THE RAINBOW
Ursula went home to Beldover faint, dim, closed up. She could scarcely
speak or notice. It was as if her energy were frozen. Her people asked
her what was the matter. She told them she had broken off the
engagement with Skrebensky. They looked blank and angry. But she could
not feel any more.
The weeks crawled by in apathy. He would have sailed for India now. She
was scarcely interested. She was inert, without strength or interest.
Suddenly a shock ran through her, so violent that she thought she was
struck down. Was she with child? She had been so stricken under the
pain of herself and of him, this had never occurred to her. Now like a
flame it took hold of her limbs and body. Was she with child?
In the first flaming hours of wonder, she did not know what she felt.
She was as if tied to the stake. The flames were licking her and
devouring her. But the flames were also good. They seemed to wear her
away to rest. What she felt in her heart and her womb she did not know.
It was a kind of swoon.
Then gradually the heaviness of her heart pressed and pressed into
consciousness. What was she doing? Was she bearing a child? Bearing a
child? To what?
Her flesh thrilled, but her soul was sick. It seemed, this child, like
the seal set on her own nullity. Yet she was glad in her flesh that she
was with child. She began to think, that she would write to Skrebensky,
that she would go out to him, and marry him, and live simply as a good
wife to him. What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the
living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body,
rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no
further complication. She had been wrong, she had been arrogant and
wicked, wanting that other thing, that fantastic freedom, that
illusory, conceited fulfilment which she had imagined she could not
have with Skrebensky. Who was she to be wanting some fantastic
fulfilment in her life? Was it not enough that she had her man, her
children, her place of shelter under the sun? Was it not enough for
her, as it had been enough for her mother? She would marry and love her
husband and fill her place simply. That was the ideal.
Suddenly she saw her mother in a just and true light. Her mother was
simple and radically true. She had taken the life that was given. She
had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted on creating life to fit
herself. Her mother was right, profoundly right, and she herself had
been false, trashy, conceited.
A great mood of humility came over her, and in this humility a bondaged
sort of peace. She gave her limbs to the bondage, she loved the
bondage, she called it peace. In this state she sat down to write to
Skrebensky.
“Since you left me I have suffered a great deal, and so have come to
myself. I cannot tell you the remorse I feel for my wicked, perverse
behaviour. It was given to me to love you, and to know your love for
me. But instead of thankfully, on my knees, taking what God had given
me, I must have the moon in my keeping, I must insist on having the
moon for my own. Because I could not have it, everything else must go.
“I do not know if you can ever forgive me. I could die with shame to
think of my behaviour with you during our last times, and I don’t know
if I could ever bear to look you in the face again. Truly the best
thing would be for me to die, and cover my fantasies for ever. But I
find I am with child, so that cannot be.
“It is your child, and for that reason I must revere it and submit my
body entirely to its welfare, entertaining no thought of death, which
once more is largely conceit. Therefore, because you once loved me, and
because this child is your child, I ask you to have me back. If you
will cable me one word, I will come to you as soon as I can. I swear to
you to be a dutiful wife, and to serve you in all things. For now I
only hate myself and my own conceited foolishness. I love you—I love
the thought of you—you were natural and decent all through, whilst I
was so false. Once I am with you again, I shall ask no more than to
rest in your shelter all my life——”
This letter she wrote, sentence by sentence, as if from her deepest,
sincerest heart. She felt that now, now, she was at the depths of
herself. This was her true self, forever. With this document she would
appear before God at the Judgment Day.
For what had a woman but to submit? What was her flesh but for
childbearing, her strength for her children and her husband, the giver
of life? At last she was a woman.
She posted her letter to his club, to be forwarded to him in Calcutta.
He would receive it soon after his arrival in India—within three weeks
of his arrival there. In a month’s time she would receive word from
him. Then she would go.
