第 12 页

"When you're undressed, you s'll go up to see your

mother--when you're undressed, pet, when you've let Tilly

undress you, when you're a little jewel in your nightie, love.

Oh, don't you cry, don't you--"

Brangwen sat stiff in his chair. He felt his brain going

tighter. He crossed over the room, aware only of the maddening

sobbing.

"Don't make a noise," he said.

And a new fear shook the child from the sound of his voice.

She cried mechanically, her eyes looking watchful through her

tears, in terror, alert to what might happen.

"I want--my--mother," quavered the sobbing, blind

voice.

A shiver of irritation went over the man's limbs. It was the

utter, persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the voice

and the crying.

"You must come and be undressed," he said, in a quiet voice

that was thin with anger.

And he reached his hand and grasped her. He felt her body

catch in a convulsive sob. But he too was blind, and intent,

irritated into mechanical action. He began to unfasten her

little apron. She would have shrunk from him, but could not. So

her small body remained in his grasp, while he fumbled at the

little buttons and tapes, unthinking, intent, unaware of

anything but the irritation of her. Her body was held taut and

resistant, he pushed off the little dress and the petticoats,

revealing the white arms. She kept stiff, overpowered, violated,

he went on with his task. And all the while she sobbed,

choking:

"I want my mother."

He was unheedingly silent, his face stiff. The child was now

incapable of understanding, she had become a little, mechanical

thing of fixed will. She wept, her body convulsed, her voice

repeating the same cry.

"Eh, dear o' me!" cried Tilly, becoming distracted herself.

Brangwen, slow, clumsy, blind, intent, got off all the little

garments, and stood the child naked in its shift upon the

sofa.

"Where's her nightie?" he asked.

Tilly brought it, and he put it on her. Anna did not move her

limbs to his desire. He had to push them into place. She stood,

with fixed, blind will, resistant, a small, convulsed,

unchangeable thing weeping ever and repeating the same phrase.

He lifted one foot after the other, pulled off slippers and

socks. She was ready.

"Do you want a drink?" he asked.

She did not change. Unheeding, uncaring, she stood on the

sofa, standing back, alone, her hands shut and half lifted, her

face, all tears, raised and blind. And through the sobbing and

choking came the broken:

"I--want--my--mother."

"Do you want a drink?" he said again.

There was no answer. He lifted the stiff, denying body

between his hands. Its stiff blindness made a flash of rage go

through him. He would like to break it.

He set the child on his knee, and sat again in his chair

beside the fire, the wet, sobbing, inarticulate noise going on

near his ear, the child sitting stiff, not yielding to him or

anything, not aware.

A new degree of anger came over him. What did it all matter?

What did it matter if the mother talked Polish and cried in

labour, if this child were stiff with resistance, and crying?

Why take it to heart? Let the mother cry in labour, let the

child cry in resistance, since they would do so. Why should he

fight against it, why resist? Let it be, if it were so. Let them

be as they were, if they insisted.

And in a daze he sat, offering no fight. The child cried on,

the minutes ticked away, a sort of torpor was on him.

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. Don't cry any more wet tears, don't, it's better

not to. Don't cry--it's not so bad as all that. Hush now,

hush--let it be enough."

His voice was queer and distant and calm. He looked at the

child. She was beside herself now. He wanted her to stop, he

wanted it all to stop, to become natural.

"Come," he said, rising to turn away, "we'll go an' supper-up

the beast."

He took a big shawl, folded her round, and went out into the

kitchen for a lantern.

"You're never taking the child out, of a night like this,"

said Tilly.

"Ay, it'll quieten her," he answered.

It was raining. The child was suddenly still, shocked,

finding the rain on its face, the darkness.

"We'll just give the cows their something-to-eat, afore they

go to bed," Brangwen was saying to her, holding her close and

sure.

There was a trickling of water into the butt, a burst of

rain-drops sputtering on to her shawl, and the light of the

lantern swinging, flashing on a wet pavement and the base of a

wet wall. Otherwise it was black darkness: one breathed

darkness.

He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they entered into

the high, dry barn, that smelled warm even if it were not warm.

He hung the lantern on the nail and shut the door. They were in

another world now. The light shed softly on the timbered barn,

on the whitewashed walls, and the great heap of hay; instruments

cast their shadows largely, a ladder rose to the dark arch of a

loft. Outside there was the driving rain, inside, the

softly-illuminated stillness and calmness of the barn.

Holding the child on one arm, he set about preparing the food

for the cows, filling a pan with chopped hay and brewer's grains

and a little meal. The child, all wonder, watched what he did. A

new being was created in her for the new conditions. Sometimes,

a little spasm, eddying from the bygone storm of sobbing, shook

her small body. Her eyes were wide and wondering, pathetic. She

was silent, quite still.

In a sort of dream, his heart sunk to the bottom, leaving the

surface of him still, quite still, he rose with the panful of

food, carefully balancing the child on one arm, the pan in the

other hand. The silky fringe of the shawl swayed softly, grains

and hay trickled to the floor; he went along a dimly-lit passage

behind the mangers, where the horns of the cows pricked out of

the obscurity. The child shrank, he balanced stiffly, rested the

pan on the manger wall, and tipped out the food, half to this

cow, half to the next. There was a noise of chains running, as

the cows lifted or dropped their heads sharply; then a

contented, soothing sound, a long snuffing as the beasts ate in

silence.

