第 23 页

handkerchief quickly, satisfied and happy, and settled down on

the pillow again, with her fingers in his close, strange,

fur-like hair.

The evening began to fall, the light was half alive, livid.

He hid his face against her.

"I don't like the twilight," he said.

"I love it," she answered.

He hid his face against her, who was warm and like sunlight.

She seemed to have sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed

like sunlight upon him. 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.

To him, turned towards her heart-pulse, all was very still

and very warm and very close, like noon-tide. He was glad to

know this warm, full noon. It ripened him and took away his

responsibility, some of his conscience.

They got up when it was quite dark. She hastily twisted her

hair into a knot, and was dressed in a twinkling. Then they went

downstairs, drew to the fire, and sat in silence, saying a few

words now and then.

Her father was coming. She bundled the dishes away, flew

round and tidied the room, assumed another character, and again

seated herself. He sat thinking of his carving of Eve. He loved

to go over his carving in his mind, dwelling on every stroke,

every line. How he loved it now! When he went back to his

Creation-panel again, he would finish his Eve, tender and

sparkling. It did not satisfy him yet. The Lord should labour

over her in a silent passion of Creation, and Adam should be

tense as if in a dream of immortality, and Eve should take form

glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His

own soul for her, yet she was a radiance.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

He found it difficult to say. His soul became shy when he

tried to communicate it.

"I was thinking my Eve was too hard and lively."

"Why?"

"I don't know. She should be more----," he made a

gesture of infinite tenderness.

There was a stillness with a little joy. He could not tell

her any more. Why could he not tell her any more? She felt a

pang of disconsolate sadness. But it was nothing. She went to

him.

Her father came, and found them both very glowing, like an

open flower. He loved to sit with them. Where there was a

perfume of love, anyone who came must breathe it. They were both

very quick and alive, lit up from the other-world, so that it

was quite an experience for them, that anyone else could

exist.

But still it troubled Will Brangwen a little, in his orderly,

conventional mind, that the established rule of things had gone

so utterly. One ought to get up in the morning and wash oneself

and be a decent social being. Instead, the two of them stayed in

bed till nightfall, and then got up, she never washed her face,

but sat there talking to her father as bright and shameless as a

daisy opened out of the dew. Or she got up at ten o'clock, and

quite blithely went to bed again at three, or at half-past four,

stripping him naked in the daylight, and all so gladly and

perfectly, oblivious quite of his qualms. He let her do as she

liked with him, and shone with strange pleasure. She was to

dispose of him as she would. He was translated with gladness to

be in her hands. And down went his qualms, his maxims, his

rules, his smaller beliefs, she scattered them like an expert

skittle-player. He was very much astonished and delighted to see

them scatter.

He stood and gazed and grinned with wonder whilst his Tablets

of Stone went bounding and bumping and splintering down the

hill, dislodged for ever. Indeed, it was true as they said, that

a man wasn't born before he was married. What a change

indeed!

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams,

the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all

on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from

inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken

away entire: Ilkeston, streets, church, people, work,

rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet peeled away into unreality,

leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one's own being,

strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and

aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent

bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was

confounding. Things are not what they seem! When he was a child,

he had thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her

skirts and petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be

divested of its garment, the garment could lie there shed away

intact, and one could stand in a new world, a new earth, naked

in a new, naked universe. It was too astounding and

miraculous.

This then was marriage! The old things didn't matter any

more. One got up at four o'clock, and had broth at tea-time and

made toffee in the middle of the night. One didn't put on one's

clothes or one did put on one's clothes. He still was not quite

sure it was not criminal. But it was a discovery to find one

might be so supremely absolved. All that mattered was that he

should love her and she should love him and they should live

kindled to one another, like the Lord in two burning bushes that

were not consumed. And so they lived for the time.

She was less hampered than he, so she came more quickly to

her fulness, and was sooner ready to enjoy again a return to the

outside world. She was going to give a tea-party. His heart

sank. He wanted to go on, to go on as they were. He wanted to

have done with the outside world, to declare it finished for

ever. He was anxious with a deep desire and anxiety that she

should stay with him where they were in the timeless universe of

free, perfect limbs and immortal breast, affirming that the old

outward order was finished. The new order was begun to last for

ever, the living life, palpitating from the gleaming core, to

action, without crust or cover or outward lie. But no, he could

not keep her. She wanted the dead world again-she wanted to walk

on the outside once more. She was going to give a tea-party. It

made him frightened and furious and miserable. He was afraid all

would be lost that he had so newly come into: like the youth in

the fairy tale, who was king for one day in the year, and for

the rest a beaten herd: like Cinderella also, at the feast. He

was sullen. But she blithely began to make preparations for her

tea-party. His fear was too strong, he was troubled, he hated

her shallow anticipation and joy. Was she not forfeiting the

reality, the one reality, for all that was shallow and

worthless? Wasn't she carelessly taking off her crown to be an

artificial figure having other artificial women to tea: when she

might have been perfect with him, and kept him perfect, in the

land of intimate connection? Now he must be deposed, his joy

must be destroyed, he must put on the vulgar, shallow death of

an outward existence.

He ground his soul in uneasiness and fear. But she rose to a

real outburst of house-work, turning him away as she shoved the

furniture aside to her broom. He stood hanging miserable near.

