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he knew her altogether. Poland, her husband, the war--he

understood no more of this in her. He did not understand her

foreign nature, half German, half Polish, nor her foreign

speech. 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. He

had passed through the married pair without fully making Himself

known to them.

Now He was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as

they stood together. When at last they had joined hands, the

house was finished, and the Lord took up his abode. And they

were glad.

The days went on as before, Brangwen went out to his work,

his wife nursed her child and attended in some measure to the

farm. They did not think of each other-why should they? Only

when she touched him, he knew her instantly, that she was with

him, near him, that she was the gateway and the way out, that

she was beyond, and that he was travelling in her through the

beyond. Whither?--What does it matter? He responded always.

When she called, he answered, when he asked, her response came

at once, or at length.

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.

CHAPTER IV

GIRLHOOD OF ANNE BRANGWEN

When Anna was nine years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames'

school in Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her

inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked,

disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to

respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna only laughed

at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized her in superb,

childish fashion.

The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt

for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority. She was very shy,

and tortured with misery when people did not like her. On the

other hand, she cared very little for anybody save her mother,

whom she still rather resentfully worshipped, and her father,

whom she loved and patronized, but upon whom she depended. 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.

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.

She had two brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom

she was intimately related to but whom she never mingled with,

and Fred, fair and responsive, whom she adored but did not

consider as a real, separate thing. She was too much the centre

of her own universe, too little aware of anything outside.

The first person she met, who affected her as a real,

living person, whom she regarded as having definite existence,

was Baron Skrebensky, her mother's friend. He also was a Polish

exile, who had taken orders, and had received from Mr. Gladstone

a small country living in Yorkshire.

When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother

to spend a few days with the Baron Skrebensky. He was very

unhappy in his red-brick vicarage. He was vicar of a country

church, a living worth a little over two hundred pounds a year,

but he had a large parish containing several collieries, with a

new, raw, heathen population. He went to the north of England

expecting homage from the common people, for he was an

aristocrat. He was roughly, even cruelly received. But he never

understood it. He remained a fiery aristocrat. Only he had to

learn to avoid his parishioners.

Anna was very much impressed by him. He was a smallish man

with a rugged, rather crumpled face and blue eyes set very deep

and glowing. His wife was a tall thin woman, of noble Polish

family, mad with pride. He still spoke broken English, for he

had kept very close to his wife, both of them forlorn in this

strange, inhospitable country, and they always spoke in Polish

together. He was disappointed with Mrs. Brangwen's soft, natural

English, very disappointed that her child spoke no Polish.

Anna loved to watch him. She liked the big, new, rambling

vicarage, desolate and stark on its hill. It was so exposed, so

bleak and bold after the Marsh. The Baron talked endlessly in

Polish to Mrs. Brangwen; he made furious gestures with his

hands, his blue eyes were full of fire. And to Anna, there was a

significance about his sharp, flinging movements. Something in

her responded to his extravagance and his exuberant manner. She

thought him a very wonderful person. She was shy of him, she

liked him to talk to her. She felt a sense of freedom near

him.

She never could tell how she knew it, but she did know that

he was a knight of Malta. She could never remember whether she

had seen his star, or cross, of his order or not, but it flashed

in her mind, like a symbol. He at any rate represented to the

child the real world, where kings and lords and princes moved

and fulfilled their shining lives, whilst queens and ladies and

princesses upheld the noble order.

She had recognized the Baron Skrebensky as a real person, he

had had some regard for her. But when she did not see him any

more, he faded and became a memory. But as a memory he was

always alive to her.

Anna became a tall, awkward girl. Her eyes were still very

dark and quick, but they had grown careless, they had lost their

watchful, hostile look. Her fierce, spun hair turned brown, it

grew heavier and was tied back. She was sent to a young ladies'

school in Nottingham.

And at this period she was absorbed in becoming a young lady.

She was intelligent enough, but not interested in learning. At

first, she thought all the girls at school very ladylike and

wonderful, and she wanted to be like them. She came to a speedy

disillusion: they galled and maddened her, they were petty and

mean. After the loose, generous atmosphere of her home, where

little things did not count, she was always uneasy in the world,

that would snap and bite at every trifle.

