Chapter VI.

ANNA VICTRIX

Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two

took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen,

and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody

else buried, themselves two blissful survivors, with everything to

squander as they would. At first, he could not get rid of a culpable

sense of licence on his part. Wasn’t there some duty outside, calling

him and he did not come?

It was all very well at night, when the doors were locked and the

darkness drawn round the two of them. Then they were the only

inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest were under the flood. And

being alone in the world, they were a law unto themselves, they could

enjoy and squander and waste like conscienceless gods.

But in the morning, as the carts clanked by, and children shouted down

the lane; as the hucksters came calling their wares, and the church

clock struck eleven, and he and she had not got up yet, even to

breakfast, he could not help feeling guilty, as if he were committing a

breach of the law—ashamed that he was not up and doing.

“Doing what?” she asked. “What is there to do? You will only lounge

about.”

Still, even lounging about was respectable. One was at least in

connection with the world, then. Whereas now, lying so still and

peacefully, while the daylight came obscurely through the drawn blind,

one was severed from the world, one shut oneself off in tacit denial of

the world. And he was troubled.

But it was so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with

her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even

irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming: there seemed no

space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, whilst she

traced his features with her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy,

and he loved her to do it.

But he was strange and unused. So suddenly, everything that had been

before was shed away and gone. One day, he was a bachelor, living with

the world. The next day, he was with her, as remote from the world as

if the two of them were buried like a seed in darkness. Suddenly, like

a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on

to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly

knowledge and experience. He heard it in the huckster’s cries, the

noise of carts, the calling of children. And it was all like the hard,

shed rind, discarded. Inside, in the softness and stillness of the

room, was the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent activity,

absorbed in reality.

Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only

far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the destruction. Here at

the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here

was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it

remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted.

As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or

change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow

wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside

them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal

being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all

movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found

themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for their

moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off,

for ever far off, towards the rim.

Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme centre, down the

circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and further out,

towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had burned and

were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably glad.

Gradually they began to wake up, the noises outside became more real.

They understood and answered the call outside. They counted the strokes

of the bell. And when they counted midday, they understood that it was

midday, in the world, and for themselves also.

It dawned upon her that she was hungry. She had been getting hungrier

for a lifetime. But even yet it was not sufficiently real to rouse her.

A long way off she could hear the words, “I am dying of hunger.” Yet

she lay still, separate, at peace, and the words were unuttered. There

was still another lapse.

And then, quite calmly, even a little surprised, she was in the

present, and was saying:

“I am dying with hunger.”

“So am I,” he said calmly, as if it were of not the slightest

significance. And they relapsed into the warm, golden stillness. And

the minutes flowed unheeded past the window outside.

Then suddenly she stirred against him.

“My dear, I am dying of hunger,” she said.

It was a slight pain to him to be brought to.

“We’ll get up,” he said, unmoving.

And she sank her head on to him again, and they lay still, lapsing.

Half consciously, he heard the clock chime the hour. She did not hear.

“Do get up,” she murmured at length, “and give me something to eat.”

“Yes,” he said, and he put his arms round her, and she lay with her

face on him. They were faintly astonished that they did not move. The

minutes rustled louder at the window.

“Let me go then,” he said.

She lifted her head from him, relinquishingly. With a little breaking

away, he moved out of bed, and was taking his clothes. She stretched

out her hand to him.

“You are so nice,” she said, and he went back for a moment or two.

Then actually he did slip into some clothes, and, looking round quickly

at her, was gone out of the room. She lay translated again into a pale,

clearer peace. As if she were a spirit, she listened to the noise of

him downstairs, as if she were no longer of the material world.

It was half-past one. He looked at the silent kitchen, untouched from

last night, dim with the drawn blind. And he hastened to draw up the

blind, so people should know they were not in bed any later. Well, it

was his own house, it did not matter. Hastily he put wood in the grate

and made a fire. He exulted in himself, like an adventurer on an

undiscovered island. The fire blazed up, he put on the kettle. How

happy he felt! How still and secluded the house was! There were only he

and she in the world.

But when he unbolted the door, and, half-dressed, looked out, he felt

furtive and guilty. The world was there, after all. And he had felt so

secure, as though this house were the Ark in the flood, and all the

rest was drowned. The world was there: and it was afternoon. The

morning had vanished and gone by, the day was growing old. Where was

the bright, fresh morning? He was accused. Was the morning gone, and he

had lain with blinds drawn, let it pass by unnoticed?

He looked again round the chill, grey afternoon. And he himself so soft

and warm and glowing! There were two sprigs of yellow jasmine in the

saucer that covered the milk-jug. He wondered who had been and left the

sign. Taking the jug, he hastily shut the door. Let the day and the

daylight drop out, let it go by unseen. He did not care. What did one

day more or less matter to him. It could fall into oblivion unspent if

it liked, this one course of daylight.

“Somebody has been and found the door locked,” he said when he went

upstairs with the tray. He gave her the two sprigs of jasmine. She

laughed as she sat up in bed, childishly threading the flowers in the

breast of her nightdress. Her brown hair stuck out like a nimbus, all

fierce, round her softly glowing face. Her dark eyes watched the tray

eagerly.

“How good!” she cried, sniffing the cold air. “I’m glad you did a lot.”

And she stretched out her hands eagerly for her plate—“Come back to

bed, quick—it’s cold.” She rubbed her hands together sharply.

He [put off what little clothing he had on, and] sat beside her in the

bed.

“You look like a lion, with your mane sticking out, and your nose

pushed over your food,” he said.

She tinkled with laughter, and gladly ate her breakfast.

The morning was sunk away unseen, the afternoon was steadily going too,

and he was letting it go. One bright transit of daylight gone by

unacknowledged! There was something unmanly, recusant in it. He could

not quite reconcile himself to the fact. He felt he ought to get up, go

out quickly into the daylight, and work or spend himself energetically

in the open air of the afternoon, retrieving what was left to him of

the day.

But he did not go. Well, one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a

lamb. If he had lost this day of his life, he had lost it. He gave it

up. He was not going to count his losses. _She_ didn’t care. _She_

didn’t care in the least. Then why should he? Should he be behind her

in recklessness and independence? She was superb in her indifference.

He wanted to be like her.

She took her responsibilities lightly. When she spilled her tea on the

pillow, she rubbed it carelessly with a handkerchief, and turned over

the pillow. He would have felt guilty. She did not. And it pleased him.

It pleased him very much to see how these things did not matter to her.

When the meal was over, she wiped her mouth on her handkerchief

quickly, satisfied and happy, and settled down on the pillow again,

with her fingers in his close, strange, fur-like hair.

The evening began to fall, the light was half alive, livid. He hid his

face against her.

“I don’t like the twilight,” he said.

“I love it,” she answered.

He hid his face against her, who was warm and like sunlight. She seemed

to have sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed like sunlight

upon him. In her was a more real day than the day could give: so warm

and steady and restoring. He hid his face against her whilst the

twilight fell, whilst she lay staring out with her unseeing dark eyes,

as if she wandered forth untrammelled in the vagueness. The vagueness

gave her scope and set her free.

To him, turned towards her heart-pulse, all was very still and very

warm and very close, like noon-tide. He was glad to know this warm,

full noon. It ripened him and took away his responsibility, some of his

conscience.

They got up when it was quite dark. She hastily twisted her hair into a

knot, and was dressed in a twinkling. Then they went downstairs, drew

to the fire, and sat in silence, saying a few words now and then.

Her father was coming. She bundled the dishes away, flew round and

tidied the room, assumed another character, and again seated herself.

He sat thinking of his carving of Eve. He loved to go over his carving

in his mind, dwelling on every stroke, every line. How he loved it now!

When he went back to his Creation-panel again, he would finish his Eve,

tender and sparkling. It did not satisfy him yet. The Lord should

labour over her in a silent passion of Creation, and Adam should be

tense as if in a dream of immortality, and Eve should take form

glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His own soul

for her, yet she was a radiance.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

He found it difficult to say. His soul became shy when he tried to

communicate it.

“I was thinking my Eve was too hard and lively.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She should be more——,” he made a gesture of infinite

tenderness.

There was a stillness with a little joy. He could not tell her any

more. Why could he not tell her any more? She felt a pang of

disconsolate sadness. But it was nothing. She went to him.

Her father came, and found them both very glowing, like an open flower.

He loved to sit with them. Where there was a perfume of love, anyone

who came must breathe it. They were both very quick and alive, lit up

from the other-world, so that it was quite an experience for them, that

anyone else could exist.

But still it troubled Will Brangwen a little, in his orderly,

conventional mind, that the established rule of things had gone so

utterly. One ought to get up in the morning and wash oneself and be a

decent social being. Instead, the two of them stayed in bed till

nightfall, and then got up, she never washed her face, but sat there

talking to her father as bright and shameless as a daisy opened out of

the dew. Or she got up at ten o’clock, and quite blithely went to bed

again at three, or at half-past four, stripping him naked in the

daylight, and all so gladly and perfectly, oblivious quite of his

qualms. He let her do as she liked with him, and shone with strange

pleasure. She was to dispose of him as she would. He was translated

with gladness to be in her hands. And down went his qualms, his maxims,

his rules, his smaller beliefs, she scattered them like an expert

skittle-player. He was very much astonished and delighted to see them

scatter.

He stood and gazed and grinned with wonder whilst his Tablets of Stone

went bounding and bumping and splintering down the hill, dislodged for

ever. Indeed, it was true as they said, that a man wasn’t born before

he was married. What a change indeed!

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the

discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the

discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was

as if the surface of the world had been broken away entire: Ilkeston,

streets, church, people, work, rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet

peeled away into unreality, leaving here exposed the inside, the

reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings

and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the

permanent bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was

confounding. Things are not what they seem! When he was a child, he had

thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her skirts and

petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be divested of its

garment, the garment could lie there shed away intact, and one could

stand in a new world, a new earth, naked in a new, naked universe. It

was too astounding and miraculous.

This then was marriage! The old things didn’t matter any more. One got

up at four o’clock, and had broth at tea-time and made toffee in the

middle of the night. One didn’t put on one’s clothes or one did put on

one’s clothes. He still was not quite sure it was not criminal. But it

was a discovery to find one might be so supremely absolved. All that

mattered was that he should love her and she should love him and they

should live kindled to one another, like the Lord in two burning bushes

that were not consumed. And so they lived for the time.

She was less hampered than he, so she came more quickly to her fulness,

and was sooner ready to enjoy again a return to the outside world. She

was going to give a tea-party. His heart sank. He wanted to go on, to

go on as they were. He wanted to have done with the outside world, to

declare it finished for ever. He was anxious with a deep desire and

anxiety that she should stay with him where they were in the timeless

universe of free, perfect limbs and immortal breast, affirming that the

old outward order was finished. The new order was begun to last for

ever, the living life, palpitating from the gleaming core, to action,

without crust or cover or outward lie. But no, he could not keep her.

