,.;:; ; ; : \ THE KAINBOW X AW RE N C B 11 MM niim -l* '" THE RAINBOW THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS The publisher will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LIBRARY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price. THE RAINBOW BY D. H. LAWRENCE THE MODERN LIBRARY NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, I 9 I 5, BY D. H. LAWRENCE Random House IS THE PUBLISHER OF THE MODERN LIBRARY BENNETT A. CERF DONALD S. KLOPFER ROBERT K. HAAS Manufactured in the United States of America Printed by Parkway Printing Company Bound by H. Wolff TO ELSE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I How TOM BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 1 II THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 43 III CHILDHOOD OF ANNA LENSKY 74 IV GIRLHOOD OF ANNA BRANGWEN 89 V WEDDING AT THE MARSH 123 VI ANNA VICTRIX . . . , . . . . . . . 134 VII THE CATHEDRAL 185 VIII THE CHILD 198 IX THE MARSH AND THE FLOOD . . / . . . .225 X THE WIDENING CIRCLE 245 XI FIRST LOVE 266 XII SHAME 315 XIII THE MAN'S WORLD .333 XIV THE WIDENING CIRCLE 390 XV THE BITTERNESS OF ECSTASY 404 XVI THE KAINBOW , . 456 THE RAINBOW CHAPTER I HOW TOM BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 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 dis- tance. 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, Kt-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring anger; through all the irreso* lute 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 neces- sity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money. Neither were they thriftless. Thej 2 THE RAINBOW 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 ci. J :h wao 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 inter- course between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, naked- ness 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 vege- tation 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 3 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, star- ing 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 tho 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 hus- 4 THE RAINBOW band, 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 su- perior. 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 those 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 chil- dren, 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. Hardv's nature different from that of the common women HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 5 of Cossethay, in what was it beyond them? All the women of Cossethay talked eagerly about Mrs. Hardy, of her hus- band, 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 waz 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 in the life of Mrs. Hardy. And the Brang- wen 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 re- veals 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 some^ thing 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 Brang- wen, 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 home- stead, and, reaching the road, went over in a heavy bridge. 6 THE RAINBOW 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 Tlkeston hill, and the invasion was complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen. Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-trees past the Brangwens' garden gate. But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there, through the dark archway of the canal's square aqueduct, was a colliery spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses plastered on the valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill of the town. The homestead was just on the safe side of civilization, outside the gate. The house stood bare from the road, ap- proached 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 embank- ment, 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 bv all this com- motion 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 embank- ment 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. HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 7 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, 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 in- trinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamen- table complaints, when she raised her voice against her hus- band in particular and against everybody else after him, only made those who heard her wonder and feel affectionately towards her, even whilst 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 man- ner of speech that warmed his belly with pride and male triumph whilst 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 her 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 ad- mired 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 rudi- ments 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. 8 THE RAINBOW 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 oc- curred. Later, when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid, almost middle-aged man, he turned ifter strange women, and became a silent, inscrutable fol- ower of forbidden pleasure, neglecting his indignant bour- geois wife without a qualm. Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have any- ;hing 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 vx>ice, 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 9 drank, and was often to be found in his public house blather- ing 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 ac- knowledge his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep v 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 gentle- man. 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 bad a low opinion of himself. He knew 10 THE RAINBOW his own limitation. He knew that his brain was a slow hope- less 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 any one 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 him- self, 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 learn- ing. 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 com- position on the Army, he did at last learn to repeat the few HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 11 facts he knew : " You can join the army at eighteen. You have to be over five foot eight." But he had all the time a living conviction that this was a dodge and that his common- places were beneath contempt. Then he reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched out what he had written, made an agonized effort to think of something in the real composition style, failed, became sullen with rage and humiliation, put the pen down and would have been torn to pieces rather than attempt to write another word. He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar School got used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at learning, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a slate, and then things went on as be- fore. 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 shoul- ders, 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 12 THE RAINBOW 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 par- ticularly against the young Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom returned the hatred violently, his face grow- ing 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 fcon, 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 occa- sionally 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 su- preme 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 com- prised 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 13 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 nov? He did not know what to feel. There was a slight wonder, a pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash and of cold fear lest this was all that would happen, lest his relations with woman were going to be no more than this nothingness; there was a slight sense of shame before the prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his inefficiency; there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of her; there was a moment of paralyzed horror when he felt he might have taken a disease from her; and upon all this startled tumult of emotion, was laid the steadying hand of common sense, which said it did not matter very much, so long as he had no disease. He soon recovered balance, and really it did not matter so very much. But it had shocked him, and put a mistrust into his heart, and emphasized his fear of what was within himself. He was, however, in a few days going about again in his own careless, happy-go-lucky fashion, his blue eyes just as clear and honest as ever, his face just as fresh, his appetite just as keen. Or apparently so. He had, in fact, lost some of his buoy- ant 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 14 THE RAINBOW 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 func- tional, 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 exuber- ance, 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 resent- ment. 