 CHAPTER 6 ANNA VICTRICS PART I O'Branquin 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 was 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 license on his part. But there was 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 to sultrily 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 to no space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, while she traced his features with her fingertips, 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. Only like a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening onto a soft feckoned earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience. He heard it and the hucksters' 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 colonel 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 center the great wheel was motionless, centered upon itself. Here was a poised, unflodged 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 center of all the slow wheeling of space and of the rapid agitation of life, deep inside them all at the center 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, forever far off, towards the rim. Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme center, 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 unheated 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 piece 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. While it was his own house it did not matter. Hastily he put wood in the grate and made a fire. He exalted 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 and 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 to the chill gray 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, left 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 of it light, 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. She 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 to, and he was letting it go. One bright, transitive 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 his 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. Then 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 untrammeled 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 labor 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. There 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 Brangwin 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 also 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 forever. 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 at all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away and tired. Ilkston, 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 he 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 fullness, 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 forever. 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 breasts, affirming that the old outward order was finished. The new order was begun to last forever, 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 fairytale, 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 housework, 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 woodwork? 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. She 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. He did not exist. His dark, passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and now clinched and coiled round a center of hatred existed in its own power. There was a curiously ugly pallor and 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 you 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. She 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 and 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. O, 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 and anguished 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 clayy and ugly. His intelligence was self-absorbed. How unnatural it was to sit with a self-absorbed creature, like something negative, a scanced 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 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 wince 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 defense 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 fire-glow. 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 parlor, 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 was 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 throws of pain. Then by emotion 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 forever. When they came to themselves the night was very dark. Two hours had gone by. They lay still and warm and weak like the newborn 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 ewes and smoothed the graves in the churchyard. When 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. Chapter 6 Part 2 of the Rainbow This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Chapter 6 Part 2 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 snow print 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 since she was, from habit and custom, a regular attendant at morning service. But she had ceased to come with any anticipation. Today, 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 fulfill 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 fulfill these injunctions. But quickly this pawled. 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 readymade duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of social duty and never of herself. 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. Loversheed, the vicar, and a protective sort of feeling for cassette 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 a 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 mere 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 neighbor 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 carrying 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 at 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, wrapped, half-delighted face, looking at a little stained window. She saw the ruby-colored glass with the shadow heaved along the bottom from the snow outside, and of 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 feelings she felt for the little woolly lambs on green legs the 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 parlor, continuing in the same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to her. Then he went to the bookshelf and took down books to look at that she had scarcely glanced over. He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations and old missiles, and then over a book on paintings and 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 pieta that she burst out, I do think, their loathsome, she cried. What? He said, surprised, abstracted. Those bodies with slits in them posing to be worshiped? 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 got to take it for what it means. It means your human body put up to be slit, and killed, and then worshiped. What else? Delapsed 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 poof 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 poofed 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, naive and inhuman as a hawk. 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 the 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 was 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 to him, drawing the stuff along under its vivid stabbing irresistibly. She made the machine home. 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 parlor. Then he walked back and out of the house again. Her heart sank. Very swiftly she began to make his tea. He went blackhearted down the road to Elkston. 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 Elkston 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 bookshop 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 fulfillment. 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 marvelous, 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 poured over the pictures intensely and these were wooden statues. Hulse, he believed that, meant wood. Wooden statues so shape into 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 Elkston. It was 10 o'clock as he was mounting the hill to Cacete, 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 set 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 irrigate 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 that 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 "'that 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 that 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 clear to 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 marvelous again, just marvelous. "'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 and 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 marvelous world. "'She was, for the most part, lost in the marvelousness of it. "'Even her great woes were marvelous 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 going to work. "'Then the flow of her life, which he seemed to dam 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 churchyard 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 flat, flat, flat 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 weekdays there was a glint of sky and fields. "'The little church seemed to babble away "'to the colleges the morning through. "'But on Sundays, when he stayed at home, "'a deeply colored 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 Qi on Sundays, then she regained another, "'lighter world that had never known the gloom "'in the stained glass and the ecstasy of chanting. "'Her husband was obliterated. "'She was with her father again, "'who was so fresh and free in 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 compliments. "'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 in 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 enunciation 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.'" End of chapter six, part two. Chapter six, part three of The Rainbow. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Chapter six, part three. 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 honor it. She did no service to his work as a lace designer, nor to himself as breadwinner. 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 rainwater, 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, inquate 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, forever. 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 soul desires, knowing his own tunneling nose. She felt often she must suffocate, and she fought him off. Then he, knowing he was blind, fought madly back again, frantic and sensual fear. He did foolish things. He asserted himself on his rights. He irrigated the old position of master of the house. You have 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 have 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 crafts that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of tubs, jostling, and 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 irrigating 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 fulfill 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 cudgled 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's 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. 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 you're 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, almost delicately, and see his face dark and sensitive attend to her news. She waited and waited for him to become gentle and stilt towards her, but he was always harsh, and he bullied her. So that the bud shriveled 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 the mystery 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. And 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 nought. He isn't miserable, she said. I'll back my life. If you can do nought else, you could 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 of 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 Brangwin. 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 is 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. He was 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 around 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 teased, and something like calm restored to the little circle, the thought of Will Brangwin's entry was not pleasantly entertained. Tillie was set to watch out for him as he passed by on his way home. The little party at table heard the woman-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 Brangwin, and take a bit off your length. Will Brangwin sat down? He felt something strange in the atmosphere. He was dark-browed, but his eyes had the keen, intense, 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 Brangwin, 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 Brangwin. Are you itching to be off the moment you enter? The talk of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of sun set poured in, shining on the floor. A gray hand appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her waddles made an aura-flam tossed here and there as she went. Her gray body was like a ghost. Anna watching through 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 coloring. He went bald, rather bald, when he was quite young, replied her mother. Also was it 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 Branglund 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. There were separate people with separate destinies. Why should they seek each till a 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 shadowyly 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 the 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 said 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 in the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far off faint noises of the town where 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. 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. When 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 and the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating oreola, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew-trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day blue bells 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 beginning, 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 piece 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 of black shadow, shy, wild, a beast of prey roamed and vanished from sight, and like strands of gossip were 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 maiden-blush 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 she 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 or 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. But in her heart itself was always the same strain, tense, anxious. She was not safe. She was always exposed. She was always attacked. There was a yearning in her for a fullness 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. 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, wrapped look in her face she awaited his homecoming that night. Then when he came she rose with her hands full of love as the 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 and 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 unfulfillment? Let it be fulfilled in him, then, as it was fulfilled in her. He had given her her fulfillment. 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 fulfillment 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, rebirths 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 exalt with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play than 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 Michael, 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.