She wanted the dead world again—she wanted to walk on the outside once

more. She was going to give a tea-party. It made him frightened and

furious and miserable. He was afraid all would be lost that he had so

newly come into: like the youth in the fairy tale, who was king for one

day in the year, and for the rest a beaten herd: like Cinderella also,

at the feast. He was sullen. But she blithely began to make

preparations for her tea-party. His fear was too strong, he was

troubled, he hated her shallow anticipation and joy. Was she not

forfeiting the reality, the one reality, for all that was shallow and

worthless? Wasn’t she carelessly taking off her crown to be an

artificial figure having other artificial women to tea: when she might

have been perfect with him, and kept him perfect, in the land of

intimate connection? Now he must be deposed, his joy must be destroyed,

he must put on the vulgar, shallow death of an outward existence.

He ground his soul in uneasiness and fear. But she rose to a real

outburst of house-work, turning him away as she shoved the furniture

aside to her broom. He stood hanging miserable near. He wanted her

back. Dread, and desire for her to stay with him, and shame at his own

dependence on her drove him to anger. He began to lose his head. The

wonder was going to pass away again. All the love, the magnificent new

order was going to be lost, she would forfeit it all for the outside

things. She would admit the outside world again, she would throw away

the living fruit for the ostensible rind. He began to hate this in her.

Driven by fear of her departure into a state of helplessness, almost of

imbecility, he wandered about the house.

And she, with her skirts kilted up, flew round at her work, absorbed.

“Shake the rug then, if you must hang round,” she said.

And fretting with resentment, he went to shake the rug. She was

blithely unconscious of him. He came back, hanging near to her.

“Can’t you do anything?” she said, as if to a child, impatiently.

“Can’t you do your wood-work?”

“Where shall I do it?” he asked, harsh with pain.

“Anywhere.”

How furious that made him.

“Or go for a walk,” she continued. “Go down to the Marsh. Don’t hang

about as if you were only half there.”

He winced and hated it. He went away to read. Never had his soul felt

so flayed and uncreated.

And soon he must come down again to her. His hovering near her, wanting

her to be with him, the futility of him, the way his hands hung,

irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him blindly and

destructively, he became a mad creature, black and electric with fury.

The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed black and evil, he was

fiendish in his thwarted soul.

There followed two black and ghastly days, when she was set in anguish

against him, and he felt as if he were in a black, violent underworld,

and his wrists quivered murderously. And she resisted him. He seemed a

dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her, hanging on to her, burdening

her. She would give anything to have him removed.

“You need some work to do,” she said. “You ought to be at work. Can’t

you _do_ something?”

His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the

darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained

complete in his own tense, black will. He was now unaware of her. She

did not exist. His dark, passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and

now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own

power. There was a curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his

face. She shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed

grappled upon her.

She retreated before him. She went down to the Marsh, she entered again

the immunity of her parents’ love for her. He remained at Yew Cottage,

black and clinched, his mind dead. He was unable to work at his

wood-carving. He went on working monotonously at the garden, blindly,

like a mole.

As she came home, up the hill, looking away at the town dim and blue on

the hill, her heart relaxed and became yearning. She did not want to

fight him any more. She wanted love—oh, love. Her feet began to hurry.

She wanted to get back to him. Her heart became tight with yearning for

him.

He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of the turf,

laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable workman.

“How nice you’ve made it,” she said, approaching tentatively down the

path.

But he did not heed, he did not hear. His brain was solid and dead.

“Haven’t you made it nice?” she repeated, rather plaintively.

He looked up at her, with that fixed, expressionless face and unseeing

eyes which shocked her, made her go dazed and blind. Then he turned

away. She saw his slender, stooping figure groping. A revulsion came

over her. She went indoors.

As she took off her hat in the bedroom, she found herself weeping

bitterly, with some of the old, anguished, childish desolation. She sat

still and cried on. She did not want him to know. She was afraid of his

hard, evil moments, the head dropped a little, rigidly, in a crouching,

cruel way. She was afraid of him. He seemed to lacerate her sensitive

femaleness. He seemed to hurt her womb, to take pleasure in torturing

her.

He came into the house. The sound of his footsteps in his heavy boots

filled her with horror: a hard, cruel, malignant sound. She was afraid

he would come upstairs. But he did not. She waited apprehensively. He

went out.

Where she was most vulnerable, he hurt her. Oh, where she was delivered

over to him, in her very soft femaleness, he seemed to lacerate her and

desecrate her. She pressed her hands over her womb in anguish, whilst

the tears ran down her face. And why, and why? Why was he like this?

Suddenly she dried her tears. She must get the tea ready. She went

downstairs and set the table. When the meal was ready, she called to

him.

“I’ve mashed the tea, Will, are you coming?”

She herself could hear the sound of tears in her own voice, and she

began to cry again. He did not answer, but went on with his work. She

waited a few minutes, in anguish. Fear came over her, she was

panic-stricken with terror, like a child; and she could not go home

again to her father; she was held by the power in this man who had

taken her.

She turned indoors so that he should not see her tears. She sat down to

table. Presently he came into the scullery. His movements jarred on

her, as she heard them. How horrible was the way he pumped,

exacerbating, so cruel! How she hated to hear him! How he hated her!

How his hatred was like blows upon her! The tears were coming again.

He came in, his face wooden and lifeless, fixed, persistent. He sat

down to tea, his head dropped over his cup, uglily. His hands were red

from the cold water, and there were rims of earth in his nails. He went

on with his tea.

It was his negative insensitiveness to her that she could not bear,

something clayey and ugly. His intelligence was self-absorbed. How

unnatural it was to sit with a self-absorbed creature, like something

negative ensconced opposite one. Nothing could touch him—he could only

absorb things into his own self.

The tears were running down her face. Something startled him, and he

was looking up at her with his hateful, hard, bright eyes, hard and

unchanging as a bird of prey.

“What are you crying for?” came the grating voice.

She winced through her womb. She could not stop crying.

“What are you crying for?” came the question again, in just the same

tone. And still there was silence, with only the sniff of her tears.

His eyes glittered, and as if with malignant desire. She shrank and

became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down. A sort of swoon of

helplessness came over her. She was of another order than he, she had

no defence against him. Against such an influence, she was only

vulnerable, she was given up.

He rose and went out of the house, possessed by the evil spirit. It

tortured him and wracked him, and fought in him. And whilst he worked,

in the deepening twilight, it left him. Suddenly he saw that she was

hurt. He had only seen her triumphant before. Suddenly his heart was

torn with compassion for her. He became alive again, in an anguish of

compassion. He could not bear to think of her tears—he could not bear

it. He wanted to go to her and pour out his heart’s blood to her. He

wanted to give everything to her, all his blood, his life, to the last

dregs, pour everything away to her. He yearned with passionate desire

to offer himself to her, utterly.

The evening star came, and the night. She had not lighted the lamp. His

heart burned with pain and with grief. He trembled to go to her.

And at last he went, hesitating, burdened with a great offering. The

hardness had gone out of him, his body was sensitive, slightly

trembling. His hand was curiously sensitive, shrinking, as he shut the

door. He fixed the latch almost tenderly.

In the kitchen was only the fireglow, he could not see her. He quivered

with dread lest she had gone—he knew not where. In shrinking dread, he

went through to the parlour, to the foot of the stairs.

“Anna,” he called.

There was no answer. He went up the stairs, in dread of the empty

house—the horrible emptiness that made his heart ring with insanity. He

opened the bedroom door, and his heart flashed with certainty that she

had gone, that he was alone.

But he saw her on the bed, lying very still and scarcely noticeable,

with her back to him. He went and put his hand on her shoulder, very

gently, hesitating, in a great fear and self-offering. She did not

move.

He waited. The hand that touched her shoulder hurt him, as if she were

sending it away. He stood dim with pain.

“Anna,” he said.

But still she was motionless, like a curled up, oblivious creature. His

heart beat with strange throes of pain. Then, by a motion under his

hand, he knew she was crying, holding herself hard so that her tears

should not be known. He waited. The tension continued—perhaps she was

not crying—then suddenly relapsed with a sharp catch of a sob. His

heart flamed with love and suffering for her. Kneeling carefully on the

bed, so that his earthy boots should not touch it, he took her in his

arms to comfort her. The sobs gathered in her, she was sobbing

bitterly. But not to him. She was still away from him.

He held her against his breast, whilst she sobbed, withheld from him,

and all his body vibrated against her.

“Don’t cry—don’t cry,” he said, with an odd simplicity. His heart was

calm and numb with a sort of innocence of love, now.

She still sobbed, ignoring him, ignoring that he held her. His lips

were dry.

“Don’t cry, my love,” he said, in the same abstract way. In his breast

his heart burned like a torch, with suffering. He could not bear the

desolateness of her crying. He would have soothed her with his blood.

He heard the church clock chime, as if it touched him, and he waited in

suspense for it to have gone by. It was quiet again.

“My love,” he said to her, bending to touch her wet face with his

mouth. He was afraid to touch her. How wet her face was! His body

trembled as he held her. He loved her till he felt his heart and all

his veins would burst and flood her with his hot, healing blood. He

knew his blood would heal and restore her.

She was becoming quieter. He thanked the God of mercy that at last she

was becoming quieter. His head felt so strange and blazed. Still he

held her close, with trembling arms. His blood seemed very strong,

enveloping her.

And at last she began to draw near to him, she nestled to him. His

limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she

cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of

fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth,

soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins would burst with

anguish of thankfulness, his heart was mad with gratefulness, he could

pour himself out upon her for ever.

When they came to themselves, the night was very dark. Two hours had

gone by. They lay still and warm and weak, like the new-born, together.

And there was a silence almost of the unborn. Only his heart was

weeping happily, after the pain. He did not understand, he had yielded,

given way. There _was_ no understanding. There could be only

acquiescence and submission, and tremulous wonder of consummation.

The next morning, when they woke up, it had snowed. He wondered what

was the strange pallor in the air, and the unusual tang. Snow was on

the grass and the window-sill, it weighed down the black, ragged

branches of the yews, and smoothed the graves in the churchyard.

Soon, it began to snow again, and they were shut in. He was glad, for

then they were immune in a shadowy silence, there was no world, no

time.

The snow lasted for some days. On the Sunday they went to church. They

made a line of footprints across the garden, he left a flat snowprint

of his hand on the wall as he vaulted over, they traced the snow across

the churchyard. For three days they had been immune in a perfect love.

