seemed to hasten and urge her forward, that other voice.
“I remember you,” the young man’s voice was saying. “I remember you
from the first time I saw you, because of your dark eyes and fair
face.”
Mrs. Brangwen laughed, shy and pleased.
“You were a curly-headed little lad,” she said.
“Was I? Yes, I know. They were very proud of my curls.”
And a laugh ran to silence.
“You were a very well-mannered lad, I remember,” said her father.
“Oh! did I ask you to stay the night? I always used to ask people to
stay the night. I believe it was rather trying for my mother.”
There was a general laugh. Ursula rose. She had to go.
At the click of the latch everybody looked round. The girl hung in the
doorway, seized with a moment’s fierce confusion. She was going to be
good-looking. Now she had an attractive gawkiness, as she hung a
moment, not knowing how to carry her shoulders. Her dark hair was tied
behind, her yellow-brown eyes shone without direction. Behind her, in
the parlour, was the soft light of a lamp upon open books.
A superficial readiness took her to her Uncle Tom, who kissed her,
greeting her with warmth, making a show of intimate possession of her,
and at the same time leaving evident his own complete detachment.
But she wanted to turn to the stranger. He was standing back a little,
waiting. He was a young man with very clear greyish eyes that waited
until they were called upon, before they took expression.
Something in his self-possessed waiting moved her, and she broke into a
confused, rather beautiful laugh as she gave him her hand, catching her
breath like an excited child. His hand closed over hers very close,
very near, he bowed, and his eyes were watching her with some
attention. She felt proud—her spirit leapt to life.
“You don’t know Mr. Skrebensky, Ursula,” came her Uncle Tom’s intimate
voice. She lifted her face with an impulsive flash to the stranger, as
if to declare a knowledge, laughing her palpitating, excited laugh.
His eyes became confused with roused lights, his detached attention
changed to a readiness for her. He was a young man of twenty-one, with
a slender figure and soft brown hair brushed up on the German fashion
straight from his brow.
“Are you staying long?” she asked.
“I’ve got a month’s leave,” he said, glancing at Tom Brangwen. “But
I’ve various places I must go to—put in some time here and there.”
He brought her a strong sense of the outer world. It was as if she were
set on a hill and could feel vaguely the whole world lying spread
before her.
“What have you a month’s leave from?” she asked.
“I’m in the Engineers—in the Army.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, glad.
“We’re taking _you_ away from your studies,” said her Uncle Tom.
“Oh, no,” she replied quickly.
Skrebensky laughed, young and inflammable.
“She won’t wait to be taken away,” said her father. But that seemed
clumsy. She wished he would leave her to say her own things.
“Don’t you like study?” asked Skrebensky, turning to her, putting the
question from his own case.
“I like some things,” said Ursula. “I like Latin and French—and
grammar.”
He watched her, and all his being seemed attentive to her, then he
shook his head.
“I don’t,” he said. “They say all the brains of the army are in the
Engineers. I think that’s why I joined them—to get the credit of other
people’s brains.”
He said this quizzically and with chagrin. And she became alert to him.
It interested her. Whether he had brains or not, he was interesting.
His directness attracted her, his independent motion. She was aware of
the movement of his life over against hers.
“I don’t think brains matter,” she said.
“What does matter then?” came her Uncle Tom’s intimate, caressing,
half-jeering voice.
She turned to him.
“It matters whether people have courage or not,” she said.
“Courage for what?” asked her uncle.
“For everything.”
Tom Brangwen gave a sharp little laugh. The mother and father sat
silent, with listening faces. Skrebensky waited. She was speaking for
him.
“Everything’s nothing,” laughed her uncle.
She disliked him at that moment.
“She doesn’t practice what she preaches,” said her father, stirring in
his chair and crossing one leg over the other. “She has courage for
mighty little.”
But she would not answer. Skrebensky sat still, waiting. His face was
irregular, almost ugly, flattish, with a rather thick nose. But his
eyes were pellucid, strangely clear, his brown hair was soft and thick
as silk, he had a slight moustache. His skin was fine, his figure
slight, beautiful. Beside him, her Uncle Tom looked full-blown, her
father seemed uncouth. Yet he reminded her of her father, only he was
finer, and he seemed to be shining. And his face was almost ugly.
He seemed simply acquiescent in the fact of his own being, as if he
were beyond any change or question. He was himself. There was a sense
of fatality about him that fascinated her. He made no effort to prove
himself to other people. Let it be accepted for what it was, his own
being. In its isolation it made no excuse or explanation for itself.
So he seemed perfectly, even fatally established, he did not ask to be
rendered before he could exist, before he could have relationship with
another person.
This attracted Ursula very much. She was so used to unsure people who
took on a new being with every new influence. Her Uncle Tom was always
more or less what the other person would have him. In consequence, one
never knew the real Uncle Tom, only a fluid, unsatisfactory flux with a
more or less consistent appearance.
But, let Skrebensky do what he would, betray himself entirely, he
betrayed himself always upon his own responsibility. He permitted no
question about himself. He was irrevocable in his isolation.
So Ursula thought him wonderful, he was so finely constituted, and so
distinct, self-contained, self-supporting. This, she said to herself,
was a gentleman, he had a nature like fate, the nature of an
aristocrat.
She laid hold of him at once for her dreams. Here was one such as those
Sons of God who saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. He was
no son of Adam. Adam was servile. Had not Adam been driven cringing out
of his native place, had not the human race been a beggar ever since,
seeking its own being? But Anton Skrebensky could not beg. He was in
possession of himself, of that, and no more. Other people could not
really give him anything nor take anything from him. His soul stood
alone.
She knew that her mother and father acknowledged him. The house was
changed. There had been a visit paid to the house. Once three angels
stood in Abraham’s doorway, and greeted him, and stayed and ate with
him, leaving his household enriched for ever when they went.
The next day she went down to the Marsh according to invitation. The
two men were not come home. Then, looking through the window, she saw
the dogcart drive up, and Skrebensky leapt down. She saw him draw
himself together, jump, laugh to her uncle, who was driving, then come
towards her to the house. He was so spontaneous and revealed in his
movements. He was isolated within his own clear, fine atmosphere, and
as still as if fated.
His resting in his own fate gave him an appearance of indolence, almost
of languor: he made no exuberant movement. When he sat down, he seemed
to go loose, languid.
“We are a little late,” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“We went to Derby to see a friend of my father’s.”
“Who?”
It was an adventure to her to put direct questions and get plain
answers. She knew she might do it with this man.
“Why, he is a clergyman too—he is my guardian—one of them.”
Ursula knew that Skrebensky was an orphan.
“Where is really your home now?” she asked.
“My home?—I wonder. I am very fond of my colonel—Colonel Hepburn: then
there are my aunts: but my real home, I suppose, is the army.”
“Do you like being on your own?”
His clear, greenish-grey eyes rested on her a moment, and, as he
considered, he did not see her.
“I suppose so,” he said. “You see my father—well, he was never
acclimatized here. He wanted—I don’t know what he wanted—but it was a
strain. And my mother—I always knew she was too good to me. I could
feel her being too good to me—my mother! Then I went away to school so
early. And I must say, the outside world was always more naturally a
home to me than the vicarage—I don’t know why.”
“Do you feel like a bird blown out of its own latitude?” she asked,
using a phrase she had met.
“No, no. I find everything very much as I like it.”
He seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world, a sense
of distances and large masses of humanity. It drew her as a scent draws
a bee from afar. But also it hurt her.
It was summer, and she wore cotton frocks. The third time he saw her
she had on a dress with fine blue-and-white stripes, with a white
collar, and a large white hat. It suited her golden, warm complexion.
“I like you best in that dress,” he said, standing with his head
slightly on one side, and appreciating her in a perceiving, critical
fashion.
She was thrilled with a new life. For the first time she was in love
with a vision of herself: she saw as it were a fine little reflection
of herself in his eyes. And she must act up to this: she must be
beautiful. Her thoughts turned swiftly to clothes, her passion was to
make a beautiful appearance. Her family looked on in amazement at the
sudden transformation of Ursula. She became elegant, really elegant, in
figured cotton frocks she made for herself, and hats she bent to her
fancy. An inspiration was upon her.
He sat with a sort of languor in her grandmother’s rocking chair,
rocking slowly, languidly, backward and forward, as Ursula talked to
him.
“You are not poor, are you?” she said.
“Poor in money? I have about a hundred and fifty a year of my own—so I
am poor or rich, as you like. I am poor enough, in fact.”
“But you will earn money?”
“I shall have my pay—I have my pay now. I’ve got my commission. That is
another hundred and fifty.”
“You will have more, though?”
“I shan’t have more than £ 200 a year for ten years to come. I shall
always be poor, if I have to live on my pay.”
“Do you mind it?”
“Being poor? Not now—not very much. I may later. People—the officers,
are good to me. Colonel Hepburn has a sort of fancy for me—he is a rich
man, I suppose.”
A chill went over Ursula. Was he going to sell himself in some way?
“Is Colonel Hepburn married?”
“Yes—with two daughters.”
But she was too proud at once to care whether Colonel Hepburn’s
daughter wanted to marry him or not.
There came a silence. Gudrun entered, and Skrebensky still rocked
languidly on the chair.
“You look very lazy,” said Gudrun.
“I am lazy,” he answered.
“You look really floppy,” she said.
“I am floppy,” he answered.
“Can’t you stop?” asked Gudrun.
“No—it’s the _perpetuum mobile.”_
“You look as if you hadn’t a bone in your body.”
“That’s how I like to feel.”
“I don’t admire your taste.”
“That’s my misfortune.”
And he rocked on.
Gudrun seated herself behind him, and as he rocked back, she caught his
hair between her finger and thumb, so that it tugged him as he swung
forward again. He took no notice. There was only the sound of the
rockers on the floor. In silence, like a crab, Gudrun caught a strand
of his hair each time he rocked back. Ursula flushed, and sat in some
pain. She saw the irritation gathering on his brow.
At last he leapt up, suddenly, like a steel spring going off, and stood
on the hearthrug.
“Damn it, _why_ can’t I rock?” he asked petulantly, fiercely.
Ursula loved him for his sudden, steel-like start out of the languor.
He stood on the hearthrug fuming, his eyes gleaming with anger.
Gudrun laughed in her deep, mellow fashion.
“Men don’t rock themselves,” she said.
“Girls don’t pull men’s hair,” he said.
Gudrun laughed again.
Ursula sat amused, but waiting. And he knew Ursula was waiting for him.
It roused his blood. He had to go to her, to follow her call.
Once he drove her to Derby in the dog-cart. He belonged to the horsey
set of the sappers. They had lunch in an inn, and went through the
market, pleased with everything. He bought her a copy of _Wuthering
Heights_ from a bookstall. Then they found a little fair in progress
and she said:
“My father used to take me in the swingboats.”
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” she said.
“Would you like to go now?”
“Love it,” she said, though she was afraid. But the prospect of doing
an unusual, exciting thing was attractive to her.
He went straight to the stand, paid the money, and helped her to mount.
He seemed to ignore everything but just what he was doing. Other people
were mere objects of indifference to him. She would have liked to hang
back, but she was more ashamed to retreat from him than to expose
herself to the crowd or to dare the swingboat. His eyes laughed, and
standing before her with his sharp, sudden figure, he set the boat
swinging. She was not afraid, she was thrilled. His colour flushed, his
eyes shone with a roused light, and she looked up at him, her face like
a flower in the sun, so bright and attractive. So they rushed through
the bright air, up at the sky as if flung from a catapult, then falling
terribly back. She loved it. The motion seemed to fan their blood to
fire, they laughed, feeling the flames.
After the swingboats, they went on the roundabouts to calm down, he
twisting astride on his jerky wooden steed towards her, and always
seeming at his ease, enjoying himself. A zest of antagonism to the
convention made him fully himself. As they sat on the whirling
carousal, with the music grinding out, she was aware of the people on
the earth outside, and it seemed that he and she were riding carelessly
over the faces of the crowd, riding for ever buoyantly, proudly,
gallantly over the upturned faces of the crowd, moving on a high level,
spurning the common mass.
When they must descend and walk away, she was unhappy, feeling like a
giant suddenly cut down to ordinary level, at the mercy of the mob.
They left the fair, to return for the dog-cart. Passing the large
church, Ursula must look in. But the whole interior was filled with
scaffolding, fallen stone and rubbish were heaped on the floor, bits of
plaster crunched underfoot, and the place re-echoed to the calling of
secular voices and to blows of the hammer.
She had come to plunge in the utter gloom and peace for a moment,
bringing all her yearning, that had returned on her uncontrolled after
the reckless riding over the face of the crowd, in the fair. After
pride, she wanted comfort, solace, for pride and scorn seemed to hurt
her most of all.
And she found the immemorial gloom full of bits of falling plaster, and
dust of floating plaster, smelling of old lime, having scaffolding and
rubbish heaped about, dust cloths over the altar.
“Let us sit down a minute,” she said.
They sat unnoticed in the back pew, in the gloom, and she watched the
dirty, disorderly work of bricklayers and plasterers. Workmen in heavy
boots walking grinding down the aisles, calling out in a vulgar accent:
“Hi, mate, has them corner mouldin’s come?”
There were shouts of coarse answer from the roof of the church. The
place echoed desolate.
Skrebensky sat close to her. Everything seemed wonderful, if dreadful
to her, the world tumbling into ruins, and she and he clambering
unhurt, lawless over the face of it all. He sat close to her, touching
her, and she was aware of his influence upon her. But she was glad. It
excited her to feel the press of him upon her, as if his being were
urging her to something.
As they drove home, he sat near to her. And when he swayed to the cart,
he swayed in a voluptuous, lingering way, against her, lingering as he
swung away to recover balance. Without speaking, he took her hand
across, under the wrap, and with his unseeing face lifted to the road,
his soul intent, he began with his one hand to unfasten the buttons of
her glove, to push back her glove from her hand, carefully laying bare
her hand. And the close-working, instinctive subtlety of his fingers
upon her hand sent the young girl mad with voluptuous delight. His hand
was so wonderful, intent as a living creature skilfully pushing and
manipulating in the dark underworld, removing her glove and laying bare
her palm, her fingers. Then his hand closed over hers, so firm, so
close, as if the flesh knitted to one thing his hand and hers.
Meanwhile his face watched the road and the ears of the horse, he drove
with steady attention through the villages, and she sat beside him,
rapt, glowing, blinded with a new light. Neither of them spoke. In
outward attention they were entirely separate. But between them was the
compact of his flesh with hers, in the hand-clasp.
Then, in a strange voice, affecting nonchalance and superficiality he
said to her:
“Sitting in the church there reminded me of Ingram.”
“Who is Ingram?” she asked.
She also affected calm superficiality. But she knew that something
forbidden was coming.
“He is one of the other men with me down at Chatham—a subaltern—but a
year older than I am.”
“And why did the church remind you of him?”
“Well, he had a girl in Rochester, and they always sat in a particular
corner in the cathedral for their love-making.”
“How nice!” she cried, impulsively.
They misunderstood each other.
“It had its disadvantages though. The verger made a row about it.”
“What a shame! Why shouldn’t they sit in a cathedral?”
“I suppose they all think it a profanity—except you and Ingram and the
girl.”
“I don’t think it a profanity—I think it’s right, to make love in a
cathedral.”
She said this almost defiantly, in despite of her own soul.
He was silent.
“And was she nice?”
“Who? Emily? Yes, she was rather nice. She was a milliner, and she
wouldn’t be seen in the streets with Ingram. It was rather sad, really,
because the verger spied on them, and got to know their names and then
made a regular row. It was a common tale afterwards.”
“What did she do?”
“She went to London, into a big shop. Ingram still goes up to see her.”
“Does he love her?”
“It’s a year and a half he’s been with her now.”
“What was she like?”
“Emily? Little, shy-violet sort of girl with nice eyebrows.”
Ursula meditated this. It seemed like real romance of the outer world.
“Do all men have lovers?” she asked, amazed at her own temerity. But
her hand was still fastened with his, and his face still had the same
unchanging fixity of outward calm.
“They’re always mentioning some amazing fine woman or other, and
getting drunk to talk about her. Most of them dash up to London the
moment they are free.”
“What for?”
“To some amazing fine woman or other.”
“What sort of woman?”
“Various. Her name changes pretty frequently, as a rule. One of the
fellows is a perfect maniac. He keeps a suit-case always ready, and the
instant he is at liberty, he bolts with it to the station, and changes
in the train. No matter who is in the carriage, off he whips his tunic,
and performs at least the top half of his toilet.”
Ursula quivered and wondered.
“Why is he in such a hurry?” she asked.
Her throat was becoming hard and difficult.
“He’s got a woman in his mind, I suppose.”
She was chilled, hardened. And yet this world of passions and
lawlessness was fascinating to her. It seemed to her a splendid
recklessness. Her adventure in life was beginning. It seemed very
splendid.
That evening she stayed at the Marsh till after dark, and Skrebensky
escorted her home. For she could not go away from him. And she was
waiting, waiting for something more.
In the warm of the early night, with the shadows new about them, she
felt in another, harder, more beautiful, less personal world. Now a new
state should come to pass.
He walked near to her, and with the same, silent, intent approach put
his arm round her waist, and softly, very softly, drew her to him, till
his arm was hard and pressed in upon her; she seemed to be carried
along, floating, her feet scarce touching the ground, borne upon the
firm, moving surface of his body, upon whose side she seemed to lie, in
a delicious swoon of motion. And whilst she swooned, his face bent
nearer to her, her head was leaned on his shoulder, she felt his warm
breath on her face. Then softly, oh softly, so softly that she seemed
to faint away, his lips touched her cheek, and she drifted through
strands of heat and darkness.
Still she waited, in her swoon and her drifting, waited, like the
Sleeping Beauty in the story. She waited, and again his face was bent
to hers, his lips came warm to her face, their footsteps lingered and
ceased, they stood still under the trees, whilst his lips waited on her
face, waited like a butterfly that does not move on a flower. She
pressed her breast a little nearer to him, he moved, put both his arms
round her, and drew her close.
And then, in the darkness, he bent to her mouth, softly, and touched
her mouth with his mouth. She was afraid, she lay still on his arm,
feeling his lips on her lips. She kept still, helpless. Then his mouth
drew near, pressing open her mouth, a hot, drenching surge rose within
her, she opened her lips to him, in pained, poignant eddies she drew
him nearer, she let him come farther, his lips came and surging,
surging, soft, oh soft, yet oh, like the powerful surge of water,
irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away.
She heard him breathing heavily, strangely, beside her. A terrible and
magnificent sense of his strangeness possessed her. But she shrank a
little now, within herself. Hesitating, they continued to walk on,
quivering like shadows under the ash trees of the hill, where her
grandfather had walked with his daffodils to make his proposal, and
where her mother had gone with her young husband, walking close upon
him as Ursula was now walking upon Skrebensky.
Ursula was aware of the dark limbs of the trees stretching overhead,
clothed with leaves, and of fine ash leaves tressing the summer night.
They walked with their bodies moving in complex unity, close together.
He held her hand, and they went the long way round by the road, to be
farther. Always she felt as if she were supported off her feet, as if
her feet were light as little breezes in motion.
He would kiss her again—but not again that night with the same
deep—reaching kiss. She was aware now, aware of what a kiss might be.
And so, it was more difficult to come to him.
She went to bed feeling all warm with electric warmth, as if the gush
of dawn were within her, upholding her. And she slept deeply, sweetly,
oh, so sweetly. In the morning she felt sound as an ear of wheat,
fragrant and firm and full.
They continued to be lovers, in the first wondering state of
unrealization. Ursula told nobody; she was entirely lost in her own
world.
Yet some strange affectation made her seek for a spurious confidence.
She had at school a quiet, meditative, serious-souled friend called
Ethel, and to Ethel must Ursula confide the story. Ethel listened
absorbedly, with bowed, unbetraying head, whilst Ursula told her
secret. Oh, it was so lovely, his gentle, delicate way of making love!
Ursula talked like a practiced lover.
“Do you think,” asked Ursula, “it is wicked to let a man kiss
you—_real_ kisses, not flirting?”
“I should think,” said Ethel, “it depends.”
“He kissed me under the ash trees on Cossethay hill—do you think it was
wrong?”
“When?”
“On Thursday night when he was seeing me home—but real kisses—real—. He
is an officer in the army.”
“What time was it?” asked the deliberate Ethel.
“I don’t know—about half-past nine.”
There was a pause.
“I think it’s wrong,” said Ethel, lifting her head with impatience.
“You don’t _know_ him.”
She spoke with some contempt.
“Yes, I do. He is half a Pole, and a Baron too. In England he is
equivalent to a Lord. My grandmother was his father’s friend.”
But the two friends were hostile. It was as if Ursula _wanted_ to
divide herself from her acquaintances, in asserting her connection with
Anton, as she now called him.
He came a good deal to Cossethay, because her mother was fond of him.
Anna Brangwen became something of a _grande dame_ with Skrebensky, very
calm, taking things for granted.
“Aren’t the children in bed?” cried Ursula petulantly, as she came in
with the young man.
“They will be in bed in half an hour,” said the mother.
“There is no peace,” cried Ursula.
“The children must _live,_ Ursula,” said her mother.
And Skrebensky was against Ursula in this. Why should she be so
insistent?
But then, as Ursula knew, he did not have the perpetual tyranny of
young children about him. He treated her mother with great courtliness,
to which Mrs. Brangwen returned an easy, friendly hospitality.
Something pleased the girl in her mother’s calm assumption of state. It
seemed impossible to abate Mrs. Brangwen’s position. She could never be
beneath anyone in public relation. Between Brangwen and Skrebensky
there was an unbridgeable silence. Sometimes the two men made a slight
conversation, but there was no interchange. Ursula rejoiced to see her
father retreating into himself against the young man.
She was proud of Skrebensky in the house. His lounging, languorous
indifference irritated her and yet cast a spell over her. She knew it
was the outcome of a spirit of _laisser-aller_ combined with profound
young vitality. Yet it irritated her deeply.
Notwithstanding, she was proud of him as he lounged in his lambent
fashion in her home, he was so attentive and courteous to her mother
and to herself all the time. It was wonderful to have his awareness in
the room. She felt rich and augmented by it, as if she were the
positive attraction and he the flow towards her. And his courtesy and
his agreement might be all her mother’s, but the lambent flicker of his
body was for herself. She held it.
She must ever prove her power.
“I meant to show you my little wood-carving,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s not worth showing, that,” said her father.
“Would you like to see it?” she asked, leaning towards the door.
And his body had risen from the chair, though his face seemed to want
to agree with her parents.
“It is in the shed,” she said.
And he followed her out of the door, whatever his feelings might be.
In the shed they played at kisses, really played at kisses. It was a
delicious, exciting game. She turned to him, her face all laughing,
like a challenge. And he accepted the challenge at once. He twined his
hand full of her hair, and gently, with his hand wrapped round with
hair behind her head, gradually brought her face nearer to his, whilst
she laughed breathless with challenge, and his eyes gleamed with
answer, with enjoyment of the game. And he kissed her, asserting his
will over her, and she kissed him back, asserting her deliberate
enjoyment of him. Daring and reckless and dangerous they knew it was,
their game, each playing with fire, not with love. A sort of defiance
of all the world possessed her in it—she would kiss him just because
she wanted to. And a dare-devilry in him, like a cynicism, a cut at
everything he pretended to serve, retaliated in him.
She was very beautiful then, so wide opened, so radiant, so
palpitating, exquisitely vulnerable and poignantly, wrongly, throwing
herself to risk. It roused a sort of madness in him. Like a flower
shaking and wide-opened in the sun, she tempted him and challenged him,
and he accepted the challenge, something went fixed in him. And under
all her laughing, poignant recklessness was the quiver of tears. That
almost sent him mad, mad with desire, with pain, whose only issue was
through possession of her body.
So, shaken, afraid, they went back to her parents in the kitchen, and
dissimulated. But something was roused in both of them that they could
not now allay. It intensified and heightened their senses, they were
more vivid, and powerful in their being. But under it all was a
poignant sense of transience. It was a magnificent self-assertion on
the part of both of them, he asserted himself before her, he felt
himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted
herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence
infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of them get from
such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in
contradistinction to all the rest of life? Wherein was something finite
and sad, for the human soul at its maximum wants a sense of the
infinite.
Nevertheless, it was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the
passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined
against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male,
she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one
moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme
contradistinction to the male.
The next afternoon, when he came, prowling, she went with him across to
the church. Her father was gradually gathering in anger against him,
her mother was hardening in anger against her. But the parents were
naturally tolerant in action.
They went together across the churchyard, Ursula and Skrebensky, and
ran to hiding in the church. It was dimmer in there than the sunny
afternoon outside, but the mellow glow among the bowed stone was very
sweet. The windows burned in ruby and in blue, they made magnificent
arras to their bower of secret stone.
“What a perfect place for a _rendezvous,”_ he said, in a hushed voice,
glancing round.
She too glanced round the familiar interior. The dimness and stillness
chilled her. But her eyes lit up with daring. Here, here she would
assert her indomitable gorgeous female self, here. Here she would open
her female flower like a flame, in this dimness that was more
passionate than light.
They hung apart a moment, then wilfully turned to each other for the
desired contact. She put her arms round him, she cleaved her body to
his, and with her hands pressed upon his shoulders, on his back, she
seemed to feel right through him, to know his young, tense body right
through. And it was so fine, so hard, yet so exquisitely subject and
under her control. She reached him her mouth and drank his full kiss,
drank it fuller and fuller.
And it was so good, it was very, very good. She seemed to be filled
with his kiss, filled as if she had drunk strong, glowing sunshine. She
glowed all inside, the sunshine seemed to beat upon her heart
underneath, she had drunk so beautifully.
She drew away, and looked at him radiant, exquisitely, glowingly
beautiful, and satisfied, but radiant as an illumined cloud.
To him this was bitter, that she was so radiant and satisfied. She
laughed upon him, blind to him, so full of her own bliss, never
doubting but that he was the same as she was. And radiant as an angel
she went with him out of the church, as if her feet were beams of light
that walked on flowers for footsteps.
He went beside her, his soul clenched, his body unsatisfied. Was she
going to make this easy triumph over him? For him, there was now no
self-bliss, only pain and confused anger.
It was high summer, and the hay-harvest was almost over. It would be
finished on Saturday. On Saturday, however, Skrebensky was going away.
He could not stay any longer.
Having decided to go he became very tender and loving to her, kissing
her gently, with such soft, sweet, insidious closeness that they were
both of them intoxicated.
The very last Friday of his stay he met her coming out of school, and
took her to tea in the town. Then he had a motor-car to drive her home.
Her excitement at riding in a motor-car was greatest of all. He too was
very proud of this last _coup_. He saw Ursula kindle and flare up to
the romance of the situation. She raised her head like a young horse
snuffing with wild delight.
The car swerved round a corner, and Ursula was swung against
Skrebensky. The contact made her aware of him. With a swift, foraging
impulse she sought for his hand and clasped it in her own, so close, so
combined, as if they were two children.
The wind blew in on Ursula’s face, the mud flew in a soft, wild rush
from the wheels, the country was blackish green, with the silver of new
hay here and there, and masses of trees under a silver-gleaming sky.
Her hand tightened on his with a new consciousness, troubled. They did
not speak for some time, but sat, hand-fast, with averted, shining
faces.
And every now and then the car swung her against him. And they waited
for the motion to bring them together. Yet they stared out of the
windows, mute.
She saw the familiar country racing by. But now, it was no familiar
country, it was wonderland. There was the Hemlock Stone standing on its
grassy hill. Strange it looked on this wet, early summer evening,
remote, in a magic land. Some rooks were flying out of the trees.
Ah, if only she and Skrebensky could get out, dismount into this
enchanted land where nobody had ever been before! Then they would be
enchanted people, they would put off the dull, customary self. If she
were wandering there, on that hill-slope under a silvery, changing sky,
in which many rooks melted like hurrying showers of blots! If they
could walk past the wetted hay-swaths, smelling the early evening, and
pass in to the wood where the honeysuckle scent was sweet on the cold
tang in the air, and showers of drops fell when one brushed a bough,
cold and lovely on the face!
But she was here with him in the car, close to him, and the wind was
rushing on her lifted, eager face, blowing back the hair. He turned and
looked at her, at her face clean as a chiselled thing, her hair
chiselled back by the wind, her fine nose keen and lifted.
It was agony to him, seeing her swift and clean-cut and virgin. He
wanted to kill himself, and throw his detested carcase at her feet. His
desire to turn round on himself and rend himself was an agony to him.
Suddenly she glanced at him. He seemed to be crouching towards her,
reaching, he seemed to wince between the brows. But instantly, seeing
her lighted eyes and radiant face, his expression changed, his old
reckless laugh shone to her. She pressed his hand in utter delight, and
he abided. And suddenly she stooped and kissed his hand, bent her head
and caught it to her mouth, in generous homage. And the blood burned in
him. Yet he remained still, he made no move.
She started. They were swinging into Cossethay. Skrebensky was going to
leave her. But it was all so magic, her cup was so full of bright wine,
her eyes could only shine.
He tapped and spoke to the man. The car swung up by the yew trees. She
gave him her hand and said good-bye, naïve and brief as a schoolgirl.
And she stood watching him go, her face shining. The fact of his
driving on meant nothing to her, she was so filled by her own bright
ecstacy. She did not see him go, for she was filled with light, which
was of him. Bright with an amazing light as she was, how could she miss
him.
In her bedroom she threw her arms in the air in clear pain of
magnificence. Oh, it was her transfiguration, she was beyond herself.
She wanted to fling herself into all the hidden brightness of the air.
It was there, it was there, if she could but meet it.
But the next day she knew he had gone. Her glory had partly died
down—but never from her memory. It was too real. Yet it was gone by,
leaving a wistfulness. A deeper yearning came into her soul, a new
reserve.
She shrank from touch and question. She was very proud, but very new,
and very sensitive. Oh, that no one should lay hands on her!
She was happier running on by herself. Oh, it was a joy to run along
the lanes without seeing things, yet being with them. It was such a joy
to be alone with all one’s riches.
The holidays came, when she was free. She spent most of her time
running on by herself, curled up in a squirrel-place in the garden,
lying in a hammock in the coppice, while the birds came near—near—so
near. Oh, in rainy weather, she flitted to the Marsh, and lay hidden
with her book in a hay-loft.
All the time, she dreamed of him, sometimes definitely, but when she
was happiest, only vaguely. He was the warm colouring of her dreams, he
was the hot blood beating within them.
When she was less happy, out of sorts, she pondered over his
appearance, his clothes, the buttons with his regimental badge, which
he had given her. Or she tried to imagine his life in barracks. Or she
conjured up a vision of herself as she appeared in his eyes.
His birthday was in August, and she spent some pains on making him a
cake. She felt that it would not be in good taste for her to give him a
present.
Their correspondence was brief, mostly an exchange of post-cards, not
at all frequent. But with her cake she must send him a letter.
_“Dear Anton. The sunshine has come back specially for your birthday, I
think.
I made the cake myself, and wish you many happy returns of the day.
Don’t eat it if it is not good. Mother hopes you will come and see
us when you are near enough._
_“I am
“Your Sincere Friend,
“Ursula Brangwen.”_
It bored her to write a letter even to him. After all, writing words on
paper had nothing to do with him and her.
The fine weather had set in, the cutting machine went on from dawn till
sunset, chattering round the fields. She heard from Skrebensky; he too
was on duty in the country, on Salisbury Plain. He was now a second
lieutenant in a Field Troop. He would have a few days off shortly, and
would come to the Marsh for the wedding.
Fred Brangwen was going to marry a schoolmistress out of Ilkeston as
soon as corn-harvest was at an end.
The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the
corn-harvest. To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest
purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue
and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering
flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant,
almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were
like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red
button-chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little
chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a
drunken dance.
Then her Uncle Tom appeared, always like the cynical Bacchus in the
picture. He would have a jolly wedding, a harvest supper and a wedding
feast in one: a tent in the home close, and a band for dancing, and a
great feast out of doors.
Fred demurred, but Tom must be satisfied. Also Laura, a handsome,
clever girl, the bride, she also must have a great and jolly feast. It
appealed to her educated sense. She had been to Salisbury Training
College, knew folk-songs and morris-dancing.
So the preparations were begun, directed by Tom Brangwen. A marquee was
set up on the home close, two large bonfires were prepared. Musicians
were hired, feast made ready.
Skrebensky was to come, arriving in the morning. Ursula had a new white
dress of soft crepe, and a white hat. She liked to wear white. With her
black hair and clear golden skin, she looked southern, or rather
tropical, like a Creole. She wore no colour whatsoever.
She trembled that day as she appeared to go down to the wedding. She
was to be a bridesmaid. Skrebensky would not arrive till afternoon. The
wedding was at two o’clock.
As the wedding-party returned home, Skrebensky stood in the parlour at
the Marsh. Through the window he saw Tom Brangwen, who was best man,
coming up the garden path most elegant in cut-away coat and white slip
and spats, with Ursula laughing on his arm. Tom Brangwen was handsome,
with his womanish colouring and dark eyes and black close-cut
moustache. But there was something subtly coarse and suggestive about
him for all his beauty; his strange, bestial nostrils opened so hard
and wide, and his well-shaped head almost disquieting in its nakedness,
rather bald from the front, and all its soft fulness betrayed.
Skrebensky saw the man rather than the woman. She saw only the slender,
unchangeable youth waiting there inscrutable, like her fate. He was
beyond her, with his loose, slightly horsey appearance, that made him
seem very manly and foreign. Yet his face was smooth and soft and
impressionable. She shook hands with him, and her voice was like the
rousing of a bird startled by the dawn.
“Isn’t it nice,” she cried, “to have a wedding?”
There were bits of coloured confetti lodged on her dark hair.
Again the confusion came over him, as if he were losing himself and
becoming all vague, undefined, inchoate. Yet he wanted to be hard,
manly, horsey. And he followed her.
There was a light tea, and the guests scattered. The real feast was for
the evening. Ursula walked out with Skrebensky through the stackyard to
the fields, and up the embankment to the canal-side.
The new corn-stacks were big and golden as they went by, an army of
white geese marched aside in braggart protest. Ursula was light as a
white ball of down. Skrebensky drifted beside her, indefinite, his old
form loosened, and another self, grey, vague, drifting out as from a
bud. They talked lightly, of nothing.
The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn hedges, on
towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left was the whole black
agitation of colliery and railway and the town which rose on its hill,
the church tower topping all. The round white dot of the clock on the
tower was distinct in the evening light.
That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the grim,
alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the evening, mellow
over the green water-meadows and the winding alder trees beside the
river, and the pale stretches of stubble beyond. There the evening
glowed softly, and even a pee-wit was flapping in solitude and peace.
Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the canal
between. The berries on the hedges were crimson and bright red, above
the leaves. The glow of evening and the wheeling of the solitary
pee-wit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet the shuffling noise
of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the town opposite, and they two
walked the blue strip of water-way, the ribbon of sky between.
He was looking, Ursula thought, very beautiful, because of a flush of
sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how he had learned to
shoe horses and select cattle fit for killing.
“Do you like to be a soldier?” she asked.
“I am not exactly a soldier,” he replied.
“But you only do things for wars,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Would you like to go to war?”
“I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would want to
go.”
A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of potent
unrealities.
“Why would you want to go?”
“I should be doing something, it would be genuine. It’s a sort of
toy-life as it is.”
“But what would you be doing if you went to war?”
“I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger.”
“But you’d only make them to be pulled down again when the armies had
done with them. It seems just as much a game.”
“If you call war a game.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.”
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
“Why is fighting more serious than anything else?” she asked.
“You either kill or get killed—and I suppose it is serious enough,
killing.”
“But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,” she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
“But the result matters,” he said. “It matters whether we settle the
Mahdi or not.”
“Not to you—nor me—we don’t care about Khartoum.”
“You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.”
“But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara—do you?” she replied,
laughing with antagonism.
“_I_ don’t—but we’ve got to back up those who do.
“Why have we?”
“Where is the nation if we don’t?”
“But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the
nation.”
“They might say _they_ weren’t either.”
“Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should
still be myself,” she asserted brilliantly.
“You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d just be a prey to everybody and anybody.”
“How a prey?”
“They’d come and take everything you’d got.”
“Well, they couldn’t take much even then. I don’t care what they take.
I’d rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave
me everything you can buy.”
“That’s because you are a romanticist.”
“Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away,
and people just living in the houses. It’s all so stiff and stupid. I
hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for,
really?”
“I would fight for the nation.”
“For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?”
“I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.”
“But when it didn’t need your services in particular—when there is no
fighting? What would you do then?”
He was irritated.
“I would do what everybody else does.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.”
The answer came in exasperation.
“It seems to me,” she answered, “as if you weren’t anybody—as if there
weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem
like nothing to me.”
They had walked till they had reached a wharf, just above a lock. There
an empty barge, painted with a red and yellow cabin hood, but with a
long, coal-black hold, was lying moored. A man, lean and grimy, was
sitting on a box against the cabin-side by the door, smoking, and
nursing a baby that was wrapped in a drab shawl, and looking into the
glow of evening. A woman bustled out, sent a pail dashing into the
canal, drew her water, and bustled in again. Children’s voices were
heard. A thin blue smoke ascended from the cabin chimney, there was a
smell of cooking.
Ursula, white as a moth, lingered to look. Skrebensky lingered by her.
The man glanced up.
“Good evening,” he called, half impudent, half attracted. He had blue
eyes which glanced impudently from his grimy face.
“Good evening,” said Ursula, delighted. “_Isn’t_ it nice now?”
“Ay,” said the man, “very nice.”
His mouth was red under his ragged, sandy moustache. His teeth were
white as he laughed.
“Oh, but—” stammered Ursula, laughing, “it _is_. Why do you say it as
if it weren’t?”
“’Appen for them as is childt-nursin’ it’s none so rosy.”
“May I look inside your barge?” asked Ursula.
“There’s nobody’ll stop you; you come if you like.”
The barge lay at the opposite bank, at the wharf. It was the _Annabel,_
belonging to J. Ruth of Loughborough. The man watched Ursula closely
from his keen, twinkling eyes. His fair hair was wispy on his grimed
forehead. Two dirty children appeared to see who was talking.
Ursula glanced at the great lock gates. They were shut, and the water
was sounding, spurting and trickling down in the gloom beyond. On this
side the bright water was almost to the top of the gate. She went
boldly across, and round to the wharf.
Stooping from the bank, she peeped into the cabin, where was a red glow
of fire and the shadowy figure of a woman. She _did_ want to go down.
“You’ll mess your frock,” said the man, warningly.
“I’ll be careful,” she answered. “May I come?”
“Ay, come if you like.”
She gathered her skirts, lowered her foot to the side of the boat, and
leapt down, laughing. Coal-dust flew up.
The woman came to the door. She was plump and sandy-haired, young, with
an odd, stubby nose.
“Oh, you _will_ make a mess of yourself,” she cried, surprised and
laughing with a little wonder.
“I did want to see. Isn’t it lovely living on a barge?” asked Ursula.
“I don’t live on one altogether,” said the woman cheerfully.
“She’s got her parlour an’ her plush suite in Loughborough,” said her
husband with just pride.
Ursula peeped into the cabin, where saucepans were boiling and some
dishes were on the table. It was very hot. Then she came out again. The
man was talking to the baby. It was a blue-eyed, fresh-faced thing with
floss of red-gold hair.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.
“It’s a girl—aren’t you a girl, eh?” he shouted at the infant, shaking
his head. Its little face wrinkled up into the oddest, funniest smile.
“Oh!” cried Ursula. “Oh, the dear! Oh, how nice when she laughs!”
“She’ll laugh hard enough,” said the father.
“What is her name?” asked Ursula.
“She hasn’t got a name, she’s not worth one,” said the man. “Are you,
you fag-end o’ nothing?” he shouted to the baby. The baby laughed.
“No we’ve been that busy, we’ve never took her to th’ registry office,”
came the woman’s voice. “She was born on th’ boat here.”
“But you know what you’re going to call her?” asked Ursula.
“We did think of Gladys Em’ly,” said the mother.
“We thought of nowt o’ th’ sort,” said the father.
“Hark at him! What _do_ you want?’ cried the mother in exasperation.
“She’ll be called Annabel after th’ boat she was born on.”
“She’s not, so there,” said the mother, viciously defiant.
The father sat in humorous malice, grinning.
“Well, you’ll see,” he said.
And Ursula could tell, by the woman’s vibrating exasperation, that he
would never give way.
“They’re all nice names,” she said. “Call her Gladys Annabel Emily.”
“Nay, that’s heavy-laden, if you like,” he answered.
“You see!” cried the woman. “He’s that _pig-headed!_”
“And she’s so nice, and she laughs, and she hasn’t even got a name,”
crooned Ursula to the child.
“Let me hold her,” she added.