She was quite sure of him. She thought only of preparing her garments
and of living quietly, peacefully, till the time when she should join
him again and her history would be concluded for ever. The peace held
like an unnatural calm for a long time. She was aware, however, of a
gathering restiveness, a tumult impending within her. She tried to run
away from it. She wished she could hear from Skrebensky, in answer to
her letter, so that her course should be resolved, she should be
engaged in fulfilling her fate. It was this inactivity which made her
liable to the revulsion she dreaded.
It was curious how little she cared about his not having written to her
before. It was enough that she had sent her letter. She would get the
required answer, that was all.
One afternoon in early October, feeling the seething rising to madness
within her, she slipped out in the rain, to walk abroad, lest the house
should suffocate her. Everywhere was drenched wet and deserted, the
grimed houses glowed dull red, the butt houses burned scarlet in a
gleam of light, under the glistening, blackish purple slates. Ursula
went on towards Willey Green. She lifted her face and walked swiftly,
seeing the passage of light across the shallow valley, seeing the
colliery and its clouds of steam for a moment visionary in dim
brilliance, away in the chaos of rain. Then the veils closed again. She
was glad of the rain’s privacy and intimacy.
Making on towards the wood, she saw the pale gleam of Willey Water
through the cloud below, she walked the open space where hawthorn trees
streamed like hair on the wind and round bushes were presences slowing
through the atmosphere. It was very splendid, free and chaotic.
Yet she hurried to the wood for shelter. There, the vast booming
overhead vibrated down and encircled her, tree-trunks spanned the
circle of tremendous sound, myriads of tree-trunks, enormous and
streaked black with water, thrust like stanchions upright between the
roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot. She glided
between the tree-trunks, afraid of them. They might turn and shut her
in as she went through their martialled silence.
So she flitted along, keeping an illusion that she was unnoticed. She
felt like a bird that has flown in through the window of a hall where
vast warriors sit at the board. Between their grave, booming ranks she
was hastening, assuming she was unnoticed, till she emerged, with
beating heart, through the far window and out into the open, upon the
vivid green, marshy meadow.
She turned under the shelter of the common, seeing the great veils of
rain swinging with slow, floating waves across the landscape. She was
very wet and a long way from home, far enveloped in the rain and the
waving landscape. She must beat her way back through all this
fluctuation, back to stability and security.
A solitary thing, she took the track straight across the wilderness,
going back. The path was a narrow groove in the turf between high,
sere, tussocky grass; it was scarcely more than a rabbit run. So she
moved swiftly along, watching her footing, going like a bird on the
wind, with no thought, contained in motion. But her heart had a small,
living seed of fear, as she went through the wash of hollow space.
Suddenly she knew there was something else. Some horses were looming in
the rain, not near yet. But they were going to be near. She continued
her path, inevitably. They were horses in the lee of a clump of trees
beyond, above her. She pursued her way with bent head. She did not want
to lift her face to them. She did not want to know they were there. She
went on in the wild track.
She knew the heaviness on her heart. It was the weight of the horses.
But she would circumvent them. She would bear the weight steadily, and
so escape. She would go straight on, and on, and be gone by.
Suddenly the weight deepened and her heart grew tense to bear it. Her
breathing was laboured. But this weight also she could bear. She knew
without looking that the horses were moving nearer. What were they? She
felt the thud of their heavy hoofs on the ground. What was it that was
drawing near her, what weight oppressing her heart? She did not know,
she did not look.
Yet now her way was cut off. They were blocking her back. She knew they
had gathered on a log bridge over the sedgy dike, a dark, heavy,
powerfully heavy knot. Yet her feet went on and on. They would burst
before her. They would burst before her. Her feet went on and on. And
tense, and more tense became her nerves and her veins, they ran hot,
they ran white hot, they must fuse and she must die.
But the horses had burst before her. In a sort of lightning of
knowledge their movement travelled through her, the quiver and strain
and thrust of their powerful flanks, as they burst before her and drew
on, beyond.
