The Rainbow quotes

So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.

There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager.

They had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager.

They had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the change in their eyes from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring anger;

He threw the book down and walked over it and went out to the cricket field.

And he hated books as if they were his enemies. He hated them worse than ever he hated any person.

He could not voluntarily control his attention. His mind had no fixed habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere to start from. For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known in himself, that he could apply to learning.

Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his own again.

“I have got a turnip on my shoulders, let me stick to th’ fallow,” he said to his exasperated mother.

He had too low an opinion of himself.

Then, when he was twenty-three, his mother died, and he was left at home with Effie. His mother’s death was another blow out of the dark. He could not understand it, he knew it was no good his trying.

One had to submit to these unforeseen blows that come unawares and leave a bruise that remains and hurts whenever it is touched.

He began to be afraid of all that which was up against him. He had loved his mother.

“Tilly,” he called loudly, “have we got any butter?”

The stranger stood there like a silence in her black cloak.

“Eh?” came the shrill cry from the distance.

He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven travelling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the greater ordering.

Unless she would come to him, he must remain as a nothingness.

It was a hard experience.

… after he had raged and tried to escape, and said he was good enough by himself, he was a man, and could stand alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night humble himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing.

He was nothing. But with her, he would be real.

If she were now walking across the frosty grass near the sheep-shelter, through the fretful bleating of the ewes and lambs, she would bring him completeness and perfection. And if it should be so, that she should come to him!

Then she looked up at him, the wide, young eyes blazing with light. And he bent down and kissed her on the lips.

And the dawn blazed in them, their new life came to pass, it was beyond all conceiving good, it was so good, that it was almost like a passing-away, a trespass.

He drew her suddenly closer to him.

Then she went on laying the tray for the vicar. Needing the table, she put the daffodils aside on the dresser without noticing them. Only their coolness, touching her hand, remained echoing there a long while.

They were such strangers, they must forever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him.

Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other. He went out into the wind.

They were such strangers, they must forever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him.

Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact!

It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other. He went out into the wind. Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about.

Happy she never seemed, but quick, sharp, absorbed, full of imagination and changeability. Tilly said she was bewitched. But it did not matter so long as she did not cry.

There was something heartrending about Anna’s crying, her childish anguish seemed so utter and so timeless, as if it were a thing of all the ages.

She made playmates of the creatures of the farmyard, talking to them, telling them the stories she had from her mother, counselling them and correcting them. Brangwen found her at the gate leading to the paddock and to the duckpond.

“I want her to go away.”

“Then want’s your portion,” he replied laconically.

So they drew nearer together. He would take her with him when he went out in the trap. The horse ready at the gate, he came noisily into the house, which seemed quiet and peaceful till he appeared to set everything awake.

He was happy, this morning, driving to town, with the hoofs of the horse spanking the hard earth.

Well he was happy, if half the world were weeping at the funeral of the other half.

And it was a jolly girl sitting beside him. And Woman was immortal, whatever happened, whoever turned towards death. Let the misery come when it could not be resisted.

And his mind drifted away to the birds, their solemn, dignified faces, their flight so soft and broad-winged. And then to the birds his brother had shot, fluffy, dust-coloured, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly asleep.

It was a queer thing, a dead owl.

He lifted his cup to his lips, he watched the child with the beads. But his mind was occupied with owls, and the atmosphere of his boyhood, with his brothers and sisters.

It was some little time before he came to, and turned to attend to the child. He was shocked by her little wet, blinded face. A bit dazed, he pushed back the wet hair.

Like a living statue of grief, her blind face cried on.

“Nay,” he said, “not as bad as that. It’s not as bad as that, Anna, my child. Come, what are you crying for so much? Come, stop now, it’ll make you sick. I wipe you dry, don’t wet your face any more.

But he knew her, he knew her meaning, without understanding. What she said, what she spoke, this was a blind gesture on her part. In herself she walked strong and clear, he knew her, he saluted her, was with her.

What was memory after all, but the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been fulfilled?

What was Paul Lensky to her, but an unfulfilled possibility to which he, Brangwen, was the reality and the fulfilment? What did it matter, that Anna Lensky was born of Lydia and Paul? God was her father and her mother.

What was memory after all, but the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been fulfilled? What was Paul Lensky to her, but an unfulfilled possibility to which he, Brangwen, was the reality and the fulfilment?

What did it matter, that Anna Lensky was born of Lydia and Paul? God was her father and her mother.

He had passed through the married pair without fully making Himself known to them.

Anna’s soul was put at peace between them. She looked from one to the other, and she saw them established to her safety, and she was free.

She played between the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud in confidence, having the assurance on her right hand and the assurance on her left.

She was no longer called upon to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch. Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens, and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath, between.

These two, her mother and father, held her still in fee. But she was free of other people, towards whom, on the whole, she took the benevolent attitude. She deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or arrogance, however.

As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof.

She could confer favours, but, save from her mother and father, she could receive none. She hated people who came too near to her. Like a wild thing, she wanted her distance. She mistrusted intimacy.

As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof. She could confer favours, but, save from her mother and father, she could receive none. She hated people who came too near to her.

Like a wild thing, she wanted her distance. She mistrusted intimacy.

In Cossethay and Ilkeston she was always an alien. She had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom she met were significant to her. They seemed part of a herd, undistinguished. She did not take people very seriously.

“They’re bagatelle,” she said, using one of her mother’s rare phrases.

“Bagatelles or billiards, it makes no matter, they’re nice young lasses enough.”