He yielded her the child, that smelt of babies. But it had such blue,
wide, china blue eyes, and it laughed so oddly, with such a taking
grimace, Ursula loved it. She cooed and talked to it. It was such an
odd, exciting child.
“What’s _your_ name?” the man suddenly asked of her.
“My name is Ursula—Ursula Brangwen,” she replied.
“Ursula!” he exclaimed, dumbfounded.
“There was a Saint Ursula. It’s a very old name,” she added hastily, in
justification.
“Hey, mother!” he called.
There was no answer.
“Pem!” he called, “can’t y’hear?”
“What?” came the short answer.
“What about ‘Ursula’?” he grinned.
“What about _what?_” came the answer, and the woman appeared in the
doorway, ready for combat.
“Ursula—it’s the lass’s name there,” he said, gently.
The woman looked the young girl up and down. Evidently she was
attracted by her slim, graceful, new beauty, her effect of white
elegance, and her tender way of holding the child.
“Why, how do you write it?” the mother asked, awkward now she was
touched. Ursula spelled out her name. The man looked at the woman. A
bright, confused flush came over the mother’s face, a sort of luminous
shyness.
“It’s not a _common_ name, is it!” she exclaimed, excited as by an
adventure.
“Are you goin’ to have it then?” he asked.
“I’d rather have it than Annabel,” she said, decisively.
“An’ I’d rather have it than Gladys Em’ler,” he replied.
There was a silence, Ursula looked up.
“Will you really call her Ursula?” she asked.
“Ursula Ruth,” replied the man, laughing vainly, as pleased as if he
had found something.
It was now Ursula’s turn to be confused.
“It _does_ sound awfully nice,” she said. “I _must_ give her something.
And I haven’t got anything at all.”
She stood in her white dress, wondering, down there in the barge. The
lean man sitting near to her watched her as if she were a strange
being, as if she lit up his face. His eyes smiled on her, boldly, and
yet with exceeding admiration underneath.
“Could I give her my necklace?” she said.
It was the little necklace made of pieces of amethyst and topaz and
pearl and crystal, strung at intervals on a little golden chain, which
her Uncle Tom had given her. She was very fond of it. She looked at it
lovingly, when she had taken it from her neck.
“Is it valuable?” the man asked her, curiously.
“I think so,” she replied.
“The stones and pearl are real; it is worth three or four pounds,” said
Skrebensky from the wharf above. Ursula could tell he disapproved of
her.
“I _must_ give it to your baby—may I?” she said to the bargee.
He flushed, and looked away into the evening.
“Nay,” he said, “it’s not for me to say.”
“What would your father and mother say?” cried the woman curiously,
from the door.
“It is my own,” said Ursula, and she dangled the little glittering
string before the baby. The infant spread its little fingers. But it
could not grasp. Ursula closed the tiny hand over the jewel. The baby
waved the bright ends of the string. Ursula had given her necklace
away. She felt sad. But she did not want it back.
The jewel swung from the baby’s hand and fell in a little heap on the
coal-dusty bottom of the barge. The man groped for it, with a kind of
careful reverence. Ursula noticed the coarsened, blunted fingers
groping at the little jewelled heap. The skin was red on the back of
the hand, the fair hairs glistened stiffly. It was a thin, sinewy,
capable hand nevertheless, and Ursula liked it. He took up the necklace
carefully, and blew the coal-dust from it, as it lay in the hollow of
his hand. He seemed still and attentive. He held out his hand with the
necklace shining small in its hard, black hollow.
“Take it back,” he said.
Ursula hardened with a kind of radiance.
“No,” she said. “It belongs to little Ursula.”
And she went to the infant and fastened the necklace round its warm,
soft, weak little neck.
There was a moment of confusion, then the father bent over his child:
“What do you say?” he said. “Do you say thank you? Do you say thank
you, Ursula?”
“Her name’s Ursula _now_,” said the mother, smiling a little bit
ingratiatingly from the door. And she came out to examine the jewel on
the child’s neck.
“It is Ursula, isn’t it?” said Ursula Brangwen.
The father looked up at her, with an intimate, half-gallant,
half-impudent, but wistful look. His captive soul loved her: but his
soul was captive, he knew, always.
She wanted to go. He set a little ladder for her to climb up to the
wharf. She kissed the child, which was in its mother’s arms, then she
turned away. The mother was effusive. The man stood silent by the
ladder.
Ursula joined Skrebensky. The two young figures crossed the lock, above
the shining yellow water. The barge-man watched them go.
“I _loved_ them,” she was saying. “He was so gentle—oh, so gentle! And
the baby was such a dear!”
“Was he gentle?” said Skrebensky. “The woman had been a servant, I’m
sure of that.”
Ursula winced.
“But I loved his impudence—it was so gentle underneath.”
She went hastening on, gladdened by having met the grimy, lean man with
the ragged moustache. He gave her a pleasant warm feeling. He made her
feel the richness of her own life. Skrebensky, somehow, had created a
deadness round her, a sterility, as if the world were ashes.
They said very little as they hastened home to the big supper. He was
envying the lean father of three children, for his impudent directness
and his worship of the woman in Ursula, a worship of body and soul
together, the man’s body and soul wistful and worshipping the body and
spirit of the girl, with a desire that knew the inaccessibility of its
object, but was only glad to know that the perfect thing existed, glad
to have had a moment of communion.
Why could not he himself desire a woman so? Why did he never really
want a woman, not with the whole of him: never loved, never worshipped,
only just physically wanted her.
But he would want her with his body, let his soul do as it would. A
kind of flame of physical desire was gradually beating up in the Marsh,
kindled by Tom Brangwen, and by the fact of the wedding of Fred, the
shy, fair, stiff-set farmer with the handsome, half-educated girl. Tom
Brangwen, with all his secret power, seemed to fan the flame that was
rising. The bride was strongly attracted by him, and he was exerting
his influence on another beautiful, fair girl, chill and burning as the
sea, who said witty things which he appreciated, making her glint with
more, like phosphorescence. And her greenish eyes seemed to rock a
secret, and her hands like mother-of-pearl seemed luminous,
transparent, as if the secret were burning visible in them.
At the end of supper, during dessert, the music began to play, violins,
and flutes. Everybody’s face was lit up. A glow of excitement
prevailed. When the little speeches were over, and the port remained
unreached for any more, those who wished were invited out to the open
for coffee. The night was warm.
Bright stars were shining, the moon was not yet up. And under the stars
burned two great, red, flameless fires, and round these lights and
lanterns hung, the marquee stood open before a fire, with its lights
inside.
The young people flocked out into the mysterious night. There was sound
of laughter and voices, and a scent of coffee. The farm-buildings
loomed dark in the background. Figures, pale and dark, flitted about,
intermingling. The red fire glinted on a white or a silken skirt, the
lanterns gleamed on the transient heads of the wedding guests.
To Ursula it was wonderful. She felt she was a new being. The darkness
seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beast, the haystacks
loomed half-revealed, a crowd of them, a dark, fecund lair just behind.
Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go.
She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to
race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was
mad to be gone. It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready
to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the
quarry, and she was also the hound. The darkness was passionate and
breathing with immense, unperceived heaving. It was waiting to receive
her in her flight. And how could she start—and how could she let go?
She must leap from the known into the unknown. Her feet and hands beat
like a madness, her breast strained as if in bonds.
The music began, and the bonds began to slip. Tom Brangwen was dancing
with the bride, quick and fluid and as if in another element,
inaccessible as the creatures that move in the water. Fred Brangwen
went in with another partner. The music came in waves. One couple after
another was washed and absorbed into the deep underwater of the dance.
“Come,” said Ursula to Skrebensky, laying her hand on his arm.
At the touch of her hand on his arm, his consciousness melted away from
him. He took her into his arms, as if into the sure, subtle power of
his will, and they became one movement, one dual movement, dancing on
the slippery grass. It would be endless, this movement, it would
continue for ever. It was his will and her will locked in a trance of
motion, two wills locked in one motion, yet never fusing, never
yielding one to the other. It was a glaucous, intertwining, delicious
flux and contest in flux.
They were both absorbed into a profound silence, into a deep, fluid
underwater energy that gave them unlimited strength. All the dancers
were waving intertwined in the flux of music. Shadowy couples passed
and repassed before the fire, the dancing feet danced silently by into
the darkness. It was a vision of the depths of the underworld, under
the great flood.
There was a wonderful rocking of the darkness, slowly, a great, slow
swinging of the whole night, with the music playing lightly on the
surface, making the strange, ecstatic, rippling on the surface of the
dance, but underneath only one great flood heaving slowly backwards to
the verge of oblivion, slowly forward to the other verge, the heart
sweeping along each time, and tightening with anguish as the limit was
reached, and the movement, at crises, turned and swept back.
As the dance surged heavily on, Ursula was aware of some influence
looking in upon her. Something was looking at her. Some powerful,
glowing sight was looking right into her, not upon her, but right at
her. Out of the great distance, and yet imminent, the powerful,
overwhelming watch was kept upon her. And she danced on and on with
Skrebensky, while the great, white watching continued, balancing all in
its revelation.
“The moon has risen,” said Anton, as the music ceased, and they found
themselves suddenly stranded, like bits of jetsam on a shore. She
turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And
her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to
its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her
two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a
quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon. She
wanted the moon to fill in to her, she wanted more, more communion with
the moon, consummation. But Skrebensky put his arm round her, and led
her away. He put a big, dark cloak round her, and sat holding her hand,
whilst the moonlight streamed above the glowing fires.
She was not there. Patiently she sat, under the cloak, with Skrebensky
holding her hand. But her naked self was away there beating upon the
moonlight, dashing the moonlight with her breasts and her knees, in
meeting, in communion. She half started, to go in actuality, to fling
away her clothing and flee away, away from this dark confusion and
chaos of people to the hill and the moon. But the people stood round
her like stones, like magnetic stones, and she could not go, in
actuality. Skrebensky, like a load-stone weighed on her, the weight of
his presence detained her. She felt the burden of him, the blind,
persistent, inert burden. He was inert, and he weighed upon her. She
sighed in pain. Oh, for the coolness and entire liberty and brightness
of the moon. Oh, for the cold liberty to be herself, to do entirely as
she liked. She wanted to get right away. She felt like bright metal
weighted down by dark, impure magnetism. He was the dross, people were
the dross. If she could but get away to the clean free moonlight.
“Don’t you like me to-night?” said his low voice, the voice of the
shadow over her shoulder. She clenched her hands in the dewy brilliance
of the moon, as if she were mad.
“Don’t you like me to-night?” repeated the soft voice.
And she knew that if she turned, she would die. A strange rage filled
her, a rage to tear things asunder. Her hands felt destructive, like
metal blades of destruction.
“Let me alone,” she said.
A darkness, an obstinacy settled on him too, in a kind of inertia. He
sat inert beside her. She threw off her cloak and walked towards the
moon, silver-white herself. He followed her closely.
The music began again and the dance. He appropriated her. There was a
fierce, white, cold passion in her heart. But he held her close, and
danced with her. Always present, like a soft weight upon her, bearing
her down, was his body against her as they danced. He held her very
close, so that she could feel his body, the weight of him sinking,
settling upon her, overcoming her life and energy, making her inert
along with him, she felt his hands pressing behind her, upon her. But
still in her body was the subdued, cold, indomitable passion. She liked
the dance: it eased her, put her into a sort of trance. But it was only
a kind of waiting, of using up the time that intervened between her and
her pure being. She left herself against him, she let him exert all his
power over her, to bear her down. She received all the force of his
power. She even wished he might overcome her. She was cold and unmoved
as a pillar of salt.
His will was set and straining with all its tension to encompass him
and compel her. If he could only compel her. He seemed to be
annihilated. She was cold and hard and compact of brilliance as the
moon itself, and beyond him as the moonlight was beyond him, never to
be grasped or known. If he could only set a bond round her and compel
her!
So they danced four or five dances, always together, always his will
becoming more tense, his body more subtle, playing upon her. And still
he had not got her, she was hard and bright as ever, intact. But he
must weave himself round her, enclose her, enclose her in a net of
shadow, of darkness, so she would be like a bright creature gleaming in
a net of shadows, caught. Then he would have her, he would enjoy her.
How he would enjoy her, when she was caught.
At last, when the dance was over, she would not sit down, she walked
away. He came with his arm round her, keeping her upon the movement of
his walking. And she seemed to agree. She was bright as a piece of
moonlight, as bright as a steel blade, he seemed to be clasping a blade
that hurt him. Yet he would clasp her, if it killed him.
They went towards the stackyard. There he saw, with something like
terror, the great new stacks of corn glistening and gleaming
transfigured, silvery and present under the night-blue sky, throwing
dark, substantial shadows, but themselves majestic and dimly present.
She, like glimmering gossamer, seemed to burn among them, as they rose
like cold fires to the silvery-bluish air. All was intangible, a
burning of cold, glimmering, whitish-steely fires. He was afraid of the
great moon-conflagration of the cornstacks rising above him. His heart
grew smaller, it began to fuse like a bead. He knew he would die.
She stood for some moments out in the overwhelming luminosity of the
moon. She seemed a beam of gleaming power. She was afraid of what she
was. Looking at him, at his shadowy, unreal, wavering presence a sudden
lust seized her, to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into
nothing. Her hands and wrists felt immeasurably hard and strong, like
blades. He waited there beside her like a shadow which she wanted to
dissipate, destroy as the moonlight destroys a darkness, annihilate,
have done with. She looked at him and her face gleamed bright and
inspired. She tempted him.
And an obstinacy in him made him put his arm round her and draw her to
the shadow. She submitted: let him try what he could do. Let him try
what he could do. He leaned against the side of the stack, holding her.
The stack stung him keenly with a thousand cold, sharp flames. Still
obstinately he held her.
And timorously, his hands went over her, over the salt, compact
brilliance of her body. If he could but have her, how he would enjoy
her! If he could but net her brilliant, cold, salt-burning body in the
soft iron of his own hands, net her, capture her, hold her down, how
madly he would enjoy her. He strove subtly, but with all his energy, to
enclose her, to have her. And always she was burning and brilliant and
hard as salt, and deadly. Yet obstinately, all his flesh burning and
corroding, as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison,
still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome her. Even, in
his frenzy, he sought for her mouth with his mouth, though it was like
putting his face into some awful death. She yielded to him, and he
pressed himself upon her in extremity, his soul groaning over and over:
“Let me come—let me come.”
She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and
fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to be
destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his
kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.
But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and
burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded,
yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his
destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last
substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And
her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with
agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed,
annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more.
Gradually she began to come to herself. Gradually a sort of daytime
consciousness came back to her. Suddenly the night was struck back into
its old, accustomed, mild reality. Gradually she realized that the
night was common and ordinary, that the great, blistering, transcendent
night did not really exist. She was overcome with slow horror. Where
was she? What was this nothingness she felt? The nothingness was
Skrebensky. Was he really there?—who was he? He was silent, he was not
there. What had happened? Had she been mad: what horrible thing had
possessed her? She was filled with overpowering fear of herself,
overpowering desire that it should not be, that other burning,
corrosive self. She was seized with a frenzied desire that what had
been should never be remembered, never be thought of, never be for one
moment allowed possible. She denied it with all her might. With all her
might she turned away from it. She was good, she was loving. Her heart
was warm, her blood was dark and warm and soft. She laid her hand
caressively on Anton’s shoulder.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, softly, coaxingly, caressingly. And she
began to caress him to life again. For he was dead. And she intended
that he should never know, never become aware of what had been. She
would bring him back from the dead without leaving him one trace of
fact to remember his annihilation by.
She exerted all her ordinary, warm self, she touched him, she did him
homage of loving awareness. And gradually he came back to her, another
man. She was soft and winning and caressing. She was his servant, his
adoring slave. And she restored the whole shell of him. She restored
the whole form and figure of him. But the core was gone. His pride was
bolstered up, his blood ran once more in pride. But there was no core
to him: as a distinct male he had no core. His triumphant, flaming,
overweening heart of the intrinsic male would never beat again. He
would be subject now, reciprocal, never the indomitable thing with a
core of overweening, unabateable fire. She had abated that fire, she
had broken him.
But she caressed him. She would not have him remember what had been.
She would not remember herself.
“Kiss me, Anton, kiss me,” she pleaded.
He kissed her, but she knew he could not touch her. His arms were round
her, but they had not got her. She could feel his mouth upon her, but
she was not at all compelled by it.
“Kiss me,” she whispered, in acute distress, “kiss me.”
And he kissed her as she bade him, but his heart was hollow. She took
his kisses, outwardly. But her soul was empty and finished.
Looking away, she saw the delicate glint of oats dangling from the side
of the stack, in the moonlight, something proud and royal, and quite
impersonal. She had been proud with them, where they were, she had been
also. But in this temporary warm world of the commonplace, she was a
kind, good girl. She reached out yearningly for goodness and affection.
She wanted to be kind and good.
They went home through the night that was all pale and glowing around,
with shadows and glimmerings and presences. Distinctly, she saw the
flowers in the hedge-bottoms, she saw the thin, raked sheaves flung
white upon the thorny hedge.
How beautiful, how beautiful it was! She thought with anguish how
wildly happy she was to-night, since he had kissed her. But as he
walked with his arm round her waist, she turned with a great offering
of herself to the night that glistened tremendous, a magnificent godly
moon white and candid as a bridegroom, flowers silvery and transformed
filling up the shadows.
He kissed her again, under the yew trees at home, and she left him. She
ran from the intrusion of her parents at home, to her bedroom, where,
looking out on the moonlit country, she stretched up her arms, hard,
hard, in bliss, agony offering herself to the blond, debonair presence
of the night.
But there was a wound of sorrow, she had hurt herself, as if she had
bruised herself, in annihilating him. She covered up her two young
breasts with her hands, covering them to herself; and covering herself
with herself, she crouched in bed, to sleep.
In the morning the sun shone, she got up strong and dancing. Skrebensky
was still at the Marsh. He was coming to church. How lovely, how
amazing life was! On the fresh Sunday morning she went out to the
garden, among the yellows and the deep-vibrating reds of autumn, she
smelled the earth and felt the gossamer, the cornfields across the
country were pale and unreal, everywhere was the intense silence of the
Sunday morning, filled with unacquainted noises. She smelled the body
of the earth, it seemed to stir its powerful flank beneath her as she
stood. In the bluish air came the powerful exudation, the peace was the
peace of strong, exhausted breathing, the reds and yellows and the
white gleam of stubble were the quivers and motion of the last
subsiding transports and clear bliss of fulfilment.
The church-bells were ringing when he came. She looked up in keen
anticipation at his entry. But he was troubled and his pride was hurt.
He seemed very much clothed, she was conscious of his tailored suit.
“Wasn’t it lovely last night?” she whispered to him.
“Yes,” he said. But his face did not open nor become free.
The service and the singing in church that morning passed unnoticed by
her. She saw the coloured glow of the windows, the forms of the
worshippers. Only she glanced at the book of Genesis, which was her
favourite book in the Bible.
“And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and
multiply and replenish the earth.
“And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of
the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon
the earth, and upon all the fishes in the sea; into your hand are they
delivered.
“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the
green herb have I given you all things.”
But Ursula was not moved by the history this morning. Multiplying and
replenishing the earth bored her. Altogether it seemed merely a vulgar
and stock-raising sort of business. She was left quite cold by man’s
stock-breeding lordship over beast and fishes.
“And you, be ye fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the
earth, and multiply therein.”
In her soul she mocked at this multiplication, every cow becoming two
cows, every turnip ten turnips.
“And God said; This is the token of the covenant which I make between
me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual
generations;
“I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a token of a covenant
between me and the earth.
“And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that a
bow shall be seen in the cloud;
“And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every
living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall no more become a
flood to destroy all flesh.”
“Destroy all flesh,” why “flesh” in particular? Who was this lord of
flesh? After all, how big was the Flood? Perhaps a few dryads and fauns
had just run into the hills and the farther valleys and woods,
frightened, but most had gone on blithely unaware of any flood at all,
unless the nymphs should tell them. It pleased Ursula to think of the
naiads in Asia Minor meeting the nereids at the mouth of the streams,
where the sea washed against the fresh, sweet tide, and calling to
their sisters the news of Noah’s Flood. They would tell amusing
accounts of Noah in his ark. Some nymphs would relate how they had hung
on the side of the ark, peeped in, and heard Noah and Shem and Ham and
Japeth, sitting in their place under the rain, saying, how they four
were the only men on earth now, because the Lord had drowned all the
rest, so that they four would have everything to themselves, and be
masters of every thing, sub-tenants under the great Proprietor.
Ursula wished she had been a nymph. She would have laughed through the
window of the ark, and flicked drops of the flood at Noah, before she
drifted away to people who were less important in their Proprietor and
their Flood.
What was God, after all? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing
carrion, what then is not God? She was surfeited of this God. She was
weary of the Ursula Brangwen who felt troubled about God. What ever God
was, He was, and there was no need for her to trouble about Him. She
felt she had now all licence.
Skrebensky sat beside her, listening to the sermon, to the voice of law
and order. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” He did not
believe it. He believed his own things were quite at his own disposal.
You could do as you liked with your own things, so long as you left
other people’s alone.
Ursula caressed him and made love to him. Nevertheless he knew she
wanted to react upon him and to destroy his being. She was not with
him, she was against him. But her making love to him, her complete
admiration of him, in open life, gratified him.
She caught him out of himself, and they were lovers, in a young,
romantic, almost fantastic way. He gave her a little ring. They put it
in Rhine wine, in their glass, and she drank, then he drank. They drank
till the ring lay exposed at the bottom of the glass. Then she took the
simple jewel, and tied it on a thread round her neck, where she wore
it.
He asked her for a photograph when he was going away. She went in great
excitement to the photographer, with five shillings. The result was an
ugly little picture of herself with her mouth on one side. She wondered
over it and admired it.
He saw only the live face of the girl. The picture hurt him. He kept
it, he always remembered it, but he could scarcely bear to see it.
There was a hurt to his soul in the clear, fearless face that was
touched with abstraction. Its abstraction was certainly away from him.
Then war was declared with the Boers in South Africa, and everywhere
was a fizz of excitement. He wrote that he might have to go. And he
sent her a box of sweets.
She was slightly dazed at the thought of his going to the war, not
knowing how to feel. It was a sort of romantic situation that she knew
so well in fiction she hardly understood it in fact. Underneath a top
elation was a sort of dreariness, deep, ashy disappointment.
However, she secreted the sweets under her bed, and ate them all
herself, when she went to bed, and when she woke in the morning. All
the time she felt very guilty and ashamed, but she simply did not want
to share them.
That box of sweets remained stuck in her mind afterwards. Why had she
secreted them and eaten them every one? Why? She did not feel
guilty—she only knew she ought to feel guilty. And she could not make
up her mind. Curiously monumental that box of sweets stood up, now it
was empty. It was a crux for her. What was she to think of it?
The idea of war altogether made her feel uneasy, uneasy. When men began
organized fighting with each other it seemed to her as if the poles of
the universe were cracking, and the whole might go tumbling into the
bottomless pit. A horrible bottomless feeling she had. Yet of course
there was the minted superscription of romance and honour and even
religion about war. She was very confused.
Skrebensky was busy, he could not come to see her. She asked for no
assurance, no security. What was between them, was, and could not be
altered by avowals. She knew that by instinct, she trusted to the
intrinsic reality.
But she felt an agony of helplessness. She could do nothing. Vaguely
she knew the huge powers of the world rolling and crashing together,
darkly, clumsily, stupidly, yet colossal, so that one was brushed along
almost as dust. Helpless, helpless, swirling like dust! Yet she wanted
so hard to rebel, to rage, to fight. But with what?
Could she with her hands fight the face of the earth, beat the hills in
their places? Yet her breast wanted to fight, to fight the whole world.
And these two small hands were all she had to do it with.
The months went by, and it was Christmas—the snowdrops came. There was
a little hollow in the wood near Cossethay, where snowdrops grew wild.
She sent him some in a box, and he wrote her a quick little note of
thanks—very grateful and wistful he seemed. Her eyes grew childlike and
puzzled. Puzzled from day to day she went on, helpless, carried along
by all that must happen.
He went about at his duties, giving himself up to them. At the bottom
of his heart his self, the soul that aspired and had true hope of
self-effectuation lay as dead, still-born, a dead weight in his womb.
Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man
matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social
fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were
small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not
ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason
could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One
had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s
elaborate civilization, that was all. The Whole mattered—but the unit,
the person, had no importance, except as he represented the Whole.
So Skrebensky left the girl out and went his way, serving what he had
to serve, and enduring what he had to endure, without remark. To his
own intrinsic life, he was dead. And he could not rise again from the
dead. His soul lay in the tomb. His life lay in the established order
of things. He had his five senses too. They were to be gratified. Apart
from this, he represented the great, established, extant Idea of life,
and as this he was important and beyond question.
The good of the greatest number was all that mattered. That which was
the greatest good for them all, collectively, was the greatest good for
the individual. And so, every man must give himself to support the
state, and so labour for the greatest good of all. One might make
improvements in the state, perhaps, but always with a view to
preserving it intact.
No highest good of the community, however, would give him the vital
fulfilment of his soul. He knew this. But he did not consider the soul
of the individual sufficiently important. He believed a man was
important in so far as he represented all humanity.
He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the highest good
of the community as it stands is no longer the highest good of even the
average individual. He thought that, because the community represents
millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more
important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an
abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves. Now when the
statement of the abstract good for the community has become a formula
lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then
the “common good” becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar,
conservative materialism at a low level.
And by the highest good of the greatest number is chiefly meant the
material prosperity of all classes. Skrebensky did not really care
about his own material prosperity. If he had been penniless—well, he
would have taken his chances. Therefore how could he find his highest
good in giving up his life for the material prosperity of everybody
else! What he considered an unimportant thing for himself he could not
think worthy of every sacrifice on behalf of other people. And that
which he would consider of the deepest importance to himself as an
individual—oh, he said, you mustn’t consider the community from that
standpoint. No—no—we know what the community wants; it wants something
solid, it wants good wages, equal opportunities, good conditions of
living, that’s what the community wants. It doesn’t want anything
subtle or difficult. Duty is very plain—keep in mind the material, the
immediate welfare of every man, that’s all.
So there came over Skrebensky a sort of nullity, which more and more
terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless which she had
to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after
day was made inert with a sense of disaster. She became morbidly
sensitive, depressed, apprehensive. It was anguish to her when she saw
one rook slowly flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill-omen. And
the foreboding became so black and so powerful in her, that she was
almost extinguished.
Yet what was the matter? At the worst he was only going away. Why did
she mind, what was it she feared? She did not know. Only she had a
black dread possessing her. When she went at night and saw the big,
flashing stars they seemed terrible, by day she was always expecting
some charge to be made against her.
He wrote in March to say that he was going to South Africa in a short
time, but before he went, he would snatch a day at the Marsh.
As if in a painful dream, she waited suspended, unresolved. She did not
know, she could not understand. Only she felt that all the threads of
her fate were being held taut, in suspense. She only wept sometimes as
she went about, saying blindly:
“I am so fond of him, I am so fond of him.”
He came. But why did he come? She looked at him for a sign. He gave no
sign. He did not even kiss her. He behaved as if he were an affable,
usual acquaintance. This was superficial, but what did it hide? She
waited for him, she wanted him to make some sign.
So the whole of the day they wavered and avoided contact, until
evening. Then, laughing, saying he would be back in six months’ time
and would tell them all about it, he shook hands with her mother and
took his leave.
Ursula accompanied him into the lane. The night was windy, the yew
trees seethed and hissed and vibrated. The wind seemed to rush about
among the chimneys and the church-tower. It was dark.
The wind blew Ursula’s face, and her clothes cleaved to her limbs. But
it was a surging, turgid wind, instinct with compressed vigour of life.
And she seemed to have lost Skrebensky. Out there in the strong, urgent
night she could not find him.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Here,” came his bodiless voice.
And groping, she touched him. A fire like lightning drenched them.
“Anton?” she said.
“What?” he answered.
She held him with her hands in the darkness, she felt his body again
with hers.
“Don’t leave me—come back to me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, holding her in his arms.
But the male in him was scotched by the knowledge that she was not
under his spell nor his influence. He wanted to go away from her. He
rested in the knowledge that to-morrow he was going away, his life was
really elsewhere. His life was elsewhere—his life was elsewhere—the
centre of his life was not what she would have. She was different—there
was a breach between them. They were hostile worlds.
“You will come back to me?” she reiterated.
“Yes,” he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an appointment, not
as a man returning to his fulfilment.
So she kissed him, and went indoors, lost. He walked down to the Marsh
abstracted. The contact with her hurt him, and threatened him. He
shrank, he had to be free of her spirit. For she would stand before
him, like the angel before Balaam, and drive him back with a sword from
the way he was going, into a wilderness.
The next day she went to the station to see him go. She looked at him,
she turned to him, but he was always so strange and null—so null. He
was so collected. She thought it was that which made him null.
Strangely nothing he was.
Ursula stood near him with a mute, pale face which he would rather not
see. There seemed some shame at the very root of life, cold, dead shame
for her.
The three made a noticeable group on the station; the girl in her fur
cap and tippet and her olive green costume, pale, tense with youth,
isolated, unyielding; the soldierly young man in a crush hat and a
heavy overcoat, his face rather pale and reserved above his purple
scarf, his whole figure neutral; then the elder man, a fashionable
bowler hat pressed low over his dark brows, his face warm-coloured and
calm, his whole figure curiously suggestive of full-blooded
indifference; he was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at
the drama; in his own life he would have no drama.
The train was rushing up. Ursula’s heart heaved, but the ice was frozen
too strong upon it.
“Good-bye,” she said, lifting her hand, her face laughing with her
peculiar, blind, almost dazzling laugh. She wondered what he was doing,
when he stooped and kissed her. He should be shaking hands and going.
“Good-bye,” she said again.
He picked up his little bag and turned his back on her. There was a
hurry along the train. Ah, here was his carriage. He took his seat. Tom
Brangwen shut the door, and the two men shook hands as the whistle
went.
“Good-bye—and good luck,” said Brangwen.
“Thank you—good-bye.”
The train moved off. Skrebensky stood at the carriage window, waving,
but not really looking to the two figures, the girl and the
warm-coloured, almost effeminately-dressed man. Ursula waved her
handkerchief. The train gathered speed, it grew smaller and smaller.
Still it ran in a straight line. The speck of white vanished. The rear
of the train was small in the distance. Still she stood on the
platform, feeling a great emptiness about her. In spite of herself her
mouth was quivering: she did not want to cry: her heart was dead cold.
Her Uncle Tom had gone to an automatic machine, and was getting
matches.
“Would you like some sweets?” he said, turning round.
Her face was covered with tears, she made curious, downward grimaces
with her mouth, to get control. Yet her heart was not crying—it was
cold and earthy.
“What kind would you like—any?” persisted her uncle.
“I should love some peppermint drops,” she said, in a strange, normal
voice, from her distorted face. But in a few moments she had gained
control of herself, and was still, detached.
“Let us go into the town,” he said, and he rushed her into a train,
moving to the town station. They went to a café to drink coffee, she
sat looking at people in the street, and a great wound was in her
breast, a cold imperturbability in her soul.
This cold imperturbability of spirit continued in her now. It was as if
some disillusion had frozen upon her, a hard disbelief. Part of her had
gone cold, apathetic. She was too young, too baffled to understand, or
even to know that she suffered much. And she was too deeply hurt to
submit.
She had her blind agonies, when she wanted him, she wanted him. But
from the moment of his departure, he had become a visionary thing of
her own. All her roused torment and passion and yearning she turned to
him.
She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts. Seeing the
moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, she went and wrote:
“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.”
It meant so much to her, that sentence—she put into it all the anguish
of her youth and her young passion and yearning. She called to him from
her heart wherever she went, her limbs vibrated with anguish towards
him wherever she was, the radiating force of her soul seemed to travel
to him, endlessly, endlessly, and in her soul’s own creation, find him.
But who was he, and where did he exist? In her own desire only.
She received a post-card from him, and she put it in her bosom. It did
not mean much to her, really. The second day, she lost it, and never
even remembered she had had it, till some days afterwards.
The long weeks went by. There came the constant bad news of the war.
And she felt as if all, outside there in the world, were a hurt, a hurt
against her. And something in her soul remained cold, apathetic,
unchanging.
Her life was always only partial at this time, never did she live
completely. There was the cold, unliving part of her. Yet she was madly
sensitive. She could not bear herself. When a dirty, red-eyed old woman
came begging of her in the street, she started away as from an unclean
thing. And then, when the old woman shouted acrid insults after her,
she winced, her limbs palpitated with insane torment, she could not
bear herself. Whenever she thought of the red-eyed old woman, a sort of
madness ran in inflammation over her flesh and her brain, she almost
wanted to kill herself.
And in this state, her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within
her. She was so overwrought and sensitive, that the mere touch of
coarse wool seemed to tear her nerves.
Chapter XII.
SHAME
Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying for her
matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she had very little
intelligence when she was disjointed from happiness. Stubbornness and a
consciousness of impending fate kept her half-heartedly pinned to it.
She knew that soon she would want to become a self-responsible person,
and her dread was that she would be prevented. An all-containing will
in her for complete independence, complete social independence,
complete independence from any personal authority, kept her dullishly
at her studies. For she knew that she had always her price of
ransom—her femaleness. She was always a woman, and what she could not
get because she was a human being, fellow to the rest of mankind, she
would get because she was a female, other than the man. In her
femaleness she felt a secret riches, a reserve, she had always the
price of freedom.
However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last resource. The
other things should be tried first. There was the mysterious man’s
world to be adventured upon, the world of daily work and duty, and
existence as a working member of the community. Against this she had a
subtle grudge. She wanted to make her conquest also of this man’s
world.
So she ground away at her work, never giving it up. Some things she
liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French, mathematics and
history. Once she knew how to read French and Latin, the syntax bored
her. Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should
one remember the things one read? Something in mathematics, their cold
absoluteness, fascinated her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some
people in history puzzled her and made her ponder, but the political
parts angered her, and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she
get a poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from
her studies; one afternoon, reading _As You Like It_; once when, with
her blood, she heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how the blood
beat in a Roman’s body; so that ever after she felt she knew the Romans
by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of English Grammar, because it
gave her pleasure to detect the live movements of words and sentences;
and mathematics, the very sight of the letters in Algebra, had a real
lure for her.
She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her face got a
queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were not sure what might
seize upon her at any moment out of the unknown.
Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion in her.
When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were folded, minute
and complete, the finished flowers of the summer nine months hence,
tiny, folded up, and left there waiting, a flash of triumph and love
went over her.
“I could never die while there was a tree,” she said passionately,
sententiously, standing before a great ash in worship.
It was the people who, somehow, walked as an upright menace to her. Her
life at this time was unformed, palpitating, essentially shrinking from
all touch. She gave something to other people, but she was never
herself, since she had no self. She was not afraid nor ashamed before
trees, and birds, and the sky. But she shrank violently from people,
ashamed she was not as they were, fixed, emphatic, but a wavering,
undefined sensibility only, without form or being.
Gudrun was at this time a great comfort and shield to her. The younger
girl was a lithe, _farouche_ animal, who mistrusted all approach, and
would have none of the petty secrecies and jealousies of schoolgirl
intimacy. She would have no truck with the tame cats, nice or not,
because she believed that they were all only untamed cats with a nasty,
untrustworthy habit of tameness.
This was a great stand-back for Ursula, who suffered agonies when she
thought a person disliked her, no matter how much she despised that
other person. How could anyone dislike _her_, Ursula Brangwen? The
question terrified her and was unanswerable. She sought refuge in
Gudrun’s natural, proud indifference.
It had been discovered that Gudrun had a talent for drawing. This
solved the problem of the girl’s indifference to all study. It was said
of her, “She can draw marvellously.”
Suddenly Ursula found a queer awareness existed between herself and her
class-mistress, Miss Inger. The latter was a rather beautiful woman of
twenty-eight, a fearless-seeming, clean type of modern girl whose very
independence betrays her sorrow. She was clever, and expert in what she
did, accurate, quick, commanding.
To Ursula she had always given pleasure, because of her clear, decided,
yet graceful appearance. She carried her head high, a little thrown
back, and Ursula thought there was a look of nobility in the way she
twisted her smooth brown hair upon her head. She always wore clean,
attractive, well-fitting blouses, and a well-made skirt. Everything
about her was so well-ordered, betraying a fine, clear spirit, that it
was a pleasure to sit in her class.
Her voice was just as ringing and clear, and with unwavering,
finely-touched modulation. Her eyes were blue, clear, proud, she gave
one altogether the sense of a fine-mettled, scrupulously groomed
person, and of an unyielding mind. Yet there was an infinite poignancy
about her, a great pathos in her lonely, proudly closed mouth.
It was after Skrebensky had gone that there sprang up between the
mistress and the girl that strange awareness, then the unspoken
intimacy that sometimes connects two people who may never even make
each other’s acquaintance. Before, they had always been good friends,
in the undistinguished way of the class-room, with the professional
relationship of mistress and scholar always present. Now, however,
another thing came to pass. When they were in the room together, they
were aware of each other, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
Winifred Inger felt a hot delight in the lessons when Ursula was
present, Ursula felt her whole life begin when Miss Inger came into the
room. Then, with the beloved, subtly-intimate teacher present, the girl
sat as within the rays of some enrichening sun, whose intoxicating heat
poured straight into her veins.
The state of bliss, when Miss Inger was present, was supreme in the
girl, but always eager, eager. As she went home, Ursula dreamed of the
schoolmistress, made infinite dreams of things she could give her, of
how she might make the elder woman adore her.
Miss Inger was a Bachelor of Arts, who had studied at Newnham. She was
a clergyman’s daughter, of good family. But what Ursula adored so much
was her fine, upright, athletic bearing, and her indomitably proud
nature. She was proud and free as a man, yet exquisite as a woman.
The girl’s heart burned in her breast as she set off for school in the
morning. So eager was her breast, so glad her feet, to travel towards
the beloved. Ah, Miss Inger, how straight and fine was her back, how
strong her loins, how calm and free her limbs!
Ursula craved ceaselessly to know if Miss Inger cared for her. As yet
no definite sign had been passed between the two. Yet surely, surely
Miss Inger loved her too, was fond of her, liked her at least more than
the rest of the scholars in the class. Yet she was never certain. It
might be that Miss Inger cared nothing for her. And yet, and yet, with
blazing heart, Ursula felt that if only she could speak to her, touch
her, she would know.
The summer term came, and with it the swimming class. Miss Inger was to
take the swimming class. Then Ursula trembled and was dazed with
passion. Her hopes were soon to be realized. She would see Miss Inger
in her bathing dress.
The day came. In the great bath the water was glimmering pale emerald
green, a lovely, glimmering mass of colour within the whitish
marble-like confines. Overhead the light fell softly and the great
green body of pure water moved under it as someone dived from the side.
Ursula, trembling, hardly able to contain herself, pulled off her
clothes, put on her tight bathing-suit, and opened the door of her
cabin. Two girls were in the water. The mistress had not appeared. She
waited. A door opened. Miss Inger came out, dressed in a rust-red tunic
like a Greek girl’s, tied round the waist, and a red silk handkerchief
round her head. How lovely she looked! Her knees were so white and
strong and proud, and she was firm-bodied as Diana. She walked simply
to the side of the bath, and with a negligent movement, flung herself
in. For a moment Ursula watched the white, smooth, strong shoulders,
and the easy arms swimming. Then she too dived into the water.
Now, ah now, she was swimming in the same water with her dear mistress.
The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself,
deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch
the other, to touch her, to feel her.
“I will race you, Ursula,” came the well-modulated voice.
Ursula started violently. She turned to see the warm, unfolded face of
her mistress looking at her, to her. She was acknowledged. Laughing her
own beautiful, startled laugh, she began to swim. The mistress was just
ahead, swimming with easy strokes. Ursula could see the head put back,
the water flickering upon the white shoulders, the strong legs kicking
shadowily. And she swam blinded with passion. Ah, the beauty of the
firm, white, cool flesh! Ah, the wonderful firm limbs. Ah, if she did
not so despise her own thin, dusky fragment of a body, if only she too
were fearless and capable.
She swam on eagerly, not wanting to win, only wanting to be near her
mistress, to swim in a race with her. They neared the end of the bath,
the deep end. Miss Inger touched the pipe, swung herself round, and
caught Ursula round the waist in the water, and held her for a moment.
“I won,” said Miss Inger, laughing.
There was a moment of suspense. Ursula’s heart was beating so fast, she
clung to the rail, and could not move. Her dilated, warm, unfolded,
glowing face turned to the mistress, as if to her very sun.
“Good-bye,” said Miss Inger, and she swam away to the other pupils,
taking professional interest in them.
