THE MARSH AND THE FLOOD
There was always regular connection between the Yew Cottage and the
Marsh, yet the two households remained separate, distinct.
After Anna’s marriage, the Marsh became the home of the two boys, Tom
and Fred. Tom was a rather short, good-looking youth, with crisp black
hair and long black eyelashes and soft, dark, possessed eyes. He had a
quick intelligence. From the High School he went to London to study. He
had an instinct for attracting people of character and energy. He gave
place entirely to the other person, and at the same time kept himself
independent. He scarcely existed except through other people. When he
was alone he was unresolved. When he was with another man, he seemed to
add himself to the other, make the other bigger than life size. So that
a few people loved him and attained a sort of fulfilment in him. He
carefully chose these few.
He had a subtle, quick, critical intelligence, a mind that was like a
scale or balance. There was something of a woman in all this.
In London he had been the favourite pupil of an engineer, a clever man,
who became well-known at the time when Tom Brangwen had just finished
his studies. Through this master the youth kept acquaintance with
various individual, outstanding characters. He never asserted himself.
He seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a
presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while
still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and
mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and
perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how
to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides,
he was very good-looking, of medium stature, but beautifully
proportioned, dark, with fine colouring, always perfectly healthy.
His father allowed him a liberal pocket-money, besides which he had a
sort of post as assistant to his chief. Then from time to time the
young man appeared at the Marsh, curiously attractive, well-dressed,
reserved, having by nature a subtle, refined manner. And he set the
change in the farm.
Fred, the younger brother, was a Brangwen, large-boned, blue-eyed,
English. He was his father’s very son, the two men, father and son,
were supremely at ease with one another. Fred was succeeding to the
farm.
Between the elder brother and the younger existed an almost passionate
love. Tom watched over Fred with a woman’s poignant attention and
self-less care. Fred looked up to Tom as to something miraculous, that
which he himself would aspire to be, were he great also.
So that after Anna’s departure, the Marsh began to take on a new tone.
The boys were gentlemen; Tom had a rare nature and had risen high. Fred
was sensitive and fond of reading, he pondered Ruskin and then the
Agnostic writings. Like all the Brangwens, he was very much a thing to
himself, though fond of people, and indulgent to them, having an
exaggerated respect for them.
There was a rather uneasy friendship between him and one of the young
Hardys at the Hall. The two households were different, yet the young
men met on shy terms of equality.
It was young Tom Brangwen, with his dark lashes and beautiful
colouring, his soft, inscrutable nature, his strange repose and his
informed air, added to his position in London, who seemed to emphasize
the superior foreign element in the Marsh. When he appeared, perfectly
dressed, as if soft and affable, and yet quite removed from everybody,
he created an uneasiness in people, he was reserved in the minds of the
Cossethay and Ilkeston acquaintances to a different, remote world.
He and his mother had a kind of affinity. The affection between them
was of a mute, distant character, but radical. His father was always
uneasy and slightly deferential to his eldest son. Tom also formed the
link that kept the Marsh in real connection with the Skrebenskys, now
quite important people in their own district.
So a change in tone came over the Marsh. Tom Brangwen the father, as he
grew older, seemed to mature into a gentleman-farmer. His figure lent
itself: burly and handsome. His face remained fresh and his blue eyes
as full of light, his thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a
silky whiteness. It was his custom to laugh a great deal, in his
acquiescent, wilful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had
taken the line of easy, good-humoured acceptance. He was not
responsible for the frame of things. Yet he was afraid of the unknown
in life.
He was fairly well-off. His wife was there with him, a different being
from himself, yet somewhere vitally connected with him:—who was he to
understand where and how? His two sons were gentlemen. They were men
distinct from himself, they had separate beings of their own, yet they
were connected with himself. It was all adventurous and puzzling. Yet
one remained vital within one’s own existence, whatever the off-shoots.
So, handsome and puzzled, he laughed and stuck to himself as the only
thing he could stick to. His youngness and the wonder remained almost
the same in him. He became indolent, he developed a luxuriant ease.
Fred did most of the farm-work, the father saw to the more important
transactions. He drove a good mare, and sometimes he rode his cob. He
drank in the hotels and the inns with better-class farmers and
proprietors, he had well-to-do acquaintances among men. But one class
suited him no better than another.
His wife, as ever, had no acquaintances. Her hair was threaded now with
grey, her face grew older in form without changing in expression. She
seemed the same as when she had come to the Marsh twenty-five years
ago, save that her health was more fragile. She seemed always to haunt
the Marsh rather than to live there. She was never part of the life.
Something she represented was alien there, she remained a stranger
within the gates, in some ways fixed and impervious, in some ways
curiously refining. She caused the separateness and individuality of
all the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household.
