Title: The Rainbow
Author: D H Lawrence
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eBook No.:  0100341.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: December 2001
Date most recently updated: December 2001

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Title:      The Rainbow
Author:     D H Lawrence





TABLE OF CONTENTS


Chapter 1 How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady
Chapter 2 They Live at the Marsh
Chapter 3 Childhood of Anna Lensky
Chapter 4 Girlhood of Anna Brangwen
Chapter 5 Wedding at the Marsh
Chapter 6 Anna Victrix
Chapter 7 The Cathedral
Chapter 8 The Child
Chapter 9 The Marsh and the Flood
Chapter 10 The Widening Circle
Chapter 11 First Love
Chapter 12 Shame
Chapter 13 The Man's World
Chapter 14 The Widening Circle
Chapter 15 The Bitterness of Ecstasy
Chapter 16 The Rainbow





Chapter 1



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 civilisation, 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 agonised 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 paralysed 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
emphasised 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 churchpath 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 naive, 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 hypnotised, 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 2



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 emancipee. 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, emphasising 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 hypnotised 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 realised that there was
something around her, very foreign, she realised 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 realise.
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, fullskirted 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 realised with a
sharp pang that she belonged to him, and he to her. He realised 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