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man's figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse

traversed the sky.

At first the Brangwens were astonished by all this commotion

around them. The building of a canal across their land made them

strangers in their own place, this raw bank of earth shutting

them off disconcerted them. As they worked in the fields, from

beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the

winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic

to the brain. Then the shrill whistle of the trains re-echoed

through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the

far-off come near and imminent.

As they drove home from town, the farmers of the land met the

blackened colliers trooping from the pit-mouth. As they gathered

the harvest, the west wind brought a faint, sulphurous smell of

pit-refuse burning. As they pulled the turnips in November, the

sharp clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of empty trucks shunting on

the line, vibrated in their hearts with the fact of other

activity going on beyond them.

The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from

Heanor, a daughter of the "Black Horse". She was a slim, pretty,

dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp

things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself,

rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and

indifferent, so that her long lamentable complaints, when she

raised her voice against her husband in particular and against

everybody else after him, only made those who heard her wonder

and feel affectionately towards her, even while they were

irritated and impatient with her. She railed long and loud about

her husband, but always with a balanced, easy-flying voice and a

quaint manner of speech that warmed his belly with pride and

male triumph while he scowled with mortification at the things

she said.

Consequently Brangwen himself had a humorous puckering at the

eyes, a sort of fat laugh, very quiet and full, and he was

spoilt like a lord of creation. He calmly did as he liked,

laughed at their railing, excused himself in a teasing tone that

she loved, followed his natural inclinations, and sometimes,

pricked too near the quick, frightened and broke her by a deep,

tense fury which seemed to fix on him and hold him for days, and

which she would give anything to placate in him. They were two

very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of each

other, yet living in their separate ways from one root.

There were four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran

away early to sea, and did not come back. After this the mother

was more the node and centre of attraction in the home. The

second boy, Alfred, whom the mother admired most, was the most

reserved. He was sent to school in Ilkeston and made some

progress. But in spite of his dogged, yearning effort, he could

not get beyond the rudiments of anything, save of drawing. At

this, in which he had some power, he worked, as if it were his

hope. After much grumbling and savage rebellion against

everything, after much trying and shifting about, when his

father was incensed against him and his mother almost

despairing, he became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in

Nottingham.

He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad

Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work

and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming

fairly well-off. But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in

big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for him to

pedgill away at the lace designing, working from the tiny

squares of his paper, counting and plotting and niggling. He did

it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels within him,

adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost. And he came

back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly

man.

He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some

social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his

dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the

household, mad when anything clumsy or gross occurred. Later,

when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid,

almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and

became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure,

neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm.

Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything

to do with learning. From the first he hung round the

slaughter-house which stood away in the third yard at the back

of the farm. The Brangwens had always killed their own meat, and

supplied the neighbourhood. Out of this grew a regular butcher's

business in connection with the farm.

As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood

that ran across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the

crew-yard, by the sight of the man carrying across to the

meat-shed a huge side of beef, with the kidneys showing,

embedded in their heavy laps of fat.

He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular

features something like a later Roman youth. He was more easily

excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in

character. At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale,

plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who

insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and

made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery

business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of

contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to

be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew

everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and

lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to

Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger,

remained at home.

The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his

brothers, so had belonged rather to the company of his sisters.

He was his mother's favourite. She roused herself to

determination, and sent him forcibly away to a grammar-school in

Derby when he was twelve years old. He did not want to go, and

his father would have given way, but Mrs. Brangwen had set her

heart on it. Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body, with

full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and

when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the

family failed before her.

So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first.

He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him,

but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge

his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive

foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would

cut a sorry figure at school. But he took the infliction as

inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his

being were wrong, and his mother's conception right. If he could

have been what he liked, he would have been that which his

mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been

clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her

aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration

for any boy. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,

as he told his mother very early, with regard to himself; much

to her mortification and chagrin.

When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his

physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale

and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in

what he had to learn. But it was no good. If he beat down his

first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he went

very little further. He could not learn deliberately. His mind

simply did not work.