When young Tom Brangwen was twenty-three years old there was some
breach between him and his chief which was never explained, and he went
away to Italy, then to America. He came home for a while, then went to
Germany; always the same good-looking, carefully-dressed, attractive
young man, in perfect health, yet somehow outside of everything. In his
dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and
pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.
To Ursula he was a romantic, alluring figure. He had a grace of
bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such as
Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a long slim
mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and exquisite; or he
sent her a little necklace of rough stones, amethyst and opal and
brilliants and garnet. He spoke other languages easily and fluently,
his nature was curiously gracious and insinuating. With all that, he
was undefinably an outsider. He belonged to nowhere, to no society.
Anna Brangwen had left her intimacy with her father undeveloped since
the time of her marriage. At her marriage it had been abandoned. He and
she had drawn a reserve between them. Anna went more to her mother.
Then suddenly the father died.
It happened one springtime when Ursula was about eight years old, he,
Tom Brangwen, drove off on a Saturday morning to the market in
Nottingham, saying he might not be back till late, as there was a
special show and then a meeting he had to attend. His family understood
that he would enjoy himself.
The season had been rainy and dreary. In the evening it was pouring
with rain. Fred Brangwen, unsettled, uneasy, did not go out, as was his
wont. He smoked and read and fidgeted, hearing always the trickling of
water outside. This wet, black night seemed to cut him off and make him
unsettled, aware of himself, aware that he wanted something else, aware
that he was scarcely living. There seemed to him to be no root to his
life, no place for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad.
But his instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem.
He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not know how
to get it.
Tilly, an old woman now, came in saying that the labourers who had been
suppering up said the yard and everywhere was just a slew of water. He
heard in indifference. But he hated a desolate, raw wetness in the
world. He would leave the Marsh.
His mother was in bed. At last he shut his book, his mind was blank, he
walked upstairs intoxicated with depression and anger, and, intoxicated
with depression and anger, locked himself into sleep.
Tilly set slippers before the kitchen fire, and she also went to bed,
leaving the door unlocked. Then the farm was in darkness, in the rain.
At eleven o’clock it was still raining. Tom Brangwen stood in the yard
of the “Angel”, Nottingham, and buttoned his coat.
“Oh, well,” he said cheerfully, “it’s rained on me before. Put ’er in,
Jack, my lad, put her in—Tha’rt a rare old cock, Jacky-boy, wi’ a belly
on thee as does credit to thy drink, if not to thy corn. Co’ up lass,
let’s get off ter th’ old homestead. Oh, my heart, what a wetness in
the night! There’ll be no volcanoes after this. Hey, Jack, my beautiful
young slender feller, which of us is Noah? It seems as though the
water-works is bursted. Ducks and ayquatic fowl ’ll be king o’ the
castle at this rate—dove an’ olive branch an’ all. Stand up then, gel,
stand up, we’re not stoppin’ here all night, even if you thought we
was. I’m dashed if the jumping rain wouldn’t make anybody think they
was drunk. Hey, Jack—does rain-water wash the sense in, or does it wash
it out?” And he laughed to himself at the joke.
He was always ashamed when he had to drive after he had been drinking,
always apologetic to the horse. His apologetic frame made him
facetious. He was aware of his inability to walk quite straight.
Nevertheless his will kept stiff and attentive, in all his fuddleness.
He mounted and bowled off through the gates of the innyard. The mare
went well, he sat fixed, the rain beating on his face. His heavy body
rode motionless in a kind of sleep, one centre of attention was kept
fitfully burning, the rest was dark. He concentrated his last attention
on the fact of driving along the road he knew so well. He knew it so
well, he watched for it attentively, with an effort of will.
He talked aloud to himself, sententious in his anxiety, as if he were
perfectly sober, whilst the mare bowled along and the rain beat on him.
He watched the rain before the gig-lamps, the faint gleaming of the
shadowy horse’s body, the passing of the dark hedges.
“It’s not a fit night to turn a dog out,” he said to himself, aloud.
“It’s high time as it did a bit of clearing up, I’ll be damned if it
isn’t. It was a lot of use putting those ten loads of cinders on th’
road. They’ll be washed to kingdom-come if it doesn’t alter. Well, it’s
our Fred’s look-out, if they are. He’s top-sawyer as far as those
things go. I don’t see why I should concern myself. They can wash to
kingdom-come and back again for what I care. I suppose they would be
washed back again some day. That’s how things are. Th’ rain tumbles
down just to mount up in clouds again. So they say. There’s no more
water on the earth than there was in the year naught. That’s the story,
my boy, if you understand it. There’s no more to-day than there was a
thousand years ago—nor no less either. You can’t wear water out. No, my
boy: it’ll give you the go-by. Try to wear it out, and it takes its
hook into vapour, it has its fingers at its nose to you. It turns into
cloud and falleth as rain on the just and unjust. I wonder if I’m the
just or the unjust.”