There were very few people in church, and she was glad. She did not

care much for church. She had never questioned any beliefs, and she

was, from habit and custom, a regular attendant at morning service. But

she had ceased to come with any anticipation. To-day, however, in the

strangeness of snow, after such consummation of love, she felt

expectant again, and delighted. She was still in the eternal world.

She used, after she went to the High School, and wanted to be a lady,

wanted to fulfil some mysterious ideal, always to listen to the sermon

and to try to gather suggestions. That was all very well for a while.

The vicar told her to be good in this way and in that. She went away

feeling it was her highest aim to fulfil these injunctions.

But quickly this palled. After a short time, she was not very much

interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was

not just being good, and doing one’s best. No, she wanted something

else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to

be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked

about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or to implicate her

soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.

So that whilst she had an affection for Mr. Loverseed, the vicar, and a

protective sort of feeling for Cossethay church, wanting always to help

it and defend it, it counted very small in her life.

Not but that she was conscious of some unsatisfaction. When her husband

was roused by the thought of the churches, then she became hostile to

the ostensible church, she hated it for not fulfilling anything in her.

The Church told her to be good: very well, she had no idea of

contradicting what it said. The Church talked about her soul, about the

welfare of mankind, as if the saving of her soul lay in her performing

certain acts conducive to the welfare of mankind. Well and good—it was

so, then.

Nevertheless, as she sat in church her face had a pathos and poignancy.

Was this what she had come to hear: how by doing this thing and by not

doing that, she could save her soul? She did not contradict it. But the

pathos of her face gave the lie. There was something else she wanted to

hear, it was something else she asked for from the Church.

But who was _she_ to affirm it? And what was she doing with unsatisfied

desires? She was ashamed. She ignored them and left them out of count

as much as possible, her underneath yearnings. They angered her. She

wanted to be like other people, decently satisfied.

He angered her more than ever. Church had an irresistible attraction

for him. And he paid no more attention to that part of the service

which was Church to her, than if he had been an angel or a fabulous

beast sitting there. He simply paid no heed to the sermon or to the

meaning of the service. There was something thick, dark, dense,

powerful about him that irritated her too deeply for her to speak of

it. The Church teaching in itself meant nothing to him. “And forgive us

our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us”—it simply

did not touch him. It might have been more sounds, and it would have

acted upon him in the same way. He did not want things to be

intelligible. And he did not care about his trespasses, neither about

the trespasses of his neighbour, when he was in church. Leave that care

for weekdays. When he was in church, he took no more notice of his

daily life. It was weekday stuff. As for the welfare of mankind—he

merely did not realize that there was any such thing: except on

weekdays, when he was good-natured enough. In church, he wanted a dark,

nameless emotion, the emotion of all the great mysteries of passion.

He was not interested in the _thought_ of himself or of her: oh, and

how that irritated her! He ignored the sermon, he ignored the greatness

of mankind, he did not admit the immediate importance of mankind. He

did not care about himself as a human being. He did not attach any

vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among

men. That was just merely the margin to the text. The verity was his

connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being

lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute.

And the great mysterious, illuminated capitals to the text, were his

feelings with the Church.

It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of the Church

the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was intimately mixed

up with the thought of her own self. Indeed, her soul and her own self

were one and the same in her. Whereas he seemed simply to ignore the

fact of his own self, almost to refute it. He had a soul—a dark,

inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in

the gloom and the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free,

like some strange, underground thing, abstract.

He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in conceiving

himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free of her. In a way,

she envied it him, this dark freedom and jubilation of the soul, some

strange entity in him. It fascinated her. Again she hated it. And

again, she despised him, wanted to destroy it in him.

This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside her, not

aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to strange, secret

places the love that sprang in him for her. He sat with a dark-rapt,

half-delighted face, looking at a little stained window. She saw the

ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow heaped along the bottom from the

snow outside, and the familiar yellow figure of the lamb holding the

banner, a little darkened now, but in the murky interior strangely

luminous, pregnant.

She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The lamb,

looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a forepaw, in the

cleft of which was dangerously perched a little flag with a red cross.

Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish shadows. Since she was a

child she had liked this creature, with the same feeling she felt for

the little woolly lambs on green legs that children carried home from

the fair every year. She had always liked these toys, and she had the

same amused, childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always

been uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag did

not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted it, there

was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.

Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the faintest tension

of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the uncomfortable feeling that he

was in correspondence with the creature, the lamb in the window. A cold

wonder came over her—her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,

timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was he

doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in the glass?

Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag. Suddenly

she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the tradition seized

on her, she was transported to another world. And she hated it,

resisted it.

Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And dark,

violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he doing,

sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?

She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick up her

glove, she groped among his feet.

He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would have

pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what was amiss,

what he had been doing.

As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the chill of

antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so angry. But she was

incensed.

“Why do you never listen to the sermon?” she asked, seething with

hostility and violation.

“I do,” he said.

“You don’t—you don’t hear a single word.”

He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There was

something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge.

The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he was like this.

After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the same state

of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to her. Then he went to

the book-shelf and took down books to look at, that she had scarcely

glanced over.

He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old missals, and

then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian, English, French and

German. He had, when he was sixteen, discovered a Roman Catholic

bookshop where he could find such things.

He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not thinking.

He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she said of him later.

She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated her. She

was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic.

It was when she came to pictures of the Pietà that she burst out.

“I do think they’re loathsome,” she cried.

“What?” he said, surprised, abstracted.

“Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be worshipped.”

“You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread,” he said slowly.

“Does it,” she cried. “Then it’s worse. _I_ don’t want to see your

chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it to me.

Can’t you see it’s horrible?”

“It isn’t me, it’s Christ.”

“What if it is, it’s you! And it’s horrible, you wallowing in your own

dead body, and thinking of eating it in the Sacrament.”

“You’ve to take it for what it means.”

“It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and then

worshipped—what else?”

They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof.

“And I think that Lamb in Church,” she said, “is the biggest joke in

the parish——”

She burst into a “Pouf” of ridiculing laughter.

“It might be, to those that see nothing in it,” he said. “You know it’s

the symbol of Christ, of His innocence and sacrifice.”

“Whatever it means, it’s a _lamb,_” she said. “And I like lambs too

much to treat them as if they had to mean something. As for the

Christmas-tree flag—no——”

And again she poufed with mockery.

“It’s because you don’t know anything,” he said violently, harshly.

“Laugh at what you know, not at what you don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

“What things mean.”

“And what does it mean?”

He was reluctant to answer her. He found it difficult.

“_What_ does it mean?” she insisted.

“It means the triumph of the Resurrection.”

She hesitated, baffled, a fear came upon her. What were these things?

Something dark and powerful seemed to extend before her. Was it

wonderful after all?

But no—she refused it.

“Whatever it may pretend to mean, what it _is_ is a silly absurd

toy-lamb with a Christmas-tree flag ledged on its paw—and if it wants

to mean anything else, it must look different from that.”

He was in a state of violent irritation against her. Partly he was

ashamed of his love for these things; he hid his passion for them. He

was ashamed of the ecstasy into which he could throw himself with these

symbols. And for a few moments he hated the lamb and the mystic

pictures of the Eucharist, with a violent, ashy hatred. His fire was

put out, she had thrown cold water on it. The whole thing was

distasteful to him, his mouth was full of ashes. He went out cold with

corpse-like anger, leaving her alone. He hated her. He walked through

the white snow, under a sky of lead.

And she wept again, in bitter recurrence of the previous gloom. But her

heart was easy—oh, much more easy.

She was quite willing to make it up with him when he came home again.

He was black and surly, but abated. She had broken a little of

something in him. And at length he was glad to forfeit from his soul

all his symbols, to have her making love to him. He loved it when she

put her head on his knee, and he had not asked her to or wanted her to,

he loved her when she put her arms round him and made bold love to him,

and he did not make love to her. He felt a strong blood in his limbs

again.

And she loved the intent, far look of his eyes when they rested on her:

intent, yet far, not near, not with her. And she wanted to bring them

near. She wanted his eyes to come to hers, to know her. And they would

not. They remained intent, and far, and proud, like a hawk’s naïve and

inhuman as a hawk’s. So she loved him and caressed him and roused him

like a hawk, till he was keen and instant, but without tenderness. He

came to her fierce and hard, like a hawk striking and taking her. He

was no mystic any more, she was his aim and object, his prey. And she

was carried off, and he was satisfied, or satiated at last.

Then immediately she began to retaliate on him. She too was a hawk. If

she imitated the pathetic plover running plaintive to him, that was

part of the game. When he, satisfied, moved with a proud, insolent

slouch of the body and a half-contemptuous drop of the head, unaware of

her, ignoring her very existence, after taking his fill of her and

getting his satisfaction of her, her soul roused, its pinions became

like steel, and she struck at him. When he sat on his perch glancing

sharply round with solitary pride, pride eminent and fierce, she dashed

at him and threw him from his station savagely, she goaded him from his

keen dignity of a male, she harassed him from his unperturbed pride,

till he was mad with rage, his light brown eyes burned with fury, they

saw her now, like flames of anger they flared at her and recognized her

as the enemy.

Very good, she was the enemy, very good. As he prowled round her, she

watched him. As he struck at her, she struck back.

He was angry because she had carelessly pushed away his tools so that

they got rusty.

“Don’t leave them littering in my way, then,” she said.

“I shall leave them where I like,” he cried.

“Then I shall throw them where I like.”

They glowered at each other, he with rage in his hands, she with her

soul fierce with victory. They were very well matched. They would fight

it out.

She turned to her sewing. Immediately the tea-things were cleared away,

she fetched out the stuff, and his soul rose in rage. He hated beyond

measure to hear the shriek of calico as she tore the web sharply, as if

with pleasure. And the run of the sewing-machine gathered a frenzy in

him at last.

“Aren’t you going to stop that row?” he shouted. “Can’t you do it in

the daytime?”

She looked up sharply, hostile from her work.

“No, I can’t do it in the daytime. I have other things to do. Besides,

I like sewing, and you’re not going to stop me doing it.”

Whereupon she turned back to her arranging, fixing, stitching, his

nerves jumped with anger as the sewing-machine started and stuttered

and buzzed.

But she was enjoying herself, she was triumphant and happy as the

darting needle danced ecstatically down a hem, drawing the stuff along

under its vivid stabbing, irresistibly. She made the machine hum. She

stopped it imperiously, her fingers were deft and swift and mistress.

If he sat behind her stiff with impotent rage it only made a trembling

vividness come into her energy. On she worked. At last he went to bed

in a rage, and lay stiff, away from her. And she turned her back on

him. And in the morning they did not speak, except in mere cold

civilities.