Ursula was dazed. She could still feel the touch of the mistress’s body
against her own—only this, only this. The rest of the swimming time
passed like a trance. When the call was given to leave the water, Miss
Inger walked down the bath towards Ursula. Her rust-red, thin tunic was
clinging to her, the whole body was defined, firm and magnificent, as
it seemed to the girl.
“I enjoyed our race, Ursula, did you?” said Miss Inger.
The girl could only laugh with revealed, open, glowing face.
The love was now tacitly confessed. But it was some time before any
further progress was made. Ursula continued in suspense, in inflamed
bliss.
Then one day, when she was alone, the mistress came near to her, and
touching her cheek with her fingers, said with some difficulty.
“Would you like to come to tea with me on Saturday, Ursula?”
The girl flushed all gratitude.
“We’ll go to a lovely little bungalow on the Soar, shall we? I stay the
week-ends there sometimes.”
Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came,
her thoughts burned up like a fire. If only it were Saturday, if only
it were Saturday.
Then Saturday came, and she set out. Miss Inger met her in Sawley, and
they walked about three miles to the bungalow. It was a moist, warm
cloudy day.
The bungalow was a tiny, two-roomed shanty set on a steep bank.
Everything in it was exquisite. In delicious privacy, the two girls
made tea, and then they talked. Ursula need not be home till about ten
o’clock.
The talk was led, by a kind of spell, to love. Miss Inger was telling
Ursula of a friend, how she had died in childbirth, and what she had
suffered; then she told of a prostitute, and of some of her experiences
with men.
As they talked thus, on the little verandah of the bungalow, the night
fell, there was a little warm rain.
“It is really stifling,” said Miss Inger.
They watched a train, whose lights were pale in the lingering twilight,
rushing across the distance.
“It will thunder,” said Ursula.
The electric suspense continued, the darkness sank, they were eclipsed.
“I think I shall go and bathe,” said Miss Inger, out of the cloud-black
darkness.
“At night?” said Ursula.
“It is best at night. Will you come?”
“I should like to.”
“It is quite safe—the grounds are private. We had better undress in the
bungalow, for fear of the rain, then run down.”
Shyly, stiffly, Ursula went into the bungalow, and began to remove her
clothes. The lamp was turned low, she stood in the shadow. By another
chair Winifred Inger was undressing.
Soon the naked, shadowy figure of the elder girl came to the younger.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“One moment.”
Ursula could hardly speak. The other naked woman stood by, stood near,
silent. Ursula was ready.
They ventured out into the darkness, feeling the soft air of night upon
their skins.
“I can’t see the path,” said Ursula.
“It is here,” said the voice, and the wavering, pallid figure was
beside her, a hand grasping her arm. And the elder held the younger
close against her, close, as they went down, and by the side of the
water, she put her arms round her, and kissed her. And she lifted her
in her arms, close, saying, softly:
“I shall carry you into the water.”
[Ursula lay still in her mistress’s arms, her forehead against the
beloved, maddening breast.
“I shall put you in,” said Winifred.
But Ursula twined her body about her mistress.]
After awhile the rain came down on their flushed, hot limbs, startling,
delicious. A sudden, ice-cold shower burst in a great weight upon them.
They stood up to it with pleasure. Ursula received the stream of it
upon her breasts and her limbs. It made her cold, and a deep,
bottomless silence welled up in her, as if bottomless darkness were
returning upon her.
So the heat vanished away, she was chilled, as if from a waking up. She
ran indoors, a chill, non-existent thing, wanting to get away. She
wanted the light, the presence of other people, the external connection
with the many. Above all she wanted to lose herself among natural
surroundings.
She took her leave of her mistress and returned home. She was glad to
be on the station with a crowd of Saturday-night people, glad to sit in
the lighted, crowded railway carriage. Only she did not want to meet
anybody she knew. She did not want to talk. She was alone, immune.
All this stir and seethe of lights and people was but the rim, the
shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted very much to be
on the seething, partially illuminated shore, for within her was the
void reality of dark space.
For a time Miss Inger, her mistress, was gone; she was only a dark
void, and Ursula was free as a shade walking in an underworld of
extinction, of oblivion. Ursula was glad, with a kind of motionless,
lifeless gladness, that her mistress was extinct, gone out of her.
In the morning, however, the love was there again, burning, burning.
She remembered yesterday, and she wanted more, always more. She wanted
to be with her mistress. All separation from her mistress was a
restriction from living. Why could she not go to her to-day, to-day?
Why must she pace about revoked at Cossethay whilst her mistress was
elsewhere? She sat down and wrote a burning, passionate love-letter:
she could not help it.
The two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to fuse into
one, inseparable. Ursula went to Winifred’s lodging, she spent there
her only living hours. Winifred was very fond of water,—of swimming, of
rowing. She belonged to various athletic clubs. Many delicious
afternoons the two girls spent in a light boat on the river, Winifred
always rowing. Indeed, Winifred seemed to delight in having Ursula in
her charge, in giving things to the girl, in filling and enrichening
her life.
So that Ursula developed rapidly during the few months of her intimacy
with her mistress. Winifred had had a scientific education. She had
known many clever people. She wanted to bring Ursula to her own
position of thought.
They took religion and rid it of its dogmas, its falsehoods. Winifred
humanized it all. Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion
she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The
aspiration was the real thing,—the clothing was a matter almost of
national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a
white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their
Osiris. Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity
was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions
into universal religion.
In religion there were the two great motives of fear and love. The
motive of fear was as great as the motive of love. Christianity
accepted crucifixion to escape from fear; “Do your worst to me, that I
may have no more fear of the worst.” But that which was feared was not
necessarily all evil, and that which was loved not necessarily all
good. Fear shall become reverence, and reverence is submission in
identification; love shall become triumph, and triumph is delight in
identification.
So much she talked of religion, getting the gist of many writings. In
philosophy she was brought to the conclusion that the human desire is
the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond
humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.
There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is
base, and must be left to the ancient worshippers of power, worship of
Moloch.
We do not worship power, in our enlightened souls. Power is degenerated
to money and Napoleonic stupidity.
Ursula could not help dreaming of Moloch. Her God was not mild and
gentle, neither Lamb nor Dove. He was the lion and the eagle. Not
because the lion and the eagle had power, but because they were proud
and strong; they were themselves, they were not passive subjects of
some shepherd, or pets of some loving woman, or sacrifices of some
priest. She was weary to death of mild, passive lambs and monotonous
doves. If the lamb might lie down with the lion, it would be a great
honour to the lamb, but the lion’s powerful heart would suffer no
diminishing. She loved the dignity and self-possession of lions.
She did not see how lambs could love. Lambs could only be loved. They
could only be afraid, and tremblingly submit to fear, and become
sacrificial; or they could submit to love, and become beloveds. In both
they were passive. Raging, destructive lovers, seeking the moment when
fear is greatest, and triumph is greatest, the fear not greater than
the triumph, the triumph not greater than the fear, these were no lambs
nor doves. She stretched her own limbs like a lion or a wild horse, her
heart was relentless in its desires. It would suffer a thousand deaths,
but it would still be a lion’s heart when it rose from death, a fiercer
lion she would be, a surer, knowing herself different from and separate
from the great, conflicting universe that was not herself.
Winifred Inger was also interested in the Women’s Movement.
“The men will do no more,—they have lost the capacity for doing,” said
the elder girl. “They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They
make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to
them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and
they say ‘You are my idea,’ so they embrace themselves. As if I were
any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I
will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his
idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy
to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t _take_ a woman.
They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like
serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”
Ursula was introduced by her friend to various women and men, educated,
unsatisfied people, who still moved within the smug provincial society
as if they were nearly as tame as their outward behaviour showed, but
who were inwardly raging and mad.
It was a strange world the girl was swept into, like a chaos, like the
end of the world. She was too young to understand it all. Yet the
inoculation passed into her, through her love for her mistress.
The examination came, and then school was over. It was the long
vacation. Winifred Inger went away to London. Ursula was left alone in
Cossethay. A terrible, outcast, almost poisonous despair possessed her.
It was no use doing anything, or being anything. She had no connection
with other people. Her lot was isolated and deadly. There was nothing
for her anywhere, but this black disintegration. Yet, within all the
great attack of disintegration upon her, she remained herself. It was
the terrible core of all her suffering, that she was always herself.
Never could she escape that: she could not put off being herself.
She still adhered to Winifred Inger. But a sort of nausea was coming
over her. She loved her mistress. But a heavy, clogged sense of
deadness began to gather upon her, from the other woman’s contact. And
sometimes she thought Winifred was ugly, clayey. Her female hips seemed
big and earthy, her ankles and her arms were too thick. She wanted some
fine intensity, instead of this heavy cleaving of moist clay, that
cleaves because it has no life of its own.
Winifred still loved Ursula. She had a passion for the fine flame of
the girl, she served her endlessly, would have done anything for her.
“Come with me to London,” she pleaded to the girl. “I will make it nice
for you,—you shall do lots of things you will enjoy.”
“No,” said Ursula, stubbornly and dully. “No, I don’t want to go to
London, I want to be by myself.”
Winifred knew what this meant. She knew that Ursula was beginning to
reject her. The fine, unquenchable flame of the younger girl would
consent no more to mingle with the perverted life of the elder woman.
Winifred knew it would come. But she too was proud. At the bottom of
her was a black pit of despair. She knew perfectly well that Ursula
would cast her off.
And that seemed like the end of her life. But she was too hopeless to
rage. Wisely, economizing what was left of Ursula’s love, she went away
to London, leaving the beloved girl alone.
And after a fortnight, Ursula’s letters became tender again, loving.
Her Uncle Tom had invited her to go and stay with him. He was managing
a big, new colliery in Yorkshire. Would Winifred come too?
For now Ursula was imagining marriage for Winifred. She wanted her to
marry her Uncle Tom. Winifred knew this. She said she would come to
Wiggiston. She would now let fate do as it liked with her, since there
was nothing remaining to be done. Tom Brangwen also saw Ursula’s
intention. He too was at the end of his desires. He had done the things
he had wanted to. They had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of
soul, which he hid under an utterly tolerant good-humour. He no longer
cared about anything on earth, neither man nor woman, nor God nor
humanity. He had come to a stability of nullification. He did not care
any more, neither about his body nor about his soul. Only he would
preserve intact his 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 activity made sordid by barren
cohesion with the rest of the small activities. Farther off was the
great colliery that went night and day. And all around was the country,
green with two winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the
darker woods in the distance.
The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now, when he had
been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in the actuality
of the place. It was like some gruesome dream, some ugly, dead,
amorphous mood become concrete.
Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor-car at the raw little
station, and drove through what seemed to them like the horrible raw
beginnings of something. The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated,
persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was fascinated by the many
men who were there—groups of men standing in the streets, four or five
men walking in a gang together, their dogs running behind or before.
They were all decently dressed, and most of them rather gaunt. The
terrible gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her. Like creatures
with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate being,
within some utterly unliving shell, they passed meaninglessly along,
with strange, isolated dignity. It was as if a hard, horny shell
enclosed them all.
Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom’s house. He
was not yet at home. His house was simply, but well furnished. He had
taken out a dividing wall, and made the whole front of the house into a
large library, with one end devoted to his science. It was a handsome
room, appointed as a laboratory and reading room, but giving the same
sense of hard, mechanical activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate,
and looking out on the hideous abstraction of the town, and at the
green meadows and rough country beyond, and at the great, mathematical
colliery on the other side.
They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was getting
stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on his brows, he
looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other man of action. His
colour was as fresh, his health as perfect as ever, he walked like a
man rather absorbed.
Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library, his coat
fastened and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not shiny, rather
like something naked that one is accustomed to see covered, and his
dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to stand in the shadow, like a
thing ashamed. And the clasp of his hand was so soft and yet so
forceful, that it chilled the heart. She was afraid of him, repelled by
him, and yet attracted.
He looked at the athletic, seemingly fearless girl, and he detected in
her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately, he knew they
were akin.
His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He still
laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide
nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his
complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellent
grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which
revealed itself in his rather fat thighs and loins.
Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile, slightly
cunning regard he had for Ursula, which made the girl at once so proud
and so perplexed.
“But is this place as awful as it looks?” the young girl asked, a
strain in her eyes.
“It is just what it looks,” he said. “It hides nothing.”
“Why are the men so sad?”
“Are they sad?” he replied.
“They seem unutterably, unutterably sad,” said Ursula, out of a
passionate throat.
“I don’t think they are that. They just take it for granted.”
“What do they take for granted?”
“This—the pits and the place altogether.”
“Why don’t they alter it?” she passionately protested.
“They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place,
rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves. It is
easier,” he said.
“And you agree with them,” burst out his niece, unable to bear it. “You
think like they do—that living human beings must be taken and adapted
to all kinds of horrors. We could easily do without the pits.”
He smiled, uncomfortably, cynically. Ursula felt again the revolt of
hatred from him.
“I suppose their lives are not really so bad,” said Winifred Inger,
superior to the Zolaesque tragedy.
He turned with his polite, distant attention.
“Yes, they are pretty bad. The pits are very deep, and hot, and in some
places wet. The men die of consumption fairly often. But they earn good
wages.”
“How gruesome!” said Winifred Inger.
“Yes,” he replied gravely. It was his grave, solid, self-contained
manner which made him so much respected as a colliery manager.
The servant came in to ask where they would have tea.
“Put it in the summer-house, Mrs. Smith,” he said.
The fair-haired, good-looking young woman went out.
“Is she married and in service?” asked Ursula.
“She is a widow. Her husband died of consumption a little while ago.”
Brangwen gave a sinister little laugh. “He lay there in the house-place
at her mother’s, and five or six other people in the house, and died
very gradually. I asked her if his death wasn’t a great trouble to her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was very fretful towards the last, never
satisfied, never easy, always fret-fretting, an’ never knowing what
would satisfy him. So in one way it was a relief when it was over—for
him and for everybody.’ They had only been married two years, and she
has one boy. I asked her if she hadn’t been very happy. ‘Oh, yes, sir,
we was very comfortable at first, till he took bad—oh, we was very
comfortable—oh, yes—but, you see, you get used to it. I’ve had my
father and two brothers go off just the same. You get used to it’.”
“It’s a horrible thing to get used to,” said Winifred Inger, with a
shudder.
“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “But that’s how they are. She’ll be
getting married again directly. One man or another—it does not matter
very much. They’re all colliers.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ursula. “They’re all colliers?”
“It is with the women as with us,” he replied. “Her husband was John
Smith, loader. We reckoned him as a loader, he reckoned himself as a
loader, and so she knew he represented his job. Marriage and home is a
little side-show.
“The women know it right enough, and take it for what it’s worth. One
man or another, it doesn’t matter all the world. The pit matters. Round
the pit there will always be the side-shows, plenty of ’em.”
He looked round at the red chaos, the rigid, amorphous confusion of
Wiggiston.
“Every man his own little side-show, his home, but the pit owns every
man. The women have what is left. What’s left of this man, or what is
left of that—it doesn’t matter altogether. The pit takes all that
really matters.”
“It is the same everywhere,” burst out Winifred. “It is the office, or
the shop, or the business that gets the man, the woman gets the bit the
shop can’t digest. What is he at home, a man? He is a meaningless
lump—a standing machine, a machine out of work.”
“They know they are sold,” said Tom Brangwen. “That’s where it is. They
know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks her throat out, what
difference can it make? The man’s sold to his job. So the women don’t
bother. They take what they can catch—and _vogue la galère.”_
“Aren’t they very strict here?” asked Miss Inger.
“Oh, no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands.
They’re not very particular—neither are they very interested. They go
dragging along what is left from the pits. They’re not interested
enough to be very immoral—it all amounts to the same thing, moral or
immoral—just a question of pit-wages. The most moral duke in England
makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the
morality end up.”
Ursula sat black-souled and very bitter, hearing the two of them talk.
There seemed something ghoulish even in their very deploring of the
state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish satisfaction in it. The
pit was the great mistress. Ursula looked out of the window and saw the
proud, demonlike colliery with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the
formless, squalid mass of the town lying aside. It was the squalid heap
of side-shows. The pit was the main show, the _raison d’être_ of all.
How terrible it was! There _was_ a horrible fascination in it—human
bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the
colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a
moment she was dizzy.
Then she recovered, felt herself in a great loneliness, wherein she was
sad but free. She had departed. No more would she subscribe to the
great colliery, to the great machine which has taken us all captives.
In her soul, she was against it, she disowned even its power. It had
only to be forsaken to be inane, meaningless. And she knew it was
meaningless. But it needed a great, passionate effort of will on her
part, seeing the colliery, still to maintain her knowledge that it was
meaningless.
But her Uncle Tom and her mistress remained there among the horde,
cynically reviling the monstrous state and yet adhering to it, like a
man who reviles his mistress, yet who is in love with her. She knew her
Uncle Tom perceived what was going on. But she knew moreover that in
spite of his criticism and condemnation, he still wanted the great
machine. His only happy moments, his only moments of pure freedom were
when he was serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine
caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he act
wholely, without cynicism and unreality.
His real mistress was the machine, and the real mistress of Winifred
was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the impure abstraction,
the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in the machine, in service of
the machine, was she free from the clog and degradation of human
feeling. There, in the monstrous mechanism that held all matter, living
or dead, in its service, did she achieve her consummation and her
perfect unison, her immortality.
Hatred sprang up in Ursula’s heart. If she could she would smash the
machine. Her soul’s action should be the smashing of the great machine.
If she could destroy the colliery, and make all the men of Wiggiston
out of work, she would do it. Let them starve and grub in the earth for
roots, rather than serve such a Moloch as this.
She hated her Uncle Tom, she hated Winifred Inger. They went down to
the summer-house for tea. It was a pleasant place among a few trees, at
the end of a tiny garden, on the edge of a field. Her Uncle Tom and
Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to cheapen her. She was miserable and
desolate. But she would never give way.
Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was over
between them. She saw gross, ugly movements in her mistress, she saw a
clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that reminded her of the great
prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle Tom came in out of the broiling
sunshine heated from walking. Then the perspiration stood out upon his
head and brow, his hand was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp.
He too had something marshy about him—the succulent moistness and
turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh, where
life and decaying are one.
He was repellent to her, who was so dry and fine in her fire. Her very
bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her.
It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two weeks at
Wiggiston, and she hated it. All was grey, dry ash, cold and dead and
ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get rid of Winifred. The
girl’s hatred and her sense of repulsiveness in her mistress and in her
uncle seemed to throw the other two together. They drew together as if
against her.
In hardness and bitterness of soul, Ursula knew that Winifred was
become her uncle’s lover. She was glad. She had loved them both. Now
she wanted to be rid of them both. Their marshy, bitter-sweet
corruption came sick and unwholesome in her nostrils. Anything, to get
out of the foetid air. She would leave them both for ever, leave for
ever their strange, soft, half-corrupt element. Anything to get away.
One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula’s bed, and put her arms
round the girl, holding her to herself in spite of unwillingness, and
said,
“Dear, my dear—shall I marry Mr. Brangwen—shall I?”
The clinging, heavy, muddy question weighed on Ursula intolerably.
“Has he asked you?” she said, using all her might of hard resistance.
“He’s asked me,” said Winifred. “Do you want me to marry him, Ursula?”
“Yes,” said Ursula.
The arms tightened more on her.
“I knew you did, my sweet—and I will marry him. You’re _fond_ of him,
aren’t you?”
“I’ve been _awfully_ fond of him—ever since I was a child.”
“I know—I know. I can see what you like in him. He is a man by himself,
he has something apart from the rest.”
“Yes,” said Ursula.
“But he’s not like you, my dear—ha, he’s not as good as you. There’s
something even objectionable in him—his thick thighs—”
Ursula was silent.
“But I’ll marry him, my dear—it will be best. Now say you love me.”
A sort of profession was extorted out of the girl. Nevertheless her
mistress went away sighing, to weep in her own chamber.
In two days’ time Ursula left Wiggiston. Miss Inger went to Nottingham.
There was an engagement between her and Tom Brangwen, which the uncle
seemed to vaunt as if it were an assurance of his validity.
Brangwen and Winifred Inger continued engaged for another term. Then
they married. Brangwen had reached the age when he wanted children. He
wanted children. Neither marriage nor the domestic establishment meant
anything to him. He wanted to propagate himself. He knew what he was
doing. He had the instinct of a growing inertia, of a thing that
chooses its place of rest in which to lapse into apathy, complete,
profound indifference. He would let the machinery carry him; husband,
father, pit-manager, warm clay lifted through the recurrent action of
day after day by the great machine from which it derived its motion. As
for Winifred, she was an educated woman, and of the same sort as
himself. She would make a good companion. She was his mate.
Chapter XIII.
THE MAN’S WORLD
Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her schooldays
were over. She had passed the matriculation examination. Now she came
home to face that empty period between school and possible marriage.
At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the time, she
would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded suffering, maimed.
She had no will left to think about herself. For a time she must just
lapse.
But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her mother
had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the girl
continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs. Brangwen was
again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had died of diphtheria
in infancy.
Even this fact of her mother’s pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs.
Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in her breeding. She
would not have the existence at all of anything but the immediate,
physical, common things. Ursula inflamed in soul, was suffering all the
anguish of youth’s reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can’t
grasp, can’t even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting
all the darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her
mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of physical
considerations, and complacently to reject the reality of anything
else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen care about, but the
children, the house, and a little local gossip. And she _would not_ be
touched, she would let nothing else live near her. She went about, big
with child, slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her
own time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the
children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of
womanhood.
This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her young and
undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when Gudrun was born.
All these years nothing had happened save the coming of the children,
nothing had mattered but the bodies of her babies. As her children came
into consciousness, as they began to suffer their own fulfilment, she
cast them off. But she remained dominant in the house. Brangwen
continued in a kind of rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with
his wife. They were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as
individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of
breeding and rearing their young.
How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close, physical,
limited life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid, unshakeable as ever,
Mrs. Brangwen went about in her dominance of physical maternity.
There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that mattered to her.
She would have the children less rude and tyrannical, she _would_ have
a place in the house. But her mother pulled her down, pulled her down.
With all the cunning instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen
ridiculed and held cheap Ursula’s passions, her ideas, her
pronunciations. Ursula would try to insist, in her own home, on the
right of women to take equal place with men in the field of action and
work.
“Ay,” said the mother, “there’s a good crop of stockings lying ripe for
mending. Let that be your field of action.”
Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened her. She
hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of enforced domestic life,
she had had enough of her home. The commonness, the triviality, the
immediate meaninglessness of it all drove her to frenzy. She talked and
stormed ideas, she corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her
back in silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with
supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child not to be
taken seriously.
Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved Ursula,
therefore he always had a sense of shame, almost of betrayal, when he
turned on her. So he turned fiercely and scathingly, and with a
wholesale brutality that made Ursula go white, mute, and numb. Her
feelings seemed to be becoming deadened in her, her temper hard and
cold.
Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all these
years, he began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty years he had
gone on at this office as a draughtsman, doing work in which he had no
interest, because it seemed his allotted work. The growing up of his
daughters, their developing rejection of old forms set him also free.
He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he pushed his
way out of the earth that covered him, working always away from the
physical element in which his life was captured. Slowly, blindly,
gropingly, with what initiative was left to him, he made his way
towards individual expression and individual form.
At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving, almost to
the point where he had left off his Adam and Eve panel, when he was
courting. But now he had knowledge and skill without vision. He saw the
puerility of his young conceptions, he saw the unreal world in which
they had been conceived. He now had a new strength in his sense of
reality. He felt as if he were real, as if he handled real things. He
had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the
church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of
beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that
were utterances of himself.
But he could not quite hitch on—always he was too busy, too uncertain,
confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling. To his surprise he
found he could do it. Modelling in clay, in plaster, he produced
beautiful reproductions, really beautiful. Then he set-to to make a
head of Ursula, in high relief, in the Donatello manner. In his first
passion, he got a beautiful suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of
concentration would not come. With a little ash in his mouth he gave
up. He continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from
classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had loved
Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of the
freshness, the naïve alertness of the early Italians. But it was only
reproduction.
Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting. But he
tried water-colour painting after the manner of any other amateur. He
got his results but was not much interested. After one or two drawings
of his beloved church, which had the same alertness as his modelling,
he seemed to be incongruous with the modern atmospheric way of
painting, so that his church tower stood up, really stood and asserted
its standing, but was ashamed of its own lack of meaning, he turned
away again.
He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over reproductions
of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver and pearl and matrix.
The first things he did, in his start of discovery, were really
beautiful. Those later were more imitative. But, starting with his
wife, he made a pendant each for all his womenfolk. Then he made rings
and bracelets.
Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula left
school, he was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he delighted
in it, almost lusted after it.
All this time his only connection with the real outer world was through
his winter evening classes, which brought him into contact with state
education. About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely
indifferent—even about the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was
in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any
great adherent.
Ursula watched the newspapers, vaguely, concerning the war in South
Africa. They made her miserable, and she tried to have as little to do
with them as possible. But Skrebensky was out there. He sent her an
occasional post-card. But it was as if she were a blank wall in his
direction, without windows or outgoing. She adhered to the Skrebensky
of her memory.
Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed from the
roots and native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to it, and she was
aridly transplanted. He was really only a memory. She revived his
memory with strange passion, after the departure of Winifred. He was to
her almost the symbol of her real life. It was as if, through him, in
him, she might return to her own self, which she was before she had
loved Winifred, before this deadness had come upon her, this pitiless
transplanting. But even her memories were the work of her imagination.
She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She could not
dream of him progressively, of what he was doing now, of what relation
he would have to her now. Only sometimes she wept to think how cruelly
she had suffered when he left her—ah, _how_ she had suffered! She
remembered what she had written in her diary:
“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.”
Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been then. For
it was remembering a dead self. All that was dead after Winifred. She
knew the corpse of her young, loving self, she knew its grave. And the
young living self she mourned for had scarcely existed, it was the
creature of her imagination.
Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and unchanged. No
one would ever love her now—she would love no one. The body of love was
killed in her after Winifred, there was something of the corpse in her.
She would live, she would go on, but she would have no lovers, no lover
would want her any more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest
little flame of desire was extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid
germ that contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was
killed, she would go on growing as a plant, she would do her best to
produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead before it
was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse of hope.
The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with children.
What was her life—a sordid, formless, disintegrated nothing; Ursula
Brangwen a person without worth or importance, living in the mean
village of Cossethay, within the sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula
Brangwen, at seventeen, worthless and unvalued, neither wanted nor
needed by anybody, and conscious herself of her own dead value. It
would not bear thinking of.
But still her dogged pride held its own. She might be defiled, she
might be a corpse that should never be loved, she might be a
core-rotten stalk living upon the food that others provided; yet she
would give in to nobody.
Gradually she became conscious that she could not go on living at home
as she was doing, without place or meaning or worth. The very children
that went to school held her uselessness in contempt. She must do
something.
Her father said she had plenty to do to help her mother. From her
parents she would never get more than a hit in the face. She was not a
practical person. She thought of wild things, of running away and
becoming a domestic servant, of asking some man to take her.
She wrote to the mistress of the High School for advice.
“I cannot see very clearly what you should do, Ursula,” came the reply,
“unless you are willing to become an elementary school teacher. You
have matriculated, and that qualifies you to take a post as
uncertificated teacher in any school, at a salary of about fifty pounds
a year.
“I cannot tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in your desire to
do something. You will learn that mankind is a great body of which you
are one useful member, you will take your own place at the great task
which humanity is trying to fulfil. That will give you a satisfaction
and a self-respect which nothing else could give.”
Ursula’s heart sank. It was a cold, dreary satisfaction to think of.
Yet her cold will acquiesced. This was what she wanted.
“You have an emotional nature,” the letter went on, “a quick natural
response. If only you could learn patience and self-discipline, I do
not see why you should not make a good teacher. The least you could do
is to try. You need only serve a year, or perhaps two years, as
uncertificated teacher. Then you would go to one of the training
colleges, where I hope you would take your degree. I most strongly urge
and advise you to keep up your studies always with the intention of
taking a degree. That will give you a qualification and a position in
the world, and will give you more scope to choose your own way.
“I shall be proud to see one of my girls win her own economical
independence, which means so much more than it seems. I shall be glad
indeed to know that one more of my girls has provided for herself the
means of freedom to choose for herself.”
It all sounded grim and desperate. Ursula rather hated it. But her
mother’s contempt and her father’s harshness had made her raw at the
quick, she knew the ignominy of being a hanger-on, she felt the
festering thorn of her mother’s animal estimation.
At length she had to speak. Hard and shut down and silent within
herself, she slipped out one evening to the workshed. She heard the
tap-tap-tap of the hammer upon the metal. Her father lifted his head as
the door opened. His face was ruddy and bright with instinct, as when
he was a youth, his black moustache was cut close over his wide mouth,
his black hair was fine and close as ever. But there was about him an
abstraction, a sort of instrumental detachment from human things. He
was a worker. He watched his daughter’s hard, expressionless face. A
hot anger came over his breast and belly.
“What now?” he said.
“Can’t I,” she answered, looking aside, not looking at him, “can’t I go
out to work?”
“Go out to work, what for?”
His voice was so strong, and ready, and vibrant. It irritated her.
“I want some other life than this.”
A flash of strong rage arrested all his blood for a moment.
“Some other life?” he repeated. “Why, what other life do you want?”
She hesitated.
“Something else besides housework and hanging about. And I want to earn
something.”
Her curious, brutal hardness of speech, and the fierce invincibility of
her youth, which ignored him, made him also harden with anger.
“And how do you think _you’re_ going to earn anything?” he asked.
“I can become a teacher—I’m qualified by my matric.”
He wished her matric. in hell.
“And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?” he asked,
jeering.
“Fifty pounds a year,” she said.
He was silent, his power taken out of his hand.
He had always hugged a secret pride in the fact that his daughters need
not go out to work. With his wife’s money and his own they had four
hundred a year. They could draw on the capital if need be later on. He
was not afraid for his old age. His daughters might be ladies.
Fifty pounds a year was a pound a week—which was enough for her to live
on independently.
“And what sort of a teacher do you think you’d make? You haven’t the
patience of a Jack-gnat with your own brothers and sisters, let alone
with a class of children. And I thought you didn’t like dirty,
board-school brats.”
“They’re not all dirty.”
“You’d find they’re not all clean.”
There was silence in the workshop. The lamplight fell on the burned
silver bowl that lay between him, on mallet and furnace and chisel.
Brangwen stood with a queer, catlike light on his face, almost like a
smile. But it was no smile.
“Can I try?” she said.
“You can do what the deuce you like, and go where you like.”
Her face was fixed and expressionless and indifferent. It always sent
him to a pitch of frenzy to see it like that. He kept perfectly still.
Cold, without any betrayal of feeling, she turned and left the shed. He
worked on, with all his nerves jangled. Then he had to put down his
tools and go into the house.
In a bitter tone of anger and contempt he told his wife. Ursula was
present. There was a brief altercation, closed by Mrs. Brangwen’s
saying, in a tone of biting superiority and indifference:
“Let her find out what it’s like. She’ll soon have had enough.”
The matter was left there. But Ursula considered herself free to act.
For some days she made no move. She was reluctant to take the cruel
step of finding work, for she shrank with extreme sensitiveness and
shyness from new contact, new situations. Then at length a sort of
doggedness drove her. Her soul was full of bitterness.
She went to the Free Library in Ilkeston, copied out addresses from the
_Schoolmistress,_ and wrote for application forms. After two days she
rose early to meet the postman. As she expected, there were three long
envelopes.
Her heart beat painfully as she went up with them to her bedroom. Her
fingers trembled, she could hardly force herself to look at the long,
official forms she had to fill in. The whole thing was so cruel, so
impersonal. Yet it must be done.
“Name (surname first):...”
In a trembling hand she wrote, “Brangwen,—Ursula.”
“Age and date of birth:...”
After a long time considering, she filled in that line.
“Qualifications, with date of Examination:...”
With a little pride she wrote:
“London Matriculation Examination.”
“Previous experience and where obtained:...”
Her heart sank as she wrote:
“None.”
Still there was much to answer. It took her two hours to fill in the
three forms. Then she had to copy her testimonials from her
head-mistress and from the clergyman.
At last, however, it was finished. She had sealed the three long
envelopes. In the afternoon she went down to Ilkeston to post them. She
said nothing of it all to her parents. As she stamped her long letters
and put them into the box at the main post-office she felt as if
already she was out of the reach of her father and mother, as if she
had connected herself with the outer, greater world of activity, the
man-made world.
As she returned home, she dreamed again in her own fashion her old,
gorgeous dreams. One of her applications was to Gillingham, in Kent,
one to Kingston-on-Thames, and one to Swanwick in Derbyshire.
Gillingham was such a lovely name, and Kent was the Garden of England.
So that, in Gillingham, an old, old village by the hopfields, where the
sun shone softly, she came out of school in the afternoon into the
shadow of the plane trees by the gate, and turned down the sleepy road
towards the cottage where cornflowers poked their blue heads through
the old wooden fence, and phlox stood built up of blossom beside the
path.
A delicate, silver-haired lady rose with delicate, ivory hands uplifted
as Ursula entered the room, and:
“Oh, my dear, what do you think!”
“What is it, Mrs. Wetherall?”
Frederick had come home. Nay, his manly step was heard on the stair,
she saw his strong boots, his blue trousers, his uniformed figure, and
then his face, clean and keen as an eagle’s, and his eyes lit up with
the glamour of strange seas, ah, strange seas that had woven through
his soul, as he descended into the kitchen.
This dream, with its amplifications, lasted her a mile of walking. Then
she went to Kingston-on-Thames.
Kingston-on-Thames was an old historic place just south of London.
There lived the well-born dignified souls who belonged to the
metropolis, but who loved peace. There she met a wonderful family of
girls living in a large old Queen Anne house, whose lawns sloped to the
river, and in an atmosphere of stately peace she found herself among
her soul’s intimates. They loved her as sisters, they shared with her
all noble thoughts.
She was happy again. In her musings she spread her poor, clipped wings,
and flew into the pure empyrean.
Day followed day. She did not speak to her parents. Then came the
return of her testimonials from Gillingham. She was not wanted, neither
at Swanwick. The bitterness of rejection followed the sweets of hope.
Her bright feathers were in the dust again.
Then, suddenly, after a fortnight, came an intimation from
Kingston-on-Thames. She was to appear at the Education Office of that
town on the following Thursday, for an interview with the Committee.
Her heart stood still. She knew she would make the Committee accept
her. Now she was afraid, now that her removal was imminent. Her heart
quivered with fear and reluctance. But underneath her purpose was
fixed.
She passed shadowily through the day, unwilling to tell her news to her
mother, waiting for her father. Suspense and fear were strong upon her.
She dreaded going to Kingston. Her easy dreams disappeared from the
grasp of reality.
And yet, as the afternoon wore away, the sweetness of the dream
returned again. Kingston-on-Thames—there was such sound of dignity to
her. The shadow of history and the glamour of stately progress
enveloped her. The palaces would be old and darkened, the place of
kings obscured. Yet it was a place of kings for her—Richard and Henry
and Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth. She divined great lawns with noble
trees, and terraces whose steps the water washed softly, where the
swans sometimes came to earth. Still she must see the stately, gorgeous
barge of the Queen float down, the crimson carpet put upon the landing
stairs, the gentlemen in their purple-velvet cloaks, bare-headed,
standing in the sunshine grouped on either side waiting.
“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.”
Evening came, her father returned home, sanguine and alert and detached
as ever. He was less real than her fancies. She waited whilst he ate
his tea. He took big mouthfuls, big bites, and ate unconsciously with
the same abandon an animal gives to its food.
Immediately after tea he went over to the church. It was
choir-practice, and he wanted to try the tunes on his organ.
The latch of the big door clicked loudly as she came after him, but the
organ rolled more loudly still. He was unaware. He was practicing the
anthem. She saw his small, jet-black head and alert face between the
candle-flames, his slim body sagged on the music-stool. His face was so
luminous and fixed, the movements of his limbs seemed strange, apart
from him. The sound of the organ seemed to belong to the very stone of
the pillars, like sap running in them.
Then there was a close of music and silence.
“Father!” she said.
He looked round as if at an apparition. Ursula stood shadowily within
the candle-light.
“What now?” he said, not coming to earth.
It was difficult to speak to him.
“I’ve got a situation,” she said, forcing herself to speak.
“You’ve got what?” he answered, unwilling to come out of his mood of
organ-playing. He closed the music before him.
“I’ve got a situation to go to.”
Then he turned to her, still abstracted, unwilling.
“Oh, where’s that?” he said.
“At Kingston-on-Thames. I must go on Thursday for an interview with the
Committee.”
“You must go on Thursday?”
“Yes.”
And she handed him the letter. He read it by the light of the candles.
“Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay, Derbyshire.
“Dear Madam, You are requested to call at the above offices on Thursday
next, the 10th, at 11.30 a.m., for an interview with the committee,
referring to your application for the post of assistant mistress at the
Wellingborough Green Schools.”
It was very difficult for Brangwen to take in this remote and official
information, glowing as he was within the quiet of his church and his
anthem music.
“Well, you needn’t bother me with it now, need you?’ he said
impatiently, giving her back the letter.
“I’ve got to go on Thursday,” she said.
He sat motionless. Then he reached more music, and there was a rushing
sound of air, then a long, emphatic trumpet-note of the organ, as he
laid his hands on the keys. Ursula turned and went away.
He tried to give himself again to the organ. But he could not. He could
not get back. All the time a sort of string was tugging, tugging him
elsewhere, miserably.
So that when he came into the house after choir-practice his face was
dark and his heart black. He said nothing however, until all the
younger children were in bed. Ursula, however, knew what was brewing.
At length he asked:
“Where’s that letter?”
She gave it to him. He sat looking at it. “You are requested to call at
the above offices on Thursday next——” It was a cold, official notice to
Ursula herself and had nothing to do with him. So! She existed now as a
separate social individual. It was for her to answer this note, without
regard to him. He had even no right to interfere. His heart was hard
and angry.
“You had to do it behind our backs, had you?” he said, with a sneer.
And her heart leapt with hot pain. She knew she was free—she had broken
away from him. He was beaten.
“You said, ‘let her try,’” she retorted, almost apologizing to him.
He did not hear. He sat looking at the letter.
“Education Office, Kingston-on-Thames”—and then the typewritten “Miss
Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay.” It was all so complete
and so final. He could not but feel the new position Ursula held, as
recipient of that letter. It was an iron in his soul.
“Well,” he said at length, “you’re not going.”
Ursula started and could find no words to clamour her revolt.
“If you think you’re going dancin’ off to th’ other side of London,
you’re mistaken.”
“Why not?” she cried, at once hard fixed in her will to go.
“That’s why not,” he said.
And there was silence till Mrs. Brangwen came downstairs.
“Look here, Anna,” he said, handing her the letter.
She put back her head, seeing a typewritten letter, anticipating
trouble from the outside world. There was the curious, sliding motion
of her eyes, as if she shut off her sentient, maternal self, and a kind
of hard trance, meaningless, took its place. Thus, meaningless, she
glanced over the letter, careful not to take it in. She apprehended the
contents with her callous, superficial mind. Her feeling self was shut
down.
“What post is it?” she asked.
“She wants to go and be a teacher in Kingston-on-Thames, at fifty
pounds a year.”
“Oh, indeed.”
The mother spoke as if it were a hostile fact concerning some stranger.
She would have let her go, out of callousness. Mrs. Brangwen would
begin to grow up again only with her youngest child. Her eldest girl
was in the way now.
“She’s not going all that distance,” said the father.
“I have to go where they want me,” cried Ursula. “And it’s a good place
to go to.”
“What do you know about the place?” said her father harshly.
“And it doesn’t matter whether they want you or not, if your father
says you are not to go,” said the mother calmly.
How Ursula hated her!
“You said I was to try,” the girl cried. “Now I’ve got a place and I’m
going to go.”
“You’re not going all that distance,” said her father.
“Why don’t you get a place at Ilkeston, where you can live at home?”
asked Gudrun, who hated conflicts, who could not understand Ursula’s
uneasy way, yet who must stand by her sister.
“There aren’t any places in Ilkeston,” cried Ursula. “And I’d rather go
right away.”
“If you’d asked about it, a place could have been got for you in
Ilkeston. But you had to play Miss High-an’-mighty, and go your own
way,” said her father.
“I’ve no doubt you’d rather go right away,” said her mother, very
caustic. “And I’ve no doubt you’d find other people didn’t put up with
you for very long either. You’ve too much opinion of yourself for your
good.”
Between the girl and her mother was a feeling of pure hatred. There
came a stubborn silence. Ursula knew she must break it.
“Well, they’ve written to me, and I s’ll have to go,” she said.
“Where will you get the money from?” asked her father.
“Uncle Tom will give it me,” she said.
Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant.
Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was abstracted, he
seemed to be abstracting himself, to make a pure statement.
