2 They live at the marsh. Part 1 She was the daughter of a Polish landowner who, in debt to the Jews, had married a German wife with money and who had died just before the rebellion. Quite young she had married Paul Lenski, 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 Lenski, married to the young doctor, became with him a patriot and an emancipee. They were poor, but they were very conceited. She learned nursing as a mark of her emancipation. They represented in Poland the new movement just begun in Russia, but they were very patriotic and at the same time very European. They had two children, then came the great rebellion. Lenski, 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. Lenski was something of a fireeater also. Lydia, tempered by her German blood, coming of a different family, was obliterated, carried along in her husband's emphasis of declaration and his world of patriotism. He was indeed a brave man, but no bravery could quite have equaled the vividness of his talk. He worked very hard till nothing lived in him but his eyes, and Lydia, as if drugged, followed him like a shadow, serving, echoing. Sometimes she had her two children, sometimes they were left behind. She returned once to find them both dead of diphtheria. Her husband wept aloud, unaware of everybody, but the war went on, and soon he was back at his work. A darkness had come over Lydia's mind. She walked always in a shadow, silenced, with a strange deep terror having hold of her. Her desire was to seek satisfaction in dread, to enter a nunnery, to satisfy the instincts of dread in her through service of a dark religion, but she could not. Then came the flight to London. Lenski, the little, thin man, had got all his life locked into her resistance and could not relax again. He lived in a sort of insane irritability, touchy, haughty to the last degree, fractious, so that, as assistant doctor in one of the hospitals, he soon became impossible. There were almost beggars, but he kept still his great ideas of himself. He seemed to live in a complete hallucination, where he himself figured vivid and lordly. He guarded his wife jealously against the ignominy of her position, rushed round her like a brandished weapon, an amazing sight to the English eye, had her in his power as if he hypnotized her. She was passive, dark, always in shadow. He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death, of the shadow of revenge. When her husband died, she was relieved. He would no longer dart about her. England fitted her mood, its aloofness and foreignness. She had known a little of the language before coming, and a sort of parrot mind made her pick it up fairly easily. But she knew nothing of the English, nor of English life. Indeed, these did not exist for her. She was like one walking in the underworld, where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with one. She felt the English people as a potent, cold, slightly hostile host amongst whom she walked isolated. The English people themselves were almost deferential to her. The church saw that she did not want. She walked without passion, like a shade, tormented into moments of love by the child. Her dying husband with his tortured eyes and the skin drawn tight over his face, he was as a vision to her, not a reality. In a vision he was buried and put away. Then the vision ceased. She was untroubled. Time went on gray, uncolored, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her. When she rocked her baby at evening, maybe she fell into a Polish slumber song, or she talked sometimes to herself in Polish. Otherwise she did not think of Poland nor of that life to which she had belonged. It was a great blot looming blank in its darkness. In the superficial activity of her life she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and darknesses of abstraction were Polish. So she lived for some time. Then with slight uneasiness she used half to awake to the streets of London. She realized that there was something around her, very foreign. She realized she was in a strange place, and then she was sent away into the country. There came into her mind now the memory of her home where she had been a child, the big house among the land, the peasants of the village. She was sent to Yorkshire to nurse an old rector in his rectory by the sea. This was the first shake of the kaleidoscope that brought in front of her eyes something she must see. It hurt her brain, the open country and the moors. It hurt her and hurt her, yet it forced itself upon her as something living. It roused some potency of her childhood in her. It had some relation to her. There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now, and there was a strange insistence of light from the sea to which she must attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them, and she stooped to the disturbing influence near her feet. She even picked one or two flowers, faintly remembering in the new color 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. 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 snow drops among coarse grass and a cup full of incredibly warm sunshine. She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the back away down under the trees, she was startled and wondered what it was. Walking down, she found the blue bells around her glowing like a presence among the trees. Summer came. The moors were tangled with hair bells like water in the ruts of the roads. The heather came rosy under the skies, setting the whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past the gorse bushes, shrinking from their presence. She stepped into the heather as into a quickening bath that almost hurt. Her fingers moved over the clasped fingers of the child. She heard the anxious voice of the baby as it tried to make her talk distraught. And she shrank away again back into her darkness and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn came with a faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter darkened the moors, and almost savagely she turned again to life, demanding her life back again, demanding that it should be as it had been when she was a girl on the land at home under the sky. Snow lay in great expanses. The telegraph posts strode over the wide earth, away under the gloom of the sky, and savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this was Poland, her youth, that all was her own again. But there were no sledges nor bells. She did not see the peasants coming out like new people in their sheepskins and their fresh, ruddy, bright faces that seemed to become new and vivid when the snow lit up the ground. It did not come to her the life of her youth. It did not come back. There was a little agony of struggle, then a relapse into the darkness of the convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the walls and Christ was white on the cross of victory. She watched from the sick room the snow whirl past like flocks of shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to a leaden, inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the curving shore, and the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half submerged. But near at hand on the trees the snow was soft and bloom. Only the voice of the dying vickers spoke gray and querless from behind. By the time the snow drops were out, however, he was dead. He was dead. But with curious equanimity the returning woman watched the snow drops on the edge of the grass below, blown white in the wind, but not to be blown away.  As she rose in the morning the dawn was beating up white, gusts of light blown like a thin snowstorm from the east, blown stronger and fiercer till the rose appeared and the gold and the sea lit up below. She was impassive and indifferent, yet she was outside the enclosure of darkness. There passed a space of shadow again, the familiarity of dread worship during which she was moved oblivious to cassette. There at first there was nothing, just gray nothing. But then one morning there was a light from the yellow jasmine caught her, and after that morning and evening the persistent ringing of thrushes from the shrubbery till her heart, beaten upon, was forced to lift up its voice in rivalry and answer. Little tunes came into her mind.  Resistant she knew she was beaten, and from fear of darkness turned to fear of light. She would have hidden herself indoors if she could. Above all she craved for the peace and heavy oblivion of her old state. She could not bear to come to, to realize. The first pangs of this new parturition were so acute she knew she could not bear it. She would rather remain out of life than be torn mutilated into this birth which she could not survive. She had not the strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so hostile. She knew she would die like an early colorless, setless flower that the end of the winter puts forth mercilessly, and she wanted to harbor her modicum of twinkling life. But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezzarine tree when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she forgot. She felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person, quite glad. But she knew it was fragile and she dreaded it. The vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses for his bees to roll in, and she laughed. Then night came with brilliant stars that she knew of old from her girlhood, and they flashed so bright she knew they were victors. She could neither wake nor sleep, as if crushed between the past and the future, like a flower that comes above ground to find a great stone lying above it. She was helpless. The bewilderment and helplessness continued. She was surrounded by great moving masses that must crush her, and there was no escape, save in the old obliviousness, the cold darkness she strove to retain. But the vicar showed her eggs in the thrush's nest near the back door. She saw herself the mother-thrush upon the nest, and the way her wings were spread, so eager down upon her secret. The tense, eager nesting wings moved her beyond endurance. She thought of them in the morning when she heard the thrush whistling as he got up, and she thought, Why didn't I die out there? Why am I brought here? She was aware of people who passed around her, not as persons, but as looming presences. It was very difficult for her to adjust herself. In Poland the peasantry, the people, had been cattle to her. They had been her cattle that she owned and used. What were these people? Now she was coming awake, she was lost. But she had felt wrangling go by almost as if he had brushed her. She had tingled in body as she had gone on up the road. After she had been with him in the marsh kitchen, the voice of her body had risen strong and insistent. Soon she wanted him. He was the man who had come nearest to her for her awakening. Always, however, between wiles she lapsed into the old unconsciousness, indifference, and there was a will in her to save herself from living any more, but she would wake in the morning one day and feel her blood running, feel herself lying open like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand. She got to know him better, and her instinct fixed on him, just on him. Her impulse was strong against him, because he was not of her own sort. But one blind instinct led her to take him, to leave him, and then to relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. She felt the rooted safety of him and the life in him. Also he was young and very fresh. The blue, steady livingness of his eyes she enjoyed like mourning. 