In feeling he was developed, sensitive to the atmosphere

around him, brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very

delicate. So he had a low opinion of himself. He knew his own

limitation. He knew that his brain was a slow hopeless

good-for-nothing. So he was humble.

But at the same time his feelings were more discriminating

than those of most of the boys, and he was confused. He was more

sensuously developed, more refined in instinct than they. For

their mechanical stupidity he hated them, and suffered cruel

contempt for them. But when it came to mental things, then he

was at a disadvantage. He was at their mercy. He was a fool. He

had not the power to controvert even the most stupid argument,

so that he was forced to admit things he did not in the least

believe. And having admitted them, he did not know whether he

believed them or not; he rather thought he did.

But he loved anyone who could convey enlightenment to him

through feeling. He sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher

of literature read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson's "Ulysses",

or Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind". His lips parted, his eyes

filled with a strained, almost suffering light. And the teacher

read on, fired by his power over the boy. Tom Brangwen was moved

by this experience beyond all calculation, he almost dreaded it,

it was so deep. But when, almost secretly and shamefully, he

came to take the book himself, and began the words "Oh wild west

wind, thou breath of autumn's being," the very fact of the print

caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over his skin, the

blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting passion

of rage and incompetence. 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. He did not know how

to begin. Therefore he was helpless when it came to deliberate

understanding or deliberate learning.

He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him,

he was helpless as an idiot. So that he felt that the ground was

never sure under his feet, he was nowhere. His final downfall

was his complete inability to attend to a question put without

suggestion. If he had to write a formal composition on the Army,

he did at last learn to repeat the few facts he knew: "You can

join the army at eighteen. You have to be over five foot eight."

But he had all the time a living conviction that this was a

dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt. Then he

reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched

out what he had written, made an agonized effort to think of

something in the real composition style, failed, became sullen

with rage and humiliation, put the pen down and would have been

torn to pieces rather than attempt to write another word.

He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar

School got used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at

learning, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only

one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him

and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a

horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a

slate, and then things went on as before. The teacher got little

sympathy. But Brangwen winced and could not bear to think of the

deed, not even long after, when he was a grown man.

He was glad to leave school. It had not been unpleasant, he

had enjoyed the companionship of the other youths, or had

thought he enjoyed it, the time had passed very quickly, in

endless activity. But he knew all the time that he was in an

ignominious position, in this place of learning. He was aware of

failure all the while, of incapacity. But he was too healthy and

sanguine to be wretched, he was too much alive. Yet his soul was

wretched almost to hopelessness.

He had loved one warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a

consumptive type. The two had had an almost classic friendship,

David and Jonathan, wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the

server. But he had never felt equal with his friend, because the

other's mind outpaced his, and left him ashamed, far in the

rear. So the two boys went at once apart on leaving school. But

Brangwen always remembered his friend that had been, kept him as

a sort of light, a fine experience to remember.

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. But he went about at his work on

the farm gladly enough, glad of the active labour and the smell

of the land again, having youth and vigour and humour, and a

comic wit, having the will and the power to forget his own

shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional rages, but

usually on good terms with everybody and everything.

When he was seventeen, his father fell from a stack and broke

his neck. Then the mother and son and daughter lived on at the

farm, interrupted by occasional loud-mouthed lamenting,

jealous-spirited visitations from the butcher Frank, who had a

grievance against the world, which he felt was always giving him

less than his dues. Frank was particularly against the young

Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom returned the hatred

violently, his face growing red and his blue eyes staring. Effie

sided with Tom against Frank. But when Alfred came, from

Nottingham, heavy jowled and lowering, speaking very little, but

treating those at home with some contempt, Effie and the mother

sided with him and put Tom into the shade. It irritated the

youth that his elder brother should be made something of a hero

by the women, just because he didn't live at home and was a

lace-designer and almost a gentleman. But Alfred was something

of a Prometheus Bound, so the women loved him. Tom came later to

understand his brother better.

As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of