“Well, you’re not going all that distance away,” he said. “I’ll ask Mr.
Burt about a place here. I’m not going to have you by yourself at the
other side of London.”
“But I’ve _got_ to go to Kingston,” said Ursula. “They’ve sent for me.”
“They’ll do without you,” he said.
There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of tears.
“Well,” she said, low and tense, “you can put me off this, but I’m
_going_ to have a place. I’m _not_ going to stop at home.”
“Nobody wants you to stop at home,” he suddenly shouted, going livid
with rage.
She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its own
arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest of them.
This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She went singing
into the parlour.
“C’est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenêtre qu’est-ce qui le lui renda——”
During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard, singing to
herself, making love to the children, but her soul hard and cold with
regard to her parents. Nothing more was said. The hardness and
brightness lasted for four days. Then it began to break up. So at
evening she said to her father:
“Have you spoken about a place for me?”
“I spoke to Mr. Burt.”
“What did he say?”
“There’s a committee meeting to-morrow. He’ll tell me on Friday.”
So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an exciting
dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So she knew that this
would come to pass. Because nothing was ever fulfilled, she found,
except in the hard limited reality. She did not want to be a teacher in
Ilkeston, because she knew Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be
free, so she must take her freedom where she could.
On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in Brinsley Street
school. This could most probably be secured for her, at once, without
the trouble of application.
Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor quarter, and
she had had a taste of the common children of Ilkeston. They had
shouted after her and thrown stones. Still, as a teacher, she would be
in authority. And it was all unknown. She was excited. The very forest
of dry, sterile brick had some fascination for her. It was so hard and
ugly, so relentlessly ugly, it would purge her of some of her floating
sentimentality.
She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love her. She
would be so _personal._ Teachers were always so hard and impersonal.
There was no vivid relationship. She would make everything personal and
vivid, she would give herself, she would give, give, give all her great
stores of wealth to her children, she would make them so happy, and
they would prefer her to any teacher on the face of the earth.
At Christmas she would choose such fascinating Christmas cards for
them, and she would give them such a happy party in one of the
class-rooms.
The headmaster, Mr. Harby, was a short, thick-set, rather common man,
she thought. But she would hold before him the light of grace and
refinement, he would have her in such high esteem before long. She
would be the gleaming sun of the school, the children would blossom
like little weeds, the teachers like tall, hard plants would burst into
rare flower.
The Monday morning came. It was the end of September, and a drizzle of
fine rain like veils round her, making her seem intimate, a world to
herself. She walked forward to the new land. The old was blotted out.
The veil would be rent that hid the new world. She was gripped hard
with suspense as she went down the hill in the rain, carrying her
dinner-bag.
Through the thin rain she saw the town, a black, extensive mount. She
must enter in upon it. She felt at once a feeling of repugnance and of
excited fulfilment. But she shrank.
She waited at the terminus for the tram. Here it was beginning. Before
her was the station to Nottingham, whence Theresa had gone to school
half an hour before; behind her was the little church school she had
attended when she was a child, when her grandmother was alive. Her
grandmother had been dead two years now. There was a strange woman at
the Marsh, with her Uncle Fred, and a small baby. Behind her was
Cossethay, and blackberries were ripe on the hedges.
As she waited at the tram-terminus she reverted swiftly to her
childhood; her teasing grandfather, with his fair beard and blue eyes,
and his big, monumental body; he had got drowned: her grandmother, whom
Ursula would sometimes say she had loved more than anyone else in the
world: the little church school, the Phillips boys; one was a soldier
in the Life Guards now, one was a collier. With a passion she clung to
the past.
But as she dreamed of it, she heard the tram-car grinding round a bend,
rumbling dully, she saw it draw into sight, and hum nearer. It sidled
round the loop at the terminus, and came to a standstill, looming above
her. Some shadowy grey people stepped from the far end, the conductor
was walking in the puddles, swinging round the pole.
She mounted into the wet, comfortless tram, whose floor was dark with
wet, whose windows were all steamed, and she sat in suspense. It had
begun, her new existence.
One other passenger mounted—a sort of charwoman with a drab, wet coat.
Ursula could not bear the waiting of the tram. The bell clanged, there
was a lurch forward. The car moved cautiously down the wet street. She
was being carried forward, into her new existence. Her heart burned
with pain and suspense, as if something were cutting her living tissue.
Often, oh often the tram seemed to stop, and wet, cloaked people
mounted and sat mute and grey in stiff rows opposite her, their
umbrellas between their knees. The windows of the tram grew more
steamy; opaque. She was shut in with these unliving, spectral people.
Even yet it did not occur to her that she was one of them. The
conductor came down issuing tickets. Each little ring of his clipper
sent a pang of dread through her. But her ticket surely was different
from the rest.
They were all going to work; she also was going to work. Her ticket was
the same. She sat trying to fit in with them. But fear was at her
bowels, she felt an unknown, terrible grip upon her.
At Bath Street she must dismount and change trams. She looked uphill.
It seemed to lead to freedom. She remembered the many Saturday
afternoons she had walked up to the shops. How free and careless she
had been!
Ah, her tram was sliding gingerly downhill. She dreaded every yard of
her conveyance. The car halted, she mounted hastily.
She kept turning her head as the car ran on, because she was uncertain
of the street. At last, her heart a flame of suspense, trembling, she
rose. The conductor rang the bell brusquely.
She was walking down a small, mean, wet street, empty of people. The
school squatted low within its railed, asphalt yard, that shone black
with rain. The building was grimy, and horrible, dry plants were
shadowily looking through the windows.
She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place seemed to
have a threatening expression, imitating the church’s architecture, for
the purpose of domineering, like a gesture of vulgar authority. She saw
that one pair of feet had paddled across the flagstone floor of the
porch. The place was silent, deserted, like an empty prison waiting the
return of tramping feet.
Ursula went forward to the teachers’ room that burrowed in a gloomy
hole. She knocked timidly.
“Come in!” called a surprised man’s voice, as from a prison cell. She
entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was
lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirt-sleeves was
rubbing a paper on a jellytray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow,
sharp face, said “Good morning,” then turned away again, and stripped
the paper off the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing
transferred, before he dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap.
Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the
narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.
“Isn’t it a nasty morning,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s not much of weather.”
But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed.
This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo.
Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof.
“Am I early?” she asked.
The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to
be sharpened to needle-points of vision.
“Twenty-five past,” he said. “You’re the second to come. I’m first this
morning.”
Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin
red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing,
pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again.
There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the
table.
“Must you do so many?” asked Ursula.
Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three
years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes
were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl
thought.
“Sixty-three,” he answered.
“So many!” she said, gently. Then she remembered.
“But they’re not all for your class, are they?” she added.
“Why aren’t they?” he replied, a fierceness in his voice.
Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his
directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never
been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were
addressing a machine.
“It is too many,” she said sympathetically.
“You’ll get about the same,” he said.
That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to
feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer,
sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened
her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature.
The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about
twenty-eight appeared.
“Oh, Ursula!” the newcomer exclaimed. “You are here early! My word,
I’ll warrant you don’t keep it up. That’s Mr. Williamson’s peg. This is
yours. Standard Five teacher always has this. Aren’t you going to take
your hat off?”
Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula’s waterproof from the peg on which it
was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had already
snatched the pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed them through her
coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat,
dun-coloured hair.
“Isn’t it a beastly morning,” she exclaimed, “beastly! And if there’s
one thing I hate above another it’s a wet Monday morning;—pack of kids
trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding ’em——”
She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying
it round her waist.
“You’ve brought an apron, haven’t you?” she said jerkily, glancing at
Ursula. “Oh—you’ll want one. You’ve no idea what a sight you’ll look
before half-past four, what with chalk and ink and kids’ dirty
feet.—Well, I can send a boy down to mamma’s for one.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Ursula.
“Oh, yes—I can send easily,” cried Miss Harby.
Ursula’s heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was
she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss
Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored
him. Ursula felt the callous crude rudeness between the two teachers.
The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were already
clattering in the porch.
“Jim Richards,” called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A boy came
sheepishly forward.
“Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?” said Miss Harby, in a
commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait for an
answer. “Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my school pinas, for
Miss Brangwen—shall you?”
The boy muttered a sheepish “Yes, miss,” and was moving away.
“Hey,” called Miss Harby. “Come here—now what are you going for? What
shall you say to mamma?”
“A school pina——” muttered the boy.
“‘Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her another school
pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she’s come without one.’”
“Yes, miss,” muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving off. Miss
Harby caught him back, holding him by the shoulder.
“What are you going to say?”
“Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss Brangwin,”
muttered the boy very sheepishly.
“Miss _Brangwen!_” laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away. “Here, you’d
better have my umbrella—wait a minute.”
The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby’s umbrella, and set
off.
“Don’t take long over it,” called Miss Harby, after him. Then she
turned to Ursula, and said brightly:
“Oh, he’s a caution, that lad—but not bad, you know.”
“No,” Ursula agreed, weakly.
The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room. Ursula
glanced down the place. Its rigid, long silence was official and
chilling. Half-way down was a glass partition, the doors of which were
open. A clock ticked re-echoing, and Miss Harby’s voice sounded double
as she said:
“This is the big room—Standard Five-Six-and-Seven.—Here’s your
place—Five——”
She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a small high
teacher’s desk facing a squadron of long benches, two high windows in
the wall opposite.
It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious, unliving light
in the room changed her character. She thought it was the rainy
morning. Then she looked up again, because of the horrid feeling of
being shut in a rigid, inflexible air, away from all feeling of the
ordinary day; and she noticed that the windows were of ribbed, suffused
glass.
The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed,
pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums
against the pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a
squadron, and dread filled her. This was a new world, a new life, with
which she was threatened. But still excited, she climbed into her chair
at her teacher’s desk. It was high, and her feet could not reach the
ground, but must rest on the step. Lifted up there, off the ground, she
was in office. How queer, how queer it all was! How different it was
from the mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought of her own
village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off, so lost
to her.
She was here in this hard, stark reality—reality. It was queer that she
should call this the reality, which she had never known till to-day,
and which now so filled her with dread and dislike, that she wished she
might go away. This was the reality, and Cossethay, her beloved,
beautiful, wellknown Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was
minor reality. This prison of a school was reality. Here, then, she
would sit in state, the queen of scholars! Here she would realize her
dream of being the beloved teacher bringing light and joy to her
children! But the desks before her had an abstract angularity that
bruised her sentiment and made her shrink. She winced, feeling she had
been a fool in her anticipations. She had brought her feelings and her
generosity to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And
already she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of
place.
She slid down, and they returned to the teacher’s room. It was queer to
feel that one ought to alter one’s personality. She was nobody, there
was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she
must apply herself to it.
Mr. Harby was in the teachers’ room, standing before a big, open
cupboard, in which Ursula could see piles of pink blotting-paper, heaps
of shiny new books, boxes of chalk, and bottles of coloured inks. It
looked a treasure store.
The schoolmaster was a short, sturdy man, with a fine head, and a heavy
jowl. Nevertheless he was good-looking, with his shapely brows and
nose, and his great, hanging moustache. He seemed absorbed in his work,
and took no notice of Ursula’s entry. There was something insulting in
the way he could be so actively unaware of another person, so occupied.
When he had a moment of absence, he looked up from the table and said
good-morning to Ursula. There was a pleasant light in his brown eyes.
He seemed very manly and incontrovertible, like something she wanted to
push over.
“You had a wet walk,” he said to Ursula.
“Oh, I don’t mind, I’m used to it,” she replied, with a nervous little
laugh.
But already he was not listening. Her words sounded ridiculous and
babbling. He was taking no notice of her.
“You will sign your name here,” he said to her, as if she were some
child—“and the time when you come and go.”
Ursula signed her name in the time book and stood back. No one took any
further notice of her. She beat her brains for something to say, but in
vain.
“I’d let them in now,” said Mr. Harby to the thin man, who was very
hastily arranging his papers.
The assistant teacher made no sign of acquiescence, and went on with
what he was doing. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. At the last
moment Mr. Brunt slipped into his coat.
“You will go to the girls’ lobby,” said the schoolmaster to Ursula,
with a fascinating, insulting geniality, purely official and
domineering.
She went out and found Miss Harby, and another girl teacher, in the
porch. On the asphalt yard the rain was falling. A toneless bell
tang-tang-tanged drearily overhead, monotonously, insistently. It came
to an end. Then Mr. Brunt was seen, bare-headed, standing at the other
gate of the school yard, blowing shrill blasts on a whistle and looking
down the rainy, dreary street.
Boys in gangs and streams came trotting up, running past the master and
with a loud clatter of feet and voices, over the yard to the boys’
porch. Girls were running and walking through the other entrance.
In the porch where Ursula stood there was a great noise of girls, who
were tearing off their coats and hats, and hanging them on the racks
bristling with pegs. There was a smell of wet clothing, a tossing out
of wet, draggled hair, a noise of voices and feet.
The mass of girls grew greater, the rage around the pegs grew steadier,
the scholars tended to fall into little noisy gangs in the porch. Then
Violet Harby clapped her hands, clapped them louder, with a shrill
“Quiet, girls, quiet!”
There was a pause. The hubbub died down but did not cease.
“What did I say?” cried Miss Harby, shrilly.
There was almost complete silence. Sometimes a girl, rather late,
whirled into the porch and flung off her things.
“Leaders—in place,” commanded Miss Harby shrilly.
Pairs of girls in pinafores and long hair stood separate in the porch.
“Standard Four, Five, and Six—fall in,” cried Miss Harby.
There was a hubbub, which gradually resolved itself into three columns
of girls, two and two, standing smirking in the passage. In among the
peg-racks, other teachers were putting the lower classes into ranks.
Ursula stood by her own Standard Five. They were jerking their
shoulders, tossing their hair, nudging, writhing, staring, grinning,
whispering and twisting.
A sharp whistle was heard, and Standard Six, the biggest girls, set
off, led by Miss Harby. Ursula, with her Standard Five, followed after.
She stood beside a smirking, grinning row of girls, waiting in a narrow
passage. What she was herself she did not know.
Suddenly the sound of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off
hollowly down the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The
piano played on, a march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of
the big room. Mr. Harby was seen away beyond at his desk. Mr. Brunt
guarded the other door of the room. Ursula’s class pushed up. She stood
near them. They glanced and smirked and shoved.
“Go on,” said Ursula.
They tittered.
“Go on,” said Ursula, for the piano continued.
The girls broke loosely into the room. Mr. Harby, who had seemed
immersed in some occupation, away at his desk, lifted his head and
thundered:
“Halt!”
There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just starting
through the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued voice of Mr.
Brunt was heard, then the booming shout of Mr. Harby, from far down the
room:
“Who told Standard Five girls to come in like that?”
Ursula crimsoned. Her girls were glancing up at her, smirking their
accusation.
“I sent them in, Mr. Harby,” she said, in a clear, struggling voice.
There was a moment of silence. Then Mr. Harby roared from the distance.
“Go back to your places, Standard Five girls.”
The girls glanced up at Ursula, accusing, rather jeering, fugitive.
They pushed back. Ursula’s heart hardened with ignominious pain.
“Forward—march,” came Mr. Brunt’s voice, and the girls set off, keeping
time with the ranks of boys.
Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls, who stood
filling the ranks of the desks. She felt utterly nonexistent. She had
no place nor being there. She faced the block of children.
Down the room she heard the rapid firing of questions. She stood before
her class not knowing what to do. She waited painfully. Her block of
children, fifty unknown faces, watched her, hostile, ready to jeer. She
felt as if she were in torture over a fire of faces. And on every side
she was naked to them. Of unutterable length and torture the seconds
went by.
Then she gathered courage. She heard Mr. Brunt asking questions in
mental arithmetic. She stood near to her class, so that her voice need
not be raised too much, and faltering, uncertain, she said:
“Seven hats at twopence ha’penny each?”
A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence. She was
red and suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades, and she asked
for the answer.
The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do, there came
horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the children; and when,
relying on some pert little girl for information, she had started a
lesson, she did not know how to go on with it properly. The children
were her masters. She deferred to them. She could always hear Mr.
Brunt. Like a machine, always in the same hard, high, inhuman voice he
went on with his teaching, oblivious of everything. And before this
inhuman number of children she was always at bay. She could not get
away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective children,
depending on her for command, for command it hated and resented. It
made her feel she could not breathe: she must suffocate, it was so
inhuman. They were so many, that they were not children. They were a
squadron. She could not speak as she would to a child, because they
were not individual children, they were a collective, inhuman thing.
Dinner-time came, and stunned, bewildered, solitary, she went into the
teachers’ room for dinner. Never had she felt such a stranger to life
before. It seemed to her she had just disembarked from some strange
horrible state where everything was as in hell, a condition of hard,
malevolent system. And she was not really free. The afternoon drew at
her like some bondage.
The first week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to
teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now
and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so
incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that
she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there
watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really
threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she
had no soul in her body. Then he went away, and his going was like a
derision. The class was his class. She was a wavering substitute. He
thrashed and bullied, he was hated. But he was master. Though she was
gentle and always considerate of her class, yet they belonged to Mr.
Harby, and they did not belong to her. Like some invincible source of
the mechanism he kept all power to himself. And the class owned his
power. And in school it was power, and power alone that mattered.
Soon Ursula came to dread him, and at the bottom of her dread was a
seed of hate, for she despised him, yet he was master of her. Then she
began to get on. All the other teachers hated him, and fanned their
hatred among themselves. For he was master of them and the children, he
stood like a wheel to make absolute his authority over the herd. That
seemed to be his one reason in life, to hold blind authority over the
school. His teachers were his subjects as much as the scholars. Only,
because they had some authority, his instinct was to detest them.
Ursula could not make herself a favourite with him. From the first
moment she set hard against him. She set against Violet Harby also. Mr.
Harby was, however, too much for her, he was something she could not
come to grips with, something too strong for her. She tried to approach
him as a young, bright girl usually approaches a man, expecting a
little chivalrous courtesy. But the fact that she was a girl, a woman,
was ignored or used as a matter for contempt against her. She did not
know what she was, nor what she must be. She wanted to remain her own
responsive, personal self.
So she taught on. She made friends with the Standard Three teacher,
Maggie Schofield. Miss Schofield was about twenty years old, a subdued
girl who held aloof from the other teachers. She was rather beautiful,
meditative, and seemed to live in another, lovelier world.
Ursula took her dinner to school, and during the second week ate it in
Miss Schofield’s room. Standard Three classroom stood by itself and had
windows on two sides, looking on to the playground. It was a passionate
relief to find such a retreat in the jarring school. For there were
pots of chrysanthemums and coloured leaves, and a big jar of berries:
there were pretty little pictures on the wall, photogravure
reproductions from Greuze, and Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence”, giving an
air of intimacy; so that the room, with its window space, its smaller,
tidier desks, its touch of pictures and flowers, made Ursula at once
glad. Here at last was a little personal touch, to which she could
respond.
It was Monday. She had been at school a week and was getting used to
the surroundings, though she was still an entire foreigner in herself.
She looked forward to having dinner with Maggie. That was the bright
spot in the day. Maggie was so strong and remote, walking with slow,
sure steps down a hard road, carrying the dream within her. Ursula went
through the class teaching as through a meaningless daze.
Her class tumbled out at midday in haphazard fashion. She did not
realize what host she was gathering against herself by her superior
tolerance, her kindness and her _laisser-aller_. They were gone, and
she was rid of them, and that was all. She hurried away to the
teachers’ room.
Mr. Brunt was crouching at the small stove, putting a little rice
pudding into the oven. He rose then, and attentively poked in a small
saucepan on the hob with a fork. Then he replaced the saucepan lid.
“Aren’t they done?” asked Ursula gaily, breaking in on his tense
absorption.
She always kept a bright, blithe manner, and was pleasant to all the
teachers. For she felt like the swan among the geese, of superior
heritage and belonging. And her pride at being the swan in this ugly
school was not yet abated.
“Not yet,” replied Mr. Brunt, laconic.
“I wonder if my dish is hot,” she said, bending down at the oven. She
half expected him to look for her, but he took no notice. She was
hungry and she poked her finger eagerly in the pot to see if her
brussels sprouts and potatoes and meat were ready. They were not.
“Don’t you think it’s rather jolly bringing dinner?” she said to Mr.
Brunt.
“I don’t know as I do,” he said, spreading a serviette on a corner of
the table, and not looking at her.
“I suppose it is too far for you to go home?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he rose and looked at her. He had the bluest,
fiercest, most pointed eyes that she had ever met. He stared at her
with growing fierceness.
“If I were you, Miss Brangwen,” he said, menacingly, “I should get a
bit tighter hand over my class.”
Ursula shrank.
“Would you?” she asked, sweetly, yet in terror. “Aren’t I strict
enough?”
“Because,” he repeated, taking no notice of her, “they’ll get you down
if you don’t tackle ’em pretty quick. They’ll pull you down, and worry
you, till Harby gets you shifted—that’s how it’ll be. You won’t be here
another six weeks”—and he filled his mouth with food—“if you don’t
tackle ’em and tackle ’em quick.”
“Oh, but——” Ursula said, resentfully, ruefully. The terror was deep in
her.
“Harby’ll not help you. This is what he’ll do—he’ll let you go on,
getting worse and worse, till either you clear out or he clears you
out. It doesn’t matter to me, except that you’ll leave a class behind
you as I hope I shan’t have to cope with.”
She heard the accusation in the man’s voice, and felt condemned. But
still, school had not yet become a definite reality to her. She was
shirking it. It was reality, but it was all outside her. And she fought
against Mr. Brunt’s representation. She did not want to realize.
“Will it be so terrible?” she said, quivering, rather beautiful, but
with a slight touch of condescension, because she would not betray her
own trepidation.
“Terrible?” said the man, turning to his potatoes again. “I dunno about
terrible.”
“I _do_ feel frightened,” said Ursula. “The children seem so——”
“What?” said Miss Harby, entering at that moment.
“Why,” said Ursula, “Mr. Brunt says I ought to tackle my class,” and
she laughed uneasily.
“Oh, you have to keep order if you want to teach,” said Miss Harby,
hard, superior, trite.
Ursula did not answer. She felt non valid before them.
“If you want to be let to _live,_ you have,” said Mr. Brunt.
“Well, if you can’t keep order, what good are you?” said Miss Harby.
“An’ you’ve got to do it by yourself,”—his voice rose like the bitter
cry of the prophets. “You’ll get no _help_ from anybody.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Miss Harby. “Some people can’t be helped.” And she
departed.
The air of hostility and disintegration, of wills working in
antagonistic subordination, was hideous. Mr. Brunt, subordinate,
afraid, acid with shame, frightened her. Ursula wanted to run. She only
wanted to clear out, not to understand.
Then Miss Schofield came in, and with her another, more restful note.
Ursula at once turned for confirmation to the newcomer. Maggie remained
personal within all this unclean system of authority.
“Is the big Anderson here?” she asked of Mr. Brunt. And they spoke of
some affair about two scholars, coldly, officially.
Miss Schofield took her brown dish, and Ursula followed with her own.
The cloth was laid in the pleasant Standard Three room, there was a jar
with two or three monthly roses on the table.
“It is so nice in here, you _have_ made it different,” said Ursula
gaily. But she was afraid. The atmosphere of the school was upon her.
“The big room,” said Miss Schofield, “ha, it’s misery to be in it!”
She too spoke with bitterness. She too lived in the ignominious
position of an upper servant hated by the master above and the class
beneath. She was, she knew, liable to attack from either side at any
minute, or from both at once, for the authorities would listen to the
complaints of parents, and both would turn round on the mongrel
authority, the teacher.
So there was a hard, bitter withholding in Maggie Schofield even as she
poured out her savoury mess of big golden beans and brown gravy.
“It is vegetarian hot-pot,” said Miss Schofield. “Would you like to try
it?”
“I should love to,” said Ursula.
Her own dinner seemed coarse and ugly beside this savoury, clean dish.
“I’ve never eaten vegetarian things,” she said, “But I should think
they can be good.”
“I’m not really a vegetarian,” said Maggie, “I don’t like to bring meat
to school.”
“No,” said Ursula, “I don’t think I do either.”
And again her soul rang an answer to a new refinement, a new liberty.
If all vegetarian things were as nice as this, she would be glad to
escape the slight uncleanness of meat.
“How good!” she cried.
“Yes,” said Miss Schofield, and she proceeded to tell her the receipt.
The two girls passed on to talk about themselves. Ursula told all about
the High School, and about her matriculation, bragging a little. She
felt so poor here, in this ugly place. Miss Schofield listened with
brooding, handsome face, rather gloomy.
“Couldn’t you have got to some better place than this?” she asked at
length.
“I didn’t know what it was like,” said Ursula, doubtfully.
“Ah!” said Miss Schofield, and she turned aside her head with a bitter
motion.
“Is it as horrid as it seems?” asked Ursula, frowning lightly, in fear.
“It is,” said Miss Schofield, bitterly. “Ha!—it is _hateful!”_
Ursula’s heart sank, seeing even Miss Schofield in the deadly bondage.
“It is Mr. Harby,” said Maggie Schofield, breaking forth.
“I don’t think I _could_ live again in the big room—Mr. Brunt’s voice
and Mr. Harby—ah——”
She turned aside her head with a deep hurt. Some things she could not
bear.
“Is Mr. Harby really horrid?” asked Ursula, venturing into her own
dread.
“He!—why, he’s just a bully,” said Miss Schofield, raising her shamed
dark eyes, that flamed with tortured contempt. “He’s not bad as long as
you keep in with him, and refer to him, and do everything in his
way—but—it’s all so _mean!_ It’s just a question of fighting on both
sides—and those great louts——”
She spoke with difficulty and with increased bitterness. She had
evidently suffered. Her soul was raw with ignominy. Ursula suffered in
response.
“But why is it so horrid?” she asked, helplessly.
“You can’t do _anything,”_ said Miss Schofield. “He’s against you on
one side and he sets the children against you on the other. The
children are simply awful. You’ve got to _make_ them do everything.
Everything, everything has got to come out of you. Whatever they learn,
you’ve got to force it into them—and that’s how it is.”
Ursula felt her heart fail inside her. Why must she grasp all this, why
must she force learning on fifty-five reluctant children, having all
the time an ugly, rude jealousy behind her, ready to throw her to the
mercy of the herd of children, who would like to rend her as a weaker
representative of authority. A great dread of her task possessed her.
She saw Mr. Brunt, Miss Harby, Miss Schofield, all the school-teachers,
drudging unwillingly at the graceless task of compelling many children
into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the whole set to an
automatic state of obedience and attention, and then of commanding
their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. The first great task
was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind, or being. This state
must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and
the will of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the
children. The point was that the headmaster and the teachers should
have one will in authority, which should bring the will of the children
into accord. But the headmaster was narrow and exclusive. The will of
the teachers could not agree with his, their separate wills refused to
be so subordinated. So there was a state of anarchy, leaving the final
judgment to the children themselves, which authority should exist.
So there existed a set of separate wills, each straining itself to the
utmost to exert its own authority. Children will never naturally
acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must
be compelled by a stronger, wiser will. Against which will they must
always strive to revolt. So that the first great effort of every
teacher of a large class must be to bring the will of the children into
accordance with his own will. And this he can only do by an abnegation
of his personal self, and an application of a system of laws, for the
purpose of achieving a certain calculable result, the imparting of
certain knowledge. Whereas Ursula thought she was going to become the
first wise teacher by making the whole business personal, and using no
compulsion. She believed entirely in her own personality.
So that she was in a very deep mess. In the first place she was
offering to a class a relationship which only one or two of the
children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the mass were
left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she was placing
herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed authority of Mr. Harby,
so that the scholars could more safely harry her. She did not know, but
her instinct gradually warned her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr.
Brunt. On it went, jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it
nearly drove her mad: always the same set, harsh monotony. The man was
become a mechanism working on and on and on. But the personal man was
in subdued friction all the time. It was horrible—all hate! Must she be
like this? She could feel the ghastly necessity. She must become the
same—put away the personal self, become an instrument, an abstraction,
working upon a certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of
making them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet
gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was
being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and saw a
luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a fantasy, like
a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black and tangled in the
teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished, she was
subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be
shining? There was no sky, there was no luminous atmosphere of
out-of-doors. Only the inside of the school was real—hard, concrete,
real and vicious.
She would not yet, however, let school quite overcome her. She always
said. “It is not a permanency, it will come to an end.” She could
always see herself beyond the place, see the time when she had left it.
On Sundays and on holidays, when she was away at Cossethay or in the
woods where the beech-leaves were fallen, she could think of St.
Philip’s Church School, and by an effort of will put it in the picture
as a dirty little low-squatting building that made a very tiny mound
under the sky, while the great beech-woods spread immense about her,
and the afternoon was spacious and wonderful. Moreover the children,
the scholars, they were insignificant little objects far away, oh, far
away. And what power had they over her free soul? A fleeting thought of
them, as she kicked her way through the beech-leaves, and they were
gone. But her will was tense against them all the time.
All the while, they pursued her. She had never had such a passionate
love of the beautiful things about her. Sitting on top of the tram-car,
at evening, sometimes school was swept away as she saw a magnificent
sky settling down. And her breast, her very hands, clamoured for the
lovely flare of sunset. It was poignant almost to agony, her reaching
for it. She almost cried aloud seeing the sundown so lovely.
For she was held away. It was no matter how she said to herself that
school existed no more once she had left it. It existed. It was within
her like a dark weight, controlling her movement. It was in vain the
high-spirited, proud young girl flung off the school and its
association with her. She was Miss Brangwen, she was Standard Five
teacher, she had her most important being in her work now.
Constantly haunting her, like a darkness hovering over her heart and
threatening to swoop down over it at every moment, was the sense that
somehow, somehow she was brought down. Bitterly she denied unto herself
that she was really a schoolteacher. Leave that to the Violet Harbys.
She herself would stand clear of the accusation. It was in vain she
denied it.
Within herself some recording hand seemed to point mechanically to a
negation. She was incapable of fulfilling her task. She could never for
a moment escape from the fatal weight of the knowledge.
And so she felt inferior to Violet Harby. Miss Harby was a splendid
teacher. She could keep order and inflict knowledge on a class with
remarkable efficiency. It was no good Ursula’s protesting to herself
that she was infinitely, infinitely the superior of Violet Harby. She
knew that Violet Harby succeeded where she failed, and this in a task
which was almost a test of her. She felt something all the time wearing
upon her, wearing her down. She went about in these first weeks trying
to deny it, to say she was free as ever. She tried not to feel at a
disadvantage before Miss Harby, tried to keep up the effect of her own
superiority. But a great weight was on her, which Violet Harby could
bear, and she herself could not.
Though she did not give in, she never succeeded. Her class was getting
in worse condition, she knew herself less and less secure in teaching
it. Ought she to withdraw and go home again? Ought she to say she had
come to the wrong place, and so retire? Her very life was at test.
She went on doggedly, blindly, waiting for a crisis. Mr. Harby had now
begun to persecute her. Her dread and hatred of him grew and loomed
larger and larger. She was afraid he was going to bully her and destroy
her. He began to persecute her because she could not keep her class in
proper condition, because her class was the weak link in the chain
which made up the school.
One of the offences was that her class was noisy and disturbed Mr.
Harby, as he took Standard Seven at the other end of the room. She was
taking composition on a certain morning, walking in among the scholars.
Some of the boys had dirty ears and necks, their clothing smelled
unpleasantly, but she could ignore it. She corrected the writing as she
went.
“When you say ‘their fur is brown’, how do you write ‘their’?” she
asked.
There was a little pause; the boys were always jeeringly backward in
answering. They had begun to jeer at her authority altogether.
“Please, miss, t-h-e-i-r”, spelled a lad, loudly, with a note of
mockery.
At that moment Mr. Harby was passing.
“Stand up, Hill!” he called, in a big voice.
Everybody started. Ursula watched the boy. He was evidently poor, and
rather cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off his forehead,
the rest fitted close to his meagre head. He was pale and colourless.
“Who told you to call out?” thundered Mr. Harby.
The boy looked up and down, with a guilty air, and a cunning, cynical
reserve.
“Please, sir, I was answering,” he replied, with the same humble
insolence.
“Go to my desk.”
The boy set off down the room, the big black jacket hanging in dejected
folds about him, his thin legs, rather knocked at the knees, going
already with the pauper’s crawl, his feet in their big boots scarcely
lifted. Ursula watched him in his crawling, slinking progress down the
room. He was one of her boys! When he got to the desk, he looked round,
half furtively, with a sort of cunning grin and a pathetic leer at the
big boys in Standard VII. Then, pitiable, pale, in his dejected
garments, he lounged under the menace of the headmaster’s desk, with
one thin leg crooked at the knee and the foot struck out sideways his
hands in the low-hanging pockets of his man’s jacket.
Ursula tried to get her attention back to the class. The boy gave her a
little horror, and she was at the same time hot with pity for him. She
felt she wanted to scream. She was responsible for the boy’s
punishment. Mr. Harby was looking at her handwriting on the board. He
turned to the class.
“Pens down.”
The children put down their pens and looked up.
“Fold arms.”
They pushed back their books and folded arms.
Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate herself.
“_What_ is your composition about?” asked the headmaster. Every hand
shot up. “The ——” stuttered some voice in its eagerness to answer.
“I wouldn’t advise you to call out,” said Mr. Harby. He would have a
pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable menace that
always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes twinkling under his
bushy black eyebrows, watching the class. There was something
fascinating in him, as he stood, and again she wanted to scream. She
was all jarred, she did not know what she felt.
“Well, Alice?” he said.
“The rabbit,” piped a girl’s voice.
“A very easy subject for Standard Five.”
Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed before the
class. And she was tormented by the contradictoriness of everything.
Mr. Harby stood so strong, and so male, with his black brows and clear
forehead, the heavy jaw, the big, overhanging moustache: such a man,
with strength and male power, and a certain blind, native beauty. She
might have liked him as a man. And here he stood in some other
capacity, bullying over such a trifle as a boy’s speaking out without
permission. Yet he was not a little, fussy man. He seemed to have some
cruel, stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too small and
petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would fulfil,
because he had to earn his living. He had no finer control over
himself, only this blind, dogged, wholesale will. He would keep the job
going, since he must. And this job was to make the children spell the
word “caution” correctly, and put a capital letter after a full-stop.
So at this he hammered with his suppressed hatred, always suppressing
himself, till he was beside himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he
stood, short and handsome and powerful, teaching her class. It seemed
such a miserable thing for him to be doing. He had a decent, powerful,
rude soul. What did he care about the composition on “The Rabbit”? Yet
his will kept him there before the class, threshing the trivial
subject. It was habit with him now, to be so little and vulgar, out of
place. She saw the shamefulness of his position, felt the fettered
wickedness in him which would blaze out into evil rage in the long run,
so that he was like a persistent, strong creature tethered. It was
really intolerable. The jarring was torture to her. She looked over the
silent, attentive class that seemed to have crystallized into order and
rigid, neutral form. This he had it in his power to do, to crystallize
the children into hard, mute fragments, fixed under his will: his brute
will, which fixed them by sheer force.
She too must learn to subdue them to her will: she must. For it was her
duty, since the school was such. He had crystallized the class into
order. But to see him, a strong, powerful man, using all his power for
such a purpose, seemed almost horrible. There was something hideous
about it. The strange, genial light in his eye was really vicious, and
ugly, his smile was one of torture. He could not be impersonal. He
could not have a clear, pure purpose, he could only exercise his own
brute will. He did not believe in the least in the education he kept
inflicting year after year upon the children. So he must bully, only
bully, even while it tortured his strong, wholesome nature with shame
like a spur always galling. He was so blind and ugly and out of place.
Ursula could not bear it as he stood there. The whole situation was
wrong and ugly.
The lesson was finished, Mr. Harby went away. At the far end of the
room she heard the whistle and the thud of the cane. Her heart stood
still within her. She could not bear it, no, she could not bear it when
the boy was beaten. It made her sick. She felt that she must go out of
this school, this torture-place. And she hated the schoolmaster,
thoroughly and finally. The brute, had he no shame? He should never be
allowed to continue the atrocity of this bullying cruelty. Then Hill
came crawling back, blubbering piteously. There was something desolate
about this blubbering that nearly broke her heart. For after all, if
she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never have
happened, Hill would never have called out and been caned.
She began the arithmetic lesson. But she was distracted. The boy Hill
sat away on the back desk, huddled up, blubbering and sucking his hand.
It was a long time. She dared not go near, nor speak to him. She felt
ashamed before him. And she felt she could not forgive the boy for
being the huddled, blubbering object, all wet and snivelled, which he
was.
She went on correcting the sums. But there were too many children. She
could not get round the class. And Hill was on her conscience. At last
he had stopped crying, and sat bunched over his hands, playing quietly.
Then he looked up at her. His face was dirty with tears, his eyes had a
curious washed look, like the sky after rain, a sort of wanness. He
bore no malice. He had already forgotten, and was waiting to be
restored to the normal position.
“Go on with your work, Hill,” she said.
The children were playing over their arithmetic, and, she knew,
cheating thoroughly. She wrote another sum on the blackboard. She could
not get round the class. She went again to the front to watch. Some
were ready. Some were not. What was she to do?
At last it was time for recreation. She gave the order to cease
working, and in some way or other got her class out of the room. Then
she faced the disorderly litter of blotted, uncorrected books, of
broken rulers and chewed pens. And her heart sank in sickness. The
misery was getting deeper.
The trouble went on and on, day after day. She had always piles of
books to mark, myriads of errors to correct, a heart-wearying task that
she loathed. And the work got worse and worse. When she tried to
flatter herself that the composition grew more alive, more interesting,
she had to see that the handwriting grew more and more slovenly, the
books more filthy and disgraceful. She tried what she could, but it was
of no use. But she was not going to take it seriously. Why should she?
Why should she say to herself, that it mattered, if she failed to teach
a class to write perfectly neatly? Why should she take the blame unto
herself?
Pay day came, and she received four pounds two shillings and one penny.
She was very proud that day. She had never had so much money before.
And she had earned it all herself. She sat on the top of the tram-car
fingering the gold and fearing she might lose it. She felt so
established and strong, because of it. And when she got home she said
to her mother:
“It is pay day to-day, mother.”
“Ay,” said her mother, coolly.
Then Ursula put down fifty shillings on the table.
“That is my board,” she said.
“Ay,” said her mother, letting it lie.
Ursula was hurt. Yet she had paid her scot. She was free. She paid for
what she had. There remained moreover thirty-two shillings of her own.
She would not spend any, she who was naturally a spendthrift, because
she could not bear to damage her fine gold.
She had a standing ground now apart from her parents. She was something
else besides the mere daughter of William and Anna Brangwen. She was
independent. She earned her own living. She was an important member of
the working community. She was sure that fifty shillings a month quite
paid for her keep. If her mother received fifty shillings a month for
each of the children, she would have twenty pounds a month and no
clothes to provide. Very well then.
Ursula was independent of her parents. She now adhered elsewhere. Now,
the ‘Board of Education’ was a phrase that rang significant to her, and
she felt Whitehall far beyond her as her ultimate home. In the
government, she knew which minister had supreme control over Education,
and it seemed to her that, in some way, he was connected with her, as
her father was connected with her.
She had another self, another responsibility. She was no longer Ursula
Brangwen, daughter of William Brangwen. She was also Standard Five
teacher in St. Philip’s School. And it was a case now of being Standard
Five teacher, and nothing else. For she could not escape.
Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks passed on,
there was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There was only a girl of
that name obsessed by the fact that she could not manage her class of
children. At week-ends there came days of passionate reaction, when she
went mad with the taste of liberty, when merely to be free in the
morning, to sit down at her embroidery and stitch the coloured silks
was a passion of delight. For the prison house was always awaiting her!
This was only a respite, as her chained heart knew well. So that she
seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end, and wrung the last drop
of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel frenzy.
She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her. She did
not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how horrible she found
it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday night came, and she felt the
Monday morning at hand, she was strung up tight with dreadful
anticipation, because the strain and the torture was near again.
She did not believe that she could ever teach that great, brutish
class, in that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if she failed, she
must in some way go under. She must admit that the man’s world was too
strong for her, she could not take her place in it; she must go down
before Mr. Harby. And all her life henceforth, she must go on, never
having freed herself of the man’s world, never having achieved the
freedom of the great world of responsible work. Maggie had taken her
place there, she had even stood level with Mr. Harby and got free of
him: and her soul was always wandering in far-off valleys and glades of
poetry. Maggie was free. Yet there was something like subjection in
Maggie’s very freedom. Mr. Harby, the man, disliked the reserved woman,
Maggie. Mr. Harby, the schoolmaster, respected his teacher, Miss
Schofield.
For the present, however, Ursula only envied and admired Maggie. She
herself had still to get where Maggie had got. She had still to make
her footing. She had taken up a position on Mr. Harby’s ground, and she
must keep it. For he was now beginning a regular attack on her, to
drive her away out of his school. She could not keep order. Her class
was a turbulent crowd, and the weak spot in the school’s work.