And when he came home at night, his heart relenting and growing hot for

love of her, when he was just ready to feel he had been wrong, and when

he was expecting her to feel the same, there she sat at the

sewing-machine, the whole house was covered with clipped calico, the

kettle was not even on the fire.

She started up, affecting concern.

“Is it so late?” she cried.

But his face had gone stiff with rage. He walked through to the

parlour, then he walked back and out of the house again. Her heart

sank. Very swiftly she began to make his tea.

He went black-hearted down the road to Ilkeston. When he was in this

state he never thought. A bolt shot across the doors of his mind and

shut him in, a prisoner. He went back to Ilkeston, and drank a glass of

beer. What was he going to do? He did not want to see anybody.

He would go to Nottingham, to his own town. He went to the station and

took a train. When he got to Nottingham, still he had nowhere to go.

However, it was more agreeable to walk familiar streets. He paced them

with a mad restlessness, as if he were running amok. Then he turned to

a book-shop and found a book on Bamberg Cathedral. Here was a

discovery! here was something for him! He went into a quiet restaurant

to look at his treasure. He lit up with thrills of bliss as he turned

from picture to picture. He had found something at last, in these

carvings. His soul had great satisfaction. Had he not come out to seek,

and had he not found! He was in a passion of fulfilment. These were the

finest carvings, statues, he had ever seen. The book lay in his hands

like a doorway. The world around was only an enclosure, a room. But he

was going away. He lingered over the lovely statues of women. A

marvellous, finely-wrought universe crystallized out around him as he

looked again, at the crowns, the twining hair, the woman-faces. He

liked all the better the unintelligible text of the German. He

preferred things he could not understand with the mind. He loved the

undiscovered and the undiscoverable. He pored over the pictures

intensely. And these were wooden statues, “Holz”—he believed that meant

wood. Wooden statues so shapen to his soul! He was a million times

gladdened. How undiscovered the world was, how it revealed itself to

his soul! What a fine, exciting thing his life was, at his hand! Did

not Bamberg Cathedral make the world his own? He celebrated his

triumphant strength and life and verity, and embraced the vast riches

he was inheriting.

But it was about time to go home. He had better catch a train. All the

time there was a steady bruise at the bottom of his soul, but so steady

as to be forgettable. He caught a train for Ilkeston.

It was ten o’clock as he was mounting the hill to Cossethay, carrying

his limp book on Bamberg Cathedral. He had not yet thought of Anna, not

definitely. The dark finger pressing a bruise controlled him

thoughtlessly.

Anna had started guiltily when he left the house. She had hastened

preparing the tea, hoping he would come back. She had made some toast,

and got all ready. Then he didn’t come. She cried with vexation and

disappointment. Why had he gone? Why couldn’t he come back now? Why was

it such a battle between them? She loved him—she did love him—why

couldn’t he be kinder to her, nicer to her?

She waited in distress—then her mood grew harder. He passed out of her

thoughts. She had considered indignantly, what right he had to

interfere with her sewing? She had indignantly refuted his right to

interfere with her at all. She was not to be interfered with. Was she

not herself, and he the outsider.

Yet a quiver of fear went through her. If he should leave her? She sat

conjuring fears and sufferings, till she wept with very self-pity. She

did not know what she would do if he left her, or if he turned against

her. The thought of it chilled her, made her desolate and hard. And

against him, the stranger, the outsider, the being who wanted to

arrogate authority, she remained steadily fortified. Was she not

herself? How could one who was not of her own kind presume with

authority? She knew she was immutable, unchangeable, she was not afraid

for her own being. She was only afraid of all that was not herself. It

pressed round her, it came to her and took part in her, in form of her

man, this vast, resounding, alien world which was not herself. And he

had so many weapons, he might strike from so many sides.

When he came in at the door, his heart was blazed with pity and

tenderness, she looked so lost and forlorn and young. She glanced up,

afraid. And she was surprised to see him, shining-faced, clear and

beautiful in his movements, as if he were clarified. And a startled

pang of fear, and shame of herself went through her.

They waited for each other to speak.

“Do you want to eat anything?” she said.

“I’ll get it myself,” he answered, not wanting her to serve him. But

she brought out food. And it pleased him she did it for him. He was

again a bright lord.

“I went to Nottingham,” he said mildly.

“To your mother?” she asked, in a flash of contempt.

“No—I didn’t go home.”

“Who did you go to see?”

“I went to see nobody.”

“Then why did you go to Nottingham?”

“I went because I wanted to go.”

He was getting angry that she again rebuffed him when he was so clear

and shining.

“And who did you see?”

“I saw nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“No—who should I see?”

“You saw nobody you knew?”

“No, I didn’t,” he replied irritably.

She believed him, and her mood became cold.

“I bought a book,” he said, handing her the propitiatory volume.

She idly looked at the pictures. Beautiful, the pure women, with their

clear-dropping gowns. Her heart became colder. What did they mean to

_him_?

He sat and waited for her. She bent over the book.

“Aren’t they nice?” he said, his voice roused and glad. Her blood

flushed, but she did not lift her head.

“Yes,” she said. In spite of herself, she was compelled by him. He was

strange, attractive, exerting some power over her.

He came over to her, and touched her delicately. Her heart beat with

wild passion, wild raging passion. But she resisted as yet. It was

always the unknown, always the unknown, and she clung fiercely to her

known self. But the rising flood carried her away.

They loved each other to transport again, passionately and fully.

“Isn’t it more wonderful than ever?” she asked him, radiant like a

newly opened flower, with tears like dew.

He held her closer. He was strange and abstracted.

“It is always more wonderful,” she asseverated, in a glad, child’s

voice, remembering her fear, and not quite cleared of it yet.

So it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between

them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life

spoiled, ruined, desolate and laid waste. The next day it was all

marvellous again, just marvellous. One day she thought she would go mad

from his very presence, the sound of his drinking was detestable to

her. The next day she loved and rejoiced in the way he crossed the

floor, he was sun, moon and stars in one.

She fretted, however, at last, over the lack of stability. When the

perfect hours came back, her heart did not forget that they would pass

away again. She was uneasy. The surety, the surety, the inner surety,

the confidence in the abidingness of love: that was what she wanted.

And that she did not get. She knew also that he had not got it.

Nevertheless it was a marvellous world, she was for the most part lost

in the marvellousness of it. Even her great woes were marvellous to

her.

She could be very happy. And she wanted to be happy. She resented it

when he made her unhappy. Then she could kill him, cast him out. Many

days, she waited for the hour when he would be gone to work. Then the

flow of her life, which he seemed to damn up, was let loose, and she

was free. She was free, she was full of delight. Everything delighted

her. She took up the rug and went to shake it in the garden. Patches of

snow were on the fields, the air was light. She heard the ducks

shouting on the pond, she saw them charge and sail across the water as

if they were setting off on an invasion of the world. She watched the

rough horses, one of which was clipped smooth on the belly, so that he

wore a jacket and long stockings of brown fur, stand kissing each other

in the wintry morning by the church-yard wall. Everything delighted

her, now he was gone, the insulator, the obstruction removed, the world

was all hers, in connection with her.

She was joyfully active. Nothing pleased her more than to hang out the

washing in a high wind that came full-butt over the round of the hill,

tearing the wet garments out of her hands, making flap-flap-flap of the

waving stuff. She laughed and struggled and grew angry. But she loved

her solitary days.

Then he came home at night, and she knitted her brows because of some

endless contest between them. As he stood in the doorway her heart

changed. It steeled itself. The laughter and zest of the day

disappeared from her. She was stiffened.

They fought an unknown battle, unconsciously. Still they were in love

with each other, the passion was there. But the passion was consumed in

a battle. And the deep, fierce unnamed battle went on. Everything

glowed intensely about them, the world had put off its clothes and was

awful, with new, primal nakedness.

Sunday came when the strange spell was cast over her by him. Half she

loved it. She was becoming more like him. All the week-days, there was

a glint of sky and fields, the little church seemed to babble away to

the cottages the morning through. But on Sundays, when he stayed at

home, a deeply-coloured, intense gloom seemed to gather on the face of

the earth, the church seemed to fill itself with shadow, to become big,

a universe to her, there was a burning of blue and ruby, a sound of

worship about her. And when the doors were opened, and she came out

into the world, it was a world new-created, she stepped into the

resurrection of the world, her heart beating to the memory of the

darkness and the Passion.

If, as very often, they went to the Marsh for tea on Sundays, then she

regained another, lighter world, that had never known the gloom and the

stained glass and the ecstasy of chanting. Her husband was obliterated,

she was with her father again, who was so fresh and free and all

daylight. Her husband, with his intensity and his darkness, was

obliterated. She left him, she forgot him, she accepted her father.

Yet, as she went home again with the young man, she put her hand on his

arm tentatively, a little bit ashamed, her hand pleaded that he would

not hold it against her, her recusancy. But he was obscured. He seemed

to become blind, as if he were not there with her.

Then she was afraid. She wanted him. When he was oblivious of her, she

almost went mad with fear. For she had become so vulnerable, so

exposed. She was in touch so intimately. All things about her had

become intimate, she had known them near and lovely, like presences

hovering upon her. What if they should all go hard and separate again,

standing back from her terrible and distinct, and she, having known

them, should be at their mercy?

This frightened her. Always, her husband was to her the unknown to

which she was delivered up. She was a flower that has been tempted

forth into blossom, and has no retreat. He had her nakedness in his

power. And who was he, what was he? A blind thing, a dark force,

without knowledge. She wanted to preserve herself.

Then she gathered him to herself again and was satisfied for a moment.

But as time went on, she began to realize more and more that he did not

alter, that he was something dark, alien to herself. She had thought

him just the bright reflex of herself. As the weeks and months went by

she realized that he was a dark opposite to her, that they were

opposites, not complements.

He did not alter, he remained separately himself, and he seemed to

expect her to be part of himself, the extension of his will. She felt

him trying to gain power over her, without knowing her. What did he

want? Was he going to bully her?

What did she want herself? She answered herself, that she wanted to be

happy, to be natural, like the sunlight and the busy daytime. And, at

the bottom of her soul, she felt he wanted her to be dark, unnatural.

Sometimes, when he seemed like the darkness covering and smothering

her, she revolted almost in horror, and struck at him. She struck at

him, and made him bleed, and he became wicked. Because she dreaded him

and held him in horror, he became wicked, he wanted to destroy. And

then the fight between them was cruel.

She began to tremble. He wanted to impose himself on her. And he began

to shudder. She wanted to desert him, to leave him a prey to the open,

with the unclean dogs of the darkness setting on to devour him. He must

beat her, and make her stay with him. Whereas she fought to keep

herself free of him.