He started awake as the trap lurched deep into a rut. And he wakened to
the point in his journey. He had travelled some distance since he was
last conscious.
But at length he reached the gate, and stumbled heavily down, reeling,
gripping fast to the trap. He descended into several inches of water.
“Be damned!” he said angrily. “Be damned to the miserable slop.”
And he led the horse washing through the gate. He was quite drunk now,
moving blindly, in habit. Everywhere there was water underfoot.
The raised causeway of the house and the farm-stead was dry, however.
But there was a curious roar in the night which seemed to be made in
the darkness of his own intoxication. Reeling, blinded, almost without
consciousness he carried his parcels and the rug and cushions into the
house, dropped them, and went out to put up the horse.
Now he was at home, he was a sleep-walker, waiting only for the moment
of activity to stop. Very deliberately and carefully, he led the horse
down the slope to the cart-shed. She shied and backed.
“Why, wha’s amiss?” he hiccupped, plodding steadily on. And he was
again in a wash of water, the horse splashed up water as he went. It
was thickly dark, save for the gig-lamps, and they lit on a rippling
surface of water.
“Well, that’s a knock-out,” he said, as he came to the cart-shed, and
was wading in six inches of water. But everything seemed to him
amusing. He laughed to think of six inches of water being in the
cart-shed.
He backed in the mare. She was restive. He laughed at the fun of
untackling the mare with a lot of water washing round his feet. He
laughed because it upset her. “What’s amiss, what’s amiss, a drop o’
water won’t hurt you!” As soon as he had undone the traces, she walked
quickly away.
He hung up the shafts and took the gig-lamp. As he came out of the
familiar jumble of shafts and wheels in the shed, the water, in little
waves, came washing strongly against his legs. He staggered and almost
fell.
“Well, what the deuce!” he said, staring round at the running water in
the black, watery night.
He went to meet the running flood, sinking deeper and deeper. His soul
was full of great astonishment. He _had_ to go and look where it came
from, though the ground was going from under his feet. He went on, down
towards the pond, shakily. He rather enjoyed it. He was knee-deep, and
the water was pulling heavily. He stumbled, reeled sickeningly.
Fear took hold of him. Gripping tightly to the lamp, he reeled, and
looked round. The water was carrying his feet away, he was dizzy. He
did not know which way to turn. The water was whirling, whirling, the
whole black night was swooping in rings. He swayed uncertainly at the
centre of all the attack, reeling in dismay. In his soul, he knew he
would fall.
As he staggered something in the water struck his legs, and he fell.
Instantly he was in the turmoil of suffocation. He fought in a black
horror of suffocation, fighting, wrestling, but always borne down,
borne inevitably down. Still he wrestled and fought to get himself
free, in the unutterable struggle of suffocation, but he always fell
again deeper. Something struck his head, a great wonder of anguish went
over him, then the blackness covered him entirely.
In the utter darkness, the unconscious, drowning body was rolled along,
the waters pouring, washing, filling in the place. The cattle woke up
and rose to their feet, the dog began to yelp. And the unconscious,
drowning body was washed along in the black, swirling darkness,
passively.
Mrs. Brangwen woke up and listened. With preternaturally sharp senses
she heard the movement of all the darkness that swirled outside. For a
moment she lay still. Then she went to the window. She heard the sharp
rain, and the deep running of water. She knew her husband was outside.
“Fred,” she called, “Fred!”
Away in the night was a hoarse, brutal roar of a mass of water rushing
downwards.
She went downstairs. She could not understand the multiplied running of
water. Stepping down the step into the kitchen, she put her foot into
water. The kitchen was flooded. Where did it come from? She could not
understand.
Water was running in out of the scullery. She paddled through barefoot,
to see. Water was bubbling fiercely under the outer door. She was
afraid. Then something washed against her, something twined under her
foot. It was the riding whip. On the table were the rug and the cushion
and the parcel from the gig.
He had come home.
“Tom!” she called, afraid of her own voice.
She opened the door. Water ran in with a horrid sound. Everywhere was
moving water, a sound of waters.
“Tom!” she cried, standing in her nightdress with the candle, calling
into the darkness and the flood out of the doorway.
“Tom! Tom!”
And she listened. Fred appeared behind her, in trousers and shirt.
“Where is he?” he asked.
He looked at the flood, then at his mother. She seemed small and
uncanny, elvish, in her nightdress.
“Go upstairs,” he said. “He’ll be in th’ stable.”
“To—om! To—om!” cried the elderly woman, with a long, unnatural,
penetrating call that chilled her son to the marrow. He quickly pulled
on his boots and his coat.