But Anna was not to be won over. She had a curious shrinking from commonplace people, and particularly from the young lady of her day. She would not go into company because of the ill-at-ease feeling other people brought upon her.

Her father was delighted. Anna was very proud in her bearing, too naturally indifferent to smaller bonds to satisfy Ilkeston, which would have liked to put her down. But Brangwen was having no such thing. If she chose to be royal, royal she should be.

He stood like a rock between her and the world.

After the fashion of his family, he grew stout and handsome. His blue eyes were full of light, twinkling and sensitive, his manner was deliberate, but hearty, warm. His capacity for living his own life without attention from his neighbours made them respect him.

His capacity for living his own life without attention from his neighbours made them respect him. They would run to do anything for him. He did not consider them, but was openhanded towards them, so they made profit of their willingness.

He liked people, so long as they remained in the background.

Mrs. Brangwen went on in her own way, following her own devices. She had her husband, her two sons and Anna. These staked out and marked her horizon. The other people were outsiders.

“You look a sight, you do, red in the face,” she cried.

“I might look worse if I was green,” he answered.

“And what’s wrong wi’ Il’son?”

Will Brangwen rose uncertainly.

He had golden-brown, quick, steady eyes, like a bird’s, like a hawk’s, which cannot look afraid.

“Your Cousin Will’ll come with you,” said the father.

She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin.

Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew.

She was curiously elated. She sat in a glowing world of unreality, very delightful. A brooding light, like laughter, was in her eyes. She was aware of a strange influence entering in to her, which she enjoyed.

Without knowing it, Anna was wanting him to come. In him she had escaped.

In him the bounds of her experience were transgressed: he was the hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside world.

He came. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, talking again, there recurred the strange, remote reality which carried everything before it.

He sat amongst them, his dark face glowing, an eagerness and a touch of derisiveness on his wide mouth, something grinning and twisted, his eyes always shining like a bird’s, utterly without depth. There was no getting hold of the fellow, Brangwen irritably thought.

He was like a grinning young tomcat, that came when he thought he would, and without cognizance of the other person.

At first the youth had looked towards Tom Brangwen when he talked; and then he looked towards his aunt, for her appreciation, valuing it more than his uncle’s;

What was restraining him? Her breast was near him; his head lifted like an eagle’s. She did not move. Suddenly, with an incredibly quick, delicate movement, he put his arms round her and drew her to him.

It was quick, cleanly done, like a bird that swoops and sinks close, closer.

He was kissing her throat. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright with a fierce purpose and gladness, like a hawk’s.

He was kissing her throat. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright with a fierce purpose and gladness, like a hawk’s.

She felt him flying into the dark space of her flames, like a brand, like a gleaming hawk.

They had looked at each other, and seen each other strange, yet near, very near, like a hawk stooping, swooping, dropping into a flame of darkness. So she took the candle and they went back to the kitchen.

She was sweet and fresh with the night air, and sweet with the scent of grain. And the whole rhythm of him beat into his kisses, and still he pursued her, in his kisses, and still she was not quite overcome.

He wondered over the moonlight on her nose! All the moonlight upon her, all the darkness within her!

All the night in his arms, darkness and shine, he possessed of it all! All the night for him now, to unfold, to venture within, all the mystery to be entered, all the discovery to be made.

“What experience do I want, Aunt?” asked the boy.

And if Brangwen’s heart had not been hard and intact with anger, like a precious stone, he would have agreed.

Will Brangwen went home strange and untouched. He felt he could not alter from what he was fixed upon, his will was set. To alter it he must be destroyed. And he would not be destroyed. He had no money.

That beloved image she had broken. Who was he then? A man put apart with those whose life has no more developments. He was isolated from her. There was a generation between them, he was old, he had died out from hot life.

A great deal of ash was in his fire, cold ash. He felt the inevitable coldness, and in bitterness forgot the fire.

He sat in his coldness of age and isolation. He had his own wife. And he blamed himself, he sneered at himself, for this clinging to the young, wanting the young to belong to him.

She was still young and naive, with some girl’s freshness. But she did not want any more the fight, the battle, the control, as he, in his incontinence, still did. She was so natural, and he was ugly, unnatural, in his inability to yield place.

How hideous, this greedy middle-age, which must stand in the way of life, like a large demon.

What was missing in his life, that, in his ravening soul, he was not satisfied? He had had that friend at school, his mother, his wife, and Anna? What had he done? He had failed with his friend, he had been a poor son;

At the back of the house was a garden adjoining the paddock, a cowshed with standing for two cows, pig-cotes and fowl-houses. Will Brangwen was very happy. Anna was glad to think of being mistress of her own place.

Tom Brangwen was now the fairy godfather. He was never happy unless he was buying something.

Will Brangwen, with his interest in all woodwork, was getting the furniture. He was left to buy tables and round-staved chairs and the dressers, quite ordinary stuff, but such as was identified with his cottage.

He wished he felt older. Why, what difference was there, as far as he felt matured or completed, between him now and him at his own wedding? He might be getting married over again—he and his wife.

He felt himself tiny, a little, upright figure on a plain circled round with the immense, roaring sky: he and his wife, two little, upright figures walking across this plain, whilst the heavens shimmered and roared about them.

When did one come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get old, never die? That was the clue. He exulted strangely, with torture.

The marriage party went across the graveyard to the wall, mounted it by the little steps, and descended.

Oh, a vain white peacock of a bride perching herself on the top of the wall and giving her hand to the bridegroom on the other side, to be helped down!

The vanity of her white, slim, daintily-stepping feet, and her arched neck. And the regal impudence with which she seemed to dismiss them all, the others, parents and wedding guests, as she went with her young husband.