They went their ways now shadowed and stained with blood, feeling the

world far off, unable to give help. Till she began to get tired. After

a certain point, she became impassive, detached utterly from him. He

was always ready to burst out murderously against her. Her soul got up

and left him, she went her way. Nevertheless in her apparent

blitheness, that made his soul black with opposition, she trembled as

if she bled.

And ever and again, the pure love came in sunbeams between them, when

she was like a flower in the sun to him, so beautiful, so shining, so

intensely dear that he could scarcely bear it. Then as if his soul had

six wings of bliss he stood absorbed in praise, feeling the radiance

from the Almighty beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the

upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation.

And ever and again he appeared to her as the dread flame of power.

Sometimes, when he stood in the doorway, his face lit up, he seemed

like an Annunciation to her, her heart beat fast. And she watched him,

suspended. He had a dark, burning being that she dreaded and resisted.

She was subject to him as to the Angel of the Presence. She waited upon

him and heard his will, and she trembled in his service.

Then all this passed away. Then he loved her for her childishness and

for her strangeness to him, for the wonder of her soul which was

different from his soul, and which made him genuine when he would be

false. And she loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, or for

the way he came through a door with his face open and eager. She loved

his ringing, eager voice, and the touch of the unknown about him, his

absolute simplicity.

Yet neither of them was quite satisfied. He felt, somewhere, that she

did not respect him. She only respected him as far as he was related to

herself. For what he was, beyond her, she had no care. She did not care

for what he represented in himself. It is true, he did not know himself

what he represented. But whatever it was she did not really honour it.

She did no service to his work as a lace-designer, nor to himself as

bread-winner. Because he went down to the office and worked every

day—that entitled him to no respect or regard from her, he knew. Rather

she despised him for it. And he almost loved her for this, though at

first it maddened him like an insult.

What was much deeper, she soon came to combat his deepest feelings.

What he thought about life and about society and mankind did not matter

very much to her: he was right enough to be insignificant. This was

again galling to him. She would judge beyond him on these things. But

at length he came to accept her judgments, discovering them as if they

were his own. It was not here the deep trouble lay. The deep root of

his enmity lay in the fact that she jeered at his soul. He was

inarticulate and stupid in thought. But to some things he clung

passionately. He loved the Church. If she tried to get out of him, what

he _believed_, then they were both soon in a white rage.

Did he believe the water turned to wine at Cana? She would drive him to

the thing as a historical fact: so much rain-water—look at it—can it

become grape-juice, wine? For an instant, he saw with the clear eyes of

the mind and said no, his clear mind, answering her for a moment,

rejected the idea. And immediately his whole soul was crying in a mad,

inchoate hatred against this violation of himself. It was true for him.

His mind was extinguished again at once, his blood was up. In his blood

and bones, he wanted the scene, the wedding, the water brought forward

from the firkins as red wine: and Christ saying to His mother: “Woman,

what have I to do with thee?—mine hour is not yet come.”

And then:

“His mother saith unto the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do

it.’”

Brangwen loved it, with his bones and blood he loved it, he could not

let it go. Yet she forced him to let it go. She hated his blind

attachments.

Water, natural water, could it suddenly and unnaturally turn into wine,

depart from its being and at haphazard take on another being? Ah no, he

knew it was wrong.

She became again the palpitating, hostile child, hateful, putting

things to destruction. He became mute and dead. His own being gave him

the lie. He knew it was so: wine was wine, water was water, for ever:

the water had not become wine. The miracle was not a real fact. She

seemed to be destroying him. He went out, dark and destroyed, his soul

running its blood. And he tasted of death. Because his life was formed

in these unquestioned concepts.

She, desolate again as she had been when she was a child, went away and

sobbed. She did not care, she did not care whether the water had turned

to wine or not. Let him believe it if he wanted to. But she knew she

had won. And an ashy desolation came over her.

They were ashenly miserable for some time. Then the life began to come

back. He was nothing if not dogged. He thought again of the chapter of

St. John. There was a great biting pang. “But thou hast kept the good

wine until now.” “The best wine!” The young man’s heart responded in a

craving, in a triumph, although the knowledge that it was not true in

fact bit at him like a weasel in his heart. Which was stronger, the

pain of the denial, or the desire for affirmation? He was stubborn in

spirit, and abode by his desire. But he would not any more affirm the

miracles as true.

Very well, it was not true, the water had not turned into wine. The

water had not turned into wine. But for all that he would live in his

soul as if the water _had_ turned into wine. For truth of fact, it had

not. But for his soul, it had.

“Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn’t,” he said, “it

doesn’t bother me. I take it for what it is.”

“And _what_ is it?” she asked, quickly, hopefully.

“It’s the Bible,” he said.

That answer enraged her, and she despised him. She did not actively

question the Bible herself. But he drove her to contempt.

And yet he did not care about the Bible, the written letter. Although

he could not satisfy her, yet she knew of herself that he had something

real. He was not a dogmatist. He did not believe in _fact_ that the

water turned into wine. He did not want to make a fact out of it.

Indeed, his attitude was without criticism. It was purely individual.

He took that which was of value to him from the Written Word, he added

to his spirit. His mind he let sleep.

And she was bitter against him, that he let his mind sleep. That which

was human, belonged to mankind, he would not exert. He cared only for

himself. He was no Christian. Above all, Christ had asserted the

brotherhood of man.

She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human

knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was

immortal. Such, somewhere, was her belief, quite obscure and

unformulated. She believed in the omnipotence of the human mind.

He, on the other hand, blind as a subterranean thing, just ignored the

human mind and ran after his own dark-souled desires, following his own

tunnelling nose. She felt often she must suffocate. And she fought him

off.

Then he, knowing he was blind, fought madly back again, frantic in

sensual fear. He did foolish things. He asserted himself on his rights,

he arrogated the old position of master of the house.

“You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried.

“Fool!” she answered. “Fool!”

“I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried.

“Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who could put a

dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don’t

I know what a fool you are!”

He knew himself what a fool he was, and was flayed by the knowledge.

Yet he went on trying to steer the ship of their dual life. He asserted

his position as the captain of the ship. And captain and ship bored

her. He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable

domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to

her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility. She felt no

belief in it. She jeered at him as master of the house, master of their

dual life. And he was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame,

how her father had been a man without arrogating any authority.

He had gone on the wrong tack, and he felt it hard to give up the

expedition. There was great surging and shame. Then he yielded. He had

given up the master-of-the-house idea.

There was something he wanted, nevertheless, some form of mastery. Ever

and anon, after his collapses into the petty and the shameful, he rose

up again, and, stubborn in spirit, strong in his power to start afresh,

set out once more in his male pride of being to fulfil the hidden

passion of his spirit.

It began well, but it ended always in war between them, till they were

both driven almost to madness. He said, she did not respect him. She

laughed in hollow scorn of this. For her it was enough that she loved

him.

“Respect what?” she asked.

But he always answered the wrong thing. And though she cudgelled her

brains, she could not come at it.

“Why don’t you go on with your wood-carving?” she said. “Why don’t you

finish your Adam and Eve?”

But she did not care for the Adam and Eve, and he never put another

stroke to it. She jeered at the Eve, saying, “She is like a little

marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and

Eve like a doll.”

“It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she

continued, “when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have,

what arrogance!”

In a rage one day, after trying to work on the board, and failing, so

that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up the whole panel and

put it on the fire. She did not know. He went about for some days very

quiet and subdued after it.

“Where is the Adam and Eve board?” she asked him.

“Burnt.”

She looked at him.

“But your carving?”

“I burned it.”

“When?”

She did not believe him.

“On Friday night.”

“When I was at the Marsh?”

“Yes.”

She said no more.

Then, when he had gone to work, she wept for a whole day, and was much

chastened in spirit. So that a new, fragile flame of love came out of

the ashes of this last pain.

Directly, it occurred to her that she was with child. There was a great

trembling of wonder and anticipation through her soul. She wanted a

child. Not that she loved babies so much, though she was touched by all

young things. But she wanted to bear children. And a certain hunger in

her heart wanted to unite her husband with herself, in a child.

She wanted a son. She felt, a son would be everything. She wanted to

tell her husband. But it was such a trembling, intimate thing to tell

him, and he was at this time hard and unresponsive. So that she went

away and wept. It was such a waste of a beautiful opportunity, such a

frost that nipped in the bud one of the beautiful moments of her life.

She went about heavy and tremulous with her secret, wanting to touch

him, oh, most delicately, and see his face, dark and sensitive, attend

to her news. She waited and waited for him to become gentle and still

towards her. But he was always harsh and he bullied her.

So that the buds shrivelled from her confidence, she was chilled. She

went down to the Marsh.

“Well,” said her father, looking at her and seeing her at the first

glance, “what’s amiss wi’ you now?”

The tears came at the touch of his careful love.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Can’t you hit it off, you two?” he said.

“He’s so obstinate,” she quivered; but her soul was obdurate itself.

“Ay, an’ I know another who’s all that,” said her father.

She was silent.

“You don’t want to make yourselves miserable,” said her father; “all

about nowt.”

“_He_ isn’t miserable,” she said.

“I’ll back my life, if you can do nowt else, you can make him as

miserable as a dog. You’d be a dab hand at that, my lass.”

“_I_ do nothing to make him miserable,” she retorted.

“Oh no—oh no! A packet o’ butterscotch, you are.”

She laughed a little.

“You mustn’t think I _want_ him to be miserable,” she cried. “I don’t.”

“We quite readily believe it,” retorted Brangwen. “Neither do you

intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.”

This made her think. She was rather surprised to find that she did

_not_ intend her husband to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.

Her mother came, and they all sat down to tea, talking casually.

“Remember, child,” said her mother, “that everything is not waiting for

_your_ hand just to take or leave. You mustn’t expect it. Between two

people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you

nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to

be just your way.”

“Ha—nor do I. If I did I should soon find my mistake out. If _I_ put my

hand out to take anything, my hand is very soon bitten, I can tell

you.”

“Then you must mind where you put your hand,” said her father.

Anna was rather indignant that they took the tragedy of her young

married life with such equanimity.

“You love the man right enough,” said her father, wrinkling his

forehead in distress. “That’s all as counts.”

“I _do_ love him, more shame to him,” she cried. “I want to tell

him—I’ve been waiting for four days now to tell him——” her face began

to quiver, the tears came. Her parents watched her in silence. She did

not go on.

“Tell him what?” said her father.

“That we’re going to have an infant,” she sobbed, “and he’s never,

never let me, not once, every time I’ve come to him, he’s been horrid

to me, and I wanted to tell him, I did. And he won’t let me—he’s cruel

to me.”