“Go upstairs, mother,” he said; “I’ll go an’ see where he is.”
“To—om! To—o—om!” rang out the shrill, unearthly cry of the small
woman. There was only the noise of water and the mooing of uneasy
cattle, and the long yelping of the dog, clamouring in the darkness.
Fred Brangwen splashed out into the flood with a lantern. His mother
stood on a chair in the doorway, watching him go. It was all water,
water, running, flashing under the lantern.
“Tom! Tom! To—o—om!” came her long, unnatural cry, ringing over the
night. It made her son feel cold in his soul.
And the unconscious, drowning body of the father rolled on below the
house, driven by the black water towards the high-road.
Tilly appeared, a skirt over her nightdress. She saw her mistress
clinging on the top of a chair in the open doorway, a candle burning on
the table.
“God’s sake!” cried the old serving-woman. “The cut’s burst. That
embankment’s broke down. Whativer are we goin’ to do!”
Mrs. Brangwen watched her son, and the lantern, go along the upper
causeway to the stable. Then she saw the dark figure of a horse: then
her son hung the lamp in the stable, and the light shone out faintly on
him as he untackled the mare. The mother saw the soft blazed face of
the horse thrust forward into the stable-door. The stables were still
above the flood. But the water flowed strongly into the house.
“It’s getting higher,” said Tilly. “Hasn’t master come in?”
Mrs. Brangwen did not hear.
“Isn’t he the—ere?” she called, in her far-reaching, terrifying voice.
“No,” came the short answer out of the night.
“Go and loo—ok for him.”
His mother’s voice nearly drove the youth mad.
He put the halter on the horse and shut the stable door. He came
splashing back through the water, the lantern swinging.
The unconscious, drowning body was pushed past the house in the deepest
current. Fred Brangwen came to his mother.
“I’ll go to th’ cart-shed,” he said.
“To—om, To—o—om!” rang out the strong, inhuman cry. Fred Brangwen’s
blood froze, his heart was very angry. He gripped his veins in a
frenzy. Why was she yelling like this? He could not bear the sight of
her, perched on a chair in her white nightdress in the doorway, elvish
and horrible.
“He’s taken the mare out of the trap, so he’s all right,” he said,
growling, pretending to be normal.
But as he descended to the cart-shed, he sank into a foot of water. He
heard the rushing in the distance, he knew the canal had broken down.
The water was running deeper.
The trap was there all right, but no signs of his father. The young man
waded down to the pond. The water rose above his knees, it swirled and
forced him. He drew back.
“Is he the—e—ere?” came the maddening cry of the mother.
“No,” was the sharp answer.
“To—om—To—o—om!” came the piercing, free, unearthly call. It seemed
high and supernatural, almost pure. Fred Brangwen hated it. It nearly
drove him mad. So awfully it sang out, almost like a song.
The water was flowing fuller into the house.
“You’d better go up to Beeby’s and bring him and Arthur down, and tell
Mrs. Beeby to fetch Wilkinson,” said Fred to Tilly. He forced his
mother to go upstairs.
“I know your father is drowned,” she said, in a curious dismay.
The flood rose through the night, till it washed the kettle off the hob
in the kitchen. Mrs. Brangwen sat alone at a window upstairs. She
called no more. The men were busy with the pigs and the cattle. They
were coming with a boat for her.
Towards morning the rain ceased, the stars came out over the noise and
the terrifying clucking and trickling of the water. Then there was a
pallor in the east, the light began to come. In the ruddy light of the
dawn she saw the waters spreading out, moving sluggishly, the buildings
rising out of a waste of water. Birds began to sing, drowsily, and as
if slightly hoarse with the dawn. It grew brighter. Up the second field
was the great, raw gap in the canal embankment.
Mrs. Brangwen went from window to window, watching the flood. Somebody
had brought a little boat. The light grew stronger, the red gleam was
gone off the flood-waters, day took place. Mrs. Brangwen went from the
front of the house to the back, looking out, intent and unrelaxing, on
the pallid morning of spring.
She saw a glimpse of her husband’s buff coat in the floods, as the
water rolled the body against the garden hedge. She called to the men
in the boat. She was glad he was found. They dragged him out of the
hedge. They could not lift him into the boat. Fred Brangwen jumped into
the water, up to his waist, and half carried the body of his father
through the flood to the road. Hay and twigs and dirt were in the beard
and hair. The youth pushed through the water crying loudly without
tears, like a stricken animal. The mother at the window cried, making
no trouble.
The doctor came. But the body was dead. They carried it up to
Cossethay, to Anna’s house.
When Anna Brangwen heard the news, she pressed back her head and rolled
her eyes, as if something were reaching forward to bite at her throat.