“Alfred,” said Tom Brangwen, “keep your remarks till afterwards, and then we’ll thank you for them.—There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage.

You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have.

In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it.”

‘There’s an angel up it,’ I said, an’ she fetched me such a wipe. But there was. We used to call them thistle things ‘angels’ as wafts about. An’ I’d pushed one o’ these up my nose, for some reason or other.”

“It’s wonderful what children will get up their noses,” said Frank’s wife.

“I c’n remember our Hemmie, she shoved one o’ them bluebell things out o’ th’ middle of a bluebell, what they call ‘candles,’ up her nose, and oh, we had some work!

“Most folks as I’ve anything to do with—as has anything to do with me. They all break down.

You’ve got to go on by yourself, if it’s only to perdition. There’s nobody going alongside even there.

”

Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the destruction.

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

Here was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted.

“So am I,” he said calmly, as if it were of not the slightest significance. And they relapsed into the warm, golden stillness.

And the minutes flowed unheeded past the window outside.

Then suddenly she stirred against him.

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

“You look like a lion, with your mane sticking out, and your nose pushed over your food,”

he said.

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.

He hid his face against her, who was warm and like sunlight. She seemed to have sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed like sunlight upon him.

In her was a more real day than the day could give: so warm and steady and restoring.

He hid his face against her whilst the twilight fell, whilst she lay staring out with her unseeing dark eyes, as if she wandered forth untrammelled in the vagueness. The vagueness gave her scope and set her free.

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 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 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.

“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?”

“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—”

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

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

”

They glowered at each other, he with rage in his hands, she with her soul fierce with victory.

They were very well matched. They would fight it out.

She turned to her sewing. Immediately the tea-things were cleared away, she fetched out the stuff, and his soul rose in rage. He hated beyond measure to hear the shriek of calico as she tore the web sharply, as if with pleasure.

So it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life spoiled, ruined, desolate and laid waste. The next day it was all marvellous again, just marvellous.

One day she thought she would go mad from his very presence, the sound of his drinking was detestable to her. The next day she loved and rejoiced in the way he crossed the floor, he was sun, moon and stars in one.

She fretted, however, at last, over the lack of stability. When the perfect hours came back, her heart did not forget that they would pass away again. She was uneasy. The surety, the surety, the inner surety, the confidence in the abidingness of love:

She fretted, however, at last, over the lack of stability. When the perfect hours came back, her heart did not forget that they would pass away again. She was uneasy.

The surety, the surety, the inner surety, the confidence in the abidingness of love: that was what she wanted.

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

Nevertheless it was a marvellous world, she was for the most part lost in the marvellousness of it.

Even her great woes were marvellous to her.

She could be very happy. And she wanted to be happy. She resented it when he made her unhappy. Then she could kill him, cast him out. Many days, she waited for the hour when he would be gone to work.

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.

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.

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.”

“We quite readily believe it,” retorted Brangwen. “

Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.

”

“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.”

She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him.

They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk.

There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight.

But for what?

She was the ark, and the rest of the world was flood.

The only tangible, secure thing was the woman. He could leave her only for another woman. And where was the other woman, and who was the other woman? Besides, he would be just in the same state.

But he knew he could not. A woman, he must have a woman. And having a woman, he must be free of her. It would be the same position. For he could not be free of her.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet.

Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

And when, at evening, the sunset came in a red glare through the big opening in the clouds, she said again, “It is beyond.”

Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and she saw the hope, the promise.

Why should she travel any further?

… if she were arrived now, settled in her builded house, a rich woman, still her doors opened under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of the sun and moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo of journeying.

She was a door and a threshold, she herself.

Through her another soul was coming, to stand upon her as upon the threshold, looking out, shading its eyes for the direction to take.

It was a curious book, incoherent, full of interesting exhumations. It was dedicated: “To my wife, Millicent Maud Pearse, in whom I embrace the generous spirit of England.”

“If he embraces no more than the spirit of England,” said Tom Brangwen, “it’s a bad lookout for him.”

But paying a formal visit with his wife, he found the new Baroness a little, creamy-skinned, insidious thing with red-brown hair and a mouth that one must always watch, because it curved back continually in an incomprehensible, strange laugh that exposed her rather prominent teeth.

Anna took her best clothes, recovered her best high-school manner, and arrived with her husband. Will Brangwen, ruddy, bright, with long limbs and a small head, like some uncouth bird, was not changed in the least. The little Baroness was smiling, showing her teeth.

She had a real charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel.

Anna at once respected her, and was on her guard before her, instinctively attracted by the strange, childlike surety of the Baroness, yet mistrusting it, fascinated. The little baron was now quite white-haired, very brittle. He was wizened and wrinkled, yet fiery, unsubdued.

And it was as if she must grasp at something, as if her wings were too weak to lift her straight off the heaving motion. So she caught sight of the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.

These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better.

They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church.

They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church.

“However much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in,” the little faces mocked.

Apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very littleness.

“

You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don’t you?

” she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she laughed with malicious triumph.

But now, somehow, sadly and disillusioned, he realized that the doorway was no doorway. It was too narrow, it was false. Outside the cathedral were many flying spirits that could never be sifted through the jewelled gloom. He had lost his absolute.

He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous.

He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.

There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free.

He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.

Still he loved the Church. As a symbol, he loved it. He tended it for what it tried to represent, rather than for that which it did represent. Still he loved it. The little church across his garden-wall drew him, he gave it loving attention.

to have the intimate sacred building utterly in his own hands, and to make the form of service complete. There was a little bright anguish and tension on his face, and in his intent movements.