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 were 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 les- son: 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 de- spised 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 un- foreseen 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. HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 15 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 Eed 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 Whit- suntide 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 in- terlude, 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, in- clined 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 in- stinctive regard for women from making any definite ap- proach, feeling all the while that hln attitude was ridiculous, and flushing deep with confusion. She, however, became hard 16 THE RAINBOW 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' ? " e< 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 r 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 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." HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 1? " 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. That was a different experience. He wanted to see more of the girl. She, how- ever, 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 con- fused 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. Brang- wen 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. Brang- wen 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 18 THE RAINBOW round on him, looking at him without considering it neces- sary to know him at all. The eyebrows of the round, perceiv-. ing, 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 ?.t the almost sardonic, lidded eyes of the foreigner. The Mter sat down beside him, and they began to talk, chiefly of horses. Brangwen loved the other man for his exquisite gracious- uess, for his tact and reserve, and for his ageless, monkey- iike self-surety. They talked of horses, and of Derbyshire, ind of farming. The stranger warmed to the young fellow Vfith real warmth, and Brangwen was excited. He was trans- ported 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 tvas all. They talked a long while together, Brangwen flushing like r * girl when the other did not understand his idiom. Then they said goodnight, and shook hands. Again the foreigner bowed and repeated his goodnight. " Goodnight, 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 19 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 for- eigner: 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 ma- terial of his customary life to show through. He resented it. Was he cheated in his illusion? He balked the mean en- closure 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 Cossetha? r and Ilkeston. There ho 30 THE RAINBOW sat stubbornly in his corner at the Red Lion, smoking and musing and occasionally lifting his beer-pot, and saying noth- ing, 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 emo- tional, 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 amongst 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, every- thing 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 pleas- ure, 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 moon- light from the puddles at his feet, wondering What the Han- over ! 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 21 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 5ed Lion, moderate and decent. There he sat and stub- bornly 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 quiver- ing, 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-relation- ship. 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 f 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 im- perative 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 far- awayness 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, BrangVen 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 here 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 37 child, lie 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 clos- ing 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 for- ward 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 dis- embarrassed his hands. Now he shut his fists. He was aware of her standing there unknown, dread, yet related to him. " I came up," he said, speaking curiously matter-of-fact and level, " to ask if you'd marry me. You are free, aren't you?" There was a long silence, whilst his blue eyes, strangely impersonal, looked into her eyes to seek an answer to the truth. He was looking for the truth out of her. And she, as if hypnotized, must answer at length. " Yes, I am free to marry." The expression of his eyes changed, became less impersonal, as if he were looking almost at her, for the truth of her. Steady and intent and eternal they were, as if they would never change. They seemed to fix and to resolve 38 THE RAINBOW 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 suspense and silence. "No," she said, not of herself. "No, I don't know." He felt the tension breaking up in him, his fists slack- tened, he was unable to move. He stood looking at her, helpless in his vague collapse. For the moment she had become unreal to him. Then he saw her come to him, curi- ously direct and as if without movement, in a sudden flow. She put her hand to hiscoat. "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 we/e 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, blenched 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 eould 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 ges- tation, 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 HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 39 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/ 7 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 with- out 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 lit- tle. 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 aban- doned 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 won- dered what the vicar would say if he knew. 40 THE RAINBOW "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 some- thing quiet and professional about her. She had been a aurse beside her husband, both in Warsaw and in the re- bellion afterwards. She proceeded to set a tray. It was as if she ignored Brangwen. He sat up, unable to bear a con- tradiction 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 tiis chest. He stood there and waited, suspended. Again she came to him, as he stood in. his black clothes, HOW BRANGWEN MARRIED A POLISH LADY 41 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 black- ness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and elec- tric 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, alway? 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 dark- ness. He could see no answer. "That'll do, won't it?" he said. " Yes," she answered, mere echo without body or meaning. " Goodnight," he said. " Goodnight." . He left her standing there, expressionless and void as she was. Then she went on laying the tray for the vicar. Need- ing the table, she put the daffodils aside on the dresser with- out noticing them. Only their coolness, touching her hand, remained echoing there a long while. They were such strangers, they must for ever be such 42 THE RAINBOW 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 moon- light 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 un- der cover of cloud again. CHAPTER II THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH SHE was the daughter of a Polish landowner who, deeply in debt to the Jews, had married a German wife with money, and who had died just before the re- bellion. 