She pressed back her head, her mind was driven back to sleep. Since she
had married and become a mother, the girl she had been was forgotten.
Now, the shock threatened to break in upon her and sweep away all her
intervening life, make her as a girl of eighteen again, loving her
father. So she pressed back, away from the shock, she clung to her
present life.
It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet clothes,
his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as he came from market, yet all
sodden and inert, that the shock really broke into her, and she was
terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he was, who had been to her the
image of power and strong life.
Almost in horror, she began to take the wet things from him, to pull
off him the incongruous market-clothes of a well-to-do farmer. The
children were sent away to the Vicarage, the dead body lay on the
parlour floor, Anna quickly began to undress him, laid his fob and
seals in a wet heap on the table. Her husband and the woman helped her.
They cleared and washed the body, and laid it on the bed.
There, it looked still and grand. He was perfectly calm in death, and,
now he was laid in line, inviolable, unapproachable. To Anna, he was
the majesty of the inaccessible male, the majesty of death. It made her
still and awe-stricken, almost glad.
Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the impressive,
inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing death. He was
beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line with the infinite.
What had she to do with him? He was a majestic Abstraction, made
visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute. And who could lay claim
to him, who could speak of him, of the him who was revealed in the
stripped moment of transit from life into death? Neither the living nor
the dead could claim him, he was both the one and the other,
inviolable, inaccessibly himself.
“I shared life with you, I belong in my own way to eternity,” said
Lydia Brangwen, her heart cold, knowing her own singleness.
“I did not know you in life. You are beyond me, supreme now in death,”
said Anna Brangwen, awe-stricken, almost glad.
It was the sons who could not bear it. Fred Brangwen went about with a
set, blanched face and shut hands, his heart full of hatred and rage
for what had been done to his father, bleeding also with desire to have
his father again, to see him, to hear him again. He could not bear it.
Tom Brangwen only arrived on the day of the funeral. He was quiet and
controlled as ever. He kissed his mother, who was still dark-faced,
inscrutable, he shook hands with his brother without looking at him, he
saw the great coffin with its black handles. He even read the
name-plate, “Tom Brangwen, of the Marsh Farm. Born ——. Died ——.”
The good-looking, still face of the young man crinkled up for a moment
in a terrible grimace, then resumed its stillness. The coffin was
carried round to the church, the funeral bell tanged at intervals, the
mourners carried their wreaths of white flowers. The mother, the Polish
woman, went with dark, abstract face, on her son’s arm. He was
good-looking as ever, his face perfectly motionless and somehow
pleasant. Fred walked with Anna, she strange and winsome, he with a
face like wood, stiff, unyielding.
Only afterwards Ursula, flitting between the currant bushes down the
garden, saw her Uncle Tom standing in his black clothes, erect and
fashionable, but his fists lifted, and his face distorted, his lips
curled back from his teeth in a horrible grin, like an animal which
grimaces with torment, whilst his body panted quick, like a panting
dog’s. He was facing the open distance, panting, and holding still,
then panting rapidly again, but his face never changing from its almost
bestial look of torture, the teeth all showing, the nose wrinkled up,
the eyes, unseeing, fixed.
Terrified, Ursula slipped away. And when her Uncle Tom was in the house
again, grave and very quiet, so that he seemed almost to affect
gravity, to pretend grief, she watched his still, handsome face,
imagining it again in its distortion. But she saw the nose was rather
thick, rather Russian, under its transparent skin, she remembered the
teeth under the carefully cut moustache were small and sharp and
spaced. She could see him, in all his elegant demeanour, bestial,
almost corrupt. And she was frightened. She never forgot to look for
the bestial, frightening side of him, after this.
He said “Good-bye” to his mother and went away at once. Ursula almost
shrank from his kiss, now. She wanted it, nevertheless, and the little
revulsion as well.
At the funeral, and after the funeral, Will Brangwen was madly in love
with his wife. The death had shaken him. But death and all seemed to
gather in him into a mad, over-whelming passion for his wife. She
seemed so strange and winsome. He was almost beside himself with desire
for her.
And she took him, she seemed ready for him, she wanted him.
The grandmother stayed a while at the Yew Cottage, till the Marsh was
restored. Then she returned to her own rooms, quiet, and it seemed,
wanting nothing. Fred threw himself into the work of restoring the
farm. That his father was killed there, seemed to make it only the more
intimate and the more inevitably his own place.
There was a saying that the Brangwens always died a violent death. To
them all, except perhaps Tom, it seemed almost natural. Yet Fred went
about obstinate, his heart fixed. He could never forgive the Unknown
this murder of his father.