He was like a lover who knows he is betrayed, but who still loves, whose love is only the more intense. The church was false, but he served it the more attentively.

During the day, at his work in the office, he kept himself suspended. He did not exist. He worked automatically till it was time to go home.

When he was in the house, the child felt full and warm, rich like a creature in the sunshine. When he was gone, she was vague, forgetful. When he scolded her even, she was often more aware of him than of herself.

He was her strength and her greater self.

Ursula was three years old when another baby girl was born. Then the two small sisters were much together, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun was a quiet child who played for hours alone, absorbed in her fancies. She was brown-haired, fair-skinned, strangely placid, almost passive.

Still she set towards him like a quivering needle. All her life was directed by her awareness of him, her wakefulness to his being. And she was against her mother.

Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up.

But for him, she might have gone on like the other children, Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine, one with the flowers and insects and playthings, having no existence apart from the concrete object of her attention. But her father came too near to her.

But her father came too near to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of his breast woke her up almost in pain from the transient unconsciousness of childhood.

Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before she knew how to see.

She was wakened too soon.

She could not bear it, that he had never lived, never really become himself. And he had been her lord! Strange, it all had been! Why had he been her lord? He seemed now so far off, so without bearing on her.

“I liked them both. I married the first when I was quite a girl. Then I loved your grandfather when I was a woman. There is a difference.”

They were silent for a time.

It was no good trying to make Gudrun responsible.

She floated along like a fish in the sea, perfect within the medium of her own difference and being.

Other existence did not trouble her. Only she believed in Ursula, and trusted to Ursula.

One departed from the whole circumstance. One went away to the Grammar School, and left the little school, the meagre teachers, the Phillipses whom she had tried to love but who had made her fail, and whom she could not forgive.

She had an instinctive fear of petty people, as a deer is afraid of dogs.

Because she was blind, she could not calculate nor estimate people. She must think that everybody was just like herself.

To Ursula, as she grew a little older, it became a nightmare. When she saw, later, a Rubens picture with storms of naked babies, and found this was called “Fecundity,” she shuddered, and the world became abhorrent to her.

She knew as a child what it was to live amidst storms of babies, in the heat and swelter of fecundity.

And as a child, she was against her mother, passionately against her mother, she craved for some spirituality and stateliness.

The mother flourished amid all this.

“Better have them noisy than ill,” she said.

But the growing girls, in turn, suffered bitterly. Ursula was just coming to the stage when Andersen and Grimm were being left behind for the Idylls of the King and romantic love-stories.

He, of all people, knew. And he wanted to do this to her. He wanted to hurt her right through her closest sensitiveness, he wanted to treat her with shame, to maim her with insult.

Her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted.

She did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot. When she returned to her love for her father, the seed of mistrust and defiance burned unquenched, though covered up far from sight. She no longer belonged to him unquestioned.

Sometimes, little fish vanished before they had become real, like hallucinations, sometimes wagtails ran by the water’s brink, sometimes other little birds came to drink. She saw a kingfisher darting blue—and then she was very happy.

The kingfisher was the key to the magic world: he was witness of the border of enchantment.

But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of her life: the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in an outer world;

“I have said, Cassie, I will not have it.”

It was amazing how the father’s voice could ring out like a gong, without his being in the least moved, and how the mother could speak like a queen holding an audience, though her blouse was sticking out all round and her hair was not fastened up and the children were yelling a pandemonium.

Gradually breakfast was produced, and the elder girls came down into the babel, whilst half-naked children flitted round like the wrong ends of cherubs, as Gudrun said, watching the bare little legs and the chubby tails appearing and disappearing.

… body, to wallow in the sheepskin which formed the parlour rug, whilst the mother walked after, protesting sharply, holding the shirt like a noose, and the father’s bronze voice rang out, and the naked child wallowing on its back in the deep sheepskin announced gleefully:

“I’m bading in the sea, mother.”

“Why should I walk after you with your shirt?” said the mother. “Get up now.”

It was the dirty, desecrating hands of the revivalists which wanted to drag Jesus into this everyday life, to dress Jesus up in trousers and frock-coat, to compel Him to a vulgar equality of footing.

It was the impudent suburban soul which would ask, “What would Jesus do, if he were in my shoes?”

Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If anyone, it was the mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of the vulgar clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She never really subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen’s mystical passion.

Alas, that Christmas was only a domestic feast, a feast of sweetmeats and toys! Why did not the grownups also change their everyday hearts, and give way to ecstasy? Where was the ecstasy?

How passionately the Brangwens craved for it, the ecstasy.

The father was troubled, dark-faced and disconsolate, on Christmas night, because the passion was not there, because the day was become as every day, and hearts were not aflame.

What was the hope and the fulfilment? Nay, was it all only a useless after-death, a wan, bodiless after-death?

Alas, and alas for the passion of the human heart, that must die so long before the body was dead.

For from the grave, after the passion and the trial of anguish, the body rose torn and chill and colourless. Did not Christ say, “Mary!” and when she turned with outstretched hands to him, did he not hasten to add, “Touch me not;

She became aware of herself, that she was a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must become something. And she was afraid, troubled.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life?

Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still?

… of walking upon the waters and being blinded by the face of the Lord, of following the pillar of cloud across the desert and watching the bush that crackled yet did not burn away, this old, unquestioned duality suddenly was found to be broken apart.

The weekday world had triumphed over the Sunday world.

The Sunday world was not real, or at least, not actual. And one lived by action.

How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become oneself?

One was not oneself, one was merely a half-stated question.