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 unsheaths itself and stands always ready, waiting, receptive. He could not understand this. He forced himself, through lack of understanding, to the adherence to the line of honorable courtship and sanctioned, licensed marriage. Therefore, after he had gone to the vicarage and asked for her, she remained for some days held in this one spell, open, receptive to him, before him. He was roused to chaos. He spoke to the vicar and gave in the bands, then he stood to wait. She remained attentive and instinctively expected before him, unfolded, ready to receive him. He could not act because of self-fear and because of his conception of honor 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. In articulate he moved with her at the marsh, in violent, gloomy, wordless passion, almost in hatred of her. Till gradually she became aware of him, aware of herself with regard to him. Her blood stirred to life. She began to open towards him, to flow towards him again. He waited till the spell was between them again, till they were together within one rushing, hastening flame, and then again he was bewildered. He was tied up as with cords and could not move to her, so she came to him, and unfastened the breast of his waistcoat and his shirt, and put her hand on him, needing to know him. For it was cruel to her to be opened and offered to him, yet not to know what he was, not even that he was there. She gave herself to the hour, but he could not, and he bungled in taking her. So that he lived in suspense as if only half his faculties worked until the wedding. She did not understand, but the vagueness came over her again and the days lapsed by. He could not get definitely into touch with her, for the time being she let him go again. He suffered very much from the thought of actual marriage, the intimacy and nakedness of marriage. He knew her so little, they were so foreign to each other, they were such strangers, and they could not talk to each other. When she talked of Poland or of what had been it was all so foreign she scarcely communicated anything to him, and when he looked at her an overmuch reverence and fear of the unknown changed the nature of his desire into a sort of worship, holding her aloof from his physical desire, self-thwarting. She did not know this, she did not understand. They had looked at each other and had accepted each other, it was so. Then there was nothing to balk at, it was complete between them. At the wedding his face was stiff and expressionless. He wanted to drink, to get rid of his forethought and afterthought, to set the moment free, but he could not. The suspense only tightened at his heart. The gesting 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. 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 gray eyes clear and dilated, so that the men could not look at her, and the women were elated by her. They served her. Very wonderful she was, as she bade farewell, her ugly wide mouth smiling with pride and recognition, her voice speaking softly and richly in the foreign accent, her dilated eyes ignoring one and all the departing guests. Her manner was gracious and fascinating, but she ignored the being of him or her to whom she gave her hand. And Brangwen stood beside her, giving his hearty handshake to his friends, receiving their regard gratefully, glad of their attention. His heart was tormented within him. He did not try to smile. The time of his trial and his admittance, his gesteminy and his triumphal entry in one, had come now. Behind her there was so much unknown to him. When he approached her, he came to such a terrible, painful unknown. How could he embrace it and fathom it? How could he close his arms round all this darkness and hold it to his breast and give himself to it? What might not happen to him? If he stretched and strained forever he would never be able to grasp it all and to yield himself naked out of his own hands into the unknown power. How could a man be strong enough to take her, put his arms round her and have her, and be sure he could conquer this awful unknown next to his heart? What was it then that she was to which he must also deliver himself up and which at the same time he must embrace, contain? He was to be her husband. It was established so, and he wanted it more than he wanted life or anything. She stood beside him in her silk dress, looking at him strangely, so that a certain terror, horror, took possession of him. Because she was strange and impending and he had no choice, he could not bear to meet her look from under her strange thick brows. Is it late, she said? He looked at his watch. No, half past eleven, he said, and he made an excuse to go into the kitchen, leaving her standing in the room among the disorder and the drinking glasses.  She started up when he entered. Why haven't you gone to bed, he said? I thought I'd better stop and lock up and do, she said. Her agitation quietened him.  She stood a moment watching him as he moved with averted face. Then she said, You will be good to me, won't you?  I want to, he said, as he drew her closer and closer in. She was soothed by the stress of his embrace and remained quite still, relaxed against him, mingling in to him, and he let himself go from past and future, was reduced to the moment with her, in which he took her and was with her, and there was nothing beyond. They were together in an elemental embrace beyond their superficial foreignness. But in the morning he was uneasy again. She was still foreign and unknown to him. Only within the fear was pride, belief in himself as mate for her, and she, everything forgotten in her new hour of coming to life, radiated vigor and joy, so that he quivered to touch her. It made a great difference to him, marriage. Things became so remote and of so little significance as he knew the powerful source of his life. His eyes opened on a new universe and he wondered in thinking of his triviality before. A new calm relationship showed to him and the things he saw in the cattle he used, the young wheat as it eddied in a wind. And each time he returned home he went steadily, expectantly, like a man who goes to a profound unknown satisfaction. At dinner time he appeared in the doorway, hanging back a moment from entering to see if she was there. He saw her setting the plates on the white scrubbed table. Her arms were slim. She had a slim body and full skirts.  Somehow it was her head, so shapely and poignant that revealed her, his woman, to him.  He knew her essence, that it was his to possess, and he seemed to live thus in contact with her, in contact with the unknown, the unaccountable, and incalculable. They did not take much notice of each other consciously. I'm be-times, he said. Yes, she answered. He turned to the dogs or to the child if she was there. The little Anna played about the farm, flitting constantly in to call something to her mother, to fling her arms round her mother's skirts, to be noticed, perhaps caressed, then forgetting to slip out again. Then Brangwen, talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees, would be aware of his wife, as in her tight dark bodice and her lace fish-shoes she was reaching up to the corner covered. 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 forever, or might she go away? She was not really his. It was not a real marriage, this marriage between them. She might go away. He did not feel like a master, husband, father of her children. She belonged elsewhere. Any moment she might be gone, and he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with ever raging, ever unsatisfied desire. He must always turn home, wherever his steps were taking him, always to her, and he could never quite reach her. He could never quite be satisfied, never be at peace, because she might go away. At evening he was glad. Then when he had finished in the yard and come in and washed himself, when the child was put to bed, he could sit on the other side of the fire with his beer on the hob and his long white pipe in his fingers, conscious of her there opposite him, as she worked at her embroidery, or as she talked to him, and he was safe with her now till morning. She was curiously self-sufficient and did not say very much. Occasionally she lifted her head, her gray eyes shining with a strange light that had nothing to do with him or with this place, and would tell him about herself. She seemed to be back again in the past, chiefly in her childhood or her girlhood with her father. She very rarely talked of her first husband, but sometimes, all shining eyed, she was back at her own home, telling him about the riotous times the trip to Paris with her father, tales of the mad acts of the peasants when a burst of religious self-hurting fervor 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, Gisela, my German gubernante, was very shocked and she would not tell me, but I heard the servants talking. I remember, it was Pierre, the coachman, and my father and some of his friends, landowners. They had taken a wagon, a whole railway wagon that you travel in. A railway carriage, said Brangwen. She laughed to herself. I know it was a great scandal. Yes, a whole wagon. And they had girls, you know, fields, 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. Gisela said to me, Madam, she must not know that you have heard such things. My mother, she used to cry and she wished to beat my father, plainly beat him. He would say when she cried because he sold the forest, the wood, to jingle money in his pocket and go to Warsaw or Paris or Kiev, when she said he must take back his word, he must not sell the forest. He would stand and say, I know, I know, I have heard it all. I have heard it all before. Tell me some new thing. I know, I know, I know. Oh, but can you understand? I loved him when he stood there under the door saying only, I know, I know, I know it all already. She could not change him. No, not if she killed herself for it. And she could change everybody else but him. She could not change him. Brangwen could not understand. He had pictures of a cattle truck full of naked girls riding from nowhere to nowhere, of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said, I know, I know, of Jews running down the streets shouting in Yiddish, don't do it, don't do it, and being cut down by demented peasants, she called them cattle while she looked down interested and even amused of tutors and governesses and parrots and a convent. It was too much for him. And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to him, arrogating a curious superiority to him, a distance between them, something strange and foreign and outside his life, talking, rattling without rhyme or reason, laughing when he was shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability of any kind. Then when they went to bed, he knew that he had nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood. He was a peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a nothing. He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew so well and wondering whether it was really there, the window, the chest of drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the atmosphere. And gradually he grew into a raging fury against her. But because he was so much amazed, and there was as yet such a distance between them, and she was such an amazing thing to him with all wonder opening out behind her, he made no retaliation on her. Only he lay still and wide eyed with rage, in articulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility. And he remained wrathful and distinct from her, unchanged outwardly to her, but underneath a solid power of antagonism to her, of which she became gradually aware. And it irritated her to be made aware of him as a separate power.  