After the death of the father, the Marsh was very quiet. Mrs. Brangwen
was unsettled. She could not sit all the evening peacefully, as she
could before, and during the day she was always rising to her feet and
hesitating, as if she must go somewhere, and were not quite sure
whither.
She was seen loitering about the garden, in her little woollen jacket.
She was often driven out in the gig, sitting beside her son and
watching the countryside or the streets of the town, with a childish,
candid, uncanny face, as if it all were strange to her.
The children, Ursula and Gudrun and Theresa went by the garden gate on
their way to school. The grandmother would have them call in each time
they passed, she would have them come to the Marsh for dinner. She
wanted children about her.
Of her sons, she was almost afraid. She could see the sombre passion
and desire and dissatisfaction in them, and she wanted not to see it
any more. Even Fred, with his blue eyes and his heavy jaw, troubled
her. There was no peace. He wanted something, he wanted love, passion,
and he could not find them. But why must he trouble her? Why must he
come to her with his seething and suffering and dissatisfactions? She
was too old.
Tom was more restrained, reserved. He kept his body very still. But he
troubled her even more. She could not but see the black depths of
disintegration in his eyes, the sudden glance upon her, as if she could
save him, as if he would reveal himself.
And how could age save youth? Youth must go to youth. Always the storm!
Could she not lie in peace, these years, in the quiet, apart from life?
No, always the swell must heave upon her and break against the
barriers. Always she must be embroiled in the seethe and rage and
passion, endless, endless, going on for ever. And she wanted to draw
away. She wanted at last her own innocence and peace. She did not want
her sons to force upon her any more the old brutal story of desire and
offerings and deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women.
She wanted to be beyond it all, to know the peace and innocence of age.
She had never been a woman to work much. So that now she would stand
often at the garden-gate, watching the scant world go by. And the sight
of children pleased her, made her happy. She had usually an apple or a
few sweets in her pocket. She liked children to smile at her.
She never went to her husband’s grave. She spoke of him simply, as if
he were alive. Sometimes the tears would run down her face, in helpless
sadness. Then she recovered, and was herself again, happy.
On wet days, she stayed in bed. Her bedroom was her city of refuge,
where she could lie down and muse and muse. Sometimes Fred would read
to her. But that did not mean much. She had so many dreams to dream
over, such an unsifted store. She wanted time.
Her chief friend at this period was Ursula. The little girl and the
musing, fragile woman of sixty seemed to understand the same language.
At Cossethay all was activity and passion, everything moved upon poles
of passion. Then there were four children younger than Ursula, a throng
of babies, all the time many lives beating against each other.
So that for the eldest child, the peace of the grandmother’s bedroom
was exquisite. Here Ursula came as to a hushed, paradisal land, here
her own existence became simple and exquisite to her as if she were a
flower.
Always on Saturdays she came down to the Marsh, and always clutching a
little offering, either a little mat made of strips of coloured, woven
paper, or a tiny basket made in the kindergarten lesson, or a little
crayon drawing of a bird.
When she appeared in the doorway, Tilly, ancient but still in
authority, would crane her skinny neck to see who it was.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said. “I thought we should be seein’ you. My
word, that’s a bobby-dazzlin’ posy you’ve brought!”
It was curious how Tilly preserved the spirit of Tom Brangwen, who was
dead, in the Marsh. Ursula always connected her with her grandfather.
This day the child had brought a tight little nosegay of pinks, white
ones, with a rim of pink ones. She was very proud of it, and very shy
because of her pride.
“Your gran’mother’s in her bed. Wipe your shoes well if you’re goin’
up, and don’t go burstin’ in on her like a skyrocket. My word, but
that’s a fine posy! Did you do it all by yourself, an’ all?”
Tilly stealthily ushered her into the bedroom. The child entered with a
strange, dragging hesitation characteristic of her when she was moved.
Her grandmother was sitting up in bed, wearing a little grey woollen
jacket.
The child hesitated in silence near the bed, clutching the nosegay in
front of her. Her childish eyes were shining. The grandmother’s grey
eyes shone with a similar light.
“How pretty!” she said. “How pretty you have made them! What a darling
little bunch.”
Ursula, glowing, thrust them into her grandmother’s hand, saying, “I
made them you.”
“That is how the peasants tied them at home,” said the grandmother,
pushing the pinks with her fingers, and smelling them. “Just such tight
little bunches! And they make wreaths for their hair—they weave the
stalks. Then they go round with wreaths in their hair, and wearing
their best aprons.”
Ursula immediately imagined herself in this story-land.
“Did you used to have a wreath in your hair, grandmother?”
“When I was a little girl, I had golden hair, something like Katie’s.
Then I used to have a wreath of little blue flowers, oh, so blue, that
come when the snow is gone. Andrey, the coachman, used to bring me the
very first.”