She sobbed as if her heart would break. Her mother went and comforted

her, put her arms round her, and held her close. Her father sat with a

queer, wrinkled brow, and was rather paler than usual. His heart went

tense with hatred of his son-in-law.

So that, when the tale was sobbed out, and comfort administered and tea

sipped, and something like calm restored to the little circle, the

thought of Will Brangwen’s entry was not pleasantly entertained.

Tilly was set to watch out for him as he passed by on his way home. The

little party at table heard the woman’s servant’s shrill call:

“You’ve got to come in, Will. Anna’s here.”

After a few moments, the youth entered.

“Are you stopping?” he asked in his hard, harsh voice.

He seemed like a blade of destruction standing there. She quivered to

tears.

“Sit you down,” said Tom Brangwen, “an’ take a bit off your length.”

Will Brangwen sat down. He felt something strange in the atmosphere. He

was dark browed, but his eyes had the keen, intent, sharp look, as if

he could only see in the distance; which was a beauty in him, and which

made Anna so angry.

“Why does he always deny me?” she said to herself. “Why is it nothing

to him, what I am?”

And Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth.

“How long are you stopping?” the young husband asked his wife.

“Not very long,” she said.

“Get your tea, lad,” said Tom Brangwen. “Are you itchin’ to be off the

moment you enter?”

They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of

sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping

swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her

wattles made an oriflamme tossed here and there, as she went, her grey

body was like a ghost.

Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame

within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off

things.

“Where was I born, mother?” she asked.

“In London.”

“And was my father”—she spoke of him as if he were merely a strange

name: she could never connect herself with him—“was he dark?”

“He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring. He went

bald, rather bald, when he was quite young,” replied her mother, also

as if telling a tale which was just old imagination.

“Was he good-looking?”

“Yes—he was very good-looking—rather small. I have never seen an

Englishman who looked like him.”

“Why?”

“He was”—the mother made a quick, running movement with her hands—“his

figure was alive and changing—it was never fixed. He was not in the

least steady—like a running stream.”

It flashed over the youth—Anna too was like a running stream. Instantly

he was in love with her again.

Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with fear, fear of

the unknown, when he heard his women speak of their bygone men as of

strangers they had known in passing and had taken leave of again.

In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all their

hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should

they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?

The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the

dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little

church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a

dark blue shadow.

She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out

of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand,

along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of

thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight.

“I think we are going to have an infant, Bill,” she said, from far off.

He trembled, and his fingers tightened on hers.

“Why?” he asked, his heart beating. “You don’t know?”

“I do,” she said.

They continued without saying any more, walking along opposite

horizons, hand in hand across the intervening space, two separate

people. And he trembled as if a wind blew on to him in strong gusts,

out of the unseen. He was afraid. He was afraid to know he was alone.

For she seemed fulfilled and separate and sufficient in her half of the

world. He could not bear to know that he was cut off. Why could he not

be always one with her? It was he who had given her the child. Why

could she not be with him, one with him? Why must he be set in this

separateness, why could she not be with him, close, close, as one with

him? She must be one with him.

He held her fingers tightly in his own. She did not know what he was

thinking. The blaze of light on her heart was too beautiful and

dazzling, from the conception in her womb. She walked glorified, and

the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far-off,

faint noises of the town, were her “Magnificat”.

But he was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before

him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and

made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand

before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked

darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete

him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was

as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he

wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.

But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his

helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him

like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her

conception, and because she was with child by him.

And she was happy in showers of sunshine. She loved her husband, as a

presence, as a grateful condition. But for the moment her need was

fulfilled, and now she wanted only to hold her husband by the hand in

sheer happiness, without taking thought, only being glad.

He had various folios of reproductions, and among them a cheap print

from Fra Angelico’s “Entry of the Blessed into Paradise”. This filled

Anna with bliss. The beautiful, innocent way in which the Blessed held

each other by the hand as they moved towards the radiance, the real,

real, angelic melody, made her weep with happiness. The floweriness,

the beams of light, the linking of hands, was almost too much for her,

too innocent.

Day after day came shining through the door of Paradise, day after day

she entered into the brightness. The child in her shone till she

herself was a beam of sunshine; and how lovely was the sunshine that

loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel

bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole,

where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a

bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the

hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent

on the meadows. She was full of a rich drowsiness and loneliness. How

happy she was, how gorgeous it was to live: to have known herself, her

husband, the passion of love and begetting; and to know that all this

lived and waited and burned on around her, a terrible purifying fire,

through which she had passed for once to come to this peace of golden

radiance, when she was with child, and innocent, and in love with her

husband and with all the many angels hand in hand. She lifted her

throat to the breeze that came across the fields, and she felt it

handling her like sisters fondling her, she drank it in perfume of

cowslips and of apple-blossoms.

And in all the happiness a black shadow, shy, wild, a beast of prey,

roamed and vanished from sight, and like strands of gossamer blown

across her eyes, there was a dread for her.

She was afraid when he came home at night. As yet, her fear never

spoke, the shadow never rushed upon her. He was gentle, humble, he kept

himself withheld. His hands were delicate upon her, and she loved them.

But there ran through her the thrill, crisp as pain, for she felt the

darkness and other-world still in his soft, sheathed hands.

But the summer drifted in with the silence of a miracle, she was almost

always alone. All the while, went on the long, lovely drowsiness, the

maidenblush roses in the garden were all shed, washed away in a pouring

rain, summer drifted into autumn, and the long, vague, golden days

began to close. Crimson clouds fumed about the west, and as night came

on, all the sky was fuming and steaming, and the moon, far above the

swiftness of vapours, was white, bleared, the night was uneasy.

Suddenly the moon would appear at a clear window in the sky, looking

down from far above, like a captive. And Anna did not sleep. There was

a strange, dark tension about her husband.

She became aware that he was trying to force his will upon her,

something, there was something he wanted, as he lay there dark and

tense. And her soul sighed in weariness.

Everything was so vague and lovely, and he wanted to wake her up to the

hard, hostile reality. She drew back in resistance. Still he said

nothing. But she felt his power persisting on her, till she became

aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was

forcing her, he was forcing her. And she wanted so much the joy and the

vagueness and the innocence of her pregnancy. She did not want his

bitter-corrosive love, she did not want it poured into her, to burn

her. Why must she have it? Why, oh, why was he not content, contained?

She sat many hours by the window, in those days when he drove her most

with the black constraint of his will, and she watched the rain falling

on the yew trees. She was not sad, only wistful, blanched. The child

under her heart was a perpetual warmth. And she was sure. The pressure

was only upon her from the outside, her soul had no stripes.

Yet in her heart itself was always this same strain, tense, anxious.

She was not safe, she was always exposed, she was always attacked.

There was a yearning in her for a fulness of peace and blessedness.

What a heavy yearning it was—so heavy.

She knew, vaguely, that all the time he was not satisfied, all the time

he was trying to force something from her. Ah, how she wished she could

succeed with him, in her own way! He was there, so inevitable. She

lived in him also. And how she wanted to be at peace with him, at

peace. She loved him. She would give him love, pure love. With a

strange, rapt look in her face, she awaited his homecoming that night.

Then, when he came, she rose with her hands full of love, as of

flowers, radiant, innocent. A dark spasm crossed his face. As she

watched, her face shining and flower-like with innocent love, his face

grew dark and tense, the cruelty gathered in his brows, his eyes turned

aside, she saw the whites of his eyes as he looked aside from her. She

waited, touching him with her hands. But from his body through her

hands came the bitter-corrosive shock of his passion upon her,

destroying her in blossom. She shrank. She rose from her knees and went

away from him, to preserve herself. And it was great pain to her.

To him also it was agony. He saw the glistening, flower-like love in

her face, and his heart was black because he did not want it. Not

this—not this. He did not want flowery innocence. He was unsatisfied.

The rage and storm of unsatisfaction tormented him ceaselessly. Why had

she not satisfied him? He had satisfied her. She was satisfied, at

peace, innocent round the doors of her own paradise.

And he was unsatisfied, unfulfilled, he raged in torment, wanting,

wanting. It was for her to satisfy him: then let her do it. Let her not

come with flowery handfuls of innocent love. He would throw these aside

and trample the flowers to nothing. He would destroy her flowery,

innocent bliss. Was he not entitled to satisfaction from her, and was

not his heart all raging desire, his soul a black torment of

unfulfilment. Let it be fulfilled in him, then, as it was fulfilled in

her. He had given her her fulfilment. Let her rise up and do her part.

He was cruel to her. But all the time he was ashamed. And being

ashamed, he was more cruel. For he was ashamed that he could not come

to fulfilment without her. And he could not. And she would not heed

him. He was shackled and in darkness of torment.

She beseeched him to work again, to do his wood-carving. But his soul

was too black. He had destroyed his panel of Adam and Eve. He could not

begin again, least of all now, whilst he was in this condition.

For her there was no final release, since he could not be liberated

from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through

the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm.

She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on

him, because he harried her and wanted to destroy her.

She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations.

As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit

was somewhere far off.

She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult

with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced

before the Unknown.

Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with

child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting

her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had

chosen her, to Whom she belonged.

She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul

rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off

her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.

It surprised her, when it was over. She was shrinking and afraid. To

what was she now exposed? She half wanted to tell her husband. Yet she

shrank from him.

All the time she ran on by herself. She liked the story of David, who

danced before the Lord, and uncovered himself exultingly. Why should he

uncover himself to Michal, a common woman? He uncovered himself to the

Lord.

“Thou comest to me with a sword and a spear and a shield, but I come to

thee in the name of the Lord:—for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will

give you into our hands.”

Her heart rang to the words. She walked in her pride. And her battle

was her own Lord’s, her husband was delivered over.

In these days she was oblivious of him. Who was he, to come against

her? No, he was not even the Philistine, the Giant. He was like Saul

proclaiming his own kingship. She laughed in her heart. Who was he,

proclaiming his kingship? She laughed in her heart with pride.

And she had to dance in exultation beyond him. Because he was in the

house, she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man.

On a Saturday afternoon, when she had a fire in the bedroom, again she

took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a

slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer.

She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lord.

She was exalted over him, before the Lord.

She heard him coming up the stairs, and she flinched. She stood with

the firelight on her ankles and feet, naked in the shadowy, late

afternoon, fastening up her hair. He was startled. He stood in the

doorway, his brows black and lowering.

“What are you doing?” he said, gratingly. “You’ll catch a cold.”

And she lifted her hands and danced again, to annul him, the light

glanced on her knees as she made her slow, fine movements down the far

side of the room, across the firelight. He stood away near the door in

blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy

movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn,

pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing

his non-existence, dancing herself to the Lord, to exultation.