She knew they had not gone, she knew they awaited her still. But she
went on over the log bridge that their hoofs had churned and drummed,
she went on, knowing things about them. She was aware of their breasts
gripped, clenched narrow in a hold that never relaxed, she was aware of
their red nostrils flaming with long endurance, and of their haunches,
so rounded, so massive, pressing, pressing, pressing to burst the grip
upon their breasts, pressing for ever till they went mad, running
against the walls of time, and never bursting free. Their great
haunches were smoothed and darkened with rain. But the darkness and
wetness of rain could not put out the hard, urgent, massive fire that
was locked within these flanks, never, never.
She went on, drawing near. She was aware of the great flash of hoofs, a
bluish, iridescent flash surrounding a hollow of darkness. Large, large
seemed the bluish, incandescent flash of the hoof-iron, large as a halo
of lightning round the knotted darkness of the flanks. Like circles of
lightning came the flash of hoofs from out of the powerful flanks.
They were awaiting her again. They had gathered under an oak tree,
knotting their awful, blind, triumphing flanks together, and waiting,
waiting. They were waiting for her approach. As if from a far distance
she was drawing near, towards the line of twiggy oak trees where they
made their intense darkness, gathered on a single bank.
She must draw near. But they broke away, they cantered round, making a
wide circle to avoid noticing her, and cantered back into the open
hillside behind her.
They were behind her. The way was open before her, to the gate in the
high hedge in the near distance, so she could pass into the smaller,
cultivated field, and so out to the high-road and the ordered world of
man. Her way was clear. She lulled her heart. Yet her heart was couched
with fear, couched with fear all along.
Suddenly she hesitated as if seized by lightning. She seemed to fall,
yet found herself faltering forward with small steps. The thunder of
horses galloping down the path behind her shook her, the weight came
down upon her, down, to the moment of extinction. She could not look
round, so the horses thundered upon her.
Cruelly, they swerved and crashed by on her left hand. She saw the
fierce flanks crinkled and as yet inadequate, the great hoofs flashing
bright as yet only brandished about her, and one by one the horses
crashed by, intent, working themselves up.
They had gone by, brandishing themselves thunderously about her,
enclosing her. They slackened their burst transport, they slowed down,
and cantered together into a knot once more, in the corner by the gate
and the trees ahead of her. They stirred, they moved uneasily, they
settled their uneasy flanks into one group, one purpose. They were up
against her.
Her heart was gone, she had no more heart. She knew she dare not draw
near. That concentrated, knitted flank of the horse-group had
conquered. It stirred uneasily, awaiting her, knowing its triumph. It
stirred uneasily, with the uneasiness of awaited triumph. Her heart was
gone, her limbs were dissolved, she was dissolved like water. All the
hardness and looming power was in the massive body of the horse-group.
Her feet faltered, she came to a standstill. It was the crisis. The
horses stirred their flanks uneasily. She looked away, failing. On her
left, two hundred yards down the slope, the thick hedge ran parallel.
At one point there was an oak tree. She might climb into the boughs of
that oak tree, and so round and drop on the other side of the hedge.
Shuddering, with limbs like water, dreading every moment to fall, she
began to work her way as if making a wide detour round the horse-mass.
The horses stirred their flanks in a knot against her. She trembled
forward as if in a trance.
Then suddenly, in a flame of agony, she darted, seized the rugged knots
of the oak tree and began to climb. Her body was weak but her hands
were as hard as steel. She knew she was strong. She struggled in a
great effort till she hung on the bough. She knew the horses were
aware. She gained her foot-hold on the bough. The horses were loosening
their knot, stirring, trying to realize. She was working her way round
to the other side of the tree. As they started to canter towards her,
she fell in a heap on the other side of the hedge.
For some moments she could not move. Then she saw through the
rabbit-cleared bottom of the hedge the great, working hoofs of the
horses as they cantered near. She could not bear it. She rose and
walked swiftly, diagonally across the field. The horses galloped along
the other side of the hedge to the corner, where they were held up. She
could feel them there in their huddled group all the while she hastened
across the bare field. They were almost pathetic, now. Her will alone
carried her, till, trembling, she climbed the fence under a leaning
thorn tree that overhung the grass by the high-road. The use went from
her, she sat on the fence leaning back against the trunk of the thorn
tree, motionless.