A quick change came over her. She mistrusted herself, she

mistrusted the outer world. She did not want to go on, she did

not want to go out into it, she wanted to go no further.

"What do I care about that lot of girls?" she would

say to her father, contemptuously; "they are nobody."

The trouble was that the girls would not accept Anna at her

measure. They would have her according to themselves or not at

all. So she was confused, seduced, she became as they were for a

time, and then, in revulsion, she hated them furiously.

"Why don't you ask some of your girls here?" her father would

say.

"They're not coming here," she cried.

"And why not?"

"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. And she never

could decide whether it were her fault or theirs. She half

respected these other people, and continuous disillusion

maddened her. She wanted to respect them. Still she thought the

people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed

always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that

irritated her beyond bearing. She would rather stay at home and

avoid the rest of the world, leaving it illusory.

For at the Marsh life had indeed a certain freedom and

largeness. There was no fret about money, no mean little

precedence, nor care for what other people thought, because

neither Mrs. Brangwen nor Brangwen could be sensible of any

judgment passed on them from outside. Their lives were too

separate.

So Anna was only easy at home, where the common sense and the

supreme relation between her parents produced a freer standard

of being than she could find outside. Where, outside the Marsh,

could she find the tolerant dignity she had been brought up in?

Her parents stood undiminished and unaware of criticism. The

people she met outside seemed to begrudge her her very

existence. They seemed to want to belittle her also. She was

exceedingly reluctant to go amongst them. She depended upon her

mother and her father. And yet she wanted to go out.

At school, or in the world, she was usually at fault, she

felt usually that she ought to be slinking in disgrace. She

never felt quite sure, in herself, whether she were wrong, or

whether the others were wrong. She had not done her lessons:

well, she did not see any reason why she should do her

lessons, if she did not want to. Was there some occult reason

why she should? Were these people, schoolmistresses,

representatives of some mystic Right, some Higher Good? They

seemed to think so themselves. But she could not for her life

see why a woman should bully and insult her because she did not

know thirty lines of As You Like It. After all, what did

it matter if she knew them or not? Nothing could persuade her

that it was of the slightest importance. Because she despised

inwardly the coarsely working nature of the mistress. Therefore

she was always at outs with authority. From constant telling,

she came almost to believe in her own badness, her own intrinsic

inferiority. She felt that she ought always to be in a state of

slinking disgrace, if she fulfilled what was expected of her.

But she rebelled. She never really believed in her own badness.

At the bottom of her heart she despised the other people, who

carped and were loud over trifles. She despised them, and wanted

revenge on them. She hated them whilst they had power over

her.

Still she kept an ideal: a free, proud lady absolved from the

petty ties, existing beyond petty considerations. She would see

such ladies in pictures: Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was one

of her models. This lady was proud and royal, and stepped

indifferently over all small, mean desires: so thought Anna, in

her heart. And the girl did up her hair high under a little

slanting hat, her skirts were fashionably bunched up, she wore

an elegant, skin-fitting coat.

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. They would run to do anything for him. He did not

consider them, but was open-handed 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. Inside her own world, her life passed along like a

dream for her, it lapsed, and she lived within its lapse, active

and always pleased, intent. She scarcely noticed the outer

things at all. What was outside was outside, non-existent. She

did not mind if the boys fought, so long as it was out of her

presence. But if they fought when she was by, she was angry, and

they were afraid of her. She did not care if they broke a window

of a railway carriage or sold their watches to have a revel at

the Goose Fair. Brangwen was perhaps angry over these things. To

the mother they were insignificant. It was odd little things

that offended her. She was furious if the boys hung around the

slaughter-house, she was displeased when the school reports were

bad. It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused of,

so long as they were not stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to

brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain

gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her

against the girl. Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made

the mother's eyes glow with curious rage. Otherwise she was

pleased, indifferent.

Pursuing her splendid-lady ideal, Anna became a lofty

demoiselle of sixteen, plagued by family shortcomings. She was

very sensitive to her father. She knew if he had been drinking,

were he ever so little affected, and she could not bear it. He

flushed when he drank, the veins stood out on his temples, there

was a twinkling, cavalier boisterousness in his eye, his manner

was jovially overbearing and mocking. And it angered her. When

she heard his loud, roaring, boisterous mockery, an anger of