He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not

look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was

sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying,

uplifted to the Lord. Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced

exulting before her Lord, and knew no man.

It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was

being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing

consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not

understand. He waited obliterated. Then his eyes became blind to her,

he saw her no more. And through the unseeing veil between them he

called to her, in his jarring voice:

“What are you doing that for?”

“Go away,” she said. “Let me dance by myself.”

“That isn’t dancing,” he said harshly. “What do you want to do that

for?”

“I don’t do it for you,” she said. “You go away.”

Her strange, lifted belly, big with his child! Had he no right to be

there? He felt his presence a violation. Yet he had his right to be

there. He went and sat on the bed.

She stopped dancing, and confronted him, again lifting her slim arms

and twisting at her hair. Her nakedness hurt her, opposed to him.

“I can do as I like in my bedroom,” she cried. “Why do you interfere

with me?”

And she slipped on a dressing-gown and crouched before the fire. He was

more at ease now she was covered up. The vision of her tormented him

all the days of his life, as she had been then, a strange, exalted

thing having no relation to himself.

After this day, the door seemed to shut on his mind. His brow shut and

became impervious. His eyes ceased to see, his hands were suspended.

Within himself his will was coiled like a beast, hidden under the

darkness, but always potent, working.

At first she went on blithely enough with him shut down beside her. But

then his spell began to take hold of her. The dark, seething potency of

him, the power of a creature that lies hidden and exerts its will to

the destruction of the free-running creature, as the tiger lying in the

darkness of the leaves steadily enforces the fall and death of the

light creatures that drink by the waterside in the morning, gradually

began to take effect on her. Though he lay there in his darkness and

did not move, yet she knew he lay waiting for her. She felt his will

fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and

obscure.

She found that, in all her outgoings and her incomings, he prevented

her. Gradually she realized that she was being borne down by him, borne

down by the clinging, heavy weight of him, that he was pulling her down

as a leopard clings to a wild cow and exhausts her and pulls her down.

Gradually she realized that her life, her freedom, was sinking under

the silent grip of his physical will. He wanted her in his power. He

wanted to devour her at leisure, to have her. At length she realized

that her sleep was a long ache and a weariness and exhaustion, because

of his will fastened upon her, as he lay there beside her, during the

night.

She realized it all, and there came a momentous pause, a pause in her

swift running, a moment’s suspension in her life, when she was lost.

Then she turned fiercely on him, and fought him. He was not to do this

to her, it was monstrous. What horrible hold did he want to have over

her body? Why did he want to drag her down, and kill her spirit? Why

did he want to deny her spirit? Why did he deny her spirituality, hold

her for a body only? And was he to claim her carcase?

Some vast, hideous darkness he seemed to represent to her.

“What do you do to me?” she cried. “What beastly thing do you do to me?

You put a horrible pressure on my head, you don’t let me sleep, you

don’t let me live. Every moment of your life you are doing something to

me, something horrible, that destroys me. There is something horrible

in you, something dark and beastly in your will. What do you want of

me? What do you want to do to me?”

All the blood in his body went black and powerful and corrosive as he

heard her. Black and blind with hatred of her he was. He was in a very

black hell, and could not escape.

He hated her for what she said. Did he not give her everything, was she

not everything to him? And the shame was a bitter fire in him, that she

was everything to him, that he had nothing but her. And then that she

should taunt him with it, that he could not escape! The fire went black

in his veins. For try as he might, he could not escape. She was

everything to him, she was his life and his derivation. He depended on

her. If she were taken away, he would collapse as a house from which

the central pillar is removed.

And she hated him, because he depended on her so utterly. He was

horrible to her. She wanted to thrust him off, to set him apart. It was

horrible that he should cleave to her, so close, so close, like a leopard

that had leapt on her, and fastened.

He went on from day to day in a blackness of rage and shame and

frustration. How he tortured himself, to be able to get away from her.

But he could not. She was as the rock on which he stood, with deep,

heaving water all round, and he was unable to swim. He _must_ take his

stand on her, he must depend on her.

What had he in life, save her? Nothing. The rest was a great heaving

flood. The terror of the night of heaving, overwhelming flood, which

was his vision of life without her, was too much for him. He clung to

her fiercely and abjectly.

And she beat him off, she beat him off. Where could he turn, like a

swimmer in a dark sea, beaten off from his hold, whither could he turn?

He wanted to leave her, he wanted to be able to leave her. For his

soul’s sake, for his manhood’s sake, he must be able to leave her.

But for what? She was the ark, and the rest of the world was flood. The

only tangible, secure thing was the woman. He could leave her only for

another woman. And where was the other woman, and who was the other

woman? Besides, he would be just in the same state. Another woman would

be woman, the case would be the same.

Why was she the all, the everything, why must he live only through her,

why must he sink if he were detached from her? Why must he cleave to

her in a frenzy as for his very life?

The only other way to leave her was to die. The only straight way to

leave her was to die. His dark, raging soul knew that. But he had no

desire for death.

Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the

hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not.

But supposing he went away, right away, and found work, and had a

lodging again. He could be again as he had been before.

But he knew he could not. A woman, he must have a woman. And having a

woman, he must be free of her. It would be the same position. For he

could not be free of her.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet.

Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that

standing? Better give in and drown at once.

And upon what could he stand, save upon a woman? Was he then like the

old man of the seas, impotent to move save upon the back of another

life? Was he impotent, or a cripple, or a defective, or a fragment?

It was black, mad, shameful torture, the frenzy of fear, the frenzy of

desire, and the horrible, grasping back-wash of shame.

What was he afraid of? Why did life, without Anna, seem to him just a

horrible welter, everything jostling in a meaningless, dark, fathomless

flood? Why, if Anna left him even for a week, did he seem to be

clinging like a madman to the edge of reality, and slipping surely,

surely into the flood of unreality that would drown him. This horrible

slipping into unreality drove him mad, his soul screamed with fear and

agony.

Yet she was pushing him off from her, pushing him away, breaking his

fingers from their hold on her, persistently, ruthlessly. He wanted her

to have pity. And sometimes for a moment she had pity. But she always

began again, thrusting him off, into the deep water, into the frenzy

and agony of uncertainty.

She became like a fury to him, without any sense of him. Her eyes were

bright with a cold, unmoving hatred. Then his heart seemed to die in

its last fear. She might push him off into the deeps.

She would not sleep with him any more. She said he destroyed her sleep.

Up started all his frenzy and madness of fear and suffering. She drove

him away. Like a cowed, lurking devil he was driven off, his mind

working cunningly against her, devising evil for her. But she drove him

off. In his moments of intense suffering, she seemed to him

inconceivable, a monster, the principle of cruelty.

However her pity might give way for moments, she was hard and cold as a

jewel. He must be put off from her, she must sleep alone. She made him

a bed in the small room.

And he lay there whipped, his soul whipped almost to death, yet

unchanged. He lay in agony of suffering, thrown back into unreality,

like a man thrown overboard into a sea, to swim till he sinks, because

there is no hold, only a wide, weltering sea.

He did not sleep, save for the white sleep when a thin veil is drawn

over the mind. It was not sleep. He was awake, and he was not awake. He

could not be alone. He needed to be able to put his arms round her. He

could not bear the empty space against his breast, where she used to

be. He could not bear it. He felt as if he were suspended in space,

held there by the grip of his will. If he relaxed his will would fall,

fall through endless space, into the bottomless pit, always falling,

will-less, helpless, non-existent, just dropping to extinction, falling

till the fire of friction had burned out, like a falling star, then

nothing, nothing, complete nothing.

He rose in the morning grey and unreal. And she seemed fond of him

again, she seemed to make up to him a little.

“I slept well,” she said, with her slightly false brightness. “Did

you?”

“All right,” he answered.

He would never tell her.

For three or four nights he lay alone through the white sleep, his will

unchanged, unchanged, still tense, fixed in its grip. Then, as if she

were revived and free to be fond of him again, deluded by his silence

and seeming acquiescence, moved also by pity, she took him back again.

Each night, in spite of all the shame, he had waited with agony for

bedtime, to see if she would shut him out. And each night, as, in her

false brightness, she said Good-night, he felt he must kill her or

himself. But she asked for her kiss, so pathetically, so prettily. So

he kissed her, whilst his heart was ice.

And sometimes he went out. Once he sat for a long time in the church

porch, before going in to bed. It was dark with a wind blowing. He sat

in the church porch and felt some shelter, some security. But it grew

cold, and he must go in to bed.

Then came the night when she said, putting her arms round him and

kissing him fondly:

“Stay with me to-night, will you?”

And he had stayed without demur. But his will had not altered. He would

have her fixed to him.

So that soon she told him again she must be alone.

“I don’t _want_ to send you away. I _want_ to sleep with you. But I

can’t sleep, you don’t let me sleep.”

His blood turned black in his veins.

“What do you mean by such a thing? It’s an arrant lie. _I_ don’t let

you sleep——”

“But you don’t. I sleep so well when I’m alone. And I can’t sleep when

you’re there. You do something to me, you put a pressure on my head.

And I _must_ sleep, now the child is coming.”

“It’s something in yourself,” he replied, “something wrong in you.”

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the

world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and

repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne.

He went and lay down alone. And at length, after a grey and livid and

ghastly period, he relaxed, something gave way in him. He let go, he

did not care what became of him. Strange and dim he became to himself,

to her, to everybody. A vagueness had come over everything, like a

drowning. And it was an infinite relief to drown, a relief, a great,

great relief.

He would insist no more, he would force her no more. He would force

himself upon her no more. He would let go, relax, lapse, and what would

be, should be.

Yet he wanted her still, he always, always wanted her. In his soul, he

was desolate as a child, he was so helpless. Like a child on its

mother, he depended on her for his living. He knew it, and he knew he

could hardly help it.

Yet he must be able to be alone. He must be able to lie down alongside

the empty space, and let be. He must be able to leave himself to the

flood, to sink or live as might be. For he recognized at length his own

limitation, and the limitation of his power. He had to give in.

There was a stillness, a wanness between them. Half at least of the

battle was over. Sometimes she wept as she went about, her heart was

very heavy. But the child was always warm in her womb.

They were friends again, new, subdued friends. But there was a wanness

between them. They slept together once more, very quietly, and

distinct, not one together as before. And she was intimate with him as

at first. But he was very quiet, and not intimate. He was glad in his

soul, but for the time being he was not alive.

He could sleep with her, and let her be. He could be alone now. He had

just learned what it was to be able to be alone. It was right and

peaceful. She had given him a new, deeper freedom. The world might be a

welter of uncertainty, but he was himself now. He had come into his own

existence. He was born for a second time, born at last unto himself,

out of the vast body of humanity. Now at last he had a separate

identity, he existed alone, even if he were not quite alone. Before he

had only existed in so far as he had relations with another being. Now

he had an absolute self—as well as a relative self.