As she sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed away from
her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream, like a
stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled
by in transience, leaving her there, a stone at rest on the bed of the
stream, inalterable and passive, sunk to the bottom of all change.
She lay still a long time, with her back against the thorn tree trunk,
in her final isolation. Some colliers passed, tramping heavily up the
wet road, their voices sounding out, their shoulders up to their ears,
their figures blotched and spectral in the rain. Some did not see her.
She opened her eyes languidly as they passed by. Then one man going
alone saw her. The whites of his eyes showed in his black face as he
looked in wonderment at her. He hesitated in his walk, as if to speak
to her, out of frightened concern for her. How she dreaded his speaking
to her, dreaded his questioning her.
She slipped from her seat and went vaguely along the path—vaguely. It
was a long way home. She had an idea that she must walk for the rest of
her life, wearily, wearily. Step after step, step after step, and
always along the wet, rainy road between the hedges. Step after step,
step after step, the monotony produced a deep, cold sense of nausea in
her. How profound was her cold nausea, how profound! That too plumbed
the bottom. She seemed destined to find the bottom of all things
to-day: the bottom of all things. Well, at any rate she was walking
along the bottom-most bed—she was quite safe: quite safe, if she had to
go on and on for ever, seeing this was the very bottom, and there was
nothing deeper. There was nothing deeper, you see, so one could not but
feel certain, passive.
She arrived home at last. The climb up the hill to Beldover had been
very trying. Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not
stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up
and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very trying, very
wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.
Still, she must get to the top and go home to bed. She must go to bed.
She got in and went upstairs in the dusk without its being noticed she
was in such a sodden condition. She was too tired to go downstairs
again. She got into bed and lay shuddering with cold, yet too apathetic
to get up or call for relief. Then gradually she became more ill.
She was very ill for a fortnight, delirious, shaken and racked. But
always, amid the ache of delirium, she had a dull firmness of being, a
sense of permanency. She was in some way like the stone at the bottom
of the river, inviolable and unalterable, no matter what storm raged in
her body. Her soul lay still and permanent, full of pain, but itself
for ever. Under all her illness, persisted a deep, inalterable
knowledge.
She knew, and she cared no more. Throughout her illness, distorted into
vague forms, persisted the question of herself and Skrebensky, like a
gnawing ache that was still superficial, and did not touch her
isolated, impregnable core of reality. But the corrosion of him burned
in her till it burned itself out.
Must she belong to him, must she adhere to him? Something compelled
her, and yet it was not real. Always the ache, the ache of unreality,
of her belonging to Skrebensky. What bound her to him when she was not
bound to him? Why did the falsity persist? Why did the falsity gnaw,
gnaw, gnaw at her, why could she not wake up to clarity, to reality. If
she could but wake up, if she could but wake up, the falsity of the
dream, of her connection with Skrebensky, would be gone. But the sleep,
the delirium pinned her down. Even when she was calm and sober she was
in its spell.
Yet she was never in its spell. What extraneous thing bound her to him?
There was some bond put upon her. Why could she not break it through?
What was it? What was it?
In her delirium she beat and beat at the question. And at last her
weariness gave her the answer—it was the child. The child bound her to
him. The child was like a bond round her brain, tightened on her brain.
It bound her to Skrebensky.
But why, why did it bind her to Skrebensky? Could she not have a child
of herself? Was not the child her own affair? all her own affair? What
had it to do with him? Why must she be bound, aching and cramped with
the bondage, to Skrebensky and Skrebensky’s world? Anton’s world: it
became in her feverish brain a compression which enclosed her. If she
could not get out of the compression she would go mad. The compression
was Anton and Anton’s world, not the Anton she possessed, but the Anton
she did not possess, that which was owned by some other influence, by
the world.