They talked, and then Tilly brought the tea-tray, set for two. Ursula
had a special green and gold cup kept for herself at the Marsh. There
was thin bread and butter, and cress for tea. It was all special and
wonderful. She ate very daintily, with little fastidious bites.
“Why do you have two wedding-rings, grandmother?—Must you?” asked the
child, noticing her grandmother’s ivory coloured hand with blue veins,
above the tray.
“If I had two husbands, child.”
Ursula pondered a moment.
“Then you must wear both rings together?”
“Yes.”
“Which was my grandfather’s ring?”
The woman hesitated.
“This grandfather whom you knew? This was his ring, the red one. The
yellow one was your other grandfather’s whom you never knew.”
Ursula looked interestedly at the two rings on the proffered finger.
“Where did he buy it you?” she asked.
“This one? In Warsaw, I think.”
“You didn’t know my own grandfather then?”
“Not this grandfather.”
Ursula pondered this fascinating intelligence.
“Did he have white whiskers as well?”
“No, his beard was dark. You have his brows, I think.”
Ursula ceased and became self-conscious. She at once identified herself
with her Polish grandfather.
“And did he have brown eyes?”
“Yes, dark eyes. He was a clever man, as quick as a lion. He was never
still.”
Lydia still resented Lensky. When she thought of him, she was always
younger than he, she was always twenty, or twenty-five, and under his
domination. He incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a
person herself, as if she were just his aide-de-camp, or part of his
baggage, or one among his surgical appliances. She still resented it.
And he was always only thirty: he had died when he was thirty-four. She
did not feel sorry for him. He was older than she. Yet she still ached
in the thought of those days.
“Did you like my first grandfather best?” asked Ursula.
“I liked them both,” said the grandmother.
And, thinking, she became again Lensky’s girl-bride. He was of good
family, of better family even than her own, for she was half German.
She was a young girl in a house of insecure fortune. And he, an
intellectual, a clever surgeon and physician, had loved her. How she
had looked up to him! She remembered her first transports when he
talked to her, the important young man with the severe black beard. He
had seemed so wonderful, such an authority. After her own lax
household, his gravity and confident, hard authority seemed almost
God-like to her. For she had never known it in her life, all her
surroundings had been loose, lax, disordered, a welter.
“Miss Lydia, will you marry me?” he had said to her in German, in his
grave, yet tremulous voice. She had been afraid of his dark eyes upon
her. They did not see her, they were fixed upon her. And he was hard,
confident. She thrilled with the excitement of it, and accepted. During
the courtship, his kisses were a wonder to her. She always thought
about them, and wondered over them. She never wanted to kiss him back.
In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the
kisses she had received.
She had never quite recovered from her prostration of the first days,
or nights, of marriage. He had taken her to Vienna, and she was utterly
alone with him, utterly alone in another world, everything, everything
foreign, even he foreign to her. Then came the real marriage, passion
came to her, and she became his slave, he was her lord, her lord. She
was the girl-bride, the slave, she kissed his feet, she had thought it
an honour to touch his body, to unfasten his boots. For two years, she
had gone on as his slave, crouching at his feet, embracing his knees.
Children had come, he had followed his ideas. She was there for him,
just to keep him in condition. She was to him one of the baser or
material conditions necessary for his welfare in prosecuting his ideas,
of nationalism, of liberty, of science.
But gradually, at twenty-three, twenty-four, she began to realize that
she too might consider these ideas. By his acceptance of her
self-subordination, he exhausted the feeling in her. There were those
of his associates who would discuss the ideas with her, though he did
not wish to do so himself. She adventured into the minds of other men.
His, then, was not the only male mind! She did not exist, then, just as
his attribute! She began to perceive the attention of other men. An
excitement came over her. She remembered now the men who had paid her
court, when she was married, in Warsaw.
Then the rebellion broke out, and she was inspired too. She would go as
a nurse at her husband’s side. He worked like a lion, he wore his life
out. And she followed him helplessly. But she disbelieved in him. He
was so separate, he ignored so much. He counted too much on himself.
His work, his ideas,—did nothing else matter?
Then the children were dead, and for her, everything became remote. He
became remote. She saw him, she saw him go white when he heard the
news, then frown, as if he thought, “_Why_ have they died now, when I
have no time to grieve?”
“He has no time to grieve,” she had said, in her remote, awful soul.
“He has no time. It is so important, what he does! He is then so
self-important, this half-frenzied man! Nothing matters, but this work
of rebellion! He has not time to grieve, nor to think of his children!
He had not time even to beget them, really.”
She had let him go on alone. But, in the chaos, she had worked by his
side again. And out of the chaos, she had fled with him to London.