How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of oneself, when one was merely an unfixed something—nothing, blowing about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated.

“That’ll teach you,” she said, grimly.

And she went away, unchristian but clean.

There was something unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity. Ursula suddenly revolted to the other extreme.

She was happier running on by herself.

Oh, it was a joy to run along the lanes without seeing things, yet being with them. It was such a joy to be alone with all one’s riches.

The holidays came, when she was free. She spent most of her time running on by herself, curled up in a squirrel-place in the garden, lying in a hammock in the coppice, while the birds came near—near—so near.

All the time, she dreamed of him, sometimes definitely, but when she was happiest, only vaguely.

He was the warm colouring of her dreams, he was the hot blood beating within them.

When she was less happy, out of sorts, she pondered over his appearance, his clothes, the buttons with his regimental badge, which he had given her. Or she tried to imagine his life in barracks.

The answer came in exasperation.

“It seems to me,” she answered, “as if you weren’t anybody⁠—as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.”

They had walked till they had reached a wharf, just above a lock. There an empty barge, painted with a red and yellow cabin hood, but with a long, coal-black hold, was lying moored.

Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was mad to be gone.

It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the quarry, and she was also the hound.

The darkness was passionate and breathing with immense, unperceived heaving. It was waiting to receive her in her flight. And how could she start—and how could she let go? She must leap from the known into the unknown.

“And you, be ye fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.”

In her soul she mocked at this multiplication, every cow becoming two cows, every turnip ten turnips.

“And God said; This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations;

Ursula wished she had been a nymph.

She would have laughed through the window of the ark, and flicked drops of the flood at Noah, before she drifted away to people who were less important in their Proprietor and their Flood.

What was God, after all? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing carrion, what then is not God? She was surfeited of this God. She was weary of the Ursula Brangwen who felt troubled about God.

Ursula wished she had been a nymph. She would have laughed through the window of the ark, and flicked drops of the flood at Noah, before she drifted away to people who were less important in their Proprietor and their Flood.

What was God, after all? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing carrion, what then is not God?

She was surfeited of this God. She was weary of the Ursula Brangwen who felt troubled about God. What ever God was, He was, and there was no need for her to trouble about Him. She felt she had now all licence.

What was God, after all? If maggots in a dead dog be but God kissing carrion, what then is not God? She was surfeited of this God.

She was weary of the Ursula Brangwen who felt troubled about God.

What ever God was, He was, and there was no need for her to trouble about Him. She felt she had now all licence.

She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts. Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, she went and wrote:

“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.”

It meant so much to her, that sentence—she put into it all the anguish of her youth and her young passion and yearning.

She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the unknown.

Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion in her.

When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer nine months hence, tiny, folded up, and left there waiting, a flash of triumph and love went over her.

Gudrun was at this time a great comfort and shield to her. The younger girl was a lithe, farouche animal, who mistrusted all approach, and would have none of the petty secrecies and jealousies of schoolgirl intimacy.

She would have no truck with the tame cats, nice or not, because she believed that they were all only untamed cats with a nasty, untrustworthy habit of tameness.

This was a great stand-back for Ursula, who suffered agonies when she thought a person disliked her, no matter how much she despised that other person. How could anyone dislike her, Ursula Brangwen? The question terrified her and was unanswerable.

This was a great stand-back for Ursula, who suffered agonies when she thought a person disliked her, no matter how much she despised that other person.

How could anyone dislike her, Ursula Brangwen?

The question terrified her and was unanswerable. She sought refuge in Gudrun’s natural, proud indifference.

The aspiration was the real thing—the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris.

Religions were local and religion was universal.

Christianity was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions into universal religion.

But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that.

They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.

”

It was no use doing anything, or being anything. She had no connection with other people. Her lot was isolated and deadly. There was nothing for her anywhere, but this black disintegration. Yet, within all the great attack of disintegration upon her, she remained herself.

It was the terrible core of all her suffering, that she was always herself.

Never could she escape that: she could not put off being herself.

Farther off was the great colliery that went night and day. And all around was the country, green with two winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the darker woods in the distance.

The whole place was just unreal, just unreal.

Even now, when he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in the actuality of the place. It was like some gruesome dream, some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete.

“Why don’t they alter it?” she passionately protested.

“They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves. It is easier,” he said.

“And you agree with them,” burst out his niece, unable to bear it. “You think like they do—that living human beings must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors. We could easily do without the pits.”

“

Every man his own little sideshow, his home, but the pit owns every man.

The women have what is left. What’s left of this man, or what is left of that—it doesn’t matter altogether. The pit takes all that really matters.”

“They know they are sold,” said Tom Brangwen. “That’s where it is.

They know they are sold to their job.

If a woman talks her throat out, what difference can it make? The man’s sold to his job. So the women don’t bother. They take what they can catch—and vogue la galère.”

Brangwen ridiculed and held cheap Ursula’s passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula would try to insist, in her own home, on the right of women to take equal place with men in the field of action and work.

“Ay,” said the mother, “there’s a good crop of stockings lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action.”

Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it all drove her to frenzy.

“I can become a teacher—I’m qualified by my matric.”

He wished her matric. in hell.

“And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?” he asked, jeering.

So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So she knew that this would come to pass.

Because nothing was ever fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited reality.

She did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must take her freedom where she could.

It was Monday. She had been at school a week and was getting used to the surroundings, though she was still an entire foreigner in herself. She looked forward to having dinner with Maggie. That was the bright spot in the day.

Maggie was so strong and remote, walking with slow, sure steps down a hard road, carrying the dream within her.