Therefore she must go, and someone more useful must come in her place,
someone who could keep discipline.
The headmaster had worked himself into an obsession of fury against
her. He only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got worse as the
weeks went on, she was absolutely no good. His system, which was his
very life in school, the outcome of his bodily movement, was attacked
and threatened at the point where Ursula was included. She was the
danger that threatened his body with a blow, a fall. And blindly,
thoroughly, moving from strong instinct of opposition, he set to work
to expel her.
When he punished one of her children as he had punished the boy Hill,
for an offence against _himself,_ he made the punishment extra heavy
with the significance that the extra stroke came in because of the weak
teacher who allowed all these things to be. When he punished for an
offence against her, he punished lightly, as if offences against her
were not significant. Which all the children knew, and they behaved
accordingly.
Every now and again Mr. Harby would swoop down to examine exercise
books. For a whole hour, he would be going round the class, taking book
after book, comparing page after page, whilst Ursula stood aside for
all the remarks and fault-finding to be pointed at her through the
scholars. It was true, since she had come, the composition books had
grown more and more untidy, disorderly, filthy. Mr. Harby pointed to
the pages done before her regime, and to those done after, and fell
into a passion of rage. Many children he sent out to the front with
their books. And after he had thoroughly gone through the silent and
quivering class he caned the worst offenders well, in front of the
others, thundering in real passion of anger and chagrin.
“Such a condition in a class, I can’t believe it! It is simply
disgraceful! I can’t think how you have been let to get like it! Every
Monday morning I shall come down and examine these books. So don’t
think that because there is nobody paying any attention to you, that
you are free to unlearn everything you ever learned, and go back till
you are not fit for Standard Three. I shall examine all books every
Monday——”
Then in a rage, he went away with his cane, leaving Ursula to confront
a pale, quivering class, whose childish faces were shut in blank
resentment, fear, and bitterness, whose souls were full of anger and
contempt for her rather than of the master, whose eyes looked at her
with the cold, inhuman accusation of children. And she could hardly
make mechanical words to speak to them. When she gave an order they
obeyed with an insolent off-handedness, as if to say: “As for you, do
you think we would obey _you,_ but for the master?” She sent the
blubbering, caned boys to their seats, knowing that they too jeered at
her and her authority, holding her weakness responsible for what
punishment had overtaken them. And she knew the whole position, so that
even her horror of physical beating and suffering sank to a deeper
pain, and became a moral judgment upon her, worse than any hurt.
She must, during the next week, watch over her books, and punish any
fault. Her soul decided it coldly. Her personal desire was dead for
that day at least. She must have nothing more of herself in school. She
was to be Standard Five teacher only. That was her duty. In school, she
was nothing but Standard Five teacher. Ursula Brangwen must be
excluded.
So that, pale, shut, at last distant and impersonal, she saw no longer
the child, how his eyes danced, or how he had a queer little soul that
could not be bothered with shaping handwriting so long as he dashed
down what he thought. She saw no children, only the task that was to be
done. And keeping her eyes there, on the task, and not on the child,
she was impersonal enough to punish where she could otherwise only have
sympathized, understood, and condoned, to approve where she would have
been merely uninterested before. But her interest had no place any
more.
It was agony to the impulsive, bright girl of seventeen to become
distant and official, having no personal relationship with the
children. For a few days, after the agony of the Monday, she succeeded,
and had some success with her class. But it was a state not natural to
her, and she began to relax.
Then came another infliction. There were not enough pens to go round
the class. She sent to Mr. Harby for more. He came in person.
“Not enough pens, Miss Brangwen?” he said, with the smile and calm of
exceeding rage against her.
“No, we are six short,” she said, quaking.
“Oh, how is that?” he said, menacingly. Then, looking over the class,
he asked:
“How many are there here to-day?”
“Fifty-two,” said Ursula, but he did not take any notice, counting for
himself.
“Fifty-two,” he said. “And how many pens are there, Staples?”
Ursula was now silent. He would not heed her if she answered, since he
had addressed the monitor.
“That’s a very curious thing,” said Mr. Harby, looking over the silent
class with a slight grin of fury. All the childish faces looked up at
him blank and exposed.
“A few days ago there were sixty pens for this class—now there are
forty-eight. What is forty-eight from sixty, Williams?” There was a
sinister suspense in the question. A thin, ferret-faced boy in a sailor
suit started up exaggeratedly.
“Please, sir!” he said. Then a slow, sly grin came over his face. He
did not know. There was a tense silence. The boy dropped his head. Then
he looked up again, a little cunning triumph in his eyes. “Twelve,” he
said.
“I would advise you to attend,” said the headmaster dangerously. The
boy sat down.
“Forty-eight from sixty is twelve: so there are twelve pens to account
for. Have you looked for them, Staples?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then look again.”
The scene dragged on. Two pens were found: ten were missing. Then the
storm burst.
“Am I to have you thieving, besides your dirt and bad work and bad
behaviour?” the headmaster began. “Not content with being the
worst-behaved and dirtiest class in the school, you are thieves into
the bargain, are you? It is a very funny thing! Pens don’t melt into
the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What
has become of them then? They must be somewhere. What has become of
them? For they must be found, and found by Standard Five. They were
lost by Standard Five, and they must be found.”
Ursula stood and listened, her heart hard and cold. She was so much
upset, that she felt almost mad. Something in her tempted her to turn
on the headmaster and tell him to stop, about the miserable pens. But
she did not. She could not.
After every session, morning and evening, she had the pens counted.
Still they were missing. And pencils and india-rubbers disappeared. She
kept the class staying behind, till the things were found. But as soon
as Mr. Harby had gone out of the room, the boys began to jump about and
shout, and at last they bolted in a body from the school.
This was drawing near a crisis. She could not tell Mr. Harby because,
while he would punish the class, he would make her the cause of the
punishment, and her class would pay her back with disobedience and
derision. Already there was a deadly hostility grown up between her and
the children. After keeping in the class, at evening, to finish some
work, she would find boys dodging behind her, calling after her:
“Brangwen, Brangwen—Proud-acre.”
When she went into Ilkeston of a Saturday morning with Gudrun, she
heard again the voices yelling after her:
“Brangwen, Brangwen.”
She pretended to take no notice, but she coloured with shame at being
held up to derision in the public street. She, Ursula Brangwen of
Cossethay, could not escape from the Standard Five teacher which she
was. In vain she went out to buy ribbon for her hat. They called after
her, the boys she tried to teach.
And one evening, as she went from the edge of the town into the
country, stones came flying at her. Then the passion of shame and anger
surpassed her. She walked on unheeding, beside herself. Because of the
darkness she could not see who were those that threw. But she did not
want to know.
Only in her soul a change took place. Never more, and never more would
she give herself as individual to her class. Never would she, Ursula
Brangwen, the girl she was, the person she was, come into contact with
those boys. She would be Standard Five teacher, as far away personally
from her class as if she had never set foot in St. Philip’s school. She
would just obliterate them all, and keep herself apart, take them as
scholars only.
So her face grew more and more shut, and over her flayed, exposed soul
of a young girl who had gone open and warm to give herself to the
children, there set a hard, insentient thing, that worked mechanically
according to a system imposed.
It seemed she scarcely saw her class the next day. She could only feel
her will, and what she would have of this class which she must grasp
into subjection. It was no good, any more, to appeal, to play upon the
better feelings of the class. Her swift-working soul realized this.
She, as teacher, must bring them all as scholars, into subjection. And
this she was going to do. All else she would forsake. She had become
hard and impersonal, almost avengeful on herself as well as on them,
since the stone throwing. She did not want to be a person, to be
herself any more, after such humiliation. She would assert herself for
mastery, be only teacher. She was set now. She was going to fight and
subdue.
She knew by now her enemies in the class. The one she hated most was
Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed.
He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But
he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive
to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate.
Once he had thrown an ink-well at her, in one of his mad little rages.
Twice he had run home out of class. He was a well-known character.
And he grinned up his sleeve at this girl-teacher, sometimes hanging
round her to fawn on her. But this made her dislike him more. He had a
kind of leech-like power.
From one of the children she took a supple cane, and this she
determined to use when real occasion came. One morning, at composition,
she said to the boy Williams:
“Why have you made this blot?”
“Please, miss, it fell off my pen,” he whined out, in the mocking voice
that he was so clever in using. The boys near snorted with laughter.
For Williams was an actor, he could tickle the feelings of his hearers
subtly. Particularly he could tickle the children with him into
ridiculing his teacher, or indeed, any authority of which he was not
afraid. He had that peculiar gaol instinct.
“Then you must stay in and finish another page of composition,” said
the teacher.
This was against her usual sense of justice, and the boy resented it
derisively. At twelve o’clock she caught him slinking out.
“Williams, sit down,” she said.
And there she sat, and there he sat, alone, opposite to her, on the
back desk, looking up at her with his furtive eyes every minute.
“Please, miss, I’ve got to go an errand,” he called out insolently.
“Bring me your book,” said Ursula.
The boy came out, flapping his book along the desks. He had not written
a line.
“Go back and do the writing you have to do,” said Ursula. And she sat
at her desk, trying to correct books. She was trembling and upset. And
for an hour the miserable boy writhed and grinned in his seat. At the
end of that time he had done five lines.
“As it is so late now,” said Ursula, “you will finish the rest this
evening.”
The boy kicked his way insolently down the passage.
The afternoon came again. Williams was there, glancing at her, and her
heart beat thick, for she knew it was a fight between them. She watched
him.
During the geography lesson, as she was pointing to the map with her
cane, the boy continually ducked his whitish head under the desk, and
attracted the attention of other boys.
“Williams,” she said, gathering her courage, for it was critical now to
speak to him, “what are you doing?”
He lifted his face, the sore-rimmed eyes half smiling. There was
something intrinsically indecent about him. Ursula shrank away.
“Nothing,” he replied, feeling a triumph.
“What are you doing?” she repeated, her heart-beat suffocating her.
“Nothing,” replied the boy, insolently, aggrieved, comic.
“If I speak to you again, you must go down to Mr. Harby,” she said.
But this boy was a match even for Mr. Harby. He was so persistent, so
cringing, and flexible, he howled so when he was hurt, that the master
hated more the teacher who sent him than he hated the boy himself. For
of the boy he was sick of the sight. Which Williams knew. He grinned
visibly.
Ursula turned to the map again, to go on with the geography lesson. But
there was a little ferment in the class. Williams’ spirit infected them
all. She heard a scuffle, and then she trembled inwardly. If they all
turned on her this time, she was beaten.
“Please, miss——” called a voice in distress.
She turned round. One of the boys she liked was ruefully holding out a
torn celluloid collar. She heard the complaint, feeling futile.
“Go in front, Wright,” she said.
She was trembling in every fibre. A big, sullen boy, not bad but very
difficult, slouched out to the front. She went on with the lesson,
aware that Williams was making faces at Wright, and that Wright was
grinning behind her. She was afraid. She turned to the map again. And
she was afraid.
“Please, miss, Williams——” came a sharp cry, and a boy on the back row
was standing up, with drawn, pained brows, half a mocking grin on his
pain, half real resentment against Williams—“Please, miss, he’s nipped
me,”—and he rubbed his leg ruefully.
“Come in front, Williams,” she said.
The rat-like boy sat with his pale smile and did not move.
“Come in front,” she repeated, definite now.
“I shan’t,” he cried, snarling, rat-like, grinning. Something went
click in Ursula’s soul. Her face and eyes set, she went through the
class straight. The boy cowered before her glowering, fixed eyes. But
she advanced on him, seized him by the arm, and dragged him from his
seat. He clung to the form. It was the battle between him and her. Her
instinct had suddenly become calm and quick. She jerked him from his
grip, and dragged him, struggling and kicking, to the front. He kicked
her several times, and clung to the forms as he passed, but she went
on. The class was on its feet in excitement. She saw it, and made no
move.
She knew if she let go the boy he would dash to the door. Already he
had run home once out of her class. So she snatched her cane from the
desk, and brought it down on him. He was writhing and kicking. She saw
his face beneath her, white, with eyes like the eyes of a fish, stony,
yet full of hate and horrible fear. And she loathed him, the hideous
writhing thing that was nearly too much for her. In horror lest he
should overcome her, and yet at the heart quite calm, she brought down
the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making inarticulate
noises, and lunging vicious kicks at her. With one hand she managed to
hold him, and now and then the cane came down on him. He writhed, like
a mad thing. But the pain of the strokes cut through his writhing,
vicious, coward’s courage, bit deeper, till at last, with a long
whimper that became a yell, he went limp. She let him go, and he rushed
at her, his teeth and eyes glinting. There was a second of agonized
terror in her heart: he was a beast thing. Then she caught him, and the
cane came down on him. A few times, madly, in a frenzy, he lunged and
writhed, to kick her. But again the cane broke him, he sank with a
howling yell on the floor, and like a beaten beast lay there yelling.
Mr. Harby had rushed up towards the end of this performance.
“What’s the matter?” he roared.
Ursula felt as if something were going to break in her.
“I’ve thrashed him,” she said, her breast heaving, forcing out the
words on the last breath. The headmaster stood choked with rage,
helpless. She looked at the writhing, howling figure on the floor.
“Get up,” she said. The thing writhed away from her. She took a step
forward. She had realized the presence of the headmaster for one
second, and then she was oblivious of it again.
“Get up,” she said. And with a little dart the boy was on his feet. His
yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had been in a frenzy.
“Go and stand by the radiator,” she said.
As if mechanically, blubbering, he went.
The headmaster stood robbed of movement or speech. His face was yellow,
his hands twitched convulsively. But Ursula stood stiff not far from
him. Nothing could touch her now: she was beyond Mr. Harby. She was as
if violated to death.
The headmaster muttered something, turned, and went down the room,
whence, from the far end, he was heard roaring in a mad rage at his own
class.
The boy blubbered wildly by the radiator. Ursula looked at the class.
There were fifty pale, still faces watching her, a hundred round eyes
fixed on her in an attentive, expressionless stare.
“Give out the history readers,” she said to the monitors.
There was dead silence. As she stood there, she could hear again the
ticking of the clock, and the chock of piles of books taken out of the
low cupboard. Then came the faint flap of books on the desks. The
children passed in silence, their hands working in unison. They were no
longer a pack, but each one separated into a silent, closed thing.
“Take page 125, and read that chapter,” said Ursula.
There was a click of many books opened. The children found the page,
and bent their heads obediently to read. And they read, mechanically.
Ursula, who was trembling violently, went and sat in her high chair.
The blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice of Mr. Brunt,
the roar of Mr. Harby, came muffled through the glass partition. And
now and then a pair of eyes rose from the reading-book, rested on her a
moment, watchful, as if calculating impersonally, then sank again.
She sat still without moving, her eyes watching the class, unseeing.
She was quite still, and weak. She felt that she could not raise her
hand from the desk. If she sat there for ever, she felt she could not
move again, nor utter a command. It was a quarter-past four. She almost
dreaded the closing of the school, when she would be alone.
The class began to recover its ease, the tension relaxed. Williams was
still crying. Mr. Brunt was giving orders for the closing of the
lesson. Ursula got down.
“Take your place, Williams,” she said.
He dragged his feet across the room, wiping his face on his sleeve. As
he sat down, he glanced at her furtively, his eyes still redder. Now he
looked like some beaten rat.
At last the children were gone. Mr. Harby trod by heavily, without
looking her way, or speaking. Mr. Brunt hesitated as she was locking
her cupboard.
“If you settle Clarke and Letts in the same way, Miss Brangwen, you’ll
be all right,” he said, his blue eyes glancing down in a strange
fellowship, his long nose pointing at her.
“Shall I?” she laughed nervously. She did not want anybody to talk to
her.
As she went along the street, clattering on the granite pavement, she
was aware of boys dodging behind her. Something struck her hand that
was carrying her bag, bruising her. As it rolled away she saw that it
was a potato. Her hand was hurt, but she gave no sign. Soon she would
take the tram.
She was afraid, and strange. It was to her quite strange and ugly, like
some dream where she was degraded. She would have died rather than
admit it to anybody. She could not look at her swollen hand. Something
had broken in her; she had passed a crisis. Williams was beaten, but at
a cost.
Feeling too much upset to go home, she rode a little farther into the
town, and got down from the tram at a small tea-shop. There, in the
dark little place behind the shop, she drank her tea and ate
bread-and-butter. She did not taste anything. The taking of tea was
just a mechanical action, to cover over her existence. There she sat in
the dark, obscure little place, without knowing. Only unconsciously she
nursed the back of her hand, which was bruised.
When finally she took her way home, it was sunset red across the west.
She did not know why she was going home. There was nothing for her
there. She had, true, only to pretend to be normal. There was nobody
she could speak to, nowhere to go for escape. But she must keep on,
under this red sunset, alone, knowing the horror in humanity, that
would destroy her, and with which she was at war. Yet it had to be so.
In the morning again she must go to school. She got up and went without
murmuring even to herself. She was in the hands of some bigger,
stronger, coarser will.
School was fairly quiet. But she could feel the class watching her,
ready to spring on her. Her instinct was aware of the class instinct to
catch her if she were weak. But she kept cold and was guarded.
Williams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning there was
a knock at the door: someone wanted the headmaster. Mr. Harby went out,
heavily, angrily, nervously. He was afraid of irate parents. After a
moment in the passage, he came again into school.
“Sturgess,” he called to one of his larger boys. “Stand in front of the
class and write down the name of anyone who speaks. Will you come this
way, Miss Brangwen.”
He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.
Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with a whitish
skin, not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple hat.
“I called about Vernon,” said the woman, speaking in a refined accent.
There was about the woman altogether an appearance of refinement and of
cleanliness, curiously contradicted by her half beggar’s deportment,
and a sense of her being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad
inside. She was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man’s wife, but
a creature separate from society. By her dress she was not poor.
Ursula knew at once that she was Williams’ mother, and that he was
Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and well-dressed, in a
sailor suit. And he had this same peculiar, half transparent
unwholesomeness, rather like a corpse.
“I wasn’t able to send him to school to-day,” continued the woman, with
a false grace of manner. “He came home last night _so_ ill—he was
violently sick—I thought I should have to send for the doctor.—You know
he has a weak heart.”
The woman looked at Ursula with her pale, dead eyes.
“No,” replied the girl, “I did not know.”
She stood still with repulsion and uncertainty. Mr. Harby, large and
male, with his overhanging moustache, stood by with a slight, ugly
smile at the corner of his eyes. The woman went on insidiously, not
quite human:
“Oh, yes, he has had heart disease ever since he was a child. That is
why he isn’t very regular at school. And it is very bad to beat him. He
was awfully ill this morning—I shall call on the doctor as I go back.”
“Who is staying with him now, then?” put in the deep voice of the
schoolmaster, cunningly.
“Oh, I left him with a woman who comes in to help me—and who
understands him. But I shall call in the doctor on my way home.”
Ursula stood still. She felt vague threats in all this. But the woman
was so utterly strange to her, that she did not understand.
“He told me he had been beaten,” continued the woman, “and when I
undressed him to put him to bed, his body was covered with marks—I
could show them to any doctor.”
Mr. Harby looked at Ursula to answer. She began to understand. The
woman was threatening to take out a charge of assault on her son
against her. Perhaps she wanted money.
“I caned him,” she said. “He was so much trouble.”
“I’m sorry if he was troublesome,” said the woman, “but he must have
been shamefully beaten. I could show the marks to any doctor. I’m sure
it isn’t allowed, if it was known.”
“I caned him while he kept kicking me,” said Ursula, getting angry
because she was half excusing herself, Mr. Harby standing there with
the twinkle at the side of his eyes, enjoying the dilemma of the two
women.
“I’m sure I’m sorry if he behaved badly,” said the woman. “But I can’t
think he deserved beating as he has been. I can’t send him to school,
and really can’t afford to pay the doctor.—Is it allowed for the
teachers to beat the children like that, Mr. Harby?”
The headmaster refused to answer. Ursula loathed herself, and loathed
Mr. Harby with his twinkling cunning and malice on the occasion. The
other miserable woman watched her chance.
“It is an expense to me, and I have a great struggle to keep my boy
decent.”
Ursula still would not answer. She looked out at the asphalt yard,
where a dirty rag of paper was blowing.
“And it isn’t allowed to beat a child like that, I am sure, especially
when he is delicate.”
Ursula stared with a set face on the yard, as if she did not hear. She
loathed all this, and had ceased to feel or to exist.
“Though I know he is troublesome sometimes—but I think it was too much.
His body is covered with marks.”
Mr. Harby stood sturdy and unmoved, waiting now to have done, with the
twinkling, tiny wrinkles of an ironical smile at the corners of his
eyes. He felt himself master of the situation.
“And he was violently sick. I couldn’t possibly send him to school
to-day. He couldn’t keep his head up.”
Yet she had no answer.
“You will understand, sir, why he is absent,” she said, turning to Mr.
Harby.
“Oh, yes,” he said, rough and off-hand. Ursula detested him for his
male triumph. And she loathed the woman. She loathed everything.
“You will try to have it remembered, sir, that he has a weak heart. He
is so sick after these things.”
“Yes,” said the headmaster, “I’ll see about it.”
“I know he is troublesome,” the woman only addressed herself to the
male now—“but if you could have him punished without beating—he is
really delicate.”
Ursula was beginning to feel upset. Harby stood in rather superb
mastery, the woman cringing to him to tickle him as one tickles trout.
“I had come to explain why he was away this morning, sir. You will
understand.”
She held out her hand. Harby took it and let it go, surprised and
angry.
“Good morning,” she said, and she gave her gloved, seedy hand to
Ursula. She was not ill-looking, and had a curious insinuating way,
very distasteful yet effective.
“Good morning, Mr. Harby, and thank you.”
The figure in the grey costume and the purple hat was going across the
school yard with a curious lingering walk. Ursula felt a strange pity
for her, and revulsion from her. She shuddered. She went into the
school again.
The next morning Williams turned up, looking paler than ever, very neat
and nicely dressed in his sailor blouse. He glanced at Ursula with a
half-smile: cunning, subdued, ready to do as she told him. There was
something about him that made her shiver. She loathed the idea of
having laid hands on him. His elder brother was standing outside the
gate at playtime, a youth of about fifteen, tall and thin and pale. He
raised his hat, almost like a gentleman. But there was something
subdued, insidious about him too.
“Who is it?” said Ursula.
“It’s the big Williams,” said Violet Harby roughly. “_She_ was here
yesterday, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“It’s no good her coming—her character’s not good enough for her to
make any trouble.”
Ursula shrank from the brutality and the scandal. But it had some
vague, horrid fascination. How sordid everything seemed! She felt sorry
for the queer woman with the lingering walk, and those queer, insidious
boys. The Williams in her class was wrong somewhere. How nasty it was
altogether.
So the battle went on till her heart was sick. She had several more
boys to subjugate before she could establish herself. And Mr. Harby
hated her almost as if she were a man. She knew now that nothing but a
thrashing would settle some of the big louts who wanted to play cat and
mouse with her. Mr. Harby would not give them the thrashing if he could
help it. For he hated the teacher, the stuck-up, insolent high-school
miss with her independence.
“Now, Wright, what have you done this time?” he would say genially to
the boy who was sent to him from Standard Five for punishment. And he
left the lad standing, lounging, wasting his time.
So that Ursula would appeal no more to the headmaster, but, when she
was driven wild, she seized her cane, and slashed the boy who was
insolent to her, over head and ears and hands. And at length they were
afraid of her, she had them in order.
But she had paid a great price out of her own soul, to do this. It
seemed as if a great flame had gone through her and burnt her sensitive
tissue. She who shrank from the thought of physical suffering in any
form, had been forced to fight and beat with a cane and rouse all her
instincts to hurt. And afterwards she had been forced to endure the
sound of their blubbering and desolation, when she had broken them to
order.
Oh, and sometimes she felt as if she would go mad. What did it matter,
what did it matter if their books were dirty and they did not obey? She
would rather, in reality, that they disobeyed the whole rules of the
school, than that they should be beaten, broken, reduced to this
crying, hopeless state. She would rather bear all their insults and
insolences a thousand times than reduce herself and them to this.
Bitterly she repented having got beside herself, and having tackled the
boy she had beaten.
Yet it had to be so. She did not want to do it. Yet she had to. Oh,
why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must
brutalize herself to live? Why had she become a school-teacher, why,
why?
The children had forced her to the beatings. No, she did not pity them.
She had come to them full of kindness and love, and they would have
torn her to pieces. They chose Mr. Harby. Well then, they must know her
as well as Mr. Harby, they must first be subjugate to her. For she was
not going to be made nought, no, neither by them, nor by Mr. Harby, nor
by all the system around her. She was not going to be put down,
prevented from standing free. It was not to be said of her, she could
not take her place and carry out her task. She would fight and hold her
place in this state also, in the world of work and man’s convention.
She was isolated now from the life of her childhood, a foreigner in a
new life, of work and mechanical consideration. She and Maggie, in
their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant,
discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in
the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her
the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far
transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the
vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form
and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman
meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something,
she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she
were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere
that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.
In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel
move towards freeing herself. But having more freedom she only became
more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She
wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she
wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she
wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she
could put no name to.
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and
surpass. And one never knew where one was going. It was a blind fight.
She had suffered bitterly in this school of St. Philip’s. She was like
a young filly that has been broken in to the shafts, and has lost its
freedom. And now she was suffering bitterly from the agony of the
shafts. The agony, the galling, the ignominy of her breaking in. This
wore into her soul. But she would never submit. To shafts like these
she would never submit for long. But she would know them. She would
serve them that she might destroy them.
She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage
meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of
pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two
girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an
endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy,
finding, discovering.
But Ursula never told about Winifred Inger. That was a sort of secret
side-show to her life, never to be opened. She did not even think of
it. It was the closed door she had not the strength to open.
Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began gradually to have
a new life of her own again. She was going to college in eighteen
months’ time. Then she would take her degree, and she would—ah, she
would perhaps be a big woman, and lead a movement. Who knows?—At any
rate she would go to college in eighteen months’ time. All that
mattered now was work, work.
And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St. Philip’s
School, which was always destroying her, but which she could now
manage, without spoiling all her life. She would submit to it for a
time, since the time had a definite limit.
The class-teaching itself at last became almost mechanical. It was a
strain on her, an exhausting wearying strain, always unnatural. But
there was a certain amount of pleasure in the sheer oblivion of
teaching, so much work to do, so many children to see after, so much to
be done, that one’s self was forgotten. When the work had become like
habit to her, and her individual soul was left out, had its growth
elsewhere, then she could be almost happy.
Her real, individual self drew together and became more coherent during
these two years of teaching, during the struggle against the odds of
class teaching. It was always a prison to her, the school. But it was a
prison where her wild, chaotic soul became hard and independent. When
she was well enough and not tired, then she did not hate the teaching.
She enjoyed getting into the swing of work of a morning, putting forth
all her strength, making the thing go. It was for her a strenuous form
of exercise. And her soul was left to rest, it had the time of torpor
in which to gather itself together in strength again. But the teaching
hours were too long, the tasks too heavy, and the disciplinary
condition of the school too unnatural for her. She was worn very thin
and quivering.
She came to school in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers wet, the
little, rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The larks quivered their
song up into the new sunshine, and the country was so glad. It was a
violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the town.
So that she stood before her class unwilling to give herself up to the
activity of teaching, to turn her energy, that longed for the country
and for joy of early summer, into the dominating of fifty children and
the transferring to them some morsels of arithmetic. There was a little
absentness about her. She could not force herself into forgetfulness. A
jar of buttercups and fool’s-parsley in the window-bottom kept her away
in the meadows, where in the lush grass the moon-daisies were
half-submerged, and a spray of pink ragged robin. Yet before her were
faces of fifty children. They were almost like big daisies in a dimness
of the grass.
A brightness was on her face, a little unreality in her teaching. She
could not quite see her children. She was struggling between two
worlds, her own world of young summer and flowers, and this other world
of work. And the glimmer of her own sunlight was between her and her
class.
Then the morning passed with a strange far-awayness and quietness.
Dinner-time came, when she and Maggie ate joyously, with all the
windows open. And then they went out into St. Philip’s churchyard,
where was a shadowy corner under red hawthorn trees. And there they
talked and read Shelley or Browning or some work about “Woman and
Labour”.
And when she went back to school, Ursula lived still in the shadowy
corner of the graveyard, where pink-red petals lay scattered from the
hawthorn tree, like myriad tiny shells on a beach, and a church bell
sometimes rang sonorously, and sometimes a bird called out, whilst
Maggie’s voice went on low and sweet.
These days she was happy in her soul: oh, she was so happy, that she
wished she could take her joy and scatter it in armfuls broadcast. She
made her children happy, too, with a little tingling of delight. But to
her, the children were not a school class this afternoon. They were
flowers, birds, little bright animals, children, anything. They only
were not Standard Five. She felt no responsibility for them. It was for
once a game, this teaching. And if they got their sums wrong, what
matter? And she would take a pleasant bit of reading. And instead of
history with dates, she would tell a lovely tale. And for grammar, they
could have a bit of written analysis that was not difficult, because
they had done it before:
“She shall be sportive as a fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs.”
She wrote that from memory, because it pleased her.
So the golden afternoon passed away and she went home happy. She had
finished her day of school, and was free to plunge into the glowing
evening of Cossethay. And she loved walking home. But it had not been
school. It had been playing at school beneath red hawthorn blossom.
She could not go on like this. The quarterly examination was coming,
and her class was not ready. It irritated her that she must drag
herself away from her happy self, and exert herself with all her
strength to force, to compel this heavy class of children to work hard
at arithmetic. They did not want to work, she did not want to compel
them. And yet, some second conscience gnawed at her, telling her the
work was not properly done. It irritated her almost to madness, and she
let loose all the irritation in the class. Then followed a day of
battle and hate and violence, when she went home raw, feeling the
golden evening taken away from her, herself incarcerated in some dark,
heavy place, and chained there with a consciousness of having done
badly at work.
What good was it that it was summer, that right till evening, when the
corncrakes called, the larks would mount up into the light, to sing
once more before nightfall. What good was it all, when she was out of
tune, when she must only remember the burden and shame of school that
day.
And still, she hated school. Still she cried, she did not believe in
it. Why should the children learn, and why should she teach them? It
was all so much milling the wind. What folly was it that made life into
this, the fulfilling of some stupid, factitious duty? It was all so
made up, so unnatural. The school, the sums, the grammar, the quarterly
examinations, the registers—it was all a barren nothing!
Why should she give her allegiance to this world, and let it so
dominate her, that her own world of warm sun and growing, sap-filled
life was turned into nothing? She was not going to do it. She was not
going to be a prisoner in the dry, tyrannical man-world. She was not
going to care about it. What did it matter if her class did ever so
badly in the quarterly examination. Let it—what did it matter?
Nevertheless, when the time came, and the report on her class was bad,
she was miserable, and the joy of the summer was taken away from her,
she was shut up in gloom. She could not really escape from this world
of system and work, out into her fields where she was happy. She must
have her place in the working world, be a recognized member with full
rights there. It was more important to her than fields and sun and
poetry, at this time. But she was only the more its enemy.
It was a very difficult thing, she thought, during the long hours of
intermission in the summer holidays, to be herself, her happy self that
enjoyed so much to lie in the sun, to play and swim and be content, and
also to be a school-teacher getting results out of a class of children.
She dreamed fondly of the time when she need not be a teacher any more.
But vaguely, she knew that responsibility had taken place in her for
ever, and as yet her prime business was to work.
The autumn passed away, the winter was at hand. Ursula became more and
more an inhabitant of the world of work, and of what is called life.
She could not see her future, but a little way off, was college, and to
the thought of this she clung fixedly. She would go to college, and get
her two or three years’ training, free of cost. Already she had applied
and had her place appointed for the coming year.
So she continued to study for her degree. She would take French, Latin,
English, mathematics and botany. She went to classes in Ilkeston, she
studied at evening. For there was this world to conquer, this knowledge
to acquire, this qualification to attain. And she worked with
intensity, because of a want inside her that drove her on. Almost
everything was subordinated now to this one desire to take her place in
the world. What kind of place it was to be she did not ask herself. The
blind desire drove her on. She must take her place.
She knew she would never be much of a success as an elementary school
teacher. But neither had she failed. She hated it, but she had managed
it.
Maggie had left St. Philip’s School, and had found a more congenial
post. The two girls remained friends. They met at evening classes, they
studied and somehow encouraged a firm hope each in the other. They did
not know whither they were making, nor what they ultimately wanted. But
they knew they wanted now to learn, to know and to do.
They talked of love and marriage, and the position of woman in
marriage. Maggie said that love was the flower of life, and blossomed
unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it was found,
and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
To Ursula this was unsatisfactory. She thought she still loved Anton
Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had not been strong
enough to acknowledge her. He had denied her. How then could she love
him? How then was love so absolute? She did not believe it. She
believed that love was a way, a means, not an end in itself, as Maggie
seemed to think. And always the way of love would be found. But whither
did it lead?
“I believe there are many men in the world one might love—there is not
only one man,” said Ursula.
She was thinking of Skrebensky. Her heart was hollow with the knowledge
of Winifred Inger.
“But you must distinguish between love and passion,” said Maggie,
adding, with a touch of contempt: “Men will easily have a passion for
you, but they won’t love you.”
“Yes,” said Ursula, vehemently, the look of suffering, almost of
fanaticism, on her face. “Passion is only part of love. And it seems so
much because it can’t last. That is why passion is never happy.”
She was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in contrast
with Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable passing-away of
things. Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of life, Maggie was
always single, always withheld, so she went in a heavy brooding sadness
that was almost meat to her. In Ursula’s last winter at St. Philip’s
the friendship of the two girls came to a climax. It was during this
winter that Ursula suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie’s
fundamental sadness of enclosedness. Maggie enjoyed and suffered
Ursula’s struggles against the confines of her life. And then the two
girls began to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life
wherein Maggie must remain enclosed.
Chapter XIV.
THE WIDENING CIRCLE
Maggie’s people, the Schofields, lived in the large gardener’s cottage,
that was half a farm, behind Belcote Hall. The hall was too damp to
live in, so the Schofields were caretakers, gamekeepers, farmers, all
in one. The father was gamekeeper and stock-breeder, the eldest son was
market-gardener, using the big hall gardens, the second son was farmer
and gardener. There was a large family, as at Cossethay.
Ursula loved to stay at Belcote, to be treated as a grand lady by
Maggie’s brothers. They were good-looking men. The eldest was
twenty-six years old. He was the gardener, a man not very tall, but
strong and well made, with brown, sunny, easy eyes and a face
handsomely hewn, brown, with a long fair moustache which he pulled as
he talked to Ursula.
The girl was excited because these men attended to her when she came
near. She could make their eyes light up and quiver, she could make
Anthony, the eldest, twist and twist his moustache. She knew she could
move them almost at will with her light laughter and chatter. They
loved her ideas, watched her as she talked vehemently about politics or
economics. And she, while she talked, saw the golden-brown eyes of
Anthony gleam like the eyes of a satyr as they watched her. He did not
listen to her words, he listened to her. It excited her.
He was like a faun pleased when she would go with him over his
hothouses, to look at the green and pretty plants, at the pink primulas
nodding among their leaves, and cinarrias flaunting purple and crimson
and white. She asked about everything, and he told her very exactly and
minutely, in a queer pedantic way that made her want to laugh. Yet she
was really interested in what he did. And he had the curious light in
his face, like the light in the eyes of the goat that was tethered by
the farmyard gate.
She went down with him into the warmish cellar, where already in the
darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming. He held the
lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny knob-end of the
rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red stem, thrusting itself
like a knob of flame through the soft soil. His face was turned up to
her, the light glittered on his eyes and his teeth as he laughed, with
a faint, musical neigh. He looked handsome. And she heard a new sound
in her ears, the faintly-musical, neighing laugh of Anthony, whose
moustache twisted up, and whose eyes were luminous with a cold, steady,
arrogant-laughing glare. There seemed a little prance of triumph in his
movement, she could not rid herself of a movement of acquiescence, a
touch of acceptance. Yet he was so humble, his voice was so caressing.
He held his hand for her to step on when she must climb a wall. And she
stepped on the living firmness of him, that quivered firmly under her
weight.
She was aware of him as if in a mesmeric state. In her ordinary sense,
she had nothing to do with him. But the peculiar ease and
unnoticeableness of his entering the house, the power of his cold,
gleaming light on her when he looked at her, was like a bewitchment. In
his eyes, as in the pale grey eyes of a goat, there seemed some of that
steady, hard fire of moonlight which has nothing to do with the day. It
made her alert, and yet her mind went out like an extinguished thing.
She was all senses, all her senses were alive.
Then she saw him on Sunday, dressed up in Sunday clothes, trying to
impress her. And he looked ridiculous. She clung to the ridiculous
effect of his stiff, Sunday clothes.
She was always conscious of some unfaithfulness to Maggie, on Anthony’s
score. Poor Maggie stood apart as if betrayed. Maggie and Anthony were
enemies by instinct. Ursula had to go back to her friend brimming with
affection and a poignancy of pity. Which Maggie received with a little
stiffness. Then poetry and books and learning took the place of
Anthony, with his goats’ movements and his cold, gleaming humour.
While Ursula was at Belcote, the snow fell. In the morning, a covering
of snow weighed on the rhododendron bushes.
“Shall we go out?” said Maggie.
She had lost some of her leader’s sureness, and was now tentative, a
little in reserve from her friend.
They took the key of the gate and wandered into the park. It was a
white world on which dark trees and tree masses stood under a sky keen
with frost. The two girls went past the hall, that was shuttered and
silent, their footprints marking the snow on the drive. Down the park,
a long way off, a man was carrying armfuls of hay across the snow. He
was a small, dark figure, like an animal moving in its unawareness.
Ursula and Maggie went on exploring, down to a tinkling, chilly brook,
that had worn the snow away in little scoops, and ran dark between.
They saw a robin glance its bright eyes and burst scarlet and grey into
the hedge, then some pertly-marked blue-tits scuffled. Meanwhile the
brook slid on coldly, chuckling to itself.
The girls wandered across the snowy grass to where the artificial
fish-ponds lay under thin ice. There was a big tree with a thick trunk
twisted with ivy, that hung almost horizontal over the ponds. Ursula
climbed joyfully into this and sat amid bosses of bright ivy and dull
berries. Some ivy leaves were like green spears held out, and tipped
with snow. The ice was seen beneath them.
Maggie took out a book, and sitting lower down the trunk began to read
Coleridge’s “Christabel”. Ursula half listened. She was wildly
thrilled. Then she saw Anthony coming across the snow, with his
confident, slightly strutting stride. His face looked brown and hard
against the snow, smiling with a sort of tense confidence.
“Hello!” she called to him.
A response went over his face, his head was lifted in an answering,
jerking gesture.
“Hello!” he said. “You’re like a bird in there.”
And Ursula’s laugh rang out. She answered to the peculiar, reedy twang
in his penetrating voice.
She did not think of Anthony, yet she lived in a sort of connection
with him, in his world. One evening she met him as she was coming down
the lane, and they walked side by side.
“I think it’s so _lovely_ here,” she cried.
“Do you?” he said. “I’m glad you like it.”
There was a curious confidence in his voice.
“Oh, I love it. What more does one want than to live in this beautiful
place, and make things grow in your garden. It is like the Garden of
Eden.”
“Is it?” he said, with a little laugh. “Yes—well, it’s not so bad——” he
was hesitating. The pale gleam was strong in his eyes, he was looking
at her steadily, watching her, as an animal might. Something leaped in
her soul. She knew he was going to suggest to her that she should be as
he was.
“Would you like to stay here with me?” he asked, tentatively.
She blenched with fear and with the intense sensation of proffered
licence suggested to her.
They had come to the gate.
“How?” she asked. “You aren’t alone here.”
“We could marry,” he answered, in the strange, coldly-gleaming
insinuating tone that chilled the sunshine into moonlight. All
substantial things seemed transformed. Shadows and dancing moonlight
were real, and all cold, inhuman, gleaming sensations. She realized
with something like terror that she was going to accept this. She was
going inevitably to accept him. His hand was reaching out to the gate
before them. She stood still. His flesh was hard and brown and final.
She seemed to be in the grip of some insult.
“I couldn’t,” she answered, involuntarily.
He gave the same brief, neighing little laugh, very sad and bitter now,
and slotted back the bar of the gate. Yet he did not open. For a moment
they both stood looking at the fire of sunset that quivered among the
purple twigs of the trees. She saw his brown, hard, well-hewn face
gleaming with anger and humiliation and submission. He was an animal
that knows that it is subdued. Her heart flamed with sensation of him,
of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an
inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the
night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.