He walked about for days, stiffened with resistance to her, stiff with the will to destroy her as she was, then suddenly out of nowhere there was connection between them again. It came on him as he was working in the fields. The tension, the bond, burst, and the passionate flood broke forward into a tremendous, magnificent rush so that he felt he could snap off the trees as he passed and create the world afresh. And when he arrived home there was no sign between them. He waited and waited till she came, and as he waited his limbs seemed strong and splendid to him. His hands seemed like passionate servants to him. Goodly he felt a stupendous power in himself of life and of urgent, strong blood. She was sure to come at last and touch him. Then he burst into flame for her and lost himself. They looked at each other, a deep laugh at the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of her again, wholesale, mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth of her, to bury himself in the depths of her, in an inexhaustible exploration. She, all the while reveling in that he reveled in her, tossed all her secrets aside and plunged to that which was secret to her as well, whilst she quivered with fear in the last anguish of delight. What did it matter who they were, whether they knew each other or not? The hour passed away again. There was severance between them, and rage, and misery, and bereavement for her, and deposition, and toiling at the mill with slaves for him. But no matter. They had had their hour, and should it chime again they were ready for it, ready to renew the game at the point where it was left off, on the edge of the outer darkness, when the secrets within the woman are game for the man, hunted doggedly, when the secrets of the woman are the man's adventure, and they both give themselves to the adventure. She was with child, and there was again the silence and distance between them. She did not want him, nor his secrets, nor his game. He was deposed. He was cast out. He seized with fury at the small, ugly-mouthed woman who had nothing to do with him. Sometimes his anger broke on her, but she did not cry. She turned on him like a tiger, and there was battle. He had to learn to contain himself again, and he hated it. He hated her that she was not there for him, and he took himself off anywhere. But an instinct of gratitude, and a knowledge that she would receive him back again, that later on she would be there for him again, prevented his straying very far. He cautiously did not go too far. He knew she might lapse into ignorance of him, lapse away from him, farther, farther, farther, till she was lost to him. He had sense enough, premonition enough in himself to be aware of this, and to measure himself accordingly, for he did not want to lose her. He did not want her to lapse away. Cold, he called her, selfish, only caring about herself, a foreigner with a bad nature, caring really about nothing, having no proper feelings at the bottom of her, and no proper niceness. He raged and piled up accusations that had some measure of truth in them all, but a certain grace in him forbade him from going too far. He knew, and he quivered with rage and hatred, that she was all these vile things, that she was everything vile and detestable. But he had grace at the bottom of him which told him that, above all things, he did not want to lose her. He was not going to lose her. So he kept some consideration for her. He preserved some relationship. He went out more often to the red lion again, to escape the madness of sitting next to her when she did not belong to him, when she was as absent as any woman in indifference could be. He could not stay at home, so he went to the red lion, and sometimes he got drunk. But he preserved his measure. Some things between them he never forfeited. A tormented look came into his eyes as if something were always dogging him. He glanced sharp and quick. He could not bear to sit still doing nothing. He had to go out to find company, to give himself away there. For he had no other outlet. He could not work to give himself out. He had not the knowledge. As the months of her pregnancy went on, she left him more and more alone. She was more and more unaware of him. His existence was annulled, and he felt bound down, bound, unable to stir, beginning to go mad, ready to rave. For she was quiet and polite, as if he did not exist, as one is quiet and polite to a servant. Nevertheless she was great with his child. It was his turn to submit. She sat opposite him, sowing, her foreign face inscrutable and indifferent. He felt he wanted to break her into acknowledgement of him, into awareness of him. It was insufferable that she had so obliterated him. He would smash her into regarding him. He had a raging agony of desire to do so. But something bigger in him withheld him, kept him motionless. So he went out of the house for relief. Or he turned to the little girl for her sympathy and her love. He appealed with all his power to the small Anna. So soon they were like lovers, father and child. For he was afraid of his wife. As she sat there with bent head, silent, working or reading, but so unutterably silent that his heart seemed under the millstone of it, she became herself like the upper millstone lying on him, crushing him as sometimes a heavy sky lies on the earth. Yet he knew he could not tear her away from the heavy obscurity into which she was merged. He must not try to tear her into recognition of himself and agreement with himself. It were disastrous, impious, so let him rage as he might he must withhold himself. But his wrist trembled and seemed mad, seemed as if they would burst. When in November the leaves came beating against the window shutters with a lashing sound, he started and his eyes flickered with flame. The dog looked up at him. He sunk his head to the fire, but his wife was startled. He was aware of her listening. They blow up with a rattle, he said. What? She asked. The leaves. She sank away again. The strange leaves beating in the wind on the wood had come nearer than she. The tension in the room was overpowering. It was difficult for him to move his head. He sat with every nerve, every vein, every fiber of muscle in his body stretched on a tension. He felt like a broken arch thrust sickeningly out from support. For her response was gone. He thrust at nothing, and he remained himself. He saved himself from crashing down into nothingness, from being squandered into fragments by sheer tension, sheer backward resistance. End of Chapter 2, Part 1 Chapter 2, Part 2 of The Rainbow This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Chapter 2, Part 2 During the last months of her pregnancy, he went about in a surcharged, imminent state that did not exhaust itself. She was also depressed, and sometimes she cried. It needed so much life to begin afresh after she had lost so lavishly. Sometimes she cried. Then he stood stiff, feeling his heart would burst, for she did not want him. She did not want even to be made aware of him. By the very puckering of her face, he knew that he must stand back, leave her intact alone. For it was the old grief come back in her, the old loss, the pain of the old life, the dead husband, the dead children. This was sacred to her, and he must not violate her with his comfort. For what she wanted, she would come to him. He stood aloof with turgid heart. He had to see her tears come, fall over her scarcely moving face, that only puckered sometimes, down under her breast, that was so still, scarcely moving, and that there was no noise, saved now and again, when with a strange, somnambulate movement, she took her handkerchief and wiped her face and blew her nose, and went on with a noiseless weeping. He knew that any offer of comfort from himself would be worse than useless, hateful to her, jangling her. She must cry, but it drove him insane.  He went away out of the house. His great and chiefest source of solace was the child. She had been at first aloof from him, reserved. However friendly she might seem one day, the next she would have lapsed to her original disregard of him, cold, detached, at her distance. The first morning after his marriage he had discovered it would not be so easy with the child. At the break of dawn he had started awake, hearing a small voice outside the door, saying plaintively, Mother! He rose and opened the door. She stood on the threshold in her nightdress, as she had climbed out of bed, black eyes staring round in hostile, her fair hair sticking out in a wild fleece, the man and child confronted each other. I want my mother, she said, jealously accenting the my. Come on then, he said gently. Where's my mother? She's here, come on. The child's eyes, staring at the man with ruffled hair and beard, did not change. The mother's voice called softly. The little bear feet entered the room with trepidation. Mother! Come, my dear! The small bear feet approached swiftly. I wondered where you were, came the plaintive voice. The mother stretched out her arms. The child stood beside the high bed. Brangwen lightly lifted the tiny girl with an upsidesy, then took his own place in the bed again. Mother! cried the child as an anguish. What, my pet? Anna wriggled close into her mother's arms, clinging tight, hiding from the fact of the man. Brangwen lay still and waited. There was a long silence. Then suddenly Anna looked round as if she thought he would be gone.   Her arms clung tightly to her mother, afraid. He did not move for some time, not knowing what to say. His face was smooth and soft, skinned with love.  