The journey had to be performed several times. There was the

rhythmic sound of the shovel in the barn, then the man returned

walking stiffly between the two weights, the face of the child

peering out from the shawl. Then the next time, as he stooped,

she freed her arm and put it round his neck, clinging soft and

warm, making all easier.

The beasts fed, he dropped the pan and sat down on a box, to

arrange the child.

"Will the cows go to sleep now?" she said, catching her

breath as she spoke.

"Yes."

"Will they eat all their stuff up first?"

"Yes. Hark at them."

And the two sat still listening to the snuffing and breathing

of cows feeding in the sheds communicating with this small barn.

The lantern shed a soft, steady light from one wall. All outside

was still in the rain. He looked down at the silky folds of the

paisley shawl. It reminded him of his mother. She used to go to

church in it. He was back again in the old irresponsibility and

security, a boy at home.

The two sat very quiet. His mind, in a sort of trance, seemed

to become more and more vague. He held the child close to him. A

quivering little shudder, re-echoing from her sobbing, went down

her limbs. He held her closer. Gradually she relaxed, the

eyelids began to sink over her dark, watchful eyes. As she sank

to sleep, his mind became blank.

When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in

a timeless stillness. What was he listening for? He seemed to be

listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life. He

remembered his wife. He must go back to her. The child was

asleep, the eyelids not quite shut, showing a slight film of

black pupil between. Why did she not shut her eyes? Her mouth

was also a little open.

He rose quickly and went back to the house.

"Is she asleep?" whispered Tilly.

He nodded. The servant-woman came to look at the child who

slept in the shawl, with cheeks flushed hot and red, and a

whiteness, a wanness round the eyes.

"God-a-mercy!" whispered Tilly, shaking her head.

He pushed off his boots and went upstairs with the child. He

became aware of the anxiety grasped tight at his heart, because

of his wife. But he remained still. The house was silent save

for the wind outside, and the noisy trickling and splattering of

water in the water-butts. There was a slit of light under his

wife's door.

He put the child into bed wrapped as she was in the shawl,

for the sheets would be cold. Then he was afraid that she might

not be able to move her arms, so he loosened her. The black eyes

opened, rested on him vacantly, sank shut again. He covered her

up. The last little quiver from the sobbing shook her

breathing.

This was his room, the room he had had before he married. It

was familiar. He remembered what it was to be a young man,

untouched.

He remained suspended. The child slept, pushing her small

fists from the shawl. He could tell the woman her child was

asleep. But he must go to the other landing. He started. There

was the sound of the owls--the moaning of the woman. What

an uncanny sound! It was not human--at least to a man.

He went down to her room, entering softly. She was lying

still, with eyes shut, pale, tired. His heart leapt, fearing she

was dead. Yet he knew perfectly well she was not. He saw the way

her hair went loose over her temples, her mouth was shut with

suffering in a sort of grin. She was beautiful to him--but

it was not human. He had a dread of her as she lay there. What

had she to do with him? She was other than himself.

Something made him go and touch her fingers that were still

grasped on the sheet. Her brown-grey eyes opened and looked at

him. She did not know him as himself. But she knew him as the

man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man

who begot the child in her: an impersonal look, in the extreme

hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great, scalding

peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing

off into the infinite.

When her pains began afresh, tearing her, he turned aside,

and could not look. But his heart in torture was at peace, his

bowels were glad. He went downstairs, and to the door, outside,

lifted his face to the rain, and felt the darkness striking

unseen and steadily upon him.

The swift, unseen threshing of the night upon him silenced

him and he was overcome. He turned away indoors, humbly. There

was the infinite world, eternal, unchanging, as well as the

world of life.

CHAPTER III

CHILDHOOD OF ANNA LENSKY

Tom Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his

stepchild Anna. When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill

of pleasure. He liked the confirmation of fatherhood. It gave

him satisfaction to know he had a son. But he felt not very much

outgoing to the baby itself. He was its father, that was

enough.

He was glad that his wife was mother of his child. She was

serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In

the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her

former self. She became now really English, really Mrs.

Brangwen. Her vitality, however, seemed lowered.

She was still, to Brangwen, immeasurably beautiful. She was

still passionate, with a flame of being. But the flame was not

robust and present. Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but

like some flower opened in the shade, that could not bear the

full light. She loved the baby. But even this, with a sort of

dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowiness even in her

mother-love. When Brangwen saw her nursing his child, happy,

absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin flame. For he

perceived how he must subdue himself in his approach to her. And

he wanted again the robust, moral exchange of love and passion

such as he had had at first with her, at one time and another,

when they were matched at their highest intensity. This was the

one experience for him now. And he wanted it, always, with

remorseless craving.

She came to him again, with the same lifting of her mouth as

had driven him almost mad with trammelled passion at first. She

came to him again, and, his heart delirious in delight and

readiness, he took her. And it was almost as before.

Perhaps it was quite as before. At any rate, it made him know

perfection, it established in him a constant eternal

knowledge.

But it died down before he wanted it to die down. She was

finished, she could take no more. And he was not exhausted, he

wanted to go on. But it could not be.

So he had to begin the bitter lesson, to abate himself, to

take less than he wanted. For she was Woman to him, all other

women were her shadows. For she had satisfied him. And he wanted

it to go on. And it could not. However he raged, and, filled

with suppression that became hot and bitter, hated her in his

soul that she did not want him, however he had mad outbursts,

and drank and made ugly scenes, still he knew, he was only

kicking against the pricks. It was not, he had to learn, that

she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she

should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want