She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east flushed
strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a rosy sky,
above the darkening, bluish snow. All this so beautiful, all this so
lovely! He did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it, and was
one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely.
They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates.
The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made only a dimness in an
unreal world. And like a shadow, the day had gone into a faintly
luminous, snowy evening, while she was talking aimlessly to him, to
keep him at a distance, yet to keep him near her, and he walked
heavily. He opened the garden gate for her quietly, and she was
entering into her own pleasances, leaving him outside the gate.
Then even whilst she was escaping, or trying to escape, this feeling of
pain, came Maggie the next day, saying:
“I wouldn’t make Anthony love you, Ursula, if you don’t want him. It is
not nice.”
“But, Maggie, I never made him love me,” cried Ursula, dismayed and
suffering, and feeling as if she had done something base.
She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she returned to
the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a
traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an
isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses.
She could not help it, that she was a traveller. She knew Anthony, that
he was not one. But oh, ultimately and finally, she must go on and on,
seeking the goal that she knew she did draw nearer to.
She was wearing away her second and last cycle at St. Philip’s. As the
months went she ticked them off, first October, then November,
December, January. She was careful always to subtract a month from the
remainder, for the summer holidays. She saw herself travelling round a
circle, only an arc of which remained to complete. Then, she was in the
open, like a bird tossed into mid-air, a bird that had learned in some
measure to fly.
There was college ahead; that was her mid-air, unknown, spacious. Come
college, and she would have broken from the confines of all the life
she had known. For her father was also going to move. They were all
going to leave Cossethay.
Brangwen had kept his carelessness about his circumstances. He knew his
work in the lace designing meant little to him personally, he just
earned his wage by it. He did not know what meant much to him. Living
close to Anna Brangwen, his mind was always suffused through with
physical heat, he moved from instinct to instinct, groping, always
groping on.
When it was suggested to him that he might apply for one of the posts
as hand-work instructor, posts about to be created by the Nottingham
Education Committee, it was as if a space had been given to him, into
which he could remove from his hot, dusky enclosure. He sent in his
application, confidently, expectantly. He had a sort of belief in his
supernatural fate. The inevitable weariness of his daily work had
stiffened some of his muscles, and made a slight deadness in his ruddy,
alert face. Now he might escape.
He was full of the new possibilities, and his wife was acquiescent. She
was willing now to have a change. She too was tired of Cossethay. The
house was too small for the growing children. And since she was nearly
forty years old, she began to come awake from her sleep of motherhood,
her energy moved more outwards. The din of growing lives roused her
from her apathy. She too must have her hand in making life. She was
quite ready to move, taking all her brood. It would be better now if
she transplanted them. For she had borne her last child, it would be
growing up.
So that in her easy, unused fashion she talked plans and arrangements
with her husband, indifferent really as to the method of the change,
since a change was coming; even if it did not come in this way it would
come in another.
The house was full of ferment. Ursula was wild with excitement. At last
her father was going to be something, socially. So long, he had been a
social cypher, without form or standing. Now he was going to be Art and
Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. That was really a
status. It was a position. He would be a specialist in his way. And he
was an uncommon man. Ursula felt they were all getting a foothold at
last. He was coming to his own. Who else that she knew could turn out
from his own fingers the beautiful things her father could produce? She
felt he was certain of this new job.
They would move. They would leave this cottage at Cossethay which had
grown too small for them; they would leave Cossethay, where the
children had all been born, and where they were always kept to the same
measure. For the people who had known them as children along with the
other village boys and girls would never, could never understand that
they should grow up different. They had held “Urtler Brangwen” one of
themselves, and had given her her place in her native village, as in a
family. And the bond was strong. But now, when she was growing to
something beyond what Cossethay would allow or understand, the bond
between her and her old associates was becoming a bondage.
“’Ello, Urs’ler, ’ow are yer goin’ on?” they said when they met her.
And it demanded of her in the old voice the old response. And something
in her must respond and belong to people who knew her. But something
else denied bitterly. What was true of her ten years ago was not true
now. And something else which she was, and must be, they could neither
see nor allow. They felt it there nevertheless, something beyond them,
and they were injured. They said she was proud and conceited, that she
was too big for her shoes nowadays. They said, she needn’t pretend,
because they knew what she was. They had known her since she was born.
They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she
did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her
that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet—and
yet—one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to
let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it
goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered
her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as
she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to
her own height.
So that when she knew that her father had the new post, and that the
family would move, she felt like skipping on the face of the earth, and
making psalms of joy. The old, bound shell of Cossethay was to be cast
off, and she was to dance away into the blue air. She wanted to dance
and sing.
She made dreams of the new place she would live in, where stately
cultured people of high feeling would be friends with her, and she
would live with the noble in the land, moving to a large freedom of
feeling. She dreamed of a rich, proud, simple girl-friend, who had
never known Mr. Harby and his like, nor ever had a note in her voice of
bondaged contempt and fear, as Maggie had.
And she gave herself to all that she loved in Cossethay, passionately,
because she was going away now. She wandered about to her favourite
spots. There was a place where she went trespassing to find the
snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened
meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree
had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers
glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of
wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves
pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed.
Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood
shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the
first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to
have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little
flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight
of the ground. She sat down on the felled tree and remained awhile
remote.
Going home, she left the purplish dark of the trees for the open lane,
where the puddles shone long and jewel-like in the ruts, the land about
her was darkened, and the sky a jewel overhead. Oh, how amazing it was
to her! It was almost too much. She wanted to run, and sing, and cry
out for very wildness and poignancy, but she could not run and sing and
cry out in such a way as to cry out the deep things in her heart, so
she was still, and almost sad with loneliness.
At Easter she went again to Maggie’s home, for a few days. She was,
however shy and fugitive. She saw Anthony, how suggestive he was to
look on, and how his eyes had a sort of supplicating light, that was
rather beautiful. She looked at him, and she looked again, for him to
become real to her. But it was her own self that was occupied
elsewhere. She seemed to have some other being.
And she turned to spring and the opening buds. There was a large pear
tree by a wall, and it was full, thronged with tiny, grey-green buds,
myriads. She stood before it arrested with delight, and a realization
went deep into her heart. There was so great a host in array behind the
cloud of pale, dim green, so much to come forth—so much sunshine to
pour down.
So the weeks passed on, trance-like and pregnant. The pear tree at
Cossethay burst into bloom against the cottage-end, like a wave burst
into foam. Then gradually the bluebells came, blue as water standing
thin in the level places under the trees and bushes, flowing in more
and more, till there was a flood of azure, and pale-green leaves
burning, and tiny birds with fiery little song and flight. Then swiftly
the flood sank and was gone, and it was summer.
There was to be no going to the seaside for a holiday. The holiday was
the removal from Cossethay.
They were going to live near Willey Green, which place was most central
for Brangwen. It was an old, quiet village on the edge of the thronged
colliery-district. So that it served, in its quaintness of odd old
cottages lingering in their sunny gardens, as a sort of bower or
pleasaunce to the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover, a pleasant
walk-round for the colliers on Sunday morning, before the public-houses
opened.
In Willey Green stood the Grammar School where Brangwen was occupied
for two days during the week, and where experiments in education were
being carried on.
Ursula wanted to live in Willey Green on the remoter side, towards
Southwell, and Sherwood Forest. There it was so lovely and romantic.
But out into the world meant out into the world. Will Brangwen must
become modern.
He bought, with his wife’s money, a fairly large house in the new,
red-brick part of Beldover. It was a villa built by the widow of the
late colliery manager, and stood in a quiet, new little side-street
near the large church.
Ursula was rather sad. Instead of having arrived at distinction they
had come to new red-brick suburbia in a grimy, small town.
Mrs. Brangwen was happy. The rooms were splendidly large—a splendid
dining-room, drawing-room and kitchen, besides a very pleasant study
downstairs. Everything was admirably appointed. The widow had settled
herself in lavishly. She was a native of Beldover, and had intended to
reign almost queen. Her bathroom was white and silver, her stairs were
of oak, her chimney-pieces were massive and oaken, with bulging,
columnar supports.
“Good and substantial,” was the keynote. But Ursula resented the stout,
inflated prosperity implied everywhere. She made her father promise to
chisel down the bulging oaken chimney-pieces, chisel them flat. That
sort of important paunch was very distasteful to her. Her father was
himself long and loosely built. What had he to do with so much “good
and substantial” importance?
They bought a fair amount also of the widow’s furniture. It was in
common good taste—the great Wilton carpet, the large round table, the
Chesterfield covered with glossy chintz in roses and birds. It was all
really very sunny and nice, with large windows, and a view right across
the shallow valley.
After all, they would be, as one of their acquaintances said, among the
elite of Beldover. They would represent culture. And as there was no
one of higher social importance than the doctors, the
colliery-managers, and the chemists, they would shine, with their Della
Robbia beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their
reproductions from Botticelli. Nay, the large photographs of the
Primavera and the Aphrodite and the Nativity in the dining-room, the
ordinary reception-room, would make dumb the mouth of Beldover.
And after all, it is better to be princess in Beldover than a vulgar
nobody in the country.
There was great preparation made for the removal of the whole Brangwen
family, ten in all. The house in Beldover was prepared, the house in
Cossethay was dismantled. Come the end of the school-term the removal
would begin.
Ursula left school at the end of July, when the summer holiday
commenced. The morning outside was bright and sunny, and the freedom
got inside the schoolroom this last day. It was as if the walls of the
school were going to melt away. Already they seemed shadowy and unreal.
It was breaking-up morning. Soon scholars and teachers would be
outside, each going his own way. The irons were struck off, the
sentence was expired, the prison was a momentary shadow halting about
them. The children were carrying away books and inkwell, and rolling up
maps. All their faces were bright with gladness and goodwill. There was
a bustle of cleaning and clearing away all marks of this last term of
imprisonment. They were all breaking free. Busily, eagerly, Ursula made
up her totals of attendances in the register. With pride she wrote down
the thousands: to so many thousands of children had she given another
sessions’s lessons. It looked tremendous. The excited hours passed
slowly in suspense. Then at last it was over. For the last time, she
stood before her children whilst they said their prayers and sang a
hymn. Then it was over.
“Good-bye, children,” she said. “I shall not forget you, and you must
not forget me.”
“No, miss,” cried the children in chorus, with shining faces.
She stood smiling on them, moved, as they filed out. Then she gave her
monitors their term sixpences, and they too departed. Cupboards were
locked, blackboards washed, inkwells and dusters removed. The place
stood bare and vacated. She had triumphed over it. It was a shell now.
She had fought a good fight here, and it had not been altogether
unenjoyable. She owed some gratitude even to this hard, vacant place,
that stood like a memorial or a trophy. So much of her life had been
fought for and won and lost here. Something of this school would always
belong to her, something of her to it. She acknowledged it. And now
came the leave-taking.
In the teachers’ room the teachers were chatting and loitering, talking
excitedly of where they were going: to the Isle of Man, to Llandudno,
to Yarmouth. They were eager, and attached to each other, like comrades
leaving a ship.
Then it was Mr. Harby’s turn to make a speech to Ursula. He looked
handsome, with his silver-grey temples and black brows, and his
imperturbable male solidity.
“Well,” he said, “we must say good-bye to Miss Brangwen and wish her
all good fortune for the future. I suppose we shall see her again some
time, and hear how she is getting on.”
“Oh, yes,” said Ursula, stammering, blushing, laughing. “Oh, yes, I
shall come and see you.”
Then she realized that this sounded too personal, and she felt foolish.
“Miss Schofield suggested these two books,” he said, putting a couple
of volumes on the table: “I hope you will like them.”
Ursula feeling very shy picked up the books. There was a volume of
Swinburne’s poetry, and a volume of Meredith’s.
“Oh, I shall love them,” she said. “Thank you very much—thank you all
so much—it is so——”
She stuttered to an end, and very red, turned the leaves of the books
eagerly, pretending to be taking the first pleasure, but really seeing
nothing.
Mr. Harby’s eyes were twinkling. He alone was at his ease, master of
the situation. It was pleasing to him to make Ursula the gift, and for
once extend good feeling to his teachers. As a rule, it was so
difficult, each one was so strained in resentment under his rule.
“Yes,” he said, “we hoped you would like the choice——”
He looked with his peculiar, challenging smile for a moment, then
returned to his cupboards.
Ursula felt very confused. She hugged her books, loving them. And she
felt that she loved all the teachers, and Mr. Harby. It was very
confusing.
At last she was out. She cast one hasty glance over the school
buildings squatting on the asphalt yard in the hot, glistening sun, one
look down the well-known road, and turned her back on it all. Something
strained in her heart. She was going away.
“Well, good luck,” said the last of the teachers, as she shook hands at
the end of the road. “We’ll expect you back some day.”
He spoke in irony. She laughed, and broke away. She was free. As she
sat on the top of the tram in the sunlight, she looked round her with
tremendous delight. She had left something which had meant much to her.
She would not go to school any more, and do the familiar things. Queer!
There was a little pang amid her exultation, of fear, not of regret.
Yet how she exulted this morning!
She was tremulous with pride and joy. She loved the two books. They
were tokens to her, representing the fruit and trophies of her two
years which, thank God, were over.
“To Ursula Brangwen, with best wishes for her future, and in warm
memory of the time she spent in St. Philip’s School,” was written in
the headmaster’s neat, scrupulous handwriting. She could see the
careful hand holding the pen, the thick fingers with tufts of black
hair on the back of each one.
He had signed, all the teachers had signed. She liked having all their
signatures. She felt she loved them all. They were her fellow-workers.
She carried away from the school a pride she could never lose. She had
her place as comrade and sharer in the work of the school, her fellow
teachers had signed to her, as one of them. And she was one of all
workers, she had put in her tiny brick to the fabric man was building,
she had qualified herself as co-builder.
Then the day for the home removal came. Ursula rose early, to pack up
the remaining goods. The carts arrived, lent by her uncle at the Marsh,
in the lull between hay and corn harvest. The goods roped in the cart,
Ursula mounted her bicycle and sped away to Beldover.
The house was hers. She entered its clean-scrubbed silence. The
dining-room had been covered with a thick rush matting, hard and of the
beautiful, luminous, clean colour of sun-dried reeds. The walls were
pale grey, the doors were darker grey. Ursula admired it very much, as
the sun came through the large windows, streaming in.
She flung open doors and windows to the sunshine. Flowers were bright
and shining round the small lawn, which stood above the road, looking
over the raw field opposite, which would later be built upon. No one
came. So she wandered down the garden at the back of the wall. The
eight bells of the church rang the hour. She could hear the many sounds
of the town about her.
At last, the cart was seen coming round the corner, familiar furniture
piled undignified on top, Tom, her brother, and Theresa, marching on
foot beside the mass, proud of having walked ten miles or more, from
the tram terminus. Ursula poured out beer, and the men drank thirstily,
by the door. A second cart was coming. Her father appeared on his motor
bicycle. There was the staggering transport of furniture up the steps
to the little lawn, where it was deposited all pell-mell in the
sunshine, very queer and discomforting.
Brangwen was a pleasant man to work with, cheerful and easy. Ursula
loved deciding him where the heavy things should stand. She watched
anxiously the struggle up the steps and through the doorways. Then the
big things were in, the carts set off again. Ursula and her father
worked away carrying in all the light things that remained upon the
lawn, and putting them in place. Dinner time came. They ate bread and
cheese in the kitchen.
“Well, we’re getting on,” said Brangwen, cheerfully.
Two more loads arrived. The afternoon passed away in a struggle with
the furniture, upstairs. Towards five o’clock, appeared the last loads,
consisting also of Mrs. Brangwen and the younger children, driven by
Uncle Fred in the trap. Gudrun had walked with Margaret from the
station. The whole family had come.
“There!” said Brangwen, as his wife got down from the cart: “Now we’re
all here.”
“Ay,” said his wife pleasantly.
And the very brevity, the silence of intimacy between the two made a
home in the hearts of the children, who clustered round feeling strange
in the new place.
Everything was at sixes and sevens. But a fire was made in the kitchen,
the hearth-rug put down, the kettle set on the hob, and Mrs. Brangwen
began towards sunset to prepare the first meal. Ursula and Gudrun were
slaving in the bedrooms, candles were rushing about. Then from the
kitchen came the smell of ham and eggs and coffee, and in the gaslight,
the scrambled meal began. The family seemed to huddle together like a
little camp in a strange place. Ursula felt a load of responsibility
upon her, caring for the half-little ones. The smallest kept near the
mother.
It was dark, and the children went sleepy but excited to bed. It was a
long time before the sound of voices died out. There was a tremendous
sense of adventure.
In the morning everybody was awake soon after dawn, the children
crying:
“When I wakened up I didn’t know where I was.”
There were the strange sounds of the town, and the repeated chiming of
the big church bells, so much harsher and more insistent than the
little bells of Cossethay. They looked through the windows past the
other new red houses to the wooded hill across the valley. They had all
a delightful sense of space and liberation, space and light and air.
But gradually all set to work. They were a careless, untidy family. Yet
when once they set about to get the house in order, the thing went with
felicity and quickness. By evening the place was roughly established.
They would not have a servant to live in the house, only a woman who
could go home at night. And they would not even have the woman yet.
They wanted to do as they liked in their own home, with no stranger in
the midst.
Chapter XV.
THE BITTERNESS OF ECSTASY
A storm of industry raged on in the house. Ursula did not go to college
till October. So, with a distinct feeling of responsibility, as if she
must express herself in this house, she laboured arranging,
re-arranging, selecting, contriving.
She could use her father’s ordinary tools, both for woodwork and
metal-work, so she hammered and tinkered. Her mother was quite content
to have the thing done. Brangwen was interested. He had a ready belief
in his daughter. He himself was at work putting up his work-shed in the
garden.
At last she had finished for the time being. The drawing-room was big
and empty. It had the good Wilton carpet, of which the family was so
proud, and the large couch and large chairs covered with shiny chintz,
and the piano, a little sculpture in plaster that Brangwen had done,
and not very much more. It was too large and empty-feeling for the
family to occupy very much. Yet they liked to know it was there, large
and empty.
The home was the dining-room. There the hard rush floor-covering made
the ground light, reflecting light upon the bottom of their hearts; in
the window-bay was a broad, sunny seat, the table was so solid one
could not jostle it, and the chairs so strong one could knock them over
without hurting them. The familiar organ that Brangwen had made stood
on one side, looking peculiarly small, the sideboard was comfortably
reduced to normal proportions. This was the family living-room.
Ursula had a bedroom to herself. It was really a servants’ bedroom,
small and plain. Its window looked over the back garden at other back
gardens, some of them old and very nice, some of them littered with
packing-cases, then at the backs of the houses whose fronts were the
shops in High Street, or the genteel homes of the under-manager or the
chief cashier, facing the chapel.
She had six weeks still before going to college. In this time she
nervously read over some Latin and some botany, and fitfully worked at
some mathematics. She was going into college as a teacher, for her
training. But, having already taken her matriculation examination, she
was entered for a university course. At the end of a year she would sit
for the Intermediate Arts, then two years after for her B.A. So her
case was not that of the ordinary school-teacher. She would be working
among the private students who came only for pure education, not for
mere professional training. She would be of the elect.
For the next three years she would be more or less dependent on her
parents again. Her training was free. All college fees were paid by the
government, she had moreover a few pounds grant every year. This would
just pay for her train fares and her clothing. Her parents would only
have to feed her. She did not want to cost them much. They would not be
well off. Her father would earn only two hundred a year, and a good
deal of her mother’s capital was spent in buying the house. Still,
there was enough to get along with.
Gudrun was attending the Art School at Nottingham. She was working
particularly at sculpture. She had a gift for this. She loved making
little models in clay, of children or of animals. Already some of these
had appeared in the Students’ Exhibition in the Castle, and Gudrun was
a distinguished person. She was chafing at the Art School and wanted to
go to London. But there was not enough money. Neither would her parents
let her go so far.
Theresa had left the High School. She was a great strapping, bold
hussy, indifferent to all higher claims. She would stay at home. The
others were at school, except the youngest. When term started, they
would all be transferred to the Grammar School at Willey Green.
Ursula was excited at making acquaintances in Beldover. The excitement
soon passed. She had tea at the clergyman’s, at the chemist’s, at the
other chemist’s, at the doctor’s, at the under-manager’s—then she knew
practically everybody. She could not take people very seriously, though
at the time she wanted to.
She wandered the country, on foot and on her bicycle, finding it very
beautiful in the forest direction, between Mansfield and Southwell and
Worksop. But she was here only skirmishing for amusement. Her real
exploration would begin in college.
Term began. She went into town each day by train. The cloistered quiet
of the college began to close around her.
She was not at first disappointed. The big college built of stone,
standing in the quiet street, with a rim of grass and lime trees all so
peaceful: she felt it remote, a magic land. Its architecture was
foolish, she knew from her father. Still, it was different from that of
all other buildings. Its rather pretty, plaything, Gothic form was
almost a style, in the dirty industrial town.
She liked the hall, with its big stone chimney-piece and its Gothic
arches supporting the balcony above. To be sure the arches were ugly,
the chimney-piece of cardboard-like carved stone, with its armorial
decoration, looked silly just opposite the bicycle stand and the
radiator, whilst the great notice-board with its fluttering papers
seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall.
Nevertheless, amorphous as it might be, there was in it a reminiscence
of the wondrous, cloistral origin of education. Her soul flew straight
back to the mediæval times, when the monks of God held the learning of
men and imparted it within the shadow of religion. In this spirit she
entered college.
The harshness and vulgarity of the lobbies and cloak-rooms hurt her at
first. Why was it not all beautiful? But she could not openly admit her
criticism. She was on holy ground.
She wanted all the students to have a high, pure spirit, she wanted
them to say only the real, genuine things, she wanted their faces to be
still and luminous as the nuns’ and the monks’ faces.
Alas, the girls chattered and giggled and were nervous, they were
dressed up and frizzed, the men looked mean and clownish.
Still, it was lovely to pass along the corridor with one’s books in
one’s hands, to push the swinging, glass-panelled door, and enter the
big room where the first lecture would be given. The windows were large
and lofty, the myriad brown students’ desks stood waiting, the great
blackboard was smooth behind the rostrum.
Ursula sat beside her window, rather far back. Looking down, she saw
the lime trees turning yellow, the tradesman’s boy passing silent down
the still, autumn-sunny street. There was the world, remote, remote.
Here, within the great, whispering sea-shell, that whispered all the
while with reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the
echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence.
She listened, she scribbled her notes with joy, almost with ecstasy,
never for a moment criticizing what she heard. The lecturer was a
mouth-piece, a priest. As he stood, black-gowned, on the rostrum, some
strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole
place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they
became a lecture.
At first, she preserved herself from criticism. She would not consider
the professors as men, ordinary men who ate bacon, and pulled on their
boots before coming to college. They were the black-gowned priests of
knowledge, serving for ever in a remote, hushed temple. They were the
initiated, and the beginning and the end of the mystery was in their
keeping.
Curious joy she had of the lectures. It was a joy to hear the theory of
education, there was such freedom and pleasure in ranging over the very
stuff of knowledge, and seeing how it moved and lived and had its
being. How happy Racine made her! She did not know why. But as the big
lines of the drama unfolded themselves, so steady, so measured, she
felt a thrill as of being in the realm of the reality. Of Latin, she
was doing Livy and Horace. The curious, intimate, gossiping tone of the
Latin class suited Horace. Yet she never cared for him, nor even Livy.
There was an entire lack of sternness in the gossipy class-room. She
tried hard to keep her old grasp of the Roman spirit. But gradually the
Latin became mere gossip-stuff and artificiality to her, a question of
manners and verbosities.
Her terror was the mathematics class. The lecturer went so fast, her
heart beat excitedly, she seemed to be straining every nerve. And she
struggled hard, during private study, to get the stuff into control.
Then came the lovely, peaceful afternoons in the botany laboratory.
There were few students. How she loved to sit on her high stool before
the bench, with her pith and her razor and her material, carefully
mounting her slides, carefully bringing her microscope into focus, then
turning with joy to record her observation, drawing joyfully in her
book, if the slide were good.
She soon made a college friend, a girl who had lived in Florence, a
girl who wore a wonderful purple or figured scarf draped over a plain,
dark dress. She was Dorothy Russell, daughter of a south-country
advocate. Dorothy lived with a maiden aunt in Nottingham, and spent her
spare moments slaving for the Women’s Social and Political Union. She
was quiet and intense, with an ivory face and dark hair looped plain
over her ears. Ursula was very fond of her, but afraid of her. She
seemed so old and so relentless towards herself. Yet she was only
twenty-two. Ursula always felt her to be a creature of fate, like
Cassandra.
The two girls had a close, stern friendship. Dorothy worked at all
things with the same passion, never sparing herself. She came closest
to Ursula during the botany hours. For she could not draw. Ursula made
beautiful and wonderful drawings of the sections under the microscope,
and Dorothy always came to learn the manner of the drawing.
So the first year went by, in magnificent seclusion and activity of
learning. It was strenuous as a battle, her college life, yet remote as
peace.
She came to Nottingham in the morning with Gudrun. The two sisters were
distinguished wherever they went, slim, strong girls, eager and
extremely sensitive. Gudrun was the more beautiful of the two, with her
sleepy, half-languid girlishness that looked so soft, and yet was
balanced and inalterable underneath. She wore soft, easy clothing, and
hats which fell by themselves into a careless grace.
Ursula was much more carefully dressed, but she was self-conscious,
always falling into depths of admiration of somebody else, and
modelling herself upon this other, and so producing a hopeless
incongruity. When she dressed for practical purposes she always looked
well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat-and-skirt and a small hat of
black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move
down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding
sensitive receptivity.
At the end of the first year Ursula got through her Intermediate Arts
examination, and there came a lull in her eager activities. She
slackened off, she relaxed altogether. Worn nervous and inflammable by
the excitement of the preparation for the examination, and by the sort
of exaltation which carried her through the crisis itself, she now fell
into a quivering passivity, her will all loosened.
The family went to Scarborough for a month. Gudrun and the father were
busy at the handicraft holiday school there, Ursula was left a good
deal with the children. But when she could, she went off by herself.
She stood and looked out over the shining sea. It was very beautiful to
her. The tears rose hot in her heart.
Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly in to her a passionate,
unborn yearning. “There are so many dawns that have not yet risen.” It
seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea, all the unrisen dawns were
appealing to her, all her unborn soul was crying for the unrisen dawns.
As she sat looking out at the tender sea, with its lovely, swift
glimmer, the sob rose in her breast, till she caught her lip suddenly
under her teeth, and the tears were forcing themselves from her. And in
her very sob, she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry. It
was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.
She glanced apprehensively round, hoping no one would see her in this
state.
Then came a time when the sea was rough. She watched the water
travelling in to the coast, she watched a big wave running unnoticed,
to burst in a shock of foam against a rock, enveloping all in a great
white beauty, to pour away again, leaving the rock emerged black and
teeming. Oh, and if, when the wave burst into whiteness, it were only
set free!
Sometimes she loitered along the harbour, looking at the sea-browned
sailors, who, in their close blue jerseys, lounged on the harbour-wall,
and laughed at her with impudent, communicative eyes.
There was established a little relation between her and them. She never
would speak to them or know any more of them. Yet as she walked by and
they leaned on the sea-wall, there was something between her and them,
something keen and delightful and painful. She liked best the young one
whose fair, salty hair tumbled over his blue eyes. He was so new and
fresh and salt and not of this world.
From Scarborough she went to her Uncle Tom’s. Winifred had a small
baby, born at the end of the summer. She had become strange and alien
to Ursula. There was an unmentionable reserve between the two women.
Tom Brangwen was an attentive father, a very domestic husband. But
there was something spurious about his domesticity, Ursula did not like
him any more. Something ugly, blatant in his nature had come out now,
making him shift everything over to a sentimental basis. A
materialistic unbeliever, he carried it all off by becoming full of
human feeling, a warm, attentive host, a generous husband, a model
citizen. And he was clever enough to rouse admiration everywhere, and
to take in his wife sufficiently. She did not love him. She was glad to
live in a state of complacent self-deception with him, she worked
according to him.
Ursula was relieved to go home. She had still two peaceful years before
her. Her future was settled for two years. She returned to college to
prepare for her final examination.
But during this year the glamour began to depart from college. The
professors were not priests initiated into the deep mysteries of life
and knowledge. After all, they were only middle-men handling wares they
had become so accustomed to that they were oblivious of them. What was
Latin?—So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class
altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop, where one bought
curios and learned the market-value of curios; dull curios too, on the
whole. She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by Chinese
and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops. “Antiques”—the very word
made her soul fall flat and dead.
The life went out of her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole
thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace,
spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naïveté of
Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer’s shop, and one bought an
equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the
factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This
was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a
little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.
The college itself was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.
A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same darkness and
bitter gloom from which she was never safe now, the realization of the
permanent substratum of ugliness under everything. As she came to the
college in the afternoon, the lawns were frothed with daisies, the lime
trees hung tender and sunlit and green; and oh, the deep, white froth
of the daisies was anguish to see.
For inside, inside the college, she knew she must enter the sham
workshop. All the while, it was a sham store, a sham warehouse, with a
single motive of material gain, and no productivity. It pretended to
exist by the religious virtue of knowledge. But the religious virtue of
knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success.
A sort of inertia came over her. Mechanically, from habit, she went on
with her studies. But it was almost hopeless. She could scarcely attend
to anything. At the Anglo-Saxon lecture in the afternoon, she sat
looking down, out of the window, hearing no word, of Beowulf or of
anything else. Down below, in the street, the sunny grey pavement went
beside the palisade. A woman in a pink frock, with a scarlet sunshade,
crossed the road, a little white dog running like a fleck of light
about her. The woman with the scarlet sunshade came over the road, a
lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her. Ursula watched
spell-bound. The woman with the scarlet sunshade and the flickering
terrier was gone—and whither? Whither?
In what world of reality was the woman in the pink dress walking? To
what warehouse of dead unreality was she herself confined?
What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when
one only learned it in order to answer examination questions, in order
that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick
with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else
was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was
debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things,
to encumber material life.
Suddenly she threw over French. She would take honours in botany. This
was the one study that lived for her. She had entered into the lives of
the plants. She was fascinated by the strange laws of the vegetable
world. She had here a glimpse of something working entirely apart from
the purpose of the human world.
College was barren, cheap, a temple converted to the most vulgar, petty
commerce. Had she not gone to hear the echo of learning pulsing back to
the source of the mystery?—The source of mystery! And barrenly, the
professors in their gowns offered commercial commodity that could be
turned to good account in the examination room; ready-made stuff too,
and not really worth the money it was intended to fetch; which they all
knew.
All the time in the college now, save when she was labouring in her
botany laboratory, for there the mystery still glimmered, she felt she
was degrading herself in a kind of trade of sham jewjaws.
Angry and stiff, she went through her last term. She would rather be
out again earning her own living. Even Brinsley Street and Mr. Harby
seemed real in comparison. Her violent hatred of the Ilkeston School
was nothing compared with the sterile degradation of college. But she
was not going back to Brinsley Street either. She would take her B.A.,
and become a mistress in some Grammar School for a time.
The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She
could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of
disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the
same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always
the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active
and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and
then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of
amorphous, squalid activity.
No matter! Every hill-top was a little different, every valley was
somehow new. Cossethay and her childhood with her father; the Marsh and
the little Church school near the Marsh, and her grandmother and her
uncles; the High School at Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky; Anton
Skrebensky and the dance in the moonlight between the fires; then the
time she could not think of without being blasted, Winifred Inger, and
the months before becoming a school-teacher; then the horrors of
Brinsley Street, lapsing into comparative peacefulness, Maggie, and
Maggie’s brother, whose influence she could still feel in her veins,
when she conjured him up; then college, and Dorothy Russell, who was
now in France, then the next move into the world again!
Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different. Yet she
was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She
did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal.
Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of
disillusion, of falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in
rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.
That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it could not
come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This world in which
she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit
up by man’s completest consciousness, she thought was all the world:
that here all was disclosed for ever. Yet all the time, within the
darkness she had been aware of points of light, like the eyes of wild
beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged
in a great heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle
of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and
the factories ground out their machine-produce and the plants and the
animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly it
seemed like the area under an arc-lamp, wherein the moths and children
played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing there was
any darkness, because they stayed in the light.
But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of range, she
saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the
vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers; she felt the strange, foolish
vanity of the camp, which said “Beyond our light and our order there is
nothing,” turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of
illuminating consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the
Creator, and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast
darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on
the edge.
Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness. For if
he did he was jeered to death by the others, who cried “Fool,
anti-social knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There _is_ no
darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and
unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and
comprehend the innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool and knave,
how dare you belittle us with the darkness?”
Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes
of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels, whom
the light fenced out, as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of
darkness. And some, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it
bristling with the tufts of the hyena and the wolf; and some having
given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit,
saw the gleam in the eyes of the wolf and the hyena, that it was the
flash of the sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the
angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied,
like the flash of fangs.
It was a little while before Easter, in her last year of college, when
Ursula was twenty-two years old, that she heard again from Skrebensky.
He had written to her once or twice from South Africa, during the first
months of his service out there in the war, and since had sent her a
post-card every now and then, at ever longer intervals. He had become a
first lieutenant, and had stayed out in Africa. She had not heard of
him now for more than two years.
Often her thoughts returned to him. He seemed like the gleaming dawn,
yellow, radiant, of a long, grey, ashy day. The memory of him was like
the thought of the first radiant hours of morning. And here was the
blank grey ashiness of later daytime. Ah, if he had only remained true
to her, she might have known the sunshine, without all this toil and
hurt and degradation of a spoiled day. He would have been her angel. He
held the keys of the sunshine. Still he held them. He could open to her
the gates of succeeding freedom and delight. Nay, if he had remained
true to her, he would have been the doorway to her, into the boundless
sky of happiness and plunging, inexhaustible freedom which was the
paradise of her soul. Ah, the great range he would have opened to her,
the illimitable endless space for self-realization and delight for
ever.
The one thing she believed in was in the love she had held for him. It
remained shining and complete, a thing to hark back to. And she said to
herself, when present things seemed a failure:
“Ah, I _was_ fond of him,” as if with him the leading flower of her
life had died.
Now she heard from him again. The chief effect was pain. The pleasure,
the spontaneous joy was not there any longer. But her _will_ rejoiced.
Her will had fixed itself to him. And the old excitement of her dreams
stirred and woke up. He was come, the man with the wondrous lips that
could send the kiss wavering to the very end of all space. Was he come
back to her? She did not believe.
My dear Ursula, I am back in England again for a few months before
going out again, this time to India. I wonder if you still keep
the memory of our times together. I have still got the little
photograph of you. You must be changed since then, for it is about
six years ago. I am fully six years older,—I have lived through
another life since I knew you at Cossethay. I wonder if you would
care to see me. I shall come up to Derby next week, and I would
call in Nottingham, and we might have tea together. Will you let
me know? I shall look for your answer.
Anton Skrebensky
Ursula had taken this letter from the rack in the hall at college, and
torn it open as she crossed to the Women’s room. The world seemed to
dissolve away from around her, she stood alone in clear air.
Where could she go, to be alone? She fled away, upstairs, and through
the private way to the reference library. Seizing a book, she sat down
and pondered the letter. Her heart beat, her limbs trembled. As in a
dream, she heard one gong sound in the college, then, strangely,
another. The first lecture had gone by.
Hurriedly she took one of her note-books and began to write.
“Dear Anton, Yes, I still have the ring. I should be very glad to
see you again. You can come here to college for me, or I will meet
you somewhere in the town. Will you let me know? Your sincere
friend——”
Trembling, she asked the librarian, who was her friend, if he would
give her an envelope. She sealed and addressed her letter, and went
out, bare-headed, to post it. When it was dropped into the pillar-box,
the world became a very still, pale place, without confines. She
wandered back to college, to her pale dream, like a first wan light of
dawn.
Skrebensky came one afternoon the following week. Day after day, she
had hurried swiftly to the letter-rack on her arrival at college in the
morning, and during the intervals between lectures. Several times,
swiftly, with secretive fingers, she had plucked his letter down from
its public prominence, and fled across the hall holding it fast and
hidden. She read her letters in the botany laboratory, where her corner
was always reserved to her.
Several letters, and then he was coming. It was Friday afternoon he
appointed. She worked over her microscope with feverish activity, able
to give only half her attention, yet working closely and rapidly. She
had on her slide some special stuff come up from London that day, and
the professor was fussy and excited about it. At the same time, as she
focused the light on her field, and saw the plant-animal lying shadowy
in a boundless light, she was fretting over a conversation she had had
a few days ago with Dr. Frankstone, who was a woman doctor of physics
in the college.
“No, really,” Dr. Frankstone had said, “I don’t see why we should
attribute some special mystery to life—do you? We don’t understand it
as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn’t warrant our saying
it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from
everything else in the universe—do you think it does? May it not be
that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities,
of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don’t
see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life,
and life alone——”
The conversation had ended on a note of uncertainty, indefinite,
wistful. But the purpose, what was the purpose? Electricity had no
soul, light and heat had no soul. Was she herself an impersonal force,
or conjunction of forces, like one of these? She looked still at the
unicellular shadow that lay within the field of light, under her
microscope. It was alive. She saw it move—she saw the bright mist of
its ciliary activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus, as it slid
across the plane of light. What then was its will? If it was a
conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held these forces
unified, and for what purpose were they unified?
For what purpose were the incalculable physical and chemical activities
nodalized in this shadowy, moving speck under her microscope? What was
the will which nodalized them and created the one thing she saw? What
was its intention? To be itself? Was its purpose just mechanical and
limited to itself?
It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind the world
gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the
creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an
intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it
all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor
mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a
consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite.
To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity.
Ursula sat abstracted over her microscope, in suspense. Her soul was
busy, infinitely busy, in the new world. In the new world, Skrebensky
was waiting for her—he would be waiting for her. She could not go yet,
because her soul was engaged. Soon she would go.
A stillness, like passing away, took hold of her. Far off, down the
corridors, she heard the gong booming five o’clock. She must go. Yet
she sat still.
The other students were pushing back their stools and putting their
microscopes away. Everything broke into turmoil. She saw, through the
window, students going down the steps, with books under their arms,
talking, all talking.
A great craving to depart came upon her. She wanted also to be gone.
She was in dread of the material world, and in dread of her own
transfiguration. She wanted to run to meet Skrebensky—the new life, the
reality.
Very rapidly she wiped her slides and put them back, cleared her place
at the bench, active, active, active. She wanted to run to meet
Skrebensky, hasten—hasten. She did not know what she was to meet. But
it would be a new beginning. She must hurry.
She flitted down the corridor on swift feet, her razor and note-books
and pencil in one hand, her pinafore over her arm. Her face was lifted
and tense with eagerness. He might not be there.
Issuing from the corridor, she saw him at once. She knew him at once.
Yet he was so strange. He stood with the curious self-effacing
diffidence which so frightened her in well-bred young men whom she
knew. He stood as if he wished to be unseen. He was very well-dressed.
She would not admit to herself the chill like a sunshine of frost that
came over her. This was he, the key, the nucleus to the new world.
He saw her coming swiftly across the hall, a slim girl in a white
flannel blouse and dark skirt, with some of the abstraction and gleam
of the unknown upon her, and he started, excited. He was very nervous.
Other students were loitering about the hall.
She laughed, with a blind, dazzled face, as she gave him her hand. He
too could not perceive her.
In a moment she was gone, to get her outdoor things. Then again, as
when she had been at school, they walked out into the town to tea. And
they went to the same tea-shop.
She knew a great difference in him. The kinship was there, the old
kinship, but he had belonged to a different world from hers. It was as
if they had cried a state of truce between him and her, and in this
truce they had met. She knew, vaguely, in the first minute, that they
were enemies come together in a truce. Every movement and word of his
was alien to her being.
Yet still she loved the fine texture of his face, of his skin. He was
rather browner, physically stronger. He was a man now. She thought his
manliness made the strangeness in him. When he was only a youth, fluid,
he was nearer to her. She thought a man must inevitably set into this
strange separateness, cold otherness of being. He talked, but not to
her. She tried to speak to him, but she could not reach him.
He seemed so balanced and sure, he made such a confident presence. He
was a great rider, so there was about him some of a horseman’s sureness
and habitual definiteness of decision, also some of the horseman’s
animal darkness. Yet his soul was only the more wavering, vague. He
seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The
vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. She knew
nothing of it. She could only feel the dark, heavy fixity of his animal
desire.
This dumb desire on his part had brought him to her? She was puzzled,
hurt by some hopeless fixity in him, that terrified her with a cold
feeling of despair. What did he want? His desires were so underground.
Why did he not admit himself? What did he want? He wanted something
that should be nameless. She shrank in fear.