He looked at her, scarcely moving his head, his eyes smiling. Have you just wakened up? He said. Go away! She retorted, with a little darting forward of the head, something like a viper. Nay, he answered. I'm not going. You can go.  There's room for you, he said.  The child glowered at him, miserable in her impotence. There's room for you as well, he said. It's a big bed enough. She glowered without answering, then turned and clung to her mother. She would not allow it. During the day she asked her mother several times, When are we going home, mother? We are at home, darling. We live here now. This is our house. We live here with your father. The child was forced to accept it, but she remained against the man. As night came on, she asked, Where are you going to sleep, mother? I sleep with the father now. And when Brangwen came in, the child asked fiercely, Why do you sleep with my mother? My mother sleeps with me, her voice quivering. You come as well and sleep with both of us, he coaxed. Mother, she cried, turning, appealing against him. But I must have a husband, darling. All women must have a husband. And you like to have a father with your mother, don't you? said Brangwen. Anna glowered at him. She seemed to cogitate. No, she cried fiercely at length. No, I don't want.  She sobbed bitterly. He stood and watched her. Sorry, but there could be no altering it. Which, when she knew, she became quiet. He was easy with her, talking to her, taking her to see the live creatures, bringing her the first chickens in his cap, taking her to gather the eggs, letting her throw crusts to the horse. She would easily accompany him and take all he had to give, but she remained neutral still. She was curiously and comprehensively jealous of her mother, always anxiously concerned about her. If Brangwen drove with his wife to Nottingham, Anna ran about happily enough or unconcerned for a long time. Then, as afternoon came on, there was only one cry. I want my mother.  The child's anguish was that her mother was gone, gone. Yet, as a rule, Anna seemed cold, resenting her mother, critical of her. It was, I don't like you to do that, mother, or I don't like you to say that. She was a sore problem to Brangwen and to all the people at the Marsh. As a rule, however, she was active, lightly flitting about the farmyard, only appearing now and again to assure herself of her mother. Happy she never seemed, but quick, sharp, absorbed, full of imagination and changeability. Tilly said she was bewitched, but it did not matter, so long as she did not cry. There was something heart-rending about Anna's crying. Her childish anguish seemed so utter and so timeless as if it were a thing of all the ages. She made playmates of the creatures of the farmyard, talking to them, telling them the stories she had from her mother, counseling them and correcting them. Brangwen found her at the gate leading to the paddock and to the duck pond. She was peering through the bars and shouting to the stately white geese that stood in a curving line. You're not to call it people when they want to come. You must not do it. The heavy balanced birds looked at the fierce little face and the fleece of keen hair thrust between the bars, and they raised their heads and swayed off, producing the long can-can-king, protesting noise of geese, rocking their ship-like, beautiful white bodies in a line beyond the gate. You're naughty, you're naughty, cried Anna, tears of dismay and vexation in her eyes, and she stamped her slipper. Why, what are they doing? said Brangwen. They won't let me come in, she said, turning her flush little face to him. Yeah, they will. You can go in if you want to, and he pushed open the gate for her. She stood irresolute, looking at the group of bluey white geese standing monumental under the gray cold day. Go on, he said. She marched valiantly a few steps in. Her little body started invulsively at the sudden derisive can-can-k-ank of the geese. A blankness spread over her. The geese trailed away with uplifted heads under the low gray sky. They don't know you, said Brangwen. You should tell them what your name is. They're naughty to shout at me, she flashed. They think you don't live here, he said. Later he found her at the gate, calling shrilly and imperiously. My name is Anna, Anna Lensky, and I live here because Mr. Brangwen's my father now. He is, yes he is, and I live here. This pleased Brangwen very much.  Instinctively he was careful of her, careful to recognize her and to give himself to her disposal. She was difficult of her affections. For tilly she had a childish essential contempt, almost dislike, because the poor woman was such a servant. The child would not let the serving woman attend to her, do intimate things for her, not for a long time. She treated her as one of an inferior race. Brangwen did not like it. Why aren't you fond of tilly, he asked? Because, because, because she looks at me with her eyes bent. Then gradually she accepted tilly as belonging to the household, never as a person. For the first weeks the black eyes of the child were forever on the watch. Brangwen, good-humored but impatient, spoiled by tilly, was an easy blusterer.  I'm not going away, he shouted, irritated at last. Go yourself, hustle, stir the scent, hop, and he pointed to the door. The child backed away from him, pale with fear. Then she gathered up courage, seeing him become patient.   A what? he shouted. Her voice wavered, but it came. A bone-maker.  She meditated, then she hissed forward her head. I'm not. Not what? A bone-maker. No more am I a bone-maker. He was really cross. Other times she would say, my mother doesn't live here. Oh, A, I want her to go away. Then once your portion, he replied, laconically, so they drew nearer together. He would take her with him when he went out in the trap. The horse, ready at the gate, he came noisily into the house, which seemed quiet and peaceful, till he appeared to set everything awake. Now then, Topsy, pop into thy bonnet. The child drew herself up, resenting the indignity of the address. I can't fasten my bonnet myself, she said, haughtily. Not man enough yet, he said, tying the ribbons under her chin with clumsy fingers. She held up her face to him. Her little bright red lips moved as he fumbled under her chin. You talk nonsense, she said, re-echoing one of his phrases. That face shouts for the pump, he said, and taking out a big red handkerchief that smelled of strong tobacco began wiping round her mouth. "'Is Kitty waiting for me?' she asked. "'A,' he said. "'Let's finish wiping your face. It'll pass with a cat-lick.'" She submitted prettily. Then, when he let her go, she began to skip, with a curious flicking up of one leg behind her. "'Now, my young buck-rabbit,' he said. "'Slippy!' She came and was shaken into her coat, and the two set off. She sat very close beside him in the gig, tucked tightly, feeling his big body sway against her, very splendid. She loved the rocking of the gig when his big, live body swayed upon her against her.  She was curiously hard and then passionately tender-hearted. Her mother was ill. The child stole about on tiptoe in the bedroom for hours, being nurse and doing the thing thoughtfully and diligently. Another day her mother was unhappy. Anna would stand with her legs apart, glowering, balancing on the sides of her slippers. She laughed when the guislings wriggled in Tilly's hand. As the pellets of food were rammed down their throats with a skewer, she laughed nervously. She was hard and imperious with the animals, squandering no love, running about amongst them like a cruel mistress. Summer came and hay-harvest. Anna was a brown, elfish mite dancing about. Tilly always marveled over her more than she loved her. But always in the child was some anxious connection with the mother. So long as Mrs. Brangbun was all right, the little girl played about and took very little notice of her. But corn-harvest went by. The autumn drew on, and the mother, the later months of her pregnancy beginning, was strange and detached. Brangbun began to knit his brows. The old unhealthy uneasiness, the unskinned susceptibility, came on the child again. If she went to the fields with her father, then instead of playing about carelessly, it was, I want to go home. Home? Why, there's not but this minute come. I want to go home. What for? What ails me? I want my mother. My mother? My mother none wants thee. I want to go home. There would be tears in a moment. Can't find to road then? And he watched her scutting silent and intent along the hedge-bottom at a steady anxious pace till she turned and was gone through the gateway. Then he saw her two fields off, still pressing forward small and urgent.  The year drew on. In the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs. Robbins were seen. Great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow. Rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth. The ground was cold as he pulled the turnips. The roads were churned deep in mud. Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack. Inside the house it was dark and quiet. The child flitted uneasily round, and now and again came her plaintive startled cry, Mother! Mrs. Branglund was heavy and unresponsive, tired, lapsed back. Branglund went on working out of doors. At evening when he came in to milk the child would run behind him. Then in the cozy cowsheds was the doors shut and the air looking warm by the light of the hanging lantern, above the branching horns of the cows. She would stand, watching his hands, squeezing rhythmically the teats of the placid beast. Watch the froth and the leaping squirt of milk.  So they kept each other company, but at a distance, rarely speaking. The darkest days of the year came on. The child was fretful, sighing as if some oppression were on her, running hither and thither without relief, and Branglund went about at his work heavy, his heart heavy as the sodden earth. The winter nights fell early. The lamp was lighted before tea time. The shutters were closed.  Mrs. Branglund went early to bed, Anna playing on the floor beside her. Branglund sat in the emptiness of the downstairs room, smoking, scarcely conscious even of his own misery, and very often he went out to escape it. Christmas passed. The wet drenched cold days of January recurred monotonously, with now and then a brilliance of blue flashing in. When Branglund went out into a morning like crystal, when every sound rang again, in the birds were many in sodden and brusque in the hedges. Then an elation came over him in spite of everything. Whether his wife were strange or sad, or whether he craved for her to be with him, it did not matter. The air rang with clear noises. The sky was like crystal, like a bell, and the earth was hard. Then he worked and was happy. His eyes shining, his cheeks flushed, and the zest of life was strong in him. The birds pecked busily round him. The horses were fresh and ready. The bare branches of the trees flung themselves up like a man yawning, taught with energy. The twigs radiated off into the clear light. He was alive and full of zest for it all, and if his wife were heavy, separated from him, extinguished, then let her be, let him remain himself. Things would be as they would be. Meanwhile he heard the ringing crow of a cockerel in the distance. He saw the pale shell of the moon he faced on a blue sky. So he shouted to the horses and was happy. If, driving into Elkston, a fresh young woman were going in to do her shopping, he hailed her and reigned in his horse and picked her up. Then he was glad to have her near him.  