She fought and fought and fought all through her illness to be free of
him and his world, to put it aside, to put it aside, into its place.
Yet ever anew it gained ascendency over her, it laid new hold on her.
Oh, the unutterable weariness of her flesh, which she could not cast
off, nor yet extricate. If she could but extricate herself, if she
could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the
vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her
father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance.
Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: “I have no
father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of
things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England
nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and
entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it,
like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.”
And again, to her feverish brain, came the vivid reality of acorns in
February lying on the floor of a wood with their shells burst and
discarded and the kernel issued naked to put itself forth. She was the
naked, clear kernel thrusting forth the clear, powerful shoot, and the
world was a bygone winter, discarded, her mother and father and Anton,
and college and all her friends, all cast off like a year that has gone
by, whilst the kernel was free and naked and striving to take new root,
to create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time. And the
kernel was the only reality; the rest was cast off into oblivion.
This grew and grew upon her. When she opened her eyes in the afternoon
and saw the window of her room and the faint, smoky landscape beyond,
this was all husk and shell lying by, all husk and shell, she could see
nothing else, she was enclosed still, but loosely enclosed. There was a
space between her and the shell. It was burst, there was a rift in it.
Soon she would have her root fixed in a new Day, her nakedness would
take itself the bed of a new sky and a new air, this old, decaying,
fibrous husk would be gone.
Gradually she began really to sleep. She slept in the confidence of her
new reality. She slept breathing with her soul the new air of a new
world. The peace was very deep and enrichening. She had her root in new
ground, she was gradually absorbed into growth.
When she woke at last it seemed as if a new day had come on the earth.
How long, how long had she fought through the dust and obscurity, for
this new dawn? How frail and fine and clear she felt, like the most
fragile flower that opens in the end of winter. But the pole of night
was turned and the dawn was coming in.
Very far off was her old experience—Skrebensky, her parting with
him—very far off. Some things were real; those first glamorous weeks.
Before, these had seemed like hallucination. Now they seemed like
common reality. The rest was unreal. She knew that Skrebensky had never
become finally real. In the weeks of passionate ecstasy he had been
with her in her desire, she had created him for the time being. But in
the end he had failed and broken down.
Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now, as she
liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something of the past, finite.
He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection for him, as
for that which is past. But, when she looked with her face forward, he
was not. Nay, when she looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before
her, what was there she could recognize but a fresh glow of light and
inscrutable trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the
unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she had
landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the
New World and the Old.
There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it
would have made little difference, however. She would have kept the
child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton
belonged to the past.
There came the cablegram from Skrebensky: “I am married.” An old pain
and anger and contempt stirred in her. Did he belong so utterly to the
cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he was. It was good that
he was as he was. Who was she to have a man according to her own
desire? It was not for her to create, but to recognize a man created by
God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She
was glad she could not create her man. She was glad she had nothing to
do with his creation. She was glad that this lay within the scope of
that vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out
of Eternity to which she herself belonged.
As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she sat at her
window, she saw the people go by in the street below, colliers, women,
children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition, but visible
through the husk, the swelling and the heaving contour of the new
germination. In the still, silenced forms of the colliers she saw a
sort of suspense, a waiting in pain for the new liberation; she saw the
same in the false hard confidence of the women. The confidence of the
women was brittle. It would break quickly to reveal the strength and
patient effort of the new germination.
In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of
the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of bygone living.
Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes she lost touch, she
lost her feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which
bound in her and all mankind. They were all in prison, they were all
going mad.
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already
enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those
who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new
houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient
triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines,
the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so
pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the
blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and
amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness
above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle,
hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new
houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the
houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over
the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she
perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of
faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And
forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a
rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her
heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow
should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it
took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc
bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great
architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals
luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the
top of heaven.
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who
crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption
were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would
quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny
covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue
to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind
and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new
architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept
away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the
over-arching heaven.
THE END