Yet she flashed with excitement. In his dark, subterranean male soul,
he was kneeling before her, darkly exposing himself. She quivered, the
dark flame ran over her. He was waiting at her feet. He was helpless,
at her mercy. She could take or reject. If she rejected him, something
would die in him. For him it was life or death. And yet, all must be
kept so dark, the consciousness must admit nothing.
“How long,” she said, “are you staying in England?”
“I am not sure—but not later than July, I believe.”
Then they were both silent. He was here, in England, for six months.
They had a space of six months between them. He waited. The same iron
rigidity, as if the world were made of steel, possessed her again. It
was no use turning with flesh and blood to this arrangement of forged
metal.
Quickly, her imagination adjusted itself to the situation.
“Have you an appointment in India?” she asked.
“Yes—I have just the six months’ leave.”
“Will you like being out there?”
“I think so—there’s a good deal of social life, and plenty going
on—hunting, polo—and always a good horse—and plenty of work, any amount
of work.”
He was always side-tracking, always side-tracking his own soul. She
could see him so well out there, in India—one of the governing class,
superimposed upon an old civilization, lord and master of a clumsier
civilization than his own. It was his choice. He would become again an
aristocrat, invested with authority and responsibility, having a great
helpless populace beneath him. One of the ruling class, his whole being
would be given over to the fulfilling and the executing of the better
idea of the state. And in India, there would be real work to do. The
country did need the civilization which he himself represented: it did
need his roads and bridges, and the enlightenment of which he was part.
He would go to India. But that was not her road.
Yet she loved him, the body of him, whatever his decisions might be. He
seemed to want something of her. He was waiting for her to decide of
him. It had been decided in her long ago, when he had kissed her first.
He was her lover, though good and evil should cease. Her will never
relaxed, though her heart and soul must be imprisoned and silenced. He
waited upon her, and she accepted him. For he had come back to her.
A glow came into his face, into his fine, smooth skin, his eyes,
gold-grey, glowed intimately to her. He burned up, he caught fire and
became splendid, royal, something like a tiger. She caught his
brilliant, burnished glamour. Her heart and her soul were shut away
fast down below, hidden. She was free of them. She was to have her
satisfaction.
She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its
proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which
seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud.
It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented
before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula
Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order.
All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality?
She was exhilarated, she did not want to go away from him. She had her
place by him. Who should take her away?
They came out of the café.
“Is there anything you would like to do?” he said. “Is there anything
we _can_ do?”
It was a dark, windy night in March.
“There is nothing to do,” she said.
Which was the answer he wanted.
“Let us walk then—where shall we walk?” he asked.
“Shall we go to the river?” she suggested, timidly.
In a moment they were on the tram, going down to Trent Bridge. She was
so glad. The thought of walking in the dark, far-reaching
water-meadows, beside the full river, transported her. Dark water
flowing in silence through the big, restless night made her feel wild.
They crossed the bridge, descended, and went away from the lights. In
an instant, in the darkness, he took her hand and they went in silence,
with subtle feet treading the darkness. The town fumed away on their
left, there were strange lights and sounds, the wind rushed against the
trees, and under the bridge. They walked close together, powerful in
unison. He drew her very close, held her with a subtle, stealthy,
powerful passion, as if they had a secret agreement which held good in
the profound darkness. The profound darkness was their universe.
“It is like it was before,” she said.
Yet it was not in the least as it was before. Nevertheless his heart
was perfectly in accord with her. They thought one thought.
“I knew I should come back,” he said at length.
She quivered.
“Did you always love me?” she asked.
The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him for a
moment. The darkness travelled massively along.
“I had to come back to you,” he said, as if hypnotized. “You were
always at the back of everything.”
She was silent with triumph, like fate.
“I loved you,” she said, “always.”
The dark flame leaped up in him. He must give her himself. He must give
her the very foundations of himself. He drew her very close, and they
went on in silence.
She started violently, hearing voices. They were near a stile across
the dark meadows.
“It’s only lovers,” he said to her, softly.
She looked to see the dark figures against the fence, wondering that
the darkness was inhabited.
“Only lovers will walk here to-night,” he said.
Then in a low, vibrating voice he told her about Africa, the strange
darkness, the strange, blood fear.
“I am not afraid of the darkness in England,” he said. “It is soft, and
natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in
Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror—not fear of anything—just
fear. One breathes it, like the smell of blood. The blacks know it.
They worship it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it—the
fear—something sensual.”
She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness.
He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying
something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft
passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to
her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood. He was
strangely secret. The whole world must be abolished. He maddened her
with his soft, cajoling, vibrating tones. He wanted her to answer, to
understand. A turgid, teeming night, heavy with fecundity in which
every molecule of matter grew big with increase, secretly urgent with
fecund desire, seemed to come to pass. She quivered, taut and
vibrating, almost pained. And gradually, he ceased telling her of
Africa, there came a silence, whilst they walked the darkness beside
the massive river. Her limbs were rich and tense, she felt they must be
vibrating with a low, profound vibration. She could scarcely walk. The
deep vibration of the darkness could only be felt, not heard.
Suddenly, as they walked, she turned to him and held him fast, as if
she were turned to steel.
“_Do_ you love me?” she cried in anguish.
“Yes,” he said, in a curious, lapping voice, unlike himself. “Yes, I
love you.”
He seemed like the living darkness upon her, she was in the embrace of
the strong darkness. He held her enclosed, soft, unutterably soft, and
with the unrelaxing softness of fate, the relentless softness of
fecundity. She quivered, and quivered, like a tense thing that is
struck. But he held her all the time, soft, unending, like darkness
closed upon her, omnipresent as the night. He kissed her, and she
quivered as if she were being destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel
vibrated, and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went
dark. She was all dark, will-less, having only the receptive will.
He kissed her, with his soft, enveloping kisses, and she responded to
them completely, her mind, her soul gone out. Darkness cleaving to
darkness, she hung close to him, pressed herself into soft flow of his
kiss, pressed herself down, down to the source and core of his kiss,
herself covered and enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss,
that travelled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the
last fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she
clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very
bottommost source of him.
So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both,
subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid
darkness.
It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the
vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness
gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction.
They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it
endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their
blood ran together as one stream.
Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a drowse, and out
of the drowse, a small light of consciousness woke up. Ursula became
aware of the night around her, the water lapping and running full just
near, the trees roaring and soughing in gusts of wind.
She kept near to him, in contact with him, but she became ever more and
more herself. And she knew she must go to catch her train. But she did
not want to draw away from contact with him.
At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in the
unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the twinkle of
lights across the river, the big flare of the town in front and on
their right.
But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked
untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and arrogant.
“The stupid lights,” Ursula said to herself, in her dark sensual
arrogance. “The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its
lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness,
like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it?—nothing,
just nothing.”
In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic
uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only
dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of
composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them
all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. But in reality
each one was a dark, blind, eager wave urging blindly forward, dark
with the same homogeneous desire. And all their talk and all their
behaviour was sham, they were dressed-up creatures. She was reminded of
the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his
clothes.
During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the same dark
richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal,
a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing at the civic pretence of
all the human life about her.
“What are you, you pale citizens?” her face seemed to say, gleaming.
“You subdued beast in sheep’s clothing, you primeval darkness falsified
to a social mechanism.”
She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time, mocking
at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.
“They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing,” she said to
herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened, neutralized men.
“They think it better to be clerks or professors than to be the dark,
fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness. What do you think
you are?” her soul asked of the professor as she sat opposite him in
class. “What do you think you are, as you sit there in your gown and
your spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffing creature with eyes
peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires. That is
what you _are,_ though nobody would believe it, and you would be the
very last to allow it.”
Her soul mocked at all this pretence. Herself, she kept on pretending.
She dressed herself and made herself fine, she attended her lectures
and scribbled her notes. But all in a mood of superficial, mocking
facility. She understood well enough their two-and-two-make-four
tricks. She was as clever as they were. But care!—did she care about
their monkey tricks of knowledge or learning or civic deportment? She
did not care in the least.
There was Skrebensky, there was her dark, vital self. Outside the
college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the edge of the
night, he was attentive. Did he care?
She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in the night.
She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood, she had the
glimmering core of fecundity, she had her mate, her complement, her
sharer in fruition. So, she had all, everything.
Skrebensky was staying in Nottingham all the time. He too was free. He
knew no one in this town, he had no civic self to maintain. He was
free. Their trams and markets and theatres and public meetings were a
shaken kaleidoscope to him, he watched as a lion or a tiger may lie
with narrowed eyes watching the people pass before its cage, the
kaleidoscopic unreality of people, or a leopard lie blinking, watching
the incomprehensible feats of the keepers. He despised it all—it was
all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their
good political speakers, their good, earnest women—all the time he felt
his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many
performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance!
He watched the citizen, a pillar of society, a model, saw the stiff
goat’s legs, which have become almost stiffened to wood in the desire
to make them puppet in their action, he saw the trousers formed to the
puppet-action: man’s legs, but man’s legs become rigid and deformed,
ugly, mechanical.
He was curiously happy, being alone, now. The glimmering grin was on
his face. He had no longer any necessity to take part in the performing
tricks of the rest. He had discovered the clue to himself, he had
escaped from the show, like a wild beast escaped straight back into its
jungle. Having a room in a quiet hotel, he hired a horse and rode out
into the country, staying sometimes for the night in some village, and
returning the next day.
He felt rich and abundant in himself. Everything he did was a
voluptuous pleasure to him—either to ride on horseback, or to walk, or
to lie in the sun, or to drink in a public-house. He had no use for
people, nor for words. He had an amused pleasure in everything, a great
sense of voluptuous richness in himself, and of the fecundity of the
universal night he inhabited. The puppet shapes of people, their
wood-mechanical voices, he was remote from them.
For there were always his meetings with Ursula. Very often, she did not
go to college in the afternoon, but walked with him instead. Or he took
a motor-car or a dog-cart and they drove into the country, leaving the
car and going away by themselves into the woods. He had not taken her
yet. With subtle, instinctive economy, they went to the end of each
kiss, each embrace, each pleasure in intimate contact, knowing
subconsciously that the last was coming. It was to be their final entry
into the source of creation.
She took him home, and he stayed a week-end at Beldover with her
family. She loved having him in the house. Strange how he seemed to
come into the atmosphere of her family, with his laughing, insidious
grace. They all loved him, he was kin to them. His raillery, his warm,
voluptuous mocking presence was meat and joy to the Brangwen household.
For this house was always quivering with darkness, they put off their
puppet form when they came home, to lie and drowse in the sun.
There was a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the undercurrent of
darkness among them all. Yet here, at home, Ursula resented it. It
became distasteful to her. And she knew that if they understood the
real relationship between her and Skrebensky, her parents, her father
in particular, would go mad with rage. So subtly, she seemed to be like
any other girl who is more or less courted by a man. And she was like
any other girl. But in her, the antagonism to the social imposition was
for the time complete and final.
She waited, every moment of the day, for his next kiss. She admitted it
to herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously, she waited. He
waited, but, until the time came, more unconsciously. When the time
came that he should kiss her again, a prevention was an annihilation to
him. He felt his flesh go grey, he was heavy with a corpse-like
inanition, he did not exist, if the time passed unfulfilled.
He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and
again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards
Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and
there was the silence between them. They stood as at the edge of a
cliff, with a great darkness beneath.
Coming out of the lane along the darkness, with the dark space
spreading down to the wind, and the twinkling lights of the station
below, the far-off windy chuff of a shunting train, the tiny
clink-clink-clink of the wagons blown between the wind, the light of
Beldover-edge twinkling upon the blackness of the hill opposite, the
glow of the furnaces along the railway to the right, their steps began
to falter. They would soon come out of the darkness into the lights. It
was like turning back. It was unfulfilment. Two quivering, unwilling
creatures, they lingered on the edge of the darkness, peering out at
the lights and the machine-glimmer beyond. They could not turn back to
the world—they could not.
So lingering along, they came to a great oak tree by the path. In all
its budding mass it roared to the wind, and its trunk vibrated in every
fibre, powerful, indomitable.
“We will sit down,” he said.
And in the roaring circle under the tree, that was almost invisible yet
whose powerful presence received them, they lay a moment looking at the
twinkling lights on the darkness opposite, saw the sweeping brand of a
train past the edge of their darkened field.
Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her
was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was
caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man,
what was he?—a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She
passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine
darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the
dark fields of immortality.
When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong. She was not
ashamed,—why should she be? He was walking beside her, the man who had
been with her. She had taken him, they had been together. Whither they
had gone, she did not know. But it was as if she had received another
nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they
had leapt together.
Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of
artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the
railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to
another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing
her from them. When she went into the lighted dining-room at home, she
was impervious to the lights and the eyes of her parents. Her everyday
self was just the same. She merely had another, stronger self that knew
the darkness.
This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of
night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. It could not
occur to her that anybody, not even the young man of the world,
Skrebensky, should have anything at all to do with her permanent self.
As for her temporal, social self, she let it look after itself.
Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky—not the young man of the
world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She was perfectly sure of
herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was
not strong—she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary
sense:—she existed supremely.
She continued at college, in her ordinary routine, merely as a cover to
her dark, powerful under-life. The fact of herself, and with her
Skrebensky, was so powerful, that she took rest in the other. She went
to college in the morning, and attended her classes, flowering, and
remote.
She had lunch with him in his hotel; every evening she spent with him,
either in town, at his rooms, or in the country. She made the excuse at
home of evening study for her degree. But she paid not the slightest
attention to her study.
They were both absolute and happy and calm. The fact of their own
consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they
were free. The only thing they wanted, as the days went by, was more
time to themselves. They wanted the time to be absolutely their own.
The Easter vacation was approaching. They agreed to go right away. It
would not matter if they did not come back. They were indifferent to
the actual facts.
“I suppose we ought to get married,” he said, rather wistfully. It
_was_ so magnificently free and in a deeper world, as it was. To make
public their connection would be to put it in range with all the things
which nullified him, and from which he was for the moment entirely
dissociated. If he married he would have to assume his social self. And
the thought of assuming his social self made him at once diffident and
abstract. If she were his social wife, if she were part of that
complication of dead reality, then what had his under-life to do with
her? One’s social wife was almost a material symbol. Whereas now she
was something more vivid to him than anything in conventional life
could be. She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and
she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living
lie to the dead whole which contained them.
He watched her pensive, puzzled face.
“I don’t think I want to marry you,” she said, her brow clouded.
It piqued him rather.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Let’s think about it afterwards, shall we?” she said.
He was crossed, yet he loved her violently.
“You’ve got a _museau,_ not a face,” he said.
“Have I?” she cried, her face lighting up like a pure flame. She
thought she had escaped. Yet he returned—he was not satisfied.
“Why?” he asked, “why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I don’t want to be with other people,” she said. “I want to be like
this. I’ll tell you if ever I want to marry you.”
“All right,” he said.
He would rather the thing was left indefinite, and that she took the
responsibility.
They talked of the Easter vacation. She thought only of complete
enjoyment.
They went to an hotel in Piccadilly. She was supposed to be his wife.
They bought a wedding-ring for a shilling, from a shop in a poor
quarter.
They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence
was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and
supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing
mortal conditions.
They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a
world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they
were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride
of the senses.
The effect upon other people was extraordinary. The glamour was cast
from the young couple upon all they came into contact with, waiters or
chance acquaintances.
_“Oui, Monsieur le baron,”_ she would reply with a mocking courtesy to
her husband.
So they came to be treated as titled people. He was an officer in the
engineers. They were just married, going to India immediately.
Thus a tissue of romance was round them. She believed she was a young
wife of a titled husband on the eve of departure for India. This, the
social fact, was a delicious make-belief. The living fact was that he
and she were man and woman, absolute and beyond all limitation.
The days went by—they were to have three weeks together—in perfect
success. All the time, they themselves were reality, all outside was
tribute to them. They were quite careless about money, but they did
nothing very extravagant. He was rather surprised when he found that he
had spent twenty pounds in a little under a week, but it was only the
irritation of having to go to the bank. The machinery of the old system
lasted for him, not the system. The money simply did not exist.
Neither did any of the old obligations. They came home from the
theatre, had supper, then flitted about in their dressing-gowns. They
had a large bedroom and a corner sitting-room high up, remote and very
cosy. They ate all their meals in their own rooms, attended by a young
German called Hans, who thought them both wonderful, and answered
assiduously:
_“Gewiss, Herr Baron—bitte sehr, Frau Baronin.”_
Often, they saw the pink of dawn away across the park. The tower of
Westminster Cathedral was emerging, the lamps of Piccadilly, stringing
away beside the trees of the park, were becoming pale and moth-like,
the morning traffic was clock-clocking down the shadowy road, which had
gleamed all night like metal, down below, running far ahead into the
night, beneath the lamps, and which was now vague, as in a mist,
because of the dawn.
Then, as the flush of dawn became stronger, they opened the glass doors
and went on to the giddy balcony, feeling triumphant as two angels in
bliss, looking down at the still sleeping world, which would wake to a
dutiful, rumbling, sluggish turmoil of unreality.
[But the air was cold. They went into their bedroom, and bathed before
going to bed, leaving the partition doors of the bathroom open, so that
the vapour came into the bedroom and faintly dimmed the mirror. She was
always in bed first. She watched him as he bathed, his quick,
unconscious movements, the electric light glinting on his wet
shoulders. He stood out of the bath, his hair all washed flat over his
forehead, and pressed the water out of his eyes. He was slender, and,
to her, perfect, a clean, straight-cut youth, without a grain of
superfluous body. The brown hair on his body was soft and fine and
adorable, he was all beautifully flushed, as he stood in the white
bath-apartment.
He saw her warm, dark, lit-up face watching him from the pillow—yet he
did not see it—it was always present, and was to him as his own eyes.
He was never aware of the separate being of her. She was like his own
eyes and his own heart beating to him.
So he went across to her, to get his sleeping suit. It was always a
perfect adventure to go near to her. She put her arms round him, and
snuffed his warm, softened skin.
“Scent,” she said.
“Soap,” he answered.
“Soap,” she repeated, looking up with bright eyes. They were both
laughing, always laughing.]
Soon they were fast asleep, asleep till midday, close together,
sleeping one sleep. Then they awoke to the ever-changing reality of
their state. They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest
lived on a lower sphere.
Whatever they wanted to do, they did. They saw a few people—Dorothy,
whose guest she was supposed to be, and a couple of friends of
Skrebensky, young Oxford men, who called her Mrs. Skrebensky with
entire simplicity. They treated her, indeed, with such respect, that
she began to think she was really quite of the whole universe, of the
old world as well as of the new. She forgot she was outside the pale of
the old world. She thought she had brought it under the spell of her
own, real world. And so she had.
In such ever-changing reality the weeks went by. All the time, they
were an unknown world to each other. Every movement made by the one was
a reality and an adventure to the other. They did not want outside
excitements. They went to very few theatres, they were often in their
sitting-room high up over Piccadilly, with windows open on two sides,
and the door open on to the balcony, looking over the Green Park, or
down upon the minute travelling of the traffic.
Then suddenly, looking at a sunset, she wanted to go. She must be gone.
She must be gone at once. And in two hours’ time they were at Charing
Cross taking train for Paris. Paris was his suggestion. She did not
care where it was. The great joy was in setting out. And for a few days
she was happy in the novelty of Paris.
Then, for some reason, she must call in Rouen on the way back to
London. He had an instinctive mistrust of her desire for the place.
But, perversely, she wanted to go there. It was as if she wanted to try
its effect upon her.
For the first time, in Rouen, he had a cold feeling of death; not
afraid of any other man, but of her. She seemed to leave him. She
followed after something that was not him. She did not want him. The
old streets, the cathedral, the age and the monumental peace of the
town took her away from him. She turned to it as if to something she
had forgotten, and wanted. This was now the reality; this great stone
cathedral slumbering there in its mass, which knew no transience nor
heard any denial. It was majestic in its stability, its splendid
absoluteness.
Her soul began to run by itself. He did not realize, nor did she. Yet
in Rouen he had the first deadly anguish, the first sense of the death
towards which they were wandering. And she felt the first heavy
yearning, heavy, heavy hopeless warning, almost like a deep, uneasy
sinking into apathy, hopelessness.
They returned to London. But still they had two days. He began to
tremble, he grew feverish with the fear of her departure. She had in
her some fatal prescience, that made her calm. What would be, would be.
He remained fairly easy, however, still in his state of heightened
glamour, till she had gone, and he had turned away from St. Pancras,
and sat on the tram-car going up Pimlico to the “Angel”, to Moorgate
Street on Sunday evening.
Then the cold horror gradually soaked into him. He saw the horror of
the City Road, he realized the ghastly cold sordidness of the tram-car
in which he sat. Cold, stark, ashen sterility had him surrounded. Where
then was the luminous, wonderful world he belonged to by rights? How
did he come to be thrown on this refuse-heap where he was?
He was as if mad. The horror of the brick buildings, of the tram-car,
of the ashen-grey people in the street made him reeling and blind as if
drunk. He went mad. He had lived with her in a close, living, pulsing
world, where everything pulsed with rich being. Now he found himself
struggling amid an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and
mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people. The life was
extinct, only ash moved and stirred or stood rigid, there was a
horrible, clattering activity, a rattle like the falling of dry slag,
cold and sterile. It was as if the sunshine that fell were unnatural
light exposing the ash of the town, as if the lights at night were the
sinister gleam of decomposition.
Quite mad, beside himself, he went to his club and sat with a glass of
whisky, motionless, as if turned to clay. He felt like a corpse that is
inhabited with just enough life to make it appear as any other of the
spectral, unliving beings which we call people in our dead language.
Her absence was worse than pain to him. It destroyed his being.
Dead, he went on from lunch to tea. His face was all the time fixed and
stiff and colourless, his life was a dry, mechanical movement. Yet even
he wondered slightly at the awful misery that had overcome him. How
could he be so ashlike and extinct? He wrote her a letter.
“I have been thinking that we must get married before long. My pay will
be more when I get out to India, we shall be able to get along. Or if
you don’t want to go to India, I could very probably stay here in
England. But I think you would like India. You could ride, and you
would know just everybody out there. Perhaps if you stay on to take
your degree, we might marry immediately after that. I will write to
your father as soon as I hear from you——”
He went on, disposing of her. If only he could be with her! All he
wanted now was to marry her, to be sure of her. Yet all the time he was
perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct, without emotion or
connection.
He felt as if his life were dead. His soul was extinct. The whole being
of him had become sterile, he was a spectre, divorced from life. He had
no fullness, he was just a flat shape. Day by day the madness
accumulated in him. The horror of not-being possessed him.
He went here, there, and everywhere. But whatever he did, he knew that
only the cipher of him was there, nothing was filled in. He went to the
theatre; what he heard and saw fell upon a cold surface of
consciousness, which was now all that he was, there was nothing behind
it, he could have no experience of any sort. Mechanical registering
took place in him, no more. He had no being, no contents. Neither had
the people he came into contact with. They were mere permutations of
known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he
now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without
life or being.
Much of the time, he was with friends and comrades. Then he forgot
everything. Their activities made up for his own negation, they engaged
his negative horror.
He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal. Then he
was just the opposite to what he had been. He became a warm, diffuse,
glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse formless fashion. Everything melted
down into a rosy glow, and he was the glow, and everything was the
glow, everybody else was the glow, and it was very nice, very nice. He
would sing songs, it was so nice.
Ursula went back to Beldover shut and firm. She loved Skrebensky, of
that she was resolved. She would allow nothing else.
She read his long, obsessed letter about getting married and going to
India, without any particular response. She seemed to ignore what he
said about marriage. It did not come home to her. He seemed, throughout
the greater part of his letter, to be talking without much meaning.
She replied to him pleasantly and easily. She rarely wrote long
letters.
“India sounds lovely. I can just see myself on an elephant swaying
between lanes of obsequious natives. But I don’t know if father would
let me go. We must see.
“I keep living over again the lovely times we have had. But I don’t
think you liked me quite so much towards the end, did you? You did not
like me when we left Paris. Why didn’t you?
“I love you very much. I love your body. It is so clear and fine. I am
glad you do not go naked, or all the women would fall in love with you.
I am very jealous of it, I love it so much.”
He was more or less satisfied with this letter. But day after day he
was walking about, dead, non-existent.
He could not come again to Nottingham until the end of April. Then he
persuaded her to go with him for a week-end to a friend’s house near
Oxford. By this time they were engaged. He had written to her father,
and the thing was settled. He brought her an emerald ring, of which she
was very proud.
Her people treated her now with a little distance, as if she had
already left them. They left her very much alone.
She went with him for the three days in the country house near Oxford.
It was delicious, and she was very happy. But the thing she remembered
most was when, getting up in the morning after he had gone back quietly
to his own room, having spent the night with her, she found herself
very rich in being alone, and enjoying to the full her solitary room,
she drew up her blind and saw the plum trees in the garden below all
glittering and snowy and delighted with the sunshine, in full bloom
under a blue sky. They threw out their blossom, they flung it out under
the blue heavens, the whitest blossom! How excited it made her.
She had to hurry through her dressing to go and walk in the garden
under the plum trees, before anyone should come and talk to her. Out
she slipped, and paced like a queen in fairy pleasaunces. The blossom
was silver-shadowy when she looked up from under the tree at the blue
sky. There was a faint scent, a faint noise of bees, a wonderful
quickness of happy morning.
She heard the breakfast gong and went indoors.
“Where have you been?” asked the others.
“I had to go out under the plum trees,” she said, her face glowing like
a flower. “It is so lovely.”
A shadow of anger crossed Skrebensky’s soul. She had not wanted him to
be there. He hardened his will.
At night there was a moon, and the blossom glistened ghostly, they went
together to look at it. She saw the moonlight on his face as he waited
near her, and his features were like silver and his eyes in shadow were
unfathomable. She was in love with him. He was very quiet.
They went indoors and she pretended to be tired. So she went quickly to
bed.
“Don’t be long coming to me,” she whispered, as she was supposed to be
kissing him good night.
And he waited, intent, obsessed, for the moment when he could come to
her.
She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on
the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he
made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong
through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion,
because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and
smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service.
She owned his body and enjoyed it with all the delight and carelessness
of a possessor. But he had become gradually afraid of her body. He
wanted her, he wanted her endlessly. But there had come a tension into
his desire, a constraint which prevented his enjoying the delicious
approach and the lovable close of the endless embrace. He was afraid.
His will was always tense, fixed.
Her final examination was at midsummer. She insisted on sitting for it,
although she had neglected her work during the past months. He also
wanted her to go in for the degree. Then, he thought, she would be
satisfied. Secretly he hoped she would fail, so that she would be more
glad of him.
“Would you rather live in India or in England when we are married?” he
asked her.
“Oh, in India, by far,” she said, with a careless lack of consideration
which annoyed him.
Once she said, with heat:
“I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and paltry,
it is so unspiritual—I hate democracy.”
He became angry to hear her talk like this, he did not know why.
Somehow, he could not bear it, when she attacked things. It was as if
she were attacking him.
“What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate democracy?”
“Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy,” she
said, “because they’re the only people who will push themselves there.
Only degenerate races are democratic.”
“What do you want then—an aristocracy?” he asked, secretly moved. He
always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy. Yet
to hear her speak for his class pained him with a curious, painful
pleasure. He felt he was acquiescing in something illegal, taking to
himself some wrong, reprehensible advantages.
“I _do_ want an aristocracy,” she cried. “And I’d far rather have an
aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now—who are
chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for
money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they must have
money-brains,—because they are ruling in the name of money.”
“The people elect the government,” he said.
“I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a
money-interest. I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the same
amount of money as I have. I _know_ I am better than all of them. I
hate them. They are not my equals. I hate equality on a money basis. It
is the equality of dirt.”
Her eyes blazed at him, he felt as if she wanted to destroy him. She
had gripped him and was trying to break him. His anger sprang up,
against her. At least he would fight for his existence with her. A
hard, blind resistance possessed him.
“_I_ don’t care about money,” he said, “neither do I want to put my
finger in the pie. I am too sensitive about my finger.”
“What is your finger to me?” she cried, in a passion. “You with your
dainty fingers, and your going to India because you will be one of the
somebodies there! It’s a mere dodge, your going to India.”
“In what way a dodge?” he cried, white with anger and fear.
“You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you’ll enjoy being
near them and being a lord over them,” she said. “And you’ll feel so
righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you, to feel
righteous? What are you righteous about, in your governing? Your
governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as
dead and mean as they are here!”
“I don’t feel righteous in the least,” he said.
“Then what _do_ you feel? It’s all such a nothingness, what you feel
and what you don’t feel.”
“What do you feel yourself?” he said. “Aren’t you righteous in your own
mind?”
“Yes, I am, because I’m against you, and all your old, dead things,”
she cried.
She seemed, with the last words, uttered in hard knowledge, to strike
down the flag that he kept flying. He felt cut off at the knees, a
figure made worthless. A horrible sickness gripped him, as if his legs
were really cut away, and he could not move, but remained a crippled
trunk, dependent, worthless. The ghastly sense of helplessness, as if
he were a mere figure that did not exist vitally, made him mad, beside
himself.
Now, even whilst he was with her, this death of himself came over him,
when he walked about like a body from which all individual life is
gone. In this state he neither heard nor saw nor felt, only the
mechanism of his life continued.
He hated her, as far as, in this state, he could hate. His cunning
suggested to him all the ways of making her esteem him. For she did not
esteem him. He left her and did not write to her. He flirted with other
women, with Gudrun.
This last made her very fierce. She was still fiercely jealous of his
body. In passionate anger she upbraided him because, not being man
enough to satisfy one woman, he hung round others.
[“Don’t I satisfy you?” he asked of her, again going white to the
throat.
“No,” she said. “You’ve never satisfied me since the first week in
London. You never satisfy me now. What does it mean to me, your having
me—”] She lifted her shoulders and turned aside her face in a motion of
cold, indifferent worthlessness. He felt he would kill her.
When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes
all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her
soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she
wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be
able to love him.
And at such moments, when he was made with her destroying him, when all
his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and
only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with
torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him again, they
came together in an overwhelming passion, in which he knew he satisfied
her.
But it all contained a developing germ of death. After each contact,
her anguished desire for him or for that which she never had from him
was stronger, her love was more hopeless. After each contact his mad
dependence on her was deepened, his hope of standing strong and taking
her in his own strength was weakened. He felt himself a mere attribute
of her.
Whitsuntide came, just before her examination. She was to have a few
days of rest. Dorothy had inherited her patrimony, and had taken a
cottage in Sussex. She invited them to stay with her.
They went down to Dorothy’s neat, low cottage at the foot of the downs.
Here they could do as they liked. Ursula was always yearning to go to
the top of the downs. The white track wound up to the rounded summit.
And she must go.
Up there, she could see the Channel a few miles away, the sea raised up
and faintly glittering in the sky, the Isle of Wight a shadow lifted in
the far distance, the river winding bright through the patterned plain
to seaward, Arundel Castle a shadowy bulk, and then the rolling of the
high, smooth downs, making a high, smooth land under heaven,
acknowledging only the heavens in their great, sun-glowing strength,
and suffering only a few bushes to trespass on the intercourse between
their great, unabateable body and the changeful body of the sky.
Below she saw the villages and the woods of the weald, and the train
running bravely, a gallant little thing, running with all the
importance of the world over the water meadows and into the gap of the
downs, waving its white steam, yet all the while so little. So little,
yet its courage carried it from end to end of the earth, till there was
no place where it did not go. Yet the downs, in magnificent
indifference, bearing limbs and body to the sun, drinking sunshine and
sea-wind and sea-wet cloud into its golden skin, with superb stillness
and calm of being, was not the downs still more wonderful? The blind,
pathetic, energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away
through the patterned levels to the sea’s dimness, so fast and so
energetic, made her weep. Where was it going? It was going nowhere, it
was just going. So blind, so without goal or aim, yet so hasty! She sat
on an old prehistoric earth-work and cried, and the tears ran down her
face. The train had tunnelled all the earth, blindly, and uglily.
And she lay face downwards on the downs, that were so strong, that
cared only for their intercourse with the everlasting skies, and she
wished she could become a strong mound smooth under the sky, bosom and
limbs bared to all winds and clouds and bursts of sunshine.
But she must get up again and look down from her foothold of sunshine,
down and away at the patterned, level earth, with its villages and its
smoke and its energy. So shortsighted the train seemed, running to the
distance, so terrifying in their littleness the villages, with such
pettiness in their activity.
Skrebensky wandered dazed, not knowing where he was or what he was
doing with her. All her passion seemed to be to wander up there on the
downs, and when she must descend to earth, she was heavy. Up there she
was exhilarated and free.
She would not love him in a house any more. She said she hated houses,
and particularly she hated beds. There was something distasteful in his
coming to her bed.
She would stay the night on the downs, up there, he with her. It was
midsummer, the days were glamorously long. At about half-past ten, when
the bluey-black darkness had at last fallen, they took rugs and climbed
the steep track to the summit of the downs, he and she.
Up there, the stars were big, the earth below was gone into darkness.
She was free up there with the stars. Far out they saw tiny yellow
lights—but it was very far out, at sea, or on land. She was free up
among the stars.
She took off her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran
over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where
they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly
naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew
about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals when she set off
on the long run to the dew-pond.
In the round dew-pond the stars were untroubled. She ventured softly
into the water, grasping at the stars with her hands.
And then suddenly she started back, running swiftly. He was there,
beside her, but only on sufferance. He was a screen for her fears. He
served her. She took him, she clasped him, clenched him close, but her
eyes were open looking at the stars, it was as if the stars were lying
with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming
her at last. It was not him.
The dawn came. They stood together on a high place, an earthwork of the
stone-age men, watching for the light. It came over the land. But the
land was dark. She watched a pale rim on the sky, away against the
darkened land. The darkness became bluer. A little wind was running in
from the sea behind. It seemed to be running to the pale rift of the
dawn. And she and he darkly, on an outpost of the darkness, stood
watching for the dawn.
The light grew stronger, gushing up against the dark sapphire of the
transparent night. The light grew stronger, whiter, then over it
hovered a flush of rose. A flush of rose, and then yellow, pale,
new-created yellow, the whole quivering and poising momentarily over
the fountain on the sky’s rim.
The rose hovered and quivered, burned, fused to flame, to a transient
red, while the yellow urged out in great waves, thrown from the
ever-increasing fountain, great waves of yellow flinging into the sky,
scattering its spray over the darkness, which became bluer and bluer,
paler, till soon it would itself be a radiance, which had been
darkness.
The sun was coming. There was a quivering, a powerful terrifying swim
of molten light. Then the molten source itself surged forth, revealing
itself. The sun was in the sky, too powerful to look at.
And the ground beneath lay so still, so peaceful. Only now and again a
cock crew. Otherwise, from the distant yellow hills to the pine trees
at the foot of the downs, everything was newly washed into being, in a
flood of new, golden creation.
It was so unutterably still and perfect with promise, the
golden-lighted, distinct land, that Ursula’s soul rocked and wept.
Suddenly he glanced at her. The tears were running over her cheeks, her
mouth was working strangely.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
After a moment’s struggle with her voice.
“It is so beautiful,” she said, looking at the glowing, beautiful land.
It was so beautiful, so perfect, and so unsullied.
He too realized what England would be in a few hours’ time—a blind,
sordid, strenuous activity, all for nothing, fuming with dirty smoke
and running trains and groping in the bowels of the earth, all for
nothing. A ghastliness came over him.
He looked at Ursula. Her face was wet with tears, very bright, like a
transfiguration in the refulgent light. Nor was his the hand to wipe
away the burning, bright tears. He stood apart, overcome by a cruel
ineffectuality.
Gradually a great, helpless sorrow was rising in him. But as yet he was
fighting it away, he was struggling for his own life. He became very
quiet and unaware of the things about him, awaiting, as it were, her
judgment on him.
They returned to Nottingham, the time of her examination came. She must
go to London. But she would not stay with him in an hotel. She would go
to a quiet little pension near the British Museum.
Those quiet residential squares of London made a great impression on
her mind. They were very complete. Her mind seemed imprisoned in their
quietness. Who was going to liberate her?
In the evening, her practical examinations being over, he went with her
to dinner at one of the hotels down the river, near Richmond. It was
golden and beautiful, with yellow water and white and scarlet-striped
boat-awnings, and blue shadows under the trees.
“When shall we be married?” he asked her, quietly, simply, as if it
were a mere question of comfort.
She watched the changing pleasure-traffic of the river. He looked at
her golden, puzzled _museau._ The knot gathered in his throat.
“I don’t know,” she said.
A hot grief gripped his throat.
“Why don’t you know—don’t you want to be married?” he asked her.
Her head turned slowly, her face, puzzled, like a boy’s face,
expressionless because she was trying to think, looked towards his
face. She did not see him, because she was pre-occupied. She did not
quite know what she was going to say.
“I don’t think I want to be married,” she said, and her naïve,
troubled, puzzled eyes rested a moment on his, then travelled away,
pre-occupied.
“Do you mean never, or not just yet?” he asked.
The knot in his throat grew harder, his face was drawn as if he were
being strangled.
“I mean never,” she said, out of some far self which spoke for once
beyond her.
His drawn, strangled face watched her blankly for a few moments, then a
strange sound took place in his throat. She started, came to herself,
and, horrified, saw him. His head made a queer motion, the chin jerked
back against the throat, the curious, crowing, hiccupping sound came
again, his face twisted like insanity, and he was crying, crying blind
and twisted as if something were broken which kept him in control.
“Tony—don’t,” she cried, starting up.
It tore every one of her nerves to see him. He made groping movements
to get out of his chair. But he was crying uncontrollably, noiselessly,
with his face twisted like a mask, contorted and the tears running down
the amazing grooves in his cheeks. Blindly, his face always this
horrible working mask, he groped for his hat, for his way down from the
terrace. It was eight o’clock, but still brightly light. The other
people were staring. In great agitation, part of which was
exasperation, she stayed behind, paid the waiter with a half-sovereign,
took her yellow silk coat, then followed Skrebensky.
She saw him walking with brittle, blind steps along the path by the
river. She could tell by the strange stiffness and brittleness of his
figure that he was still crying. Hurrying after him, running, she took
his arm.
“Tony,” she cried, “don’t! Why are you like this? What are you doing
this for? Don’t. It’s not necessary.”
He heard, and his manhood was cruelly, coldly defaced. Yet it was no
good. He could not gain control of his face. His face, his breast, were
weeping violently, as if automatically. His will, his knowledge had
nothing to do with it. He simply could not stop.
She walked holding his arm, silent with exasperation and perplexity and
pain. He took the uncertain steps of a blind man, because his mind was
blind with weeping.
“Shall we go home? Shall we have a taxi?” she said.
He could pay no attention. Very flustered, very agitated, she signalled
indefinitely to a taxi-cab that was going slowly by. The driver saluted
and drew up. She opened the door and pushed Skrebensky in, then took
her own place. Her face was uplifted, the mouth closed down, she looked
hard and cold and ashamed. She winced as the driver’s dark red face was
thrust round upon her, a full-blooded, animal face with black eyebrows
and a thick, short-cut moustache.
“Where to, lady?” he said, his white teeth showing. Again for a moment
she was flustered.
“Forty, Rutland Square,” she said.
He touched his cap and stolidly set the car in motion. He seemed to
have a league with her to ignore Skrebensky.
The latter sat as if trapped within the taxi-cab, his face still
working, whilst occasionally he made quick slight movements of the
head, to shake away his tears. He never moved his hands. She could not
bear to look at him. She sat with face uplifted and averted to the
window.
At length, when she had regained some control over herself, she turned
again to him. He was much quieter. His face was wet, and twitched
occasionally, his hands still lay motionless. But his eyes were quite
still, like a washed sky after rain, full of a wan light, and quite
steady, almost ghost-like.
A pain flamed in her womb, for him.
“I didn’t think I should hurt you,” she said, laying her hand very
lightly, tentatively, on his arm. “The words came without my knowing.
They didn’t mean anything, really.”
He remained quite still, hearing, but washed all wan and without
feeling. She waited, looking at him, as if he were some curious,
not-understandable creature.
“You won’t cry again, will you, Tony?”
Some shame and bitterness against her burned him in the question. She
noticed how his moustache was soddened wet with tears. Taking her
handkerchief, she wiped his face. The driver’s heavy, stolid back
remained always turned to them, as if conscious but indifferent.
Skrebensky sat motionless whilst Ursula wiped his face, softly,
carefully, and yet clumsily, not as well as he would have wiped it
himself.
Her handkerchief was too small. It was soon wet through. She groped in
his pocket for his own. Then, with its more ample capacity, she
carefully dried his face. He remained motionless all the while. Then
she drew his cheek to hers and kissed him. His face was cold. Her heart
was hurt. She saw the tears welling quickly to his eyes again. As if he
were a child, she again wiped away his tears. By now she herself was on
the point of weeping. Her underlip was caught between her teeth.