He wanted her back. Dread, and desire for her to stay with him,

and shame at his own dependence on her drove him to anger. He

began to lose his head. The wonder was going to pass away again.

All the love, the magnificent new order was going to be lost,

she would forfeit it all for the outside things. She would admit

the outside world again, she would throw away the living fruit

for the ostensible rind. He began to hate this in her. Driven by

fear of her departure into a state of helplessness, almost of

imbecility, he wandered about the house.

And she, with her skirts kilted up, flew round at her work,

absorbed.

"Shake the rug then, if you must hang round," she said.

And fretting with resentment, he went to shake the rug. She

was blithely unconscious of him. He came back, hanging near to

her.

"Can't you do anything?" she said, as if to a child,

impatiently. "Can't you do your wood-work?"

"Where shall I do it?" he asked, harsh with pain.

"Anywhere."

How furious that made him.

"Or go for a walk," she continued. "Go down to the Marsh.

Don't hang about as if you were only half there."

He winced and hated it. He went away to read. Never had his

soul felt so flayed and uncreated.

And soon he must come down again to her. His hovering near

her, wanting her to be with him, the futility of him, the way

his hands hung, irritated her beyond bearing. She turned on him

blindly and destructively, he became a mad creature, black and

electric with fury. The dark storms rose in him, his eyes glowed

black and evil, he was fiendish in his thwarted soul.

There followed two black and ghastly days, when she was set

in anguish against him, and he felt as if he were in a black,

violent underworld, and his wrists quivered murderously. And she

resisted him. He seemed a dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her,

hanging on to her, burdening her. She would give anything to

have him removed.

"You need some work to do," she said. "You ought to be at

work. Can't you do something?"

His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became

complete, the darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had

gone: he remained complete in his own tense, black will. He was

now unaware of her. She did not exist. His dark, passionate soul

had recoiled upon itself, and now, clinched and coiled round a

centre of hatred, existed in its own power. There was a

curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his face. She

shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed

grappled upon her.

She retreated before him. She went down to the Marsh, she

entered again the immunity of her parents' love for her. He

remained at Yew Cottage, black and clinched, his mind dead. He

was unable to work at his wood-carving. He went on working

monotonously at the garden, blindly, like a mole.

As she came home, up the hill, looking away at the town dim

and blue on the hill, her heart relaxed and became yearning. She

did not want to fight him any more. She wanted love--oh,

love. Her feet began to hurry. She wanted to get back to him.

Her heart became tight with yearning for him.

He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of

the turf, laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable

workman.

"How nice you've made it," she said, approaching tentatively

down the path.

But he did not heed, he did not hear. His brain was solid and

dead.

"Haven't you made it nice?" she repeated, rather

plaintively.

He looked up at her, with that fixed, expressionless face and

unseeing eyes which shocked her, made her go dazed and blind.

Then he turned away. She saw his slender, stooping figure

groping. A revulsion came over her. She went indoors.

As she took off her hat in the bedroom, she found herself

weeping bitterly, with some of the old, anguished, childish

desolation. She sat still and cried on. She did not want him to

know. She was afraid of his hard, evil moments, the head dropped

a little, rigidly, in a crouching, cruel way. She was afraid of

him. He seemed to lacerate her sensitive femaleness. He seemed

to hurt her womb, to take pleasure in torturing her.

He came into the house. The sound of his footsteps in his

heavy boots filled her with horror: a hard, cruel, malignant

sound. She was afraid he would come upstairs. But he did not.

She waited apprehensively. He went out.

Where she was most vulnerable, he hurt her. Oh, where she was

delivered over to him, in her very soft femaleness, he seemed to

lacerate her and desecrate her. She pressed her hands over her

womb in anguish, whilst the tears ran down her face. And why,

and why? Why was he like this?

Suddenly she dried her tears. She must get the tea ready. She

went downstairs and set the table. When the meal was ready, she

called to him.

"I've mashed the tea, Will, are you coming?"

She herself could hear the sound of tears in her own voice,

and she began to cry again. He did not answer, but went on with

his work. She waited a few minutes, in anguish. Fear came over

her, she was panic-stricken with terror, like a child; and she

could not go home again to her father; she was held by the power

in this man who had taken her.

She turned indoors so that he should not see her tears. She

sat down to table. Presently he came into the scullery. His

movements jarred on her, as she heard them. How horrible was the

way he pumped, exacerbating, so cruel! How she hated to hear

him! How he hated her! How his hatred was like blows upon her!

The tears were coming again.

He came in, his face wooden and lifeless, fixed, persistent.

He sat down to tea, his head dropped over his cup, uglily. His

hands were red from the cold water, and there were rims of earth

in his nails. He went on with his tea.

It was his negative insensitiveness to her that she could not

bear, something clayey and ugly. His intelligence was

self-absorbed. How unnatural it was to sit with a self-absorbed

creature, like something negative ensconced opposite one.

Nothing could touch him--he could only absorb things into

his own self.

The tears were running down her face. Something startled him,

and he was looking up at her with his hateful, hard, bright

eyes, hard and unchanging as a bird of prey.

"What are you crying for?" came the grating voice.

She winced through her womb. She could not stop crying.

"What are you crying for?" came the question again, in just

the same tone. And still there was silence, with only the sniff

of her tears.

His eyes glittered, and as if with malignant desire. She