Her blood ran quicker, they were both stimulated, the morning was fine. What did it matter that at the bottom of his heart was care and pain? It was at the bottom, let it stop at the bottom. His wife, her suffering, her coming pain, well, it must be so. She suffered, but he was out of doors, full in life, and it would be ridiculous, indecent to pull a long face and to insist on being miserable. He was happy this morning, driving to town, with the hoofs of the horse spanking the hard earth. Well, he was happy if half the world were weeping at the funeral of the other half, and it was a jolly girl sitting beside him, and woman was immortal, whatever happened, whoever turned towards death, let the misery come when it could not be resisted. The evening arrived later, very beautiful, with a rosy flush hovering above the sunset, and passing away into violet and lavender, with turquoise green north and south in the sky, and in the east a great yellow moon hanging heavy and radiant. It was magnificent to walk between the sunset and the moon, on a road where little holly trees thrust black into the rose and lavender, and starlings flickered in droves across the light. But what was the end of the journey? The pain came right enough, later on, when his heart and his feet were heavy, his brain dead, his life stopped. One afternoon the pains began. Mrs. Branglund was put to bed. The midwife came. Night fell. The shutters were closed. Branglund came into tea to the loaf and the pewter teapot, the child silent and quivering, playing with glass beads. The house empty it seemed, or exposed to the winter night as if it had no walls. Sometimes there sounded, long and remote in the house, vibrating through everything, the moaning cry of a woman in labor. Branglund sitting downstairs was divided. His lower, deeper self was with her, bound to her, suffering. But the big shell of his body remembered the sound of owls that used to fly around the farmstead when he was a boy. He was back in his youth, a boy haunted by the sound of the owls, waking up his brother to speak to him, and his mind drifted away to the birds, their solemn dignified faces, their flight so soft and broad winged. And then to the birds his brother had shot, fluffy, dust-colored, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly asleep.  He lifted his cup to his lips. He watched the child with the beads, but his mind was occupied with owls and the atmosphere of his boyhood with his brothers and sisters. Elsewhere, fundamental, he was with his wife in labor. The child was being brought forth out of their one flesh. He and she, one flesh out of which life must be put forth. The rent was not in his body, but it was of his body. On her the blows fell, but the quiver ran through to him, to his last fiber. She must be torn asunder for life to come forth. Yet still they were one flesh, and still from further back the life came out of him to her, and still he was the unbroken that has the broken rock in its arms. Their flesh was one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was smitten and rent from him who quivered and yielded. He went upstairs to her. As he came to the bedside, she spoke to him in Polish. Is it very bad, he asked? She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was as he stood there fairbearded and alien looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes, but she could not grasp him.  He turned away, white to the gills. It's not so very bad, said the midwife. He knew he was a strain on his wife. He went downstairs. The child glanced up at him, frightened. I want my mother, she quavered. I, but she's badly, he said mildly, unheeding. She looked at him with lost, frightened eyes. Has she got a headache? No, she's going to have a baby. The child looked round. He was unaware of her. She was alone again in terror. I want my mother, came the cry of panic. Let Tilly undress you, he said. You're tired. There was another silence. Again came the cry of labor. I want my mother, wring automatically from the wincing, panic-stricken child that felt cut off and lost in a horror of desolation. Tilly came forward, her heart rung. Come and let me undress her then, pet lamb, she crooned.  Don't you fret, my ducky. Never mind, Angel. But Anna stood upon the sofa, her back to the wall.  She's poorly, my lamb. She's poorly tonight, but she'll be better by morning. Oh, don't cry. Don't cry, love. She doesn't want you to cry, precious little heart. No, she doesn't. Tilly took gently hold of the child's skirts. Anna snatched back her dress and cried in a little hysteria. No, you're not to undress me. I want my mother. And her child's face was running with grief and tears, her body shaken. Oh, but let Tilly undress you.   Mother's poorly. She doesn't want you to cry. The child sobbed distractedly. She could not hear. I want my mother, she wept.  When you're undressed, pet.  Oh, don't you cry, don't you? Ranguin set stiff in his chair. He felt his brain going tighter. He crossed over the room, aware only of the maddening sobbing. Don't make a noise, he said. And a new fear shook the child from the sound of his voice. She cried mechanically, her eyes looking watchful through her tears. In terror, alert to what might happen, I want my mother. Quavered the sobbing, blind voice. A shiver of irritation went over the man's limbs. It was the utter persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the voice and the crying. You must come and be undressed, he said, in a quiet voice that was thin with anger. And he reached his hand and grasped her. He felt her body catch in a convulsive sob, but he too was blind and intent, irritated into mechanical action. He began to unfasten her little apron. She would have shrunk from him, but could not. So her small body remained in his grasp while he fumbled at the little buttons and tapes, unthinking, intent, unaware of anything but the irritation of her. Her body was held taut and resistant.  She kept stiff, overpowered, violated. He went on with his task. In all the while she sobbed, choking, I want my mother. He was unheatingly silent, his face stiff. The child was now incapable of understanding. She had become a little mechanical thing of fixed will. She wept. Her body convulsed, her voice repeating the same cry. A dear of me, cried Tilly, becoming distracted herself.  Where is her knighty, he asked. Tilly brought it, and he put it on her. Anna did not move her limbs to his desire. He had to push them into place. She stood, with fixed, blind will, resistant. A small convulsed, unchangeable thing, weeping ever and repeating the same phrase. He lifted one foot after the other, pulled off slippers and socks. She was ready. Do you want a drink, he asked. She did not change. Unheating, uncaring, she stood on the sofa, standing back alone. Her hands shut and half lifted. Her face, all tears, raised and blind. And through the sobbing and choking came the broken. I want my mother. Do you want a drink, he said again. There was no answer. He lifted the stiff, denying body between his hands. Its stiff blindness made a flash of rage go through him. He would like to break it. He set the child on his knee and sat again in his chair beside the fire. The wet sobbing, inarticulate noise going on near his ear. The child sitting stiff, not yielding to him or anything, not aware. A new degree of anger came over him. What did it all matter? What did it matter if the mother talked polish and cried in labor? If this child were stiff with resistance and crying, why take it to heart?  Let the child cry in resistance, since they would do so. Why should he fight against it? Why resist? Let it be if it were so. Let them be, as they were, if they insisted. And in a daze he sat, offering no fight. The child cried on. The minutes ticked away. A sort of torpor was on him. It was some little time before he came to and turned to attend to the child.  A bit dazed, he pushed back the wet hair. Like a living statue of grief, her blind face cried on. Nay, he said, not as bad as that. It's not as bad as that, Anna, my child. Come, what are you crying for so much? Come, stop now. It'll make you sick. I wipe you dry.  Don't cry any more wet tears. Don't. It's better not to. Don't cry. It's not so bad as all that. Hush now, hush. Let it be enough. His voice was queer and distant and calm. He looked at the child. She was beside herself now. He wanted her to stop. He wanted it all to stop, to become natural. Come, he said, rising to turn away. We'll go and supper up the beast. He took a big shawl, folded her round, and went out into the kitchen for a lantern. You're never taking the child out of a night like this, said Tilly. Hey, it'll quieten her, he answered. It was raining. The child was suddenly still, shocked, finding the rain on its face, the darkness. We'll just give the cows their something to eat before they go to bed, Rangwin was saying to her, holding her close and sure. There was a trickling of water into the butt, a burst of raindrops sputtering onto her shawl, and the light of the lantern swinging, flashing on a wet pavement and the base of a wet wall. Otherwise it was black darkness, one breathed darkness. He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they entered into the high dry barn that smelled warm even if it were not warm. He hung the lantern on the nail and shut the door. They were in another world now. The light shed softly on the timbered barn, on the whitewashed walls and the great heap of hay. Instruments cast their shadows largely. A ladder rose to the dark arch of a loft. Outside there was the driving rain. Inside the softly illuminated stillness and calmness of the barn. Holding the child on one arm, he set about preparing the food for the cows, filling a pan with chopped hay and brewer's grains and a little meal. The child, all wonder, watched what he did. A new being was created in her for the new conditions. Sometimes a little spasm, eddying from the bygone storm of sobbing, shook her small body.  