So she sat still, for fear of her own tears, sitting close by him,
holding his hand warm and close and loving. Meanwhile the car ran on,
and a soft, midsummer dusk began to gather. For a long while they sat
motionless. Only now and again her hand closed more closely, lovingly,
over his hand, then gradually relaxed.
The dusk began to fall. One or two lights appeared. The driver drew up
to light his lamps. Skrebensky moved for the first time, leaning
forward to watch the driver. His face had always the same still,
clarified, almost childlike look, impersonal.
They saw the driver’s strange, full, dark face peering into the lamps
under drawn brows. Ursula shuddered. It was the face almost of an
animal yet of a quick, strong, wary animal that had them within its
knowledge, almost within its power. She clung closer to Krebensky.
“My love?” she said to him, questioningly, when the car was again
running in full motion.
He made no movement or sound. He let her hold his hand, he let her
reach forward, in the gathering darkness, and kiss his still cheek. The
crying had gone by—he would not cry any more. He was whole and himself
again.
“My love,” she repeated, trying to make him notice her. But as yet he
could not.
He watched the road. They were running by Kensington Gardens. For the
first time his lips opened.
“Shall we get out and go into the park,” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, quietly, not sure what was coming.
After a moment he took the tube from its peg. She saw the stout,
strong, self-contained driver lean his head.
“Stop at Hyde Park Corner.”
The dark head nodded, the car ran on just the same.
Presently they pulled up. Skrebensky paid the man. Ursula stood back.
She saw the driver salute as he received his tip, and then, before he
set the car in motion, turn and look at her, with his quick, powerful,
animal’s look, his eyes very concentrated and the whites of his eyes
flickering. Then he drove away into the crowd. He had let her go. She
had been afraid.
Skrebensky turned with her into the park. A band was still playing and
the place was thronged with people. They listened to the ebbing music,
then went aside to a dark seat, where they sat closely, hand in hand.
Then at length, as out of the silence, she said to him, wondering:
“What hurt you so?”
She really did not know, at this moment.
“When you said you wanted never to marry me,” he replied, with a
childish simplicity.
“But why did that hurt you so?” she said. “You needn’t mind everything
I say so particularly.”
“I don’t know—I didn’t want to do it,” he said, humbly, ashamed.
She pressed his hand warmly. They sat close together, watching the
soldiers go by with their sweethearts, the lights trailing in myriads
down the great thoroughfares that beat on the edge of the park.
“I didn’t know you cared so much,” she said, also humbly.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I was knocked over myself.—But I care—all the
world.”
His voice was so quiet and colourless, it made her heart go pale with
fear.
“My love!” she said, drawing near to him. But she spoke out of fear,
not out of love.
“I care all the world—I care for nothing else—neither in life nor in
death,” he said, in the same steady, colourless voice of essential
truth.
“Than for what?” she murmured duskily.
“Than for you—to be with me.”
And again she was afraid. Was she to be conquered by this? She cowered
close to him, very close to him. They sat perfectly still, listening to
the great, heavy, beating sound of the town, the murmur of lovers going
by, the footsteps of soldiers.
She shivered against him.
“You are cold?” he said.
“A little.”
“We will go and have some supper.”
He was now always quiet and decided and remote, very beautiful. He
seemed to have some strange, cold power over her.
They went to a restaurant, and drank chianti. But his pale, wan look
did not go away.
“Don’t leave me to-night,” he said at length, looking at her, pleading.
He was so strange and impersonal, she was afraid.
“But the people of my place,” she said, quivering.
“I will explain to them—they know we are engaged.”
She sat pale and mute. He waited.
“Shall we go?” he said at length.
“Where?”
“To an hotel.”
Her heart was hardened. Without answering, she rose to acquiesce. But
she was now cold and unreal. Yet she could not refuse him. It seemed
like fate, a fate she did not want.
They went to an Italian hotel somewhere, and had a sombre bedroom with
a very large bed, clean, but sombre. The ceiling was painted with a
bunch of flowers in a big medallion over the bed. She thought it was
pretty.
He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and
clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold.
But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He
slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast
against him. She was passive, acquiscent. But her sleep was not very
deep nor very real.
She woke in the morning to a sound of water dashed on a courtyard, to
sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought she was in a foreign
country. And Skrebensky was there an incubus upon her.
She lay still, thinking, whilst his arm was round her, his head against
her shoulders, his body against hers, just behind her. He was still
asleep.
She watched the sunshine coming in bars through the _persiennes,_ and
her immediate surroundings again melted away.
She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints
had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s
fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at
one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large
and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England
had vanished away. She heard a voice in the yard below calling:
“O Giovann’—O’-O’-O’-Giovann’——!”
And she knew she was in a new country, in a new life. It was very
delicious to lie thus still, with one’s soul wandering freely and
simply in the silver light of some other, simpler, more finely natural
world.
But always there was a foreboding waiting to command her. She became
more aware of Skrebensky. She knew he was waking up. She must modify
her soul, depart from her further world, for him.
She knew he was awake. He lay still, with a concrete stillness, not as
when he slept. Then his arm tightened almost convulsively upon her, and
he said, half timidly:
“Did you sleep well?”
“Very well.”
“So did I.”
There was a pause.
“And do you love me?” he asked.
She turned and looked at him searchingly. He seemed outside her.
“I do,” she said.
But she said it out of complacency and a desire not to be harried.
There was a curious breach of silence between them, which frightened
him.
They lay rather late, then he rang for breakfast. She wanted to be able
to go straight downstairs and away from the place, when she got up. She
was happy in this room, but the thought of the publicity of the hall
downstairs rather troubled her.
A young Italian, a Sicilian, dark and slightly pock-marked, buttoned up
in a sort of grey tunic, appeared with the tray. His face had an almost
African imperturbability, impassive, incomprehensible.
“One might be in Italy,” Skrebensky said to him, genially. A vacant
look, almost like fear, came on the fellow’s face. He did not
understand.
“This is like Italy,” Skrebensky explained.
The face of the Italian flashed with a non-comprehending smile, he
finished setting out the tray, and was gone. He did not understand: he
would understand nothing: he disappeared from the door like a
half-domesticated wild animal. It made Ursula shudder slightly, the
quick, sharp-sighted, intent animality of the man.
Skrebensky was beautiful to her this morning, his face softened and
transfused with suffering and with love, his movements very still and
gentle. He was beautiful to her, but she was detached from him by a
chill distance. Always she seemed to be bearing up against the distance
that separated them. But he was unaware. This morning he was transfused
and beautiful. She admired his movements, the way he spread honey on
his roll, or poured out the coffee.
When breakfast was over, she lay still again on the pillows, whilst he
went through his toilet. She watched him, as he sponged himself, and
quickly dried himself with the towel. His body was beautiful, his
movements intent and quick, she admired him and she appreciated him
without reserve. He seemed completed now. He aroused no fruitful
fecundity in her. He seemed added up, finished. She knew him all round,
not on any side did he lead into the unknown. Poignant, almost
passionate appreciation she felt for him, but none of the dreadful
wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the
reverence of love. He was, however, unaware this morning. His body was
quiet and fulfilled, his veins complete with satisfaction, he was
happy, finished.
Again she went home. But this time he went with her. He wanted to stay
by her. He wanted her to marry him. It was already July. In early
September he must sail for India. He could not bear to think of going
alone. She must come with him. Nervously, he kept beside her.
Her examination was finished, her college career was over. There
remained for her now to marry or to work again. She applied for no
post. It was concluded she would marry. India tempted her—the strange,
strange land. But with the thought of Calcutta, or Bombay, or of Simla,
and of the European population, India was no more attractive to her
than Nottingham.
She had failed in her examination: she had gone down: she had not taken
her degree. It was a blow to her. It hardened her soul.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What are the odds, whether you are a
Bachelor of Arts or not, according to the London University? All you
know, you know, and if you are Mrs. Skrebensky, the B.A. is
meaningless.”
Instead of consoling her, this made her harder, more ruthless. She was
now up against her own fate. It was for her to choose between being
Mrs. Skrebensky, even Baroness Skrebensky, wife of a lieutenant in the
Royal Engineers, the Sappers, as he called them, living with the
European population in India—or being Ursula Brangwen, spinster,
school-mistress. She was qualified by her Intermediate Arts
examination. She would probably even now get a post quite easily as
assistant in one of the higher grade schools, or even in Willey Green
School. Which was she to do?
She hated most of all entering the bondage of teaching once more. Very
heartily she detested it. Yet at the thought of marriage and living
with Skrebensky amid the European population in India, her soul was
locked and would not budge. She had very little feeling about it: only
there was a deadlock.
Skrebensky waited, she waited, everybody waited for the decision. When
Anton talked to her, and seemed insidiously to suggest himself as a
husband to her, she knew how utterly locked out he was. On the other
hand, when she saw Dorothy, and discussed the matter, she felt she
would marry him promptly, at once, as a sharp disavowal of adherence
with Dorothy’s views.
The situation was almost ridiculous.
“But do you love him?” asked Dorothy.
“It isn’t a question of loving him,” said Ursula. “I love him well
enough—certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I
shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of
each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care
whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I
haven’t. What is it to me?”
And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt.
Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid.
“Then what _do_ you care about?” she asked, exasperated.
“I don’t know,” said Ursula. “But something impersonal.
Love—love—love—what does it mean—what does it amount to? So much
personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”
“It isn’t supposed to lead anywhere, is it?” said Dorothy, satirically.
“I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.”
“Then what does it matter to me?” cried Ursula. “As an end in itself, I
could love a hundred men, one after the other. Why should I end with a
Skrebensky? Why should I not go on, and love all the types I fancy, one
after another, if love is an end in itself? There are plenty of men who
aren’t Anton, whom I could love—whom I would like to love.”
“Then you don’t love _him,”_ said Dorothy.
“I tell you I do;—quite as much, and perhaps more than I should love
any of the others. Only there are plenty of things that aren’t in Anton
that I would love in the other men.”
“What, for instance?”
“It doesn’t matter. But a sort of strong understanding, in some men,
and then a dignity, a directness, something unquestioned that there is
in working men, and then a jolly, reckless passionateness that you
see—a man who could really let go——”
Dorothy could feel that Ursula was already hankering after something
else, something that this man did not give her.
“The question is, what _do_ you want,” propounded Dorothy. “Is it just
other men?”
Ursula was silenced. This was her own dread. Was she just promiscuous?
“Because if it is,” continued Dorothy, “you’d better marry Anton. The
other can only end badly.”
So out of fear of herself Ursula was to marry Skrebensky.
He was very busy now, preparing to go to India. He must visit relatives
and contract business. He was almost sure of Ursula now. She seemed to
have given in. And he seemed to become again an important, self-assured
man.
It was the first week in August, and he was one of a large party in a
bungalow on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a tennis, golf, motor-car,
motor-boat party, given by his great-aunt, a lady of social
pretensions. Ursula was invited to spend the week with the party.
She went rather reluctantly. Her marriage was more or less fixed for
the twenty-eighth of the month. They were to sail for India on
September the fifth. One thing she knew, in her subconsciousness, and
that was, she would never sail for India.
She and Anton, being important guests on account of the coming
marriage, had rooms in the large bungalow. It was a big place, with a
great central hall, two smaller writing-rooms, and then two corridors
from which opened eight or nine bedrooms. Skrebensky was put on one
corridor, Ursula on the other. They felt very lost, in the crowd.
Being lovers, however, they were allowed to be out alone together as
much as they liked. Yet she felt very strange, in this crowd of strange
people, uneasy, as if she had no privacy. She was not used to these
homogeneous crowds. She was afraid.
She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard, easy,
shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little. She felt she was
not pronounced enough. It was a kind of hold-your-own unconventional
atmosphere.
She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked
formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not
effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. Even before
Skrebensky she felt unimportant, almost inferior. He could take his
part very well with the rest.
He and she went out into the night. There was a moon behind clouds,
shedding a diffused light, gleaming now and again in bits of smoky
mother-of-pearl. So they walked together on the wet, ribbed sands near
the sea, hearing the run of the long, heavy waves, that made a ghostly
whiteness and a whisper.
He was sure of himself. As she walked, the soft silk of her dress—she
wore a blue shantung, full-skirted—blew away from the sea and flapped
and clung to her legs. She wished it would not. Everything seemed to
give her away, and she could not rouse herself to deny, she was so
confused.
He would lead her away to a pocket in the sand-hills, secret amid the
grey thorn-bushes and the grey, glassy grass. He held her close against
him, felt all her firm, unutterably desirable mould of body through the
fine fibre of the silk that fell about her limbs. The silk, slipping
fierily on the hidden, yet revealed roundness and firmness of her body,
her loins, seemed to run in him like fire, make his brain burn like
brimstone. She liked it, the electric fire of the silk under his hands
upon her limbs, the fire flew over her, as he drew nearer and nearer to
discovery. She vibrated like a jet of electric, firm fluid in response.
Yet she did not feel beautiful. All the time, she felt she was not
beautiful to him, only exciting. [She let him take her, and he seemed
mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the
cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt
that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing
heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. He seemed revenged.
A little wind wafted the sea grass and passed over her face. Where was
the supreme fulfilment she would never enjoy? Why was she so cold, so
unroused, so indifferent?
As they went home, and she saw the many, hateful lights of the
bungalow, of several bungalows in a group, he said softly:
“Don’t lock your door.”
“I’d rather, here,” she said.
“No, don’t. We belong to each other. Don’t let us deny it.”
She did not answer. He took her silence for consent.
He shared his room with another man.
“I suppose,” he said, “it won’t alarm the house if I go across to
happier regions.”
“So long as you don’t make a great row going, and don’t try the wrong
door,” said the other man, turning in to sleep.
Skrebensky went out in his wide-striped sleeping suit. He crossed the
big dining hall, whose low firelight smelled of cigars and whisky and
coffee, entered the other corridor and found Ursula’s room. She was
lying awake, wide-eyed and suffering. She was glad he had come, if only
for consolation. It was consolation to be held in his arms, to feel his
body against hers. Yet how foreign his arms and body were! Yet still,
not so horribly foreign and hostile as the rest of the house felt to
her.]
She did not know how she suffered in this house. She was healthy and
exorbitantly full of interest. So she played tennis and learned golf,
she rowed out and swam in the deep sea, and enjoyed it very much
indeed, full of zest. Yet all the time, among those others, she felt
shocked and wincing, as if her violently-sensitive nakedness were
exposed to the hard, brutal, material impact of the rest of the people.
The days went by unmarked, in a full, almost strenuous enjoyment of
one’s own physique. Skrebensky was one among the others, till evening
came, and he took her for himself. She was allowed a great deal of
freedom and was treated with a good deal of respect, as a girl on the
eve of marriage, about to depart for another continent.
The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something unknown
came over her, a passion for something she knew not what. She would
walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting, expecting something, as
if she had gone to a rendezvous. The salt, bitter passion of the sea,
its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its
strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a
pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment.
And then, for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom
she knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul
could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast compel
her in burning, salty passion.
One evening they went out after dinner, across the low golf links to
the dunes and the sea. The sky had small, faint stars, all was still
and faintly dark. They walked together in silence, then ploughed,
labouring, through the heavy loose sand of the gap between the dunes.
They went in silence under the even, faint darkness, in the darker
shadow of the sandhills.
Suddenly, cresting the heavy, sandy pass, Ursula lifted her head, and
shrank back, momentarily frightened. There was a great whiteness
confronting her, the moon was incandescent as a round furnace door, out
of which came the high blast of moonlight, over the seaward half of the
world, a dazzling, terrifying glare of white light. They shrank back
for a moment into shadow, uttering a cry. He felt his chest laid bare,
where the secret was heavily hidden. He felt himself fusing down to
nothingness, like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent
flame.
“How wonderful!” cried Ursula, in low, calling tones. “How wonderful!”
And she went forward, plunging into it. He followed behind. She too
seemed to melt into the glare, towards the moon.
The sands were as ground silver, the sea moved in solid brightness,
coming towards them, and she went to meet the advance of the flashing,
buoyant water. [She gave her breast to the moon, her belly to the
flashing, heaving water.] He stood behind, encompassed, a shadow ever
dissolving.
She stood on the edge of the water, at the edge of the solid, flashing
body of the sea, and the wave rushed over her feet.
“I want to go,” she cried, in a strong, dominant voice. “I want to go.”
He saw the moonlight on her face, so she was like metal, he heard her
ringing, metallic voice, like the voice of a harpy to him.
She prowled, ranging on the edge of the water like a possessed
creature, and he followed her. He saw the froth of the wave followed by
the hard, bright water swirl over her feet and her ankles, she swung
out her arms, to balance, he expected every moment to see her walk into
the sea, dressed as she was, and be carried swimming out.
But she turned, she walked to him.
“I want to go,” she cried again, in the high, hard voice, like the
scream of gulls.
“Where?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
And she seized hold of his arm, held him fast, as if captive, and
walked him a little way by the edge of the dazzling, dazing water.
Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard,
as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her
arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought
his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was
powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce,
beaked, harpy’s kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she
took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her
beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew
away and looked at him—looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took
her by the hand and led her across the foreshore, back to the
sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was
upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow.
“No, here,” she said, going out to the slope full under the moonshine.
She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came
direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the
chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It
lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave
way as if dead, lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in
the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now for ever, hidden
away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in
the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.
He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to himself. He
was aware of an unusual motion of her breast. He looked up. Her face
lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes wide open, rigid. But out
of the eyes, slowly, there rolled a tear, that glittered in the
moonlight as it ran down her cheek.
He felt as if as the knife were being pushed into his already dead
body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some
minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the
moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the water gathered,
shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged, brimmed over and ran
trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to
fall in the sand.
He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away—she did not move. He
glanced at her—she lay the same. Could he break away? He turned, saw
the open foreshore, clear in front of him, and he plunged away, on and
on, ever farther from the horrible figure that lay stretched in the
moonlight on the sands with the tears gathering and travelling on the
motionless, eternal face.
He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his
body crushed, obliterated for ever. And as yet, he had the love of his
own living body. He wandered on a long, long way, till his brain drew
dark and he was unconscious with weariness. Then he curled in the
deepest darkness he could find, under the sea-grass, and lay there
without consciousness.
She broke from her tense cramp of agony gradually, though each movement
was a goad of heavy pain. Gradually, she lifted her dead body from the
sands, and rose at last. There was now no moon for her, no sea. All had
passed away. She trailed her dead body to the house, to her room, where
she lay down inert.
Morning brought her a new access of superficial life. But all within
her was cold, dead, inert. Skrebensky appeared at breakfast. He was
white and obliterated. They did not look at each other nor speak to
each other. Apart from the ordinary, trivial talk of civil people, they
were separate, they did not speak of what was between them during the
remaining two days of their stay. They were like two dead people who
dare not recognize, dare not see each other.
Then she packed her bag and put on her things. There were several
guests leaving together, for the same train. He would have no
opportunity to speak to her.
He tapped at her bedroom door at the last minute. She stood with her
umbrella in her hand. He closed the door. He did not know what to say.
“Have you done with me?” he asked her at length, lifting his head.
“It isn’t me,” she said. “You have done with me—we have done with each
other.”
He looked at her, at the closed face, which he thought so cruel. And he
knew he could never touch her again. His will was broken, he was
seared, but he clung to the life of his body.
“Well, what have I done?” he asked, in a rather querulous voice.
“I don’t know,” she said, in the same dull, feelingless voice. “It is
finished. It had been a failure.”
He was silent. The words still burned his bowels.
“Is it my fault?” he said, looking up at length, challenging the last
stroke.
“You couldn’t——” she began. But she broke down.
He turned away, afraid to hear more. She began to gather her bag, her
handkerchief, her umbrella. She must be gone now. He was waiting for
her to be gone.
At length the carriage came and she drove away with the rest. When she
was out of sight, a great relief came over him, a pleasant banality. In
an instant, everything was obliterated. He was childishly amiable and
companionable all the day long. He was astonished that life could be so
nice. It was better than it had been before. What a simple thing it was
to be rid of her! How friendly and simple everything felt to him. What
false thing had she been forcing on him?
But at night he dared not be alone. His room-mate had gone, and the
hours of darkness were an agony to him. He watched the window in
suffering and terror. When would this horrible darkness be lifted off
him? Setting all his nerves, he endured it. He went to sleep with the
dawn.
He never thought of her. Only his terror of the hours of night grew on
him, obsessed him like a mania. He slept fitfully, with constant
wakings of anguish. The fear wore away the core of him.
His plan was to sit up very late: drink in company until one or
half-past one in the morning; then he would get three hours of sleep,
of oblivion. It was light by five o’clock. But he was shocked almost to
madness if he opened his eyes on the darkness.
In the daytime he was all right, always occupied with the thing of the
moment, adhering to the trivial present, which seemed to him ample and
satisfying. No matter how little and futile his occupations were, he
gave himself to them entirely, and felt normal and fulfilled. He was
always active, cheerful, gay, charming, trivial. Only he dreaded the
darkness and silence of his own bedroom, when the darkness should
challenge him upon his own soul. That he could not bear, as he could
not bear to think about Ursula. He had no soul, no background. He never
thought of Ursula, not once, he gave her no sign. She was the darkness,
the challenge, the horror. He turned to immediate things. He wanted to
marry quickly, to screen himself from the darkness, the challenge of
his own soul. He would marry his Colonel’s daughter. Quickly, without
hesitation, pursued by his obsession for activity, he wrote to this
girl, telling her his engagement was broken—it had been a temporary
infatuation which he less than any one else could understand now it was
over—and could he see his very dear friend soon? He would not be happy
till he had an answer.
He received a rather surprised reply from the girl, but she would be
glad to see him. She was living with her aunt. He went down to her at
once, and proposed to her the first evening. He was accepted. The
marriage took place quietly within fourteen days’ time. Ursula was not
notified of the event. In another week, Skrebensky sailed with his new
wife to India.
Chapter XVI.
THE RAINBOW
Ursula went home to Beldover faint, dim, closed up. She could scarcely
speak or notice. It was as if her energy were frozen. Her people asked
her what was the matter. She told them she had broken off the
engagement with Skrebensky. They looked blank and angry. But she could
not feel any more.
The weeks crawled by in apathy. He would have sailed for India now. She
was scarcely interested. She was inert, without strength or interest.
Suddenly a shock ran through her, so violent that she thought she was
struck down. Was she with child? She had been so stricken under the
pain of herself and of him, this had never occurred to her. Now like a
flame it took hold of her limbs and body. Was she with child?
In the first flaming hours of wonder, she did not know what she felt.
She was as if tied to the stake. The flames were licking her and
devouring her. But the flames were also good. They seemed to wear her
away to rest. What she felt in her heart and her womb she did not know.
It was a kind of swoon.
Then gradually the heaviness of her heart pressed and pressed into
consciousness. What was she doing? Was she bearing a child? Bearing a
child? To what?
Her flesh thrilled, but her soul was sick. It seemed, this child, like
the seal set on her own nullity. Yet she was glad in her flesh that she
was with child. She began to think, that she would write to Skrebensky,
that she would go out to him, and marry him, and live simply as a good
wife to him. What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the
living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body,
rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no
further complication. She had been wrong, she had been arrogant and
wicked, wanting that other thing, that fantastic freedom, that
illusory, conceited fulfilment which she had imagined she could not
have with Skrebensky. Who was she to be wanting some fantastic
fulfilment in her life? Was it not enough that she had her man, her
children, her place of shelter under the sun? Was it not enough for
her, as it had been enough for her mother? She would marry and love her
husband and fill her place simply. That was the ideal.
Suddenly she saw her mother in a just and true light. Her mother was
simple and radically true. She had taken the life that was given. She
had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted on creating life to fit
herself. Her mother was right, profoundly right, and she herself had
been false, trashy, conceited.
A great mood of humility came over her, and in this humility a bondaged
sort of peace. She gave her limbs to the bondage, she loved the
bondage, she called it peace. In this state she sat down to write to
Skrebensky.
“Since you left me I have suffered a great deal, and so have come to
myself. I cannot tell you the remorse I feel for my wicked, perverse
behaviour. It was given to me to love you, and to know your love for
me. But instead of thankfully, on my knees, taking what God had given
me, I must have the moon in my keeping, I must insist on having the
moon for my own. Because I could not have it, everything else must go.
“I do not know if you can ever forgive me. I could die with shame to
think of my behaviour with you during our last times, and I don’t know
if I could ever bear to look you in the face again. Truly the best
thing would be for me to die, and cover my fantasies for ever. But I
find I am with child, so that cannot be.
“It is your child, and for that reason I must revere it and submit my
body entirely to its welfare, entertaining no thought of death, which
once more is largely conceit. Therefore, because you once loved me, and
because this child is your child, I ask you to have me back. If you
will cable me one word, I will come to you as soon as I can. I swear to
you to be a dutiful wife, and to serve you in all things. For now I
only hate myself and my own conceited foolishness. I love you—I love
the thought of you—you were natural and decent all through, whilst I
was so false. Once I am with you again, I shall ask no more than to
rest in your shelter all my life——”
This letter she wrote, sentence by sentence, as if from her deepest,
sincerest heart. She felt that now, now, she was at the depths of
herself. This was her true self, forever. With this document she would
appear before God at the Judgment Day.
For what had a woman but to submit? What was her flesh but for
childbearing, her strength for her children and her husband, the giver
of life? At last she was a woman.
She posted her letter to his club, to be forwarded to him in Calcutta.
He would receive it soon after his arrival in India—within three weeks
of his arrival there. In a month’s time she would receive word from
him. Then she would go.
She was quite sure of him. She thought only of preparing her garments
and of living quietly, peacefully, till the time when she should join
him again and her history would be concluded for ever. The peace held
like an unnatural calm for a long time. She was aware, however, of a
gathering restiveness, a tumult impending within her. She tried to run
away from it. She wished she could hear from Skrebensky, in answer to
her letter, so that her course should be resolved, she should be
engaged in fulfilling her fate. It was this inactivity which made her
liable to the revulsion she dreaded.
It was curious how little she cared about his not having written to her
before. It was enough that she had sent her letter. She would get the
required answer, that was all.
One afternoon in early October, feeling the seething rising to madness
within her, she slipped out in the rain, to walk abroad, lest the house
should suffocate her. Everywhere was drenched wet and deserted, the
grimed houses glowed dull red, the butt houses burned scarlet in a
gleam of light, under the glistening, blackish purple slates. Ursula
went on towards Willey Green. She lifted her face and walked swiftly,
seeing the passage of light across the shallow valley, seeing the
colliery and its clouds of steam for a moment visionary in dim
brilliance, away in the chaos of rain. Then the veils closed again. She
was glad of the rain’s privacy and intimacy.
Making on towards the wood, she saw the pale gleam of Willey Water
through the cloud below, she walked the open space where hawthorn trees
streamed like hair on the wind and round bushes were presences slowing
through the atmosphere. It was very splendid, free and chaotic.
Yet she hurried to the wood for shelter. There, the vast booming
overhead vibrated down and encircled her, tree-trunks spanned the
circle of tremendous sound, myriads of tree-trunks, enormous and
streaked black with water, thrust like stanchions upright between the
roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot. She glided
between the tree-trunks, afraid of them. They might turn and shut her
in as she went through their martialled silence.
So she flitted along, keeping an illusion that she was unnoticed. She
felt like a bird that has flown in through the window of a hall where
vast warriors sit at the board. Between their grave, booming ranks she
was hastening, assuming she was unnoticed, till she emerged, with
beating heart, through the far window and out into the open, upon the
vivid green, marshy meadow.
She turned under the shelter of the common, seeing the great veils of
rain swinging with slow, floating waves across the landscape. She was
very wet and a long way from home, far enveloped in the rain and the
waving landscape. She must beat her way back through all this
fluctuation, back to stability and security.
A solitary thing, she took the track straight across the wilderness,
going back. The path was a narrow groove in the turf between high,
sere, tussocky grass; it was scarcely more than a rabbit run. So she
moved swiftly along, watching her footing, going like a bird on the
wind, with no thought, contained in motion. But her heart had a small,
living seed of fear, as she went through the wash of hollow space.
Suddenly she knew there was something else. Some horses were looming in
the rain, not near yet. But they were going to be near. She continued
her path, inevitably. They were horses in the lee of a clump of trees
beyond, above her. She pursued her way with bent head. She did not want
to lift her face to them. She did not want to know they were there. She
went on in the wild track.
She knew the heaviness on her heart. It was the weight of the horses.
But she would circumvent them. She would bear the weight steadily, and
so escape. She would go straight on, and on, and be gone by.
Suddenly the weight deepened and her heart grew tense to bear it. Her
breathing was laboured. But this weight also she could bear. She knew
without looking that the horses were moving nearer. What were they? She
felt the thud of their heavy hoofs on the ground. What was it that was
drawing near her, what weight oppressing her heart? She did not know,
she did not look.
Yet now her way was cut off. They were blocking her back. She knew they
had gathered on a log bridge over the sedgy dike, a dark, heavy,
powerfully heavy knot. Yet her feet went on and on. They would burst
before her. They would burst before her. Her feet went on and on. And
tense, and more tense became her nerves and her veins, they ran hot,
they ran white hot, they must fuse and she must die.
But the horses had burst before her. In a sort of lightning of
knowledge their movement travelled through her, the quiver and strain
and thrust of their powerful flanks, as they burst before her and drew
on, beyond.
She knew they had not gone, she knew they awaited her still. But she
went on over the log bridge that their hoofs had churned and drummed,
she went on, knowing things about them. She was aware of their breasts
gripped, clenched narrow in a hold that never relaxed, she was aware of
their red nostrils flaming with long endurance, and of their haunches,
so rounded, so massive, pressing, pressing, pressing to burst the grip
upon their breasts, pressing for ever till they went mad, running
against the walls of time, and never bursting free. Their great
haunches were smoothed and darkened with rain. But the darkness and
wetness of rain could not put out the hard, urgent, massive fire that
was locked within these flanks, never, never.
She went on, drawing near. She was aware of the great flash of hoofs, a
bluish, iridescent flash surrounding a hollow of darkness. Large, large
seemed the bluish, incandescent flash of the hoof-iron, large as a halo
of lightning round the knotted darkness of the flanks. Like circles of
lightning came the flash of hoofs from out of the powerful flanks.
They were awaiting her again. They had gathered under an oak tree,
knotting their awful, blind, triumphing flanks together, and waiting,
waiting. They were waiting for her approach. As if from a far distance
she was drawing near, towards the line of twiggy oak trees where they
made their intense darkness, gathered on a single bank.
She must draw near. But they broke away, they cantered round, making a
wide circle to avoid noticing her, and cantered back into the open
hillside behind her.
They were behind her. The way was open before her, to the gate in the
high hedge in the near distance, so she could pass into the smaller,
cultivated field, and so out to the high-road and the ordered world of
man. Her way was clear. She lulled her heart. Yet her heart was couched
with fear, couched with fear all along.
Suddenly she hesitated as if seized by lightning. She seemed to fall,
yet found herself faltering forward with small steps. The thunder of
horses galloping down the path behind her shook her, the weight came
down upon her, down, to the moment of extinction. She could not look
round, so the horses thundered upon her.
Cruelly, they swerved and crashed by on her left hand. She saw the
fierce flanks crinkled and as yet inadequate, the great hoofs flashing
bright as yet only brandished about her, and one by one the horses
crashed by, intent, working themselves up.
They had gone by, brandishing themselves thunderously about her,
enclosing her. They slackened their burst transport, they slowed down,
and cantered together into a knot once more, in the corner by the gate
and the trees ahead of her. They stirred, they moved uneasily, they
settled their uneasy flanks into one group, one purpose. They were up
against her.
Her heart was gone, she had no more heart. She knew she dare not draw
near. That concentrated, knitted flank of the horse-group had
conquered. It stirred uneasily, awaiting her, knowing its triumph. It
stirred uneasily, with the uneasiness of awaited triumph. Her heart was
gone, her limbs were dissolved, she was dissolved like water. All the
hardness and looming power was in the massive body of the horse-group.
Her feet faltered, she came to a standstill. It was the crisis. The
horses stirred their flanks uneasily. She looked away, failing. On her
left, two hundred yards down the slope, the thick hedge ran parallel.
At one point there was an oak tree. She might climb into the boughs of
that oak tree, and so round and drop on the other side of the hedge.
Shuddering, with limbs like water, dreading every moment to fall, she
began to work her way as if making a wide detour round the horse-mass.
The horses stirred their flanks in a knot against her. She trembled
forward as if in a trance.
Then suddenly, in a flame of agony, she darted, seized the rugged knots
of the oak tree and began to climb. Her body was weak but her hands
were as hard as steel. She knew she was strong. She struggled in a
great effort till she hung on the bough. She knew the horses were
aware. She gained her foot-hold on the bough. The horses were loosening
their knot, stirring, trying to realize. She was working her way round
to the other side of the tree. As they started to canter towards her,
she fell in a heap on the other side of the hedge.
For some moments she could not move. Then she saw through the
rabbit-cleared bottom of the hedge the great, working hoofs of the
horses as they cantered near. She could not bear it. She rose and
walked swiftly, diagonally across the field. The horses galloped along
the other side of the hedge to the corner, where they were held up. She
could feel them there in their huddled group all the while she hastened
across the bare field. They were almost pathetic, now. Her will alone
carried her, till, trembling, she climbed the fence under a leaning
thorn tree that overhung the grass by the high-road. The use went from
her, she sat on the fence leaning back against the trunk of the thorn
tree, motionless.
As she sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed away from
her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream, like a
stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled
by in transience, leaving her there, a stone at rest on the bed of the
stream, inalterable and passive, sunk to the bottom of all change.
She lay still a long time, with her back against the thorn tree trunk,
in her final isolation. Some colliers passed, tramping heavily up the
wet road, their voices sounding out, their shoulders up to their ears,
their figures blotched and spectral in the rain. Some did not see her.
She opened her eyes languidly as they passed by. Then one man going
alone saw her. The whites of his eyes showed in his black face as he
looked in wonderment at her. He hesitated in his walk, as if to speak
to her, out of frightened concern for her. How she dreaded his speaking
to her, dreaded his questioning her.
She slipped from her seat and went vaguely along the path—vaguely. It
was a long way home. She had an idea that she must walk for the rest of
her life, wearily, wearily. Step after step, step after step, and
always along the wet, rainy road between the hedges. Step after step,
step after step, the monotony produced a deep, cold sense of nausea in
her. How profound was her cold nausea, how profound! That too plumbed
the bottom. She seemed destined to find the bottom of all things
to-day: the bottom of all things. Well, at any rate she was walking
along the bottom-most bed—she was quite safe: quite safe, if she had to
go on and on for ever, seeing this was the very bottom, and there was
nothing deeper. There was nothing deeper, you see, so one could not but
feel certain, passive.
She arrived home at last. The climb up the hill to Beldover had been
very trying. Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not
stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up
and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very trying, very
wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.
Still, she must get to the top and go home to bed. She must go to bed.
She got in and went upstairs in the dusk without its being noticed she
was in such a sodden condition. She was too tired to go downstairs
again. She got into bed and lay shuddering with cold, yet too apathetic
to get up or call for relief. Then gradually she became more ill.
She was very ill for a fortnight, delirious, shaken and racked. But
always, amid the ache of delirium, she had a dull firmness of being, a
sense of permanency. She was in some way like the stone at the bottom
of the river, inviolable and unalterable, no matter what storm raged in
her body. Her soul lay still and permanent, full of pain, but itself
for ever. Under all her illness, persisted a deep, inalterable
knowledge.
She knew, and she cared no more. Throughout her illness, distorted into
vague forms, persisted the question of herself and Skrebensky, like a
gnawing ache that was still superficial, and did not touch her
isolated, impregnable core of reality. But the corrosion of him burned
in her till it burned itself out.
Must she belong to him, must she adhere to him? Something compelled
her, and yet it was not real. Always the ache, the ache of unreality,
of her belonging to Skrebensky. What bound her to him when she was not
bound to him? Why did the falsity persist? Why did the falsity gnaw,
gnaw, gnaw at her, why could she not wake up to clarity, to reality. If
she could but wake up, if she could but wake up, the falsity of the
dream, of her connection with Skrebensky, would be gone. But the sleep,
the delirium pinned her down. Even when she was calm and sober she was
in its spell.
Yet she was never in its spell. What extraneous thing bound her to him?
There was some bond put upon her. Why could she not break it through?
What was it? What was it?
In her delirium she beat and beat at the question. And at last her
weariness gave her the answer—it was the child. The child bound her to
him. The child was like a bond round her brain, tightened on her brain.
It bound her to Skrebensky.
But why, why did it bind her to Skrebensky? Could she not have a child
of herself? Was not the child her own affair? all her own affair? What
had it to do with him? Why must she be bound, aching and cramped with
the bondage, to Skrebensky and Skrebensky’s world? Anton’s world: it
became in her feverish brain a compression which enclosed her. If she
could not get out of the compression she would go mad. The compression
was Anton and Anton’s world, not the Anton she possessed, but the Anton
she did not possess, that which was owned by some other influence, by
the world.
She fought and fought and fought all through her illness to be free of
him and his world, to put it aside, to put it aside, into its place.
Yet ever anew it gained ascendency over her, it laid new hold on her.
Oh, the unutterable weariness of her flesh, which she could not cast
off, nor yet extricate. If she could but extricate herself, if she
could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the
vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her
father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance.
Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: “I have no
father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of
things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England
nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and
entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it,
like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.”
And again, to her feverish brain, came the vivid reality of acorns in
February lying on the floor of a wood with their shells burst and
discarded and the kernel issued naked to put itself forth. She was the
naked, clear kernel thrusting forth the clear, powerful shoot, and the
world was a bygone winter, discarded, her mother and father and Anton,
and college and all her friends, all cast off like a year that has gone
by, whilst the kernel was free and naked and striving to take new root,
to create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time. And the
kernel was the only reality; the rest was cast off into oblivion.
This grew and grew upon her. When she opened her eyes in the afternoon
and saw the window of her room and the faint, smoky landscape beyond,
this was all husk and shell lying by, all husk and shell, she could see
nothing else, she was enclosed still, but loosely enclosed. There was a
space between her and the shell. It was burst, there was a rift in it.
Soon she would have her root fixed in a new Day, her nakedness would
take itself the bed of a new sky and a new air, this old, decaying,
fibrous husk would be gone.
Gradually she began really to sleep. She slept in the confidence of her
new reality. She slept breathing with her soul the new air of a new
world. The peace was very deep and enrichening. She had her root in new
ground, she was gradually absorbed into growth.
When she woke at last it seemed as if a new day had come on the earth.
How long, how long had she fought through the dust and obscurity, for
this new dawn? How frail and fine and clear she felt, like the most
fragile flower that opens in the end of winter. But the pole of night
was turned and the dawn was coming in.
Very far off was her old experience—Skrebensky, her parting with
him—very far off. Some things were real; those first glamorous weeks.
Before, these had seemed like hallucination. Now they seemed like
common reality. The rest was unreal. She knew that Skrebensky had never
become finally real. In the weeks of passionate ecstasy he had been
with her in her desire, she had created him for the time being. But in
the end he had failed and broken down.
Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now, as she
liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something of the past, finite.
He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection for him, as
for that which is past. But, when she looked with her face forward, he
was not. Nay, when she looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before
her, what was there she could recognize but a fresh glow of light and
inscrutable trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the
unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she had
landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the
New World and the Old.
There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it
would have made little difference, however. She would have kept the
child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton
belonged to the past.
There came the cablegram from Skrebensky: “I am married.” An old pain
and anger and contempt stirred in her. Did he belong so utterly to the
cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he was. It was good that
he was as he was. Who was she to have a man according to her own
desire? It was not for her to create, but to recognize a man created by
God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She
was glad she could not create her man. She was glad she had nothing to
do with his creation. She was glad that this lay within the scope of
that vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out
of Eternity to which she herself belonged.
As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she sat at her
window, she saw the people go by in the street below, colliers, women,
children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition, but visible
through the husk, the swelling and the heaving contour of the new
germination. In the still, silenced forms of the colliers she saw a
sort of suspense, a waiting in pain for the new liberation; she saw the
same in the false hard confidence of the women. The confidence of the
women was brittle. It would break quickly to reveal the strength and
patient effort of the new germination.
In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of
the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of bygone living.
Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes she lost touch, she
lost her feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which
bound in her and all mankind. They were all in prison, they were all
going mad.
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already
enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those
who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new
houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient
triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines,
the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so
pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the
blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and
amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness
above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle,
hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new
houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the
houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over
the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she
perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of
faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And
forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a
rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her
heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow
should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it
took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc
bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great
architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals
luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the
top of heaven.
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who
crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption
were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would
quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny
covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue
to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind
and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new
architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept
away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the
over-arching heaven.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Rainbow, by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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