Ursula went through the class teaching as through a meaningless daze.

It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going. It was a blind fight. She had suffered bitterly in this school of St. Philip’s.

She was like a young filly that has been broken in to the shafts, and has lost its freedom.

And now she was suffering bitterly from the agony of the shafts. The agony, the galling, the ignominy of her breaking in. This wore into her soul. But she would never submit. To shafts like these she would never submit for long.

The agony, the galling, the ignominy of her breaking in. This wore into her soul. But she would never submit. To shafts like these she would never submit for long. But she would know them.

She would serve them that she might destroy them.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire.

She thought she still loved Anton Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had not been strong enough to acknowledge her. He had denied her. How then could she love him? How then was love so absolute? She did not believe it.

She believed that love was a way, a means, not an end in itself, as Maggie seemed to think.

And always the way of love would be found. But whither did it lead?

They loved her ideas, watched her as she talked vehemently about politics or economics. And she, while she talked, saw the golden-brown eyes of Anthony gleam like the eyes of a satyr as they watched her.

He did not listen to her words, he listened to her.

It excited her.

Yet he did not open. For a moment they both stood looking at the fire of sunset that quivered among the purple twigs of the trees. She saw his brown, hard, well-hewn face gleaming with anger and humiliation and submission.

He was an animal that knows that it is subdued.

Her heart flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she?

He was an animal that knows that it is subdued. Her heart flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense of loneliness.

Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.

She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east flushed strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a rosy sky, above the darkening, bluish snow. All this so beautiful, all this so lovely! He did not see it.

All this so beautiful, all this so lovely! He did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it, and was one with it.

Her seeing separated them infinitely.

They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates. The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made only a dimness in an unreal world.

She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered.

But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses.

She could not help it, that she was a traveller. She knew Anthony, that he was not one. But oh, ultimately and finally, she must go on and on, seeking the goal that she knew she did draw nearer to.

Philip’s. As the months went she ticked them off, first October, then November, December, January. She was careful always to subtract a month from the remainder, for the summer holidays. She saw herself travelling round a circle, only an arc of which remained to complete.

Then, she was in the open, like a bird tossed into midair, a bird that had learned in some measure to fly.

There was college ahead; that was her midair, unknown, spacious. Come college, and she would have broken from the confines of all the life she had known. For her father was also going to move. They were all going to leave Cossethay.

And yet—and yet—one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it.

So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked.

She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height.

It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet—and yet—one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go.

It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it.

So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height.

Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy.

The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night.

And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground.

Going home, she left the purplish dark of the trees for the open lane, where the puddles shone long and jewel-like in the ruts, the land about her was darkened, and the sky a jewel overhead.

Oh, how amazing it was to her! It was almost too much.

She wanted to run, and sing, and cry out for very wildness and poignancy, but she could not run and sing and cry out in such a way as to cry out the deep things in her heart, so she was still, and almost sad …

She stood before it arrested with delight, and a realization went deep into her heart. There was so great a host in array behind the cloud of pale, dim green, so much to come forth—so much sunshine to pour down.

So the weeks passed on, trance-like and pregnant.

The pear tree at Cossethay burst into bloom against the cottage-end, like a wave burst into foam.

Nay, the large photographs of the Primavera and the Aphrodite and the Nativity in the dining-room, the ordinary reception-room, would make dumb the mouth of Beldover.

And after all, it is better to be princess in Beldover than a vulgar nobody in the country.

There was great preparation made for the removal of the whole Brangwen family, ten in all. The house in Beldover was prepared, the house in Cossethay was dismantled. Come the end of the school-term the removal would begin.

The morning outside was bright and sunny, and the freedom got inside the schoolroom this last day. It was as if the walls of the school were going to melt away. Already they seemed shadowy and unreal.

It was breaking-up morning. Soon scholars and teachers would be outside, each going his own way.

The irons were struck off, the sentence was expired, the prison was a momentary shadow halting about them. The children were carrying away books and inkwell, and rolling up maps. All their faces were bright with gladness and goodwill.

In the teachers’ room the teachers were chatting and loitering, talking excitedly of where they were going: to the Isle of Man, to Llandudno, to Yarmouth.

They were eager, and attached to each other, like comrades leaving a ship.

Then it was Mr. Harby’s turn to make a speech to Ursula. He looked handsome, with his silver-grey temples and black brows, and his imperturbable male solidity.

“Ay,” said his wife pleasantly.

And the very brevity, the silence of intimacy between the two made a home in the hearts of the children, who clustered round feeling strange in the new place.

Everything was at sixes and sevens. But a fire was made in the kitchen, the hearthrug put down, the kettle set on the hob, and Mrs. Brangwen began towards sunset to prepare the first meal.

Brangwen began towards sunset to prepare the first meal. Ursula and Gudrun were slaving in the bedrooms, candles were rushing about. Then from the kitchen came the smell of ham and eggs and coffee, and in the gaslight, the scrambled meal began.

The family seemed to huddle together like a little camp in a strange place.

Ursula felt a load of responsibility upon her, caring for the half-little ones. The smallest kept near the mother.

Ursula sat beside her window, rather far back. Looking down, she saw the lime trees turning yellow, the tradesman’s boy passing silent down the still, autumn-sunny street. There was the world, remote, remote.

Here, within the great, whispering seashell, that whispered all the while with reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence.

She listened, she scribbled her notes with joy, almost with ecstasy, never for a moment criticizing what she heard. The lecturer was a mouthpiece, a priest.

So the first year went by, in magnificent seclusion and activity of learning.