She was silent, quite still. In a sort of dream his heart sunk to the bottom, leaving the surface of him still, quite still. He rose with the pan full of food, carefully balancing the child on one arm, the pan in the other hand. The silky fringe of the shawl swayed softly. Grains and hay trickled to the floor. He went along a dimly lit passage behind the manger's where the horns of the cows pricked out of the obscurity. The child shrank. He balanced stiffly, rested the pan on the manger wall, and tipped out the food. Half to this cow, half to the next. There was a noise of chains running as the cows lifted or dropped their heads sharply. Then a contented soothing sound, along snuffing as the beasts ate in silence. The journey had to be performed several times. There was the rhythmic sound of the shovel in the barn. Then the man returned, walking stiffly between the two weights, the face of the child peering out from the shawl. Then the next time, as he stooped, she freed her arm and put it round his neck, clinging soft and warm, making all easier. The beasts fed. He dropped the pan and sat down on a box to arrange the child. Will the cows go to sleep now? she said, catching her breath as she spoke. Yes. Will they eat all their stuff up first? Yes, hark at them. And the two sat listening to the snuffing and breathing of cows feeding in the sheds, communicating with this small barn. The lantern shed a soft, steady light from one wall. All outside was still in the rain. He looked down at the silky folds of the paisley shawl. It reminded him of his mother. She used to go to church in it. He was back again in the old irresponsibility and security, a boy at home. The two sat very quiet. His mind in a sort of trance seemed to become more and more vague. He held the child close to him. A quivering little shudder re-echoing from her sobbing went down her limbs. He held her closer. Gradually she relaxed. The eyelids began to sink over her dark watchful eyes. As she sank to sleep, his mind became blank. When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in a timeless stillness. What was he listening for? He seemed to be listening for some sound a long way off from beyond life. He remembered his wife. He must go back to her. The child was asleep. The eyelids not quite shut, showing a slight film of black pupil between. Why did she not shut her eyes? Her mouth was also a little open. He rose quickly and went back to the house. Is she asleep, whispered Tilly? He nodded. The servant woman came to look at the child who slept in the shawl, with cheeks flushed hot and red and a whiteness, a oneness, round the eyes. God, a mercy, whispered Tilly, shaking her head. He pushed off his boots and went upstairs with the child. He became aware of the anxiety grasped tight at his heart because of his wife. But he remained still. The house was silent, save for the wind outside, and the noisy trickling and splattering of water in the water butts. There was a slit of light under his wife's door. He put the child into bed, wrapped as she was in the shawl, for the sheets would be cold. Then he was afraid that she might not be able to move her arms, so he loosened her.  He covered her up. The last little quiver from the sobbing shook her breathing. This was his room, the room he had had before he married. It was familiar. He remembered what it was to be a young man, untouched. He remained suspended. The child slept, pushing her small fists from the shawl. He could tell the woman her child was asleep. But he must go to the other landing. He started. There was the sound of the owls, the moaning of the woman. What an uncanny sound! It was not human, at least to a man. He went down to her room, entering softly. She was lying still, with eyes shut, pale, tired. His heart leapt, fearing she was dead. Yet he knew perfectly well she was not. He saw the way her hair went loose over her temples.  She was beautiful to him, but it was not human. He had a dread of her as she lay there. What had she to do with him? She was other than himself. Something made him go and touch her fingers that were still grasped on the sheet. Her brown gray eyes opened and looked at him. She did not know him as himself, but she knew him as the man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her, an impersonal look in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite. When her pains began afresh, tearing her, he turned aside and could not look. But his heart in torture was at peace. His bowels were glad. He went downstairs and to the door outside, lifted his face to the rain, and felt the darkness striking, unseen and steadily upon him. The swift unseen threshing of the night upon him silenced him, and he was overcome. He turned away indoors, humbly. There was the infinite world, eternal, unchanging, as well as the world of life.  She was serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In the birth of the child, she seemed to lose connection with her former self. She became now really English, really Mrs. Brangwin. Her vitality, however, seemed lowered. She was still, to Brangwin, immeasurably beautiful. She was still passionate, with a flame of being. But the flame was not robust and present. Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but like some flower opened in the shade that could not bear the full light. She loved the baby, but even this, with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowyness even in her mother-love. When Brangwin saw her nursing his child, happy, absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin flame. For he perceived how he must subdue himself in his approach to her. And he wanted again the robust moral exchange of love and passion, such as he had had at first with her, at one time and another, when they were matched at their highest intensity. This was the one experience for him now, and he wanted it, always with remorseless craving. She came to him again, with the same lifting of her mouth as had driven him almost mad with trampled passion at first. She came to him again, and his heart, delirious in delight and readiness, he took her. And it was almost as before. Perhaps it was quite as before. At any rate it made him no perfection. It established in him a constant eternal knowledge. But it died down before he wanted it to die down. She was finished. She could take no more, and he was not exhausted. He wanted to go on. But it could not be. So he had to begin the bitter lesson to abate himself, to take less than he wanted, for she was woman to him. All other women were her shadows. For she had satisfied him, and he wanted it to go on, and it could not. However he raged, and filled with suppression that became hot and bitter, hated her in his soul that she did not want him.  It was not, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him in her own way and to her own measure. And she had spent much life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfillment. She had taken him and given him fulfillment. She still could do so in her own times and ways. But he must control himself, measure himself to her. He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other centers of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child, and he was jealous of the child. But he loved her, and time came to give some sort of course to his troublesome current of life so that it did not foam and flood and make misery. He formed another center of love in her child, Anna. Gradually a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child, relieving the main flood to his wife. Also he sought the company of men. He drank heavily now and again. The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby came. Seeing the mother with the baby boy delighted and serene and secure, Anna was at first puzzled. Then gradually she became indignant, and at last her little life settled on its own swivel. She was no more strained and distorted to support her mother. She became more childish, not so abnormal. Not charged with cares she could not understand. The charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had devolved elsewhere than on her. Gradually the child was freed. She became an independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own center. Of her own choice she then loved Brangwyn most, or most obviously. For these two made a little life together that had a joint activity. It amused him at evening to teach her to count, or to say her letters. He remembered for her all the little nursery rhymes and childish songs that lay forgotten at the bottom of his brain. At first she thought them rubbish, but he laughed and she laughed. They became to her a huge joke. Old King Cole, she thought was Brangwyn. Mother Hubbard was Tilly. Her mother was the old woman who lived in a shoe. It was a huge, it was a frantic delight to the child, this nonsense, after her years with her mother, after the poignant folk tales she had had from her mother, which always troubled and mystified her soul. She shared a sort of recklessness with her father, a complete chosen carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired like the mother, and had hazel eyes. Brangwyn called him the Blackbird. Hello! Brangwyn would cry, starting as he heard the wail of the child, announcing it wanted to be taken out of the cradle. There's the Blackbird tuning up. The Blackbird's singing, Anna would shout with delight. The Blackbird's singing. When the pie was opened, Brangwyn shouted in his bawling bass voice, going over to the cradle. The bird began to sing. Wasn't it a dainty dish to set before King? cried Anna, her eyes flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwyn for confirmation. He sat down with the baby, saying loudly, Sing up, my lad, sing up! And the baby cried loudly. And Anna shouted lustily, dancing in wild bliss, singing a song of six pence pocketful opposies, Asha, Asha! And she stopped suddenly in silence and looked at Brangwyn again, her eyes flashing as she shouted loudly and delightedly, I've got it wrong! I've got it wrong! Oh, my sirs! said Tilly, entering. What a racket! Brangwyn hushed the child, and Anna flipped and danced on. She loved her wild bursts of rowdiness with her father. Tilly hated it. Mrs. Brangwyn did not mind. Anna did not care much for other children. She domineered them. She treated them as if they were extremely young and incapable. To her they were little people. They were not her equals. So she was mostly alone, flying round the farm, entertaining the farm-hands, and Tilly and the servant-girl, worrying on and never ceasing. She loved driving with Brangwyn in the trap. Then, sitting high up and bowling along, her passion for eminence and dominance was satisfied. She was like a little savage in her arrogance. She thought her father important. She was installed beside him on high, and they spanked along beside the high, flourishing hedge-tops, surveying the activity of the countryside. When people shouted a greeting to him from the road below, and Brangwyn shouted jovially back, her little voice was soon heard, shrilling along with his, followed by her chuckling laugh, when she looked up at her father with bright eyes, and they laughed at each other. And soon it was the custom for the pastor by to sing out, How art thou, Tom? Well, my lady. Or else, morning, Tom, morning, my lass. Or else, you're off together, then. Or else, you're looking rarely, you too. Anna would respond with her father. How are you, John? Good morning, William. I, making for Darby, shrilling as loudly as she could. Though often in response to, You're off out a bit, then, she would reply, Yes, we are, to the great joy of all. She did not like the people who saluted him, and did not salute her. She went into the public house with him, if he had to call, and often sat beside him in the bar parlor as he drank his beer or brandy. The landlady's paid court to her in the obsequious way landlady's have. Well, little lady, and what's your name? Anna Brangwin came the immediate haughty answer. Indeed it is. And do you like driving in a trap with your father? Yes, said Anna, shy but bored by these inaneities. She had a touch-me-not way of blighting the inane inquiries of grown-up people. My word, she's a false little thing, the landlady would say to Brangwin. Hey, he answered, not encouraging comments on the child. Then there followed the presence of a biscuit or of cake, which Anna accepted as her dues. What does she say that I'm a false little thing? The small girl asked afterwards.  