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 move- ment just begun in Eussia. But they were very patriotic : and, at the same time, very " European/' They had two children. Then came the great rebellion. Lensky, very ardent and full of words, went about inciting his countrymen. Little Poles flamed down the streets of Warsaw, on the way to shoot every Muscovite. So they crossed into the south of Russia, and it was common for six little insurgents to ride into a Jewish village, brandishing swords and words, emphasizing the fact that they were going to shoot every living Muscovite. Lensky was something of a fire-eater also. Lydia, tem- pered 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 dark' ness had come over Lydia's mind. She walked always in a shadow, silenced, with a strange, deep terror having hold of 43 44 THE RAINBOW 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 as- sistant doctor in one of the hospitals he soon became im- possible. They were almost beggars. But he kept still his great ideas of himself, he seemed to live in a complete hallu- cination, where he himself figured vivid and lordly. He guarded his wife jealously against the ignominy of her posi- tion, rushed round her like a brandished weapon, an amazing sight to the English eye, had her in his power, as if he hypno- tized 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 re- morse, 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. In- deed, 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 THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 45 Polish. Otherwise she did not think of Poland, nor of that life to which she had belonged. It was a great blot looming blank in its darkness. In the superficial activity of her life, she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and darknesses of abstraction were Polish. So she lived for some time. Then, with slight uneasiness, she used half to awake to the streets of London. She realized that there was something around her, very foreign, she realized she was in a strange place. And then, she was; sent away into the country. There came into her mind now the memory of her home where she had been a child, the big house among the land, the peasants of the village She was sent to Yorkshire, to nurse an old rector in hi? rectory by the sea. This was the first shake of the kaleido- scope 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 some- thing 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 sun- shine. She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck away down under the trees, she was startled, and won- dered what it was. Walking down, she found the bluebells around her glowing like a presence, among the trees. 46 THE RAINBOW 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 un- easy. 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 sing- ing, winter darkened the moors, and almost savagely she turned again to life, demanding her life back again, demand- ing 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 dark- ness 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 be- low, 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 THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 47 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 even- ing, 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. Eesistant, 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 ob- livion of her old state. She could not bear to come to, to realize. The first pangs of this new parturition were so acute, she knew she could not bear it. She would rather remain out of life, than be torn, mutilated into this birth, which she could not survive. She had not the strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so hostile. She knew she would die like an early, colourless, scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling life. But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree, when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she forgot, she felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person, quite glad. But she knew it was fragile, and she dreaded it. The vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses, for his bees to roll in, and she laughed. Then night came, with brilliant stars that she knew of old, from her girlhood. And they flashed so bright, she knew they were victors. She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the past and the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to find a gre<*t 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. Th0 tense, eager, nesting wings moved her beyond endurance, 48 THE RAINBOW 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 Brangden 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 near- est 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 have 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 adher- ence to the line of honourable courtship and sanctioned, THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 49 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, be- cause 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 mar- riage, 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 50 THE RAINBOW 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 after- thought, 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 hand- shake 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 ad- mittance, his Gethsemane and his Triumphal Entry in one. had come now. Behind her, there was so much unknown to him. When he approached her, ho came to such a terrible painful un- known. 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 hap- pen to him? If he stretched and strained for ever he would never be able to grasp it all, and to yield himself naked out THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 51 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 un- known 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, be- cause 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 ex- cuse 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 re- mained 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 be- 52 THE RAINBOW came 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, expect- antly, like a man who goes to a profound, unknown satis- faction. At dinner-time, he appeared in the doorway, hang- ing 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 closed-banded hair. Somehow it was her head, so shapely and poignant, that revealed her his woman to him. As she Amoved about clothed closely, full-skirted and wearing her little silk apron, her dark hail- 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. "Fm betimes," he said. "Yes," she answered. He turned to the dogs, or to the child if she were 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, for- getting, to slip out again. Tnen Brangwen, talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees, would be aware of his wife, as, in her tight, dark bodice and her lace fichu, she was reaching up to the corner cupboard. He realized with a sharp pang that she belonged to him, and he to her. He realized that he lived by her. Did he own her ? Was she here for ever ? Or might she go away? She was not really his, it was not a real marriage, this marriage between them. She might go away. He did not feel like a master, husband, father of her children. She belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone. And he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with ever- araging, 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. THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 53 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 aboui 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 shin- ing-eyed, she was back at her own home, telling him about the riotoup 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 re- member, 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, lilies, 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, know, I know, I know/ Oh, but can you understand, I 54 THE RAINBOW 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 no- where, 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, con- demning 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 lie 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, un- changed 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 no- where, there was connection between them again. It came THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 55 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 s 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 ad- venture. 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 56 THE RAINBOW 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, pre- monition enough in himself, to be aware of this and to meas- ure 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 quiverec 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 Eed 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 Eed 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 g^ve 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 THEY LIVE AT THE MARSH 57 smash her into regarding him. He had a raging agony of iesire to do so. But something bigger in him withheld him, kept him mo- tionless. 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 him- self. 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. <