It was strenuous as a battle, her college life, yet remote as peace.

She came to Nottingham in the morning with Gudrun. The two sisters were distinguished wherever they went, slim, strong girls, eager and extremely sensitive.

She stood and looked out over the shining sea. It was very beautiful to her. The tears rose hot in her heart.

Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly in to her a passionate, unborn yearning. “There are so many dawns that have not yet risen.”

It seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea, all the unrisen dawns were appealing to her, all her unborn soul was crying for the unrisen dawns.

And in her very sob, she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry.

It was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.

She glanced apprehensively round, hoping no one would see her in this state.

But during this year the glamour began to depart from college. The professors were not priests initiated into the deep mysteries of life and knowledge. After all, they were only middlemen handling wares they had become so accustomed to that they were oblivious of them.

What was Latin?⁠—So much dry goods of knowledge.

What was the Latin class altogether but a sort of secondhand curio shop, where one bought curios and learned the market-value of curios; dull curios too, on the whole.

This was only a little sideshow to the factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.

The college itself was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.

A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same darkness and bitter gloom from which she was never safe now, the realization of the permanent substratum of ugliness under everything.

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same?

Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead.

Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead.

Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

No matter! Every hilltop was a little different, every valley was somehow new. Cossethay and her childhood with her father; the Marsh and the little Church school near the Marsh, and her grandmother and her uncles; the High School at Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky;

Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

No matter! Every hilltop was a little different, every valley was somehow new.

Cossethay and her childhood with her father; the Marsh and the little Church school near the Marsh, and her grandmother and her uncles; the High School at Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky; Anton Skrebensky and the dance in the moonlight between the fires;

Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different. Yet she was always Ursula Brangwen.

But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was.

Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, of falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.

Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, of falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.

That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it could not come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash.

This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit up by man’s completest consciousness, she thought was all the world: that here all was disclosed forever.

It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit up by man’s completest consciousness, she thought was all the world: that here all was disclosed forever.

Yet all the time, within the darkness she had been aware of points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing.

And her soul had acknowledged in a great heave of terror only the outer darkness.

… order there is nothing,” turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the Creator, and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on the edge.

Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness.

For if he did he was jeered to death by the others, who cried “Fool, antisocial knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There is no darkness.

We move and live and have our being within the light, and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and comprehend the innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool and knave, how dare you belittle us with the darkness?”

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels, whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of darkness.

And some, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyena and the wolf;

Often her thoughts returned to him.

He seemed like the gleaming dawn, yellow, radiant, of a long, grey, ashy day.

The memory of him was like the thought of the first radiant hours of morning. And here was the blank grey ashiness of later daytime.

Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite.

Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity.

Ursula sat abstracted over her microscope, in suspense. Her soul was busy, infinitely busy, in the new world. In the new world, Skrebensky was waiting for her—he would be waiting for her. She could not go yet, because her soul was engaged.

She knew a great difference in him. The kinship was there, the old kinship, but he had belonged to a different world from hers.

It was as if they had cried a state of truce between him and her, and in this truce they had met.

She knew, vaguely, in the first minute, that they were enemies come together in a truce. Every movement and word of his was alien to her being.

“I think so—there’s a good deal of social life, and plenty going on—hunting, polo—and always a good horse—and plenty of work, any amount of work.”

He was always sidetracking, always sidetracking his own soul.

She could see him so well out there, in India—one of the governing class, superimposed upon an old civilization, lord and master of a clumsier civilization than his own. It was his choice.

His beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity.

She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order.

All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality?

They walked close together, powerful in unison. He drew her very close, held her with a subtle, stealthy, powerful passion, as if they had a secret agreement which held good in the profound darkness.

The profound darkness was their universe.

“It is like it was before,” she said.

The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him for a moment. The darkness travelled massively along.

“I had to come back to you,” he said, as if hypnotized. “You were always at the back of everything.”

She was silent with triumph, like fate.

She looked to see the dark figures against the fence, wondering that the darkness was inhabited.

“Only lovers will walk here tonight,” he said.

Then in a low, vibrating voice he told her about Africa, the strange darkness, the strange, blood fear.

But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and arrogant.

“The stupid lights,” Ursula said to herself, in her dark sensual arrogance.

“The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it?—nothing, just nothing.”

… the next weeks, all the time she went about in the same dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing at the civic pretence of all the human life about her.

“What are you, you pale citizens?” her face seemed to say, gleaming. “You subdued beast in sheep’s clothing, you primeval darkness falsified to a social mechanism.”

She went about in the sensual subconsciousness all the time, mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

She went about in the sensual subconsciousness all the time, mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

“They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing,” she said to herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened, neutralized men.

“They think it better to be clerks or professors than to be the dark, fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness. What do you think you are?” her soul asked of the professor as she sat opposite him in class.

There was Skrebensky, there was her dark, vital self. Outside the college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the edge of the night, he was attentive. Did he care?

She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in the night.

She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood, she had the glimmering core of fecundity, she had her mate, her complement, her sharer in fruition. So, she had all, everything.

Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky—not the young man of the world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world.

The world was not strong⁠—she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense:⁠—she existed supremely.

She continued at college, in her ordinary routine, merely as a cover to her dark, powerful under-life. The fact of herself, and with her Skrebensky, was so powerful, that she took rest in the other.

“Why?” he asked, “why don’t you want to marry me?”

“I don’t want to be with other people,” she said. “I want to be like this. I’ll tell you if ever I want to marry you.”

He would rather the thing was left indefinite, and that she took the responsibility.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed.