Anna hesitated. She did not understand. Then she laughed at some absurdity she found. Soon he took her every week to market with him. I can come, can't I? She asked every Saturday or Thursday morning, when he made himself look fine in his dress of a gentleman farmer, and his face clouded at having to refuse her. So at last he overcame his own shyness and tucked her beside him. They drove into Nottingham and put up at the black swan, so far all right. Then he wanted to leave her at the inn, but he saw her face and knew it was impossible. So he mustered his courage and set off with her, holding her hand to the cattle market. She stared in bewilderment, flitting silent at his side. But in the cattle market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy, filthy boots and leather laggings, and the road underfoot was all nasty with cow muck, and it frightened her to see the cattle in the square pens. So many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness of men, and a yelling of drovers. Also she felt her father was embarrassed by her, and ill at ease. He brought her a cake at the refreshment booth, and set her on a seat. A man hailed him. Good morning, Tom. That thine, then? And the bearded farmer jerked his head at Anna. A, said Brangwin, deprecating. I didn't know that one that old. No, it's my missuses. Oh, that's it. And the man looked at Anna as if she were some odd little cattle.  Brangwin left her there, in charge of the barman, whilst he went to see about the selling of some young stirks. Farmers, butchers, drovers, dirty uncouth men from whom she shrank instinctively, stared down at her as she sat on her seat. Then went to get their drink, talking in unabated tones. All was big and violent about her. Whose child met that be? They asked of the barman. It belongs to Tom Brangwin. The child sat on and neglect, watching the door for her father. He never came. Many, many men came, but not he, and she sat like a shadow. She knew one did not cry in such a place, and every man looked at her inquisitively. She shut herself away from them. A deep gathering coldness of isolation took hold on her. He was never coming back. She sat on, frozen, unmoving. When she had become blank and timeless, he came, and she slipped off her seat to him, like one come back from the dead. He had sold his beast as quickly as he could, but all the business was not finished. He took her again through the hurtling welter of the cattle market. Then at last they turned and went out through the gate. He was always hailing one man or another, always stopping to gossip about land and cattle and horses and other things she did not understand. Standing in the filth and the smell among the legs and great boots of men, and always she heard the questions. What last is that, then? I didn't know that one of that age. It belongs to my missus. Anna was very conscious of her derivation from her mother in the end and of her alienation. But at last they were away, and Brangwun went with her into a little dark, ancient eating-house in the bridal smith gate. They had cow's tail soup and meat and cabbage and potatoes. Other men, other people, came into the dark vaulted place to eat. Anna was wide-eyed and silent with wonder. Then they went into the big market, into the corn exchange, then to shops. He bought her a little book off a stall. He loved buying things, odd things that he thought would be useful.  She was tired out with wonder and marveling, but the next day, when she thought of it, she skipped, flipping her leg in the odd dance she did, and talked to the whole time of what had happened to her, of what she had seen. It lasted her all the week, and the next Saturday she was eager to go again. She became a familiar figure in the cattle market, sitting waiting in the little booth, but she liked best to go to Derby. There her father had more friends, and she liked the familiarity of the smaller town, the nearness of the river, the strangeness that did not frighten her. It was so much smaller. She liked the covered-in market and the old women. She liked the George Inn where her father put up. The landlord was Brangwyn's old friend, and Anna was made much of.  And when the farmers all gathered at twelve o'clock for dinner, she was a little heroine. At first she would only glower or hiss at these strange men with their uncouth accent, but they were good-humored.  She kindled their attention. She was very angry because Marriott, a gentleman farmer from Ambergate, called her the little pole cat. While you're a pole cat, he said to her, I'm not, she flashed. You are, that's just how a pole cat goes. She thought about it. Well, you're, you're, she began. I'm what? She looked him up and down.  There was a roar of laughter. They loved her that she was indomitable. Ah, said Marriott. Only a pole cat says that. Well, I am a pole cat, she flamed. There was another roar of laughter from the men. They loved to tease her. Well, me little maid, Braithwaite would say to her, and how is the lamb's wool? He gave a tug at a glistening pale piece of her hair. It's not lamb's wool, said Anna indignantly, putting back her offended lock. Why, what's it caught then? It's hair. Hair. Where ever did they rear that sort? Where ever done they, she asked in dialect, her curiosity overcoming her. Instead of answering, he shouted with joy. It was the triumph to make her speak dialect. She had one enemy, the man they called nut nut, or nut nut, a cretin with interned feet who came flap-lapping along, shoulder jerking up at every step. Those poor creatures sold nuts in the public houses where he was known. He had no roof to his mouth, and the men used to mock his speech. The first time he came into the George when Anna was there, she asked after he had gone, her eyes very round, why does he do that when he walks? It cannot help itself, ducky. It's the make of the fella. She thought about it, then she laughed nervously. And then she bethought herself, her cheeks flushed, and she cried, he's a horrid man. Nay, he's non-horrid. He cannot help it if he were struck that road. But when poor Nat came wobbling in again, she slid away, and she would not eat his nuts, if the men bought them for her. And when the farmers gambled at dominoes for them, she was angry.  So her revulsion started against Nat, who had not long after to go to the workhouse. There grew in Brangwin's heart now a secret desire to make her a lady. His brother Alfred in Nottingham had caused a great scandal by becoming the lover of an educated woman, a lady, widow of a doctor. Very often Alfred Brangwin went down as a friend to her cottage, which was in Derbyshire, leaving his wife and family for a day or two, then returning to them. And no one dared gaince him, for he was a strong-willed, direct man, and he said he was a friend of this widow. One day Brangwin met his brother on the station. Where are you going to then? asked the younger brother. I'm going down to Worksworth. You've got friends down there, I'm told. Yes. I shall have to be looking in when I'm down that road. You please yourself. Tom Brangwin was so curious about the woman that the next time he was in Worksworth, he asked for her house. He found a beautiful cottage on the steep side of a hill, looking clean over the town that lay in the bottom of the basin, and away at the old quarries on the opposite side of the space. Mrs. Forbes was in the garden. She was a tall woman with white hair.  It was autumn. She wore a wide-brimmed hat. Brangwin blushed to the roots of his hair and did not know what to say. I thought I might look in, he said, knowing you were friends of my brothers. I had to come to Worksworth. She saw at once that he was a Brangwin. Will you come in? she said. My father is lying down. She took him into a drawing room full of books with a piano and a violin stand. And they talked. She simply and easily.  The room was of a kind Brangwin had never known. The atmosphere seemed open and spacious, like a mountain top to him. Does my brother like reading, he asked? Some things. He has been reading Herbert Spencer. And we read Browning sometimes. Brangwin was full of admiration, deep thrilling, almost reverential admiration. He looked at her with lit up eyes when she said, We read. At last he burst out, looking round the room. I didn't know our Alfred was this way inclined. He is quite an unusual man. He looked at her in amazement. She evidently had a new idea of his brother. She evidently appreciated him. He looked again at the woman. She was about forty, straight, rather hard, a curious, separate creature. Himself he was not in love with her. There was something chilling about her. But he was filled with boundless admiration. At tea time he was introduced to her father, an invalid who had to be helped about, but who was ruddy and well-favored, with snowy hair and watery blue eyes, and a courtly naive manner that again was new and strange to Brangwin, so suave, so merry, so innocent. His brother was this woman's lover. It was too amazing. Brangwin went home despising himself for his own poor way of life. He was a claw-hopper and a boar, dull, stuck in the mud. More than ever he wanted to clamor out to this visionary, polite world. He was well off. He was as well off as Alfred, who could not have above six hundred a year, all told. He himself made about four hundred, and could make more. His investments got better every day. Why did he not do something? His wife was a lady also. But when he got to the marsh, he realized how fixed everything was, how the other form of life was beyond him, and he regretted for the first time that he had succeeded to the farm. He felt a prisoner sitting safe and easy and unadventurous. He might with risk have done more with himself. He could neither read Browning nor Herbert