He was a broken, cold man. He had no affection for her, nor for anyone.
He had failed in _his_ work, so everything had failed. He stiffened,
and died.
She could not subscribe. He had failed, everything had failed, yet
behind the failure was the unyielding passion of life. The individual
effort might fail, but not the human joy. She belonged to the human
joy.
He died and went his way, but not before there was another child. And
this little Ursula was his grandchild. She was glad of it. For she
still honoured him, though he had been mistaken.
She, Lydia Brangwen, was sorry for him now. He was dead—he had scarcely
lived. He had never known her. He had lain with her, but he had never
known her. He had never received what she could give him. He had gone
away from her empty. So, he had never lived. So, he had died and passed
away. Yet there had been strength and power in him.
She could scarcely forgive him that he had never lived. If it were not
for Anna, and for this little Ursula, who had his brows, there would be
no more left of him than of a broken vessel thrown away, and just
remembered.
Tom Brangwen had served her. He had come to her, and taken from her. He
had died and gone his way into death. But he had made himself immortal
in his knowledge with her. So she had her place here, in life, and in
immortality. For he had taken his knowledge of her into death, so that
she had her place in death. “In my father’s house are many mansions.”
She loved both her husbands. To one she had been a naked little
girl-bride, running to serve him. The other she loved out of
fulfilment, because he was good and had given her being, because he had
served her honourably, and become her man, one with her.
She was established in this stretch of life, she had come to herself.
During her first marriage, she had not existed, except through him, he
was the substance and she the shadow running at his feet. She was very
glad she had come to her own self. She was grateful to Brangwen. She
reached out to him in gratitude, into death.
In her heart she felt a vague tenderness and pity for her first
husband, who had been her lord. He was so wrong when he died. She could
not bear it, that he had never lived, never really become himself. And
he had been her lord! Strange, it all had been! Why had he been her
lord? He seemed now so far off, so without bearing on her.
“Which did you, grandmother?”
“What?”
“Like best.”
“I liked them both. I married the first when I was quite a girl. Then I
loved your grandfather when I was a woman. There is a difference.”
They were silent for a time.
“Did you cry when my first grandfather died?” the child asked.
Lydia Brangwen rocked herself on the bed, thinking aloud.
“When we came to England, he hardly ever spoke, he was too much
concerned to take any notice of anybody. He grew thinner and thinner,
till his cheeks were hollow and his mouth stuck out. He wasn’t handsome
any more. I knew he couldn’t bear being beaten, I thought everything
was lost in the world. Only I had your mother a baby, it was no use my
dying.
“He looked at me with his black eyes, almost as if he hated me, when he
was ill, and said, ‘It only wanted this. It only wanted that I should
leave you and a young child to starve in this London.’ I told him we
should not starve. But I was young, and foolish, and frightened, which
he knew.
“He was bitter, and he never gave way. He lay beating his brains, to
see what he could do. ‘I don’t know what you will do,’ he said. ‘I am
no good, I am a failure from beginning to end. I cannot even provide
for my wife and child!’
“But you see, it was not for him to provide for us. My life went on,
though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.
“I ought to have known, I ought to have been able to say to him: ‘Don’t
be so bitter, don’t die because this has failed. You are not the
beginning and the end.’ But I was too young, he had never let me become
myself, I thought he was truly the beginning and the end. So I let him
take all upon himself. Yet all did not depend on him. Life must go on,
and I must marry your grandfather, and have your Uncle Tom, and your
Uncle Fred. We cannot take so much upon ourselves.”
The child’s heart beat fast as she listened to these things. She could
not understand, but she seemed to feel far-off things. It gave her a
deep, joyous thrill, to know she hailed from far off, from Poland, and
that dark-bearded impressive man. Strange, her antecedents were, and
she felt fate on either side of her terrible.
Almost every day, Ursula saw her grandmother, and every time, they
talked together. Till the grandmother’s sayings and stories, told in
the complete hush of the Marsh bedroom, accumulated with mystic
significance, and became a sort of Bible to the child.
And Ursula asked her deepest childish questions of her grandmother.
“Will somebody love me, grandmother?”
“Many people love you, child. We all love you.”
“But when I am grown up, will somebody love me?”
“Yes, some man will love you, child, because it’s your nature. And I
hope it will be somebody who will love you for what you are, and not
for what he wants of you. But we have a right to what we want.”
Ursula was frightened, hearing these things. Her heart sank, she felt
she had no ground under her feet. She clung to her grandmother. Here
was peace and security. Here, from her grandmother’s peaceful room, the
door opened on to the greater space, the past, which was so big, that
all it contained seemed tiny, loves and births and deaths, tiny units
and features within a vast horizon. That was a great relief, to know
the tiny importance of the individual, within the great past.