The world was a world of servants whom one civilly ignored.

Wherever they went, they were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride of the senses.

The machinery of the old system lasted for him, not the system. The money simply did not exist.

Neither did any of the old obligations.

They came home from the theatre, had supper, then flitted about in their dressing-gowns. They had a large bedroom and a corner sitting-room high up, remote and very cosy.

So he went across to her, to get his sleeping suit. It was always a perfect adventure to go near to her. She put her arms round him, and snuffed his warm, softened skin.

“Soap,” he answered.

“Soap,” she repeated, looking up with bright eyes. They were both laughing, always laughing.

Quite mad, beside himself, he went to his club and sat with a glass of whisky, motionless, as if turned to clay.

He felt like a corpse that is inhabited with just enough life to make it appear as any other of the spectral, unliving beings which we call people in our dead language.

Her absence was worse than pain to him. It destroyed his being.

He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal. Then he was just the opposite to what he had been.

He became a warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse formless fashion.

Everything melted down into a rosy glow, and he was the glow, and everything was the glow, everybody else was the glow, and it was very nice, very nice. He would sing songs, it was so nice.

“What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate democracy?”

“Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy,” she said, “because they’re the only people who will push themselves there. Only degenerate races are democratic.”

“What do you want then—an aristocracy?” he asked, secretly moved. He always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy. Yet to hear her speak for his class pained him with a curious, painful pleasure.

“What do you feel yourself?” he said. “Aren’t you righteous in your own mind?”

“Yes, I am, because I’m against you, and all your old, dead things,” she cried.

She seemed, with the last words, uttered in hard knowledge, to strike down the flag that he kept flying. He felt cut off at the knees, a figure made worthless.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him.

Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

And at such moments, when he was made with her destroying him, when all his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him …

… complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him again, they came together in an overwhelming passion, in which he knew he satisfied her.

But it all contained a developing germ of death.

After each contact, her anguished desire for him or for that which she never had from him was stronger, her love was more hopeless.

After each contact his mad dependence on her was deepened, his hope of standing strong and taking her in his own strength was weakened.

He felt himself a mere attribute of her.

Whitsuntide came, just before her examination. She was to have a few days of rest. Dorothy had inherited her patrimony, and had taken a cottage in Sussex. She invited them to stay with her.

Yet the downs, in magnificent indifference, bearing limbs and body to the sun, drinking sunshine and sea-wind and sea-wet cloud into its golden skin, with superb stillness and calm of being, was not the downs still more wonderful?

The blind, pathetic, energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away through the patterned levels to the sea’s dimness, so fast and so energetic, made her weep.

Where was it going? It was going nowhere, it was just going. So blind, so without goal or aim, yet so hasty! She sat on an old prehistoric earthwork and cried, and the tears ran down her face.

The blind, pathetic, energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away through the patterned levels to the sea’s dimness, so fast and so energetic, made her weep. Where was it going?

It was going nowhere, it was just going. So blind, so without goal or aim, yet so hasty!

She sat on an old prehistoric earthwork and cried, and the tears ran down her face. The train had tunnelled all the earth, blindly, and uglily.

Her hair was loose and blew about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals when she set off on the long run to the dew-pond.

In the round dew-pond the stars were untroubled.

She ventured softly into the water, grasping at the stars with her hands.

The sun was coming. There was a quivering, a powerful terrifying swim of molten light. Then the molten source itself surged forth, revealing itself.

The sun was in the sky, too powerful to look at.

And the ground beneath lay so still, so peaceful. Only now and again a cock crew. Otherwise, from the distant yellow hills to the pine trees at the foot of the downs, everything was newly washed into being, in a flood of new, golden creation.

And the ground beneath lay so still, so peaceful. Only now and again a cock crew.

Otherwise, from the distant yellow hills to the pine trees at the foot of the downs, everything was newly washed into being, in a flood of new, golden creation.

It was so unutterably still and perfect with promise, the golden-lighted, distinct land, that Ursula’s soul rocked and wept. Suddenly he glanced at her. The tears were running over her cheeks, her mouth was working strangely.

They returned to Nottingham, the time of her examination came. She must go to London. But she would not stay with him in an hotel. She would go to a quiet little pension near the British Museum.

Those quiet residential squares of London made a great impression on her mind. They were very complete. Her mind seemed imprisoned in their quietness. Who was going to liberate her?

In the evening, her practical examinations being over, he went with her to dinner at one of the hotels down the river, near Richmond. It was golden and beautiful, with yellow water and white and scarlet-striped boat-awnings, and blue shadows under the trees.

The knot in his throat grew harder, his face was drawn as if he were being strangled.

“I mean never,” she said, out of some far self which spoke for once beyond her.

His drawn, strangled face watched her blankly for a few moments, then a strange sound took place in his throat. She started, came to herself, and, horrified, saw him.

She watched him, as he sponged himself, and quickly dried himself with the towel. His body was beautiful, his movements intent and quick, she admired him and she appreciated him without reserve. He seemed completed now. He aroused no fruitful fecundity in her.

He seemed added up, finished. She knew him all round, not on any side did he lead into the unknown.

Poignant, almost passionate appreciation she felt for him, but none of the dreadful wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the reverence of love. He was, however, unaware this morning.

He seemed completed now. He aroused no fruitful fecundity in her. He seemed added up, finished. She knew him all round, not on any side did he lead into the unknown.

Poignant, almost passionate appreciation she felt for him, but none of the dreadful wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the reverence of love.

He was, however, unaware this morning. His body was quiet and fulfilled, his veins complete with satisfaction, he was happy, finished.