But it was a very dumb, weak, helpless self, a crawling nursling. He

went about very quiet, and in a way, submissive. He had an unalterable

self at last, free, separate, independent.

She was relieved, she was free of him. She had given him to himself.

She wept sometimes with tiredness and helplessness. But he was a

husband. And she seemed, in the child that was coming, to forget. It

seemed to make her warm and drowsy. She lapsed into a long muse,

indistinct, warm, vague, unwilling to be taken out of her vagueness.

And she rested on him also.

Sometimes she came to him with a strange light in her eyes, poignant,

pathetic, as if she were asking for something. He looked and he could

not understand. She was so beautiful, so visionary, the rays seemed to

go out of his breast to her, like a shining. He was there for her, all

for her. And she would hold his breast, and kiss it, and kiss it,

kneeling beside him, she who was waiting for the hour of her delivery.

And he would lie looking down at his breast, till it seemed that his

breast was not himself, that he had left it lying there. Yet it was

himself also, and beautiful and bright with her kisses. He was glad

with a strange, radiant pain. Whilst she kneeled beside him, and kissed

his breast with a slow, rapt, half-devotional movement.

He knew she wanted something, his heart yearned to give it her. His

heart yearned over her. And as she lifted her face, that was radiant

and rosy as a little cloud, his heart still yearned over her, and, now

from the distance, adored her. She had a flower-like presence which he

adored as he stood far off, a stranger.

The weeks passed on, the time drew near, they were very gentle, and

delicately happy. The insistent, passionate, dark soul, the powerful

unsatisfaction in him seemed stilled and tamed, the lion lay down with

the lamb in him.

She loved him very much indeed, and he waited near her. She was a

precious, remote thing to him at this time, as she waited for her

child. Her soul was glad with an ecstasy because of the coming infant.

She wanted a boy: oh, very much she wanted a boy.

But she seemed so young and so frail. She was indeed only a girl. As

she stood by the fire washing herself—she was proud to wash herself at

this time—and he looked at her, his heart was full of extreme

tenderness for her. Such fine, fine limbs, her slim, round arms like

chasing lights, and her legs so simple and childish, yet so very proud.

Oh, she stood on proud legs, with a lovely reckless balance of her full

belly, and the adorable little roundnesses, and the breasts becoming

important. Above it all, her face was like a rosy cloud shining.

How proud she was, what a lovely proud thing her young body! And she

loved him to put his hand on her ripe fullness, so that he should

thrill also with the stir and the quickening there. He was afraid and

silent, but she flung her arms round his neck with proud, impudent joy.

The pains came on, and Oh—how she cried! She would have him stay with

her. And after her long cries she would look at him, with tears in her

eyes and a sobbing laugh on her face, saying:

“I don’t mind it really.”

It was bad enough. But to her it was never deathly. Even the fierce,

tearing pain was exhilarating. She screamed and suffered, but was all

the time curiously alive and vital. She felt so powerfully alive and in

the hands of such a masterly force of life, that her bottom-most

feeling was one of exhilaration. She knew she was winning, winning, she

was always winning, with each onset of pain she was nearer to victory.

Probably he suffered more than she did. He was not shocked or

horrified. But he was screwed very tight in the vise of suffering.

It was a girl. The second of silence on her face when they said so

showed him she was disappointed. And a great blazing passion of

resentment and protest sprang up in his heart. In that moment he

claimed the child.

But when the milk came, and the infant sucked her breast, she seemed to

be leaping with extravagant bliss.

“It sucks me, it sucks me, it likes me—oh, it loves it!” she cried,

holding the child to her breast with her two hands covering it,

passionately.

And in a few moments, as she became used to her bliss, she looked at

the youth with glowing, unseeing eyes, and said:

“Anna Victrix.”

He went away, trembling, and slept. To her, her pains were the

wound-smart of a victor, she was the prouder.

When she was well again she was very happy. She called the baby Ursula.

Both Anna and her husband felt they must have a name that gave them

private satisfaction. The baby was tawny skinned, it had a curious

downy skin, and wisps of bronze hair, and the yellow grey eyes that

wavered, and then became golden-brown like the father’s. So they called

her Ursula because of the picture of the saint.

It was a rather delicate baby at first, but soon it became stronger,

and was restless as a young eel. Anna was worn out with the day-long

wrestling with its young vigour.

As a little animal, she loved and adored it and was happy. She loved

her husband, she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth, and made much of

him, she said his limbs were beautiful, she was fascinated by the

physical form of him.

And she was indeed Anna Victrix. He could not combat her any more. He

was out in the wilderness, alone with her. Having occasion to go to

London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking of naked, lurking

savages on an island, how these had built up and created the great mass

of Oxford Street or Piccadilly. How had helpless savages, running with

their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up

this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a

world of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man

was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more terrible

than man himself, almost monstrous.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that

the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own

real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of

the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only

the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not

mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new,

strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find

clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife.

And what more? What more would be necessary? The great mass of activity

in which mankind was engaged meant nothing to him. By nature, he had no

part in it. What did he live for, then? For Anna only, and for the sake

of living? What did he want on this earth? Anna only, and his children,

and his life with his children and her? Was there no more?

He was attended by a sense of something more, something further, which

gave him absolute being. It was as if now he existed in Eternity, let

Time be what it might. What was there outside? The fabricated world,

that he did not believe in? What should he bring to her, from outside?

Nothing? Was it enough, as it was? He was troubled in his acquiescence.

She was not with him. Yet he scarcely believed in himself, apart from

her, though the whole Infinite was with him. Let the whole world slide

down and over the edge of oblivion, he would stand alone. But he was

unsure of her. And he existed also in her. So he was unsure.

He hovered near to her, never quite able to forget the vague, haunting

uncertainty, that seemed to challenge him, and which he would not hear.

A pang of dread, almost guilt, as of insufficiency, would go over him

as he heard her talking to the baby. She stood before the window, with

the month-old child in her arms, talking in a musical, young sing-song

that he had not heard before, and which rang on his heart like a claim

from the distance, or the voice of another world sounding its claim on

him. He stood near, listening, and his heart surged, surged to rise and

submit. Then it shrank back and stayed aloof. He could not move, a

denial was upon him, as if he could not deny himself. He must, he must

be himself.

“Look at the silly blue-caps, my beauty,” she crooned, holding up the

infant to the window, where shone the white garden, and the blue-tits

scuffling in the snow: “Look at the silly blue-caps, my darling, having

a fight in the snow! Look at them, my bird—beating the snow about with

their wings, and shaking their heads. Oh, aren’t they wicked things,

wicked things! Look at their yellow feathers on the snow there! They’ll

miss them, won’t they, when they’re cold later on.

“Must we tell them to stop, must we say ‘stop it’ to them, my bird? But

they are naughty, naughty! Look at them!” Suddenly her voice broke loud

and fierce, she rapped the pane sharply.

“Stop it,” she cried, “stop it, you little nuisances. Stop it!” She

called louder, and rapped the pane more sharply. Her voice was fierce

and imperative.

“Have more sense,” she cried.

“There, now they’re gone. Where have they gone, the silly things? What

will they say to each other? What will they say, my lambkin? They’ll

forget, won’t they, they’ll forget all about it, out of their silly

little heads, and their blue caps.”

After a moment, she turned her bright face to her husband.

“They were _really_ fighting, they were really fierce with each other!”

she said, her voice keen with excitement and wonder, as if she belonged

to the birds’ world, were identified with the race of birds.

“Ay, they’ll fight, will blue-caps,” he said, glad when she turned to

him with her glow from elsewhere. He came and stood beside her and

looked out at the marks on the snow where the birds had scuffled, and

at the yew trees’ burdened, white and black branches. What was the

appeal it made to him, what was the question of her bright face, what

was the challenge he was called to answer? He did not know. But as he

stood there he felt some responsibility which made him glad, but

uneasy, as if he must put out his own light. And he could not move as

yet.

Anna loved the child very much, oh, very much. Yet still she was not

quite fulfilled. She had a slight expectant feeling, as of a door half

opened. Here she was, safe and still in Cossethay. But she felt as if

she were not in Cossethay at all. She was straining her eyes to

something beyond. And from her Pisgah mount, which she had attained,

what could she see? A faint, gleaming horizon, a long way off, and a

rainbow like an archway, a shadow-door with faintly coloured coping

above it. Must she be moving thither?

Something she had not, something she did not grasp, could not arrive

at. There was something beyond her. But why must she start on the

journey? She stood so safely on the Pisgah mountain.

In the winter, when she rose with the sunrise, and out of the back

windows saw the east flaming yellow and orange above the green, glowing

grass, while the great pear tree in between stood dark and magnificent

as an idol, and under the dark pear tree, the little sheet of water

spread smooth in burnished, yellow light, she said, “It is here”. And

when, at evening, the sunset came in a red glare through the big

opening in the clouds, she said again, “It is beyond”.

Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and

she saw the hope, the promise. Why should she travel any further?

Yet she always asked the question. As the sun went down in his fiery

winter haste, she faced the blazing close of the affair, in which she

had not played her fullest part, and she made her demand still: “What

are you doing, making this big shining commotion? What is it that you

keep so busy about, that you will not let us alone?”

She did not turn to her husband, for him to lead her. He was apart from

her, with her, according to her different conceptions of him. The child

she might hold up, she might toss the child forward into the furnace,

the child might walk there, amid the burning coals and the incandescent

roar of heat, as the three witnesses walked with the angel in the fire.

Soon, she felt sure of her husband. She knew his dark face and the

extent of its passion. She knew his slim, vigorous body, she said it

was hers. Then there was no denying her. She was a rich woman enjoying

her riches.

And soon again she was with child. Which made her satisfied and took

away her discontent. She forgot that she had watched the sun climb up

and pass his way, a magnificent traveller surging forward. She forgot

that the moon had looked through a window of the high, dark night, and

nodded like a magic recognition, signalled to her to follow. Sun and

moon travelled on, and left her, passed her by, a rich woman enjoying

her riches. She should go also. But she could not go, when they called,

because she must stay at home now. With satisfaction she relinquished

the adventure to the unknown. She was bearing her children.

There was another child coming, and Anna lapsed into vague content. If

she were not the wayfarer to the unknown, if she were arrived now,

settled in her builded house, a rich woman, still her doors opened

under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of

the sun and moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo

of journeying.

She was a door and a threshold, she herself. Through her another soul

was coming, to stand upon her as upon the threshold, looking out,

shading its eyes for the direction to take.