Spencer, nor have access to such a room as Mrs. Forbes's. All that form of life was outside him. But then he said he did not want it. The excitement of the visit began to pass off. The next day he was himself. And if he thought of the other woman, there was something about her and her place that he did not like. Something cold, something alien, as if she were not a woman, but an inhuman being who used up human life for cold, unliving purposes. The evening came on. He played with Anna and then sat alone with his own wife. She was sowing. He sat very still, smoking, perturbed. He was aware of his wife's quiet figure and quiet dark head bent over her needle. It was too quiet for him. It was too peaceful. He wanted to smash the walls down and let the night in so that his wife should not be so secure and quiet sitting there. He wished the air were not so close and narrow. His wife was obliterated from him. She was in her own world, quiet, secure, unnoticed, unnoticing. He was shut down by her. He rose to go out. He could not sit still any longer. He must get out of the suppressive shut-down woman-haunt. His wife lifted her head and looked at him. Are you going out? She asked. He looked down. He looked down and met her eyes. They were darker than darkness and gave deeper space. He felt himself retreating before her, defensive, whilst her eyes followed and tracked his own. I was just going up to Kasate, he said. She remained watching him. Why do you go? she said. His heart beat fast and he sat down slowly. No reason particular, he said, beginning to fill his pipe again mechanically. Why do you go away so often, she said? But you don't want me, he replied. She was silent for a while. You did not want to be with me anymore, she said. It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was his secret. Yay, he said. You want to find something else, she said. He did not answer. Did he? he asked himself. You should not want so much attention, she said. You are not a baby. I'm not grumbling, he said. Yet he knew he was. You think you have not enough, she said. How enough? You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do you do to make me love you? He was flabbergasted. I never said I hadn't enough in you, he replied. I didn't know you wanted making to love me. What do you want? You don't make it good between us anymore. You are not interested.   There was a silence. There were such strangers. Would you like to have another woman? She asked. His eyes grew round. He did not know where he was. How could she, his own wife, say such a thing? But she sat there, small and foreign and separate. It dawned upon him she did not consider herself his wife, except insofar as they agreed. She did not feel she had married him. At any rate she was willing to allow he might want another woman. A gap, a space, opened before him. No, he said slowly. What other woman should I want? Like your brother, she said. He was silent for some time, ashamed also. What of her, he said. I didn't like the woman. Yes, you liked her, she answered persistently. He stared in wonder at his own wife, as she told him his own heart so callously, and he was indignant. What right had she to sit there telling him these things? She was his wife. What right had she to speak to him like this, as if she were a stranger? I didn't, he said. I want no woman. Yes, you would like to be like Alfred. His silence was one of angry frustration. He was astonished. He had told her of his visit to Workworth, but briefly, without interest, he thought.  He began to oppose her. She was again the active unknown facing him. Must he admit her? He resisted involuntarily. Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you than me? She said. The turbulence raged in his breast. I don't, he said. Why do you? she repeated. Why do you want to deny me? Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely, isolated, unsure, she had seemed to him the utterly certain, satisfied, absolute, excluding him. Could she need anything? Why aren't you satisfied with me? I'm not satisfied with you. Paul used to come to me and take me like a man does. You only leave me alone, or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again so that you can forget me again. What am I to remember about you, said Brangwin? I want you to know there is somebody there besides yourself. Well, don't I know it? You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing there. When Paul came to me, I was something to him, a woman. I was. To you I am nothing. It is like cattle or nothing. You make me feel as if I was nothing, he said. They were silent. She sat watching him. He could not move. His soul was seething and chaotic. She turned to her sewing again, but the sight of her bent before him held him and would not let him be. She was a strange, hostile, dominant thing, yet not quite hostile. As he said, he felt his limbs were strong and hard. He sat in strength. She was silent for a long time, stitching. He was aware, poignantly, of the round shape of her head, very intimate, compelling. She lifted her head inside. The blood burned in him. Her voice ran to him like fire. Come here, she said, unsure. For some moments he did not move. Then he rose slowly and went across the hearth. It required an almost deathly effort of volition or of acquiescence. He stood before her and looked down at her. Her face was shining again. Her eyes were shining again like terrible laughter. It was to him terrible how she could be transfigured. He could not look at her, it burnt his heart. My love, she said, and she put her arms round him as he stood before her. Round his thighs, pressing him against her breast, and her hands on him seemed to reveal to him the mold of his own nakedness. He was passionately lovely to himself. He could not bear to look at her. My dear, she said. He knew she spoke a foreign language. The fear was like bliss in his heart. He looked down. Her face was shining. Her eyes were full of light. She was awful. He suffered from the compulsion to her. She was the awful unknown. He bent down to her, suffering, unable to let go, unable to let himself go, yet drawn, driven. She was now the transfigured. She was wonderful, beyond him. He wanted to go, but he could not, as yet, kiss her. He was himself apart. Easiest he could kiss her feet, but he was too ashamed for the actual deed, which were like an affront. She waited for him to meet her, not to bow before her and serve her. She wanted his active participation, not his submission. She put her fingers on him, and it was torture to him that he must give himself to her actively, participate in her, that he must meet and embrace and know her, who was other than himself. There was that in him which shrank from yielding to her, resisted the relaxing towards her, opposed the mingling with her, even while he most desired it. He was afraid. He wanted to save himself. There were a few moments of stillness, then gradually the tension, the withholding, relaxed in him, and he began to flow towards her. She was beyond him, the unattainable, but he let go his hold on himself. He relinquished himself and knew the subterranean force of his desire to come to her, to be with her, to mingle with her, losing himself to find her, to find himself in her. He began to approach her, to draw near. His blood beat up in waves of desire. He wanted to come to her, to meet her. She was there if he could reach her. The reality of her, who was just beyond him, absorbed him. Blind and destroyed, he pressed forward, nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of himself. He received within the darkness which should swallow him and yield him up to himself. If he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation that were supreme, supreme. There coming together now, after two years of married life, was much more wonderful to them than it had been before. It was the entry into another circle of existence. It was the baptism to another life. It was the complete confirmation. Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge. Their footsteps were lit up with discovery. Wherever they walked, it was well. The world re-echoed round them in discovery. They went gladly and forgetful. Everything was lost and everything was found. The new world was discovered. It remained only to be explored. They had passed through the doorway into the further space where movement was so big that it contained bonds and constraints and labors and still was complete liberty. She was the doorway to him, he to her. At last they had thrown open the doors each to the other and had stood in the doorways facing each other whilst the light flooded out from behind onto each of their faces. It was the transfiguration, glorification, the admission. And always the light of the transfiguration burned on in their heart. He went his way as before. She went her way. To the rest of the world there seemed no change. But to the two of them there was the perpetual wonder of the transfiguration. He did not know her any better, any more precisely, now that he knew her altogether. Poland, her husband, the war. He understood no more of this in her. He did not understand her foreign nature, half German, half Polish, nor her foreign speech. But he knew her. He knew her meaning without understanding. What she said, what she spoke, this was a blind gesture on her part. In herself she walked strong and clear. He knew her, he saluted her, was with her. What was memory after all but the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been fulfilled? What was Paul Lenski to her but an unfulfilled possibility to which he, Brangwen, was the reality in the fulfillment? What did it matter that Anna Lenski was born of Lydia and Paul? God was her father and her mother. He had passed through the married pair without fully making himself known to them. Now he was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen as they stood together. When at last they had joined hands the house was finished and the Lord took up his abode and they were glad. The days went on as before. Brangwen went out to his work. His wife nursed her child and attended in some measure to the farm. They did not think of each other. Why should they? Only when she touched him he knew her instantly that she was with him, near him, that she was the gateway and the way out, that she was beyond and that he was traveling in her through the beyond. With her what does it matter? He responded always when she called he answered. When he asked her response came at once or at length. Anna's soul was put at peace between them. She looked from one to the other and she saw them established to her safety and she was free. She played between the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud in confidence, having the assurance on her right hand and the assurance on her left. She was no longer called upon to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch. Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath between.