第 24 页

shrank and became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down.

A sort of swoon of helplessness came over her. She was of

another order than he, she had no defence against him. Against

such an influence, she was only vulnerable, she was given

up.

He rose and went out of the house, possessed by the evil

spirit. It tortured him and wracked him, and fought in him. And

whilst he worked, in the deepening twilight, it left him.

Suddenly he saw that she was hurt. He had only seen her

triumphant before. Suddenly his heart was torn with compassion

for her. He became alive again, in an anguish of compassion. He

could not bear to think of her tears--he could not bear it.

He wanted to go to her and pour out his heart's blood to her. He

wanted to give everything to her, all his blood, his life, to

the last dregs, pour everything away to her. He yearned with

passionate desire to offer himself to her, utterly.

The evening star came, and the night. She had not lighted the

lamp. His heart burned with pain and with grief. He trembled to

go to her.

And at last he went, hesitating, burdened with a great

offering. The hardness had gone out of him, his body was

sensitive, slightly trembling. His hand was curiously sensitive,

shrinking, as he shut the door. He fixed the latch almost

tenderly.

In the kitchen was only the fireglow, he could not see her.

He quivered with dread lest she had gone--he knew not

where. In shrinking dread, he went through to the parlour, to

the foot of the stairs.

"Anna," he called.

There was no answer. He went up the stairs, in dread of the

empty house--the horrible emptiness that made his heart

ring with insanity. He opened the bedroom door, and his heart

flashed with certainty that she had gone, that he was alone.

But he saw her on the bed, lying very still and scarcely

noticeable, with her back to him. He went and put his hand on

her shoulder, very gently, hesitating, in a great fear and

self-offering. She did not move.

He waited. The hand that touched her shoulder hurt him, as if

she were sending it away. He stood dim with pain.

"Anna," he said.

But still she was motionless, like a curled up, oblivious

creature. His heart beat with strange throes of pain. Then, by a

motion under his hand, he knew she was crying, holding herself

hard so that her tears should not be known. He waited. The

tension continued--perhaps she was not crying--then

suddenly relapsed with a sharp catch of a sob. His heart flamed

with love and suffering for her. Kneeling carefully on the bed,

so that his earthy boots should not touch it, he took her in his

arms to comfort her. The sobs gathered in her, she was sobbing

bitterly. But not to him. She was still away from him.

He held her against his breast, whilst she sobbed, withheld

from him, and all his body vibrated against her.

"Don't cry--don't cry," he said, with an odd simplicity.

His heart was calm and numb with a sort of innocence of love,

now.

She still sobbed, ignoring him, ignoring that he held her.

His lips were dry.

"Don't cry, my love," he said, in the same abstract way. In

his breast his heart burned like a torch, with suffering. He

could not bear the desolateness of her crying. He would have

soothed her with his blood. He heard the church clock chime, as

if it touched him, and he waited in suspense for it to have gone

by. It was quiet again.

"My love," he said to her, bending to touch her wet face with

his mouth. He was afraid to touch her. How wet her face was! His

body trembled as he held her. He loved her till he felt his

heart and all his veins would burst and flood her with his hot,

healing blood. He knew his blood would heal and restore her.

She was becoming quieter. He thanked the God of mercy that at

last she was becoming quieter. His head felt so strange and

blazed. Still he held her close, with trembling arms. His blood

seemed very strong, enveloping her.

And at last she began to draw near to him, she nestled to

him. His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She

clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he

held her in sinews of fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his

mouth down. And her mouth, soft and moist, received him. He felt

his veins would burst with anguish of thankfulness, his heart

was mad with gratefulness, he could pour himself out upon her

for ever.

When they came to themselves, the night was very dark. Two

hours had gone by. They lay still and warm and weak, like the

new-born, together. And there was a silence almost of the

unborn. Only his heart was weeping happily, after the pain. He

did not understand, he had yielded, given way. There was

no understanding. There could be only acquiescence and

submission, and tremulous wonder of consummation.

The next morning, when they woke up, it had snowed. He

wondered what was the strange pallor in the air, and the unusual

tang. Snow was on the grass and the window-sill, it weighed down

the black, ragged branches of the yews, and smoothed the graves

in the churchyard.

Soon, it began to snow again, and they were shut in. He was

glad, for then they were immune in a shadowy silence, there was

no world, no time.

The snow lasted for some days. On the Sunday they went to

church. They made a line of footprints across the garden, he

left a flat snowprint of his hand on the wall as he vaulted

over, they traced the snow across the churchyard. For three days

they had been immune in a perfect love.

There were very few people in church, and she was glad. She

did not care much for church. She had never questioned any

beliefs, and she was, from habit and custom, a regular attendant

at morning service. But she had ceased to come with any

anticipation. To-day, however, in the strangeness of snow, after

such consummation of love, she felt expectant again, and

delighted. She was still in the eternal world.

She used, after she went to the High School, and wanted to be

a lady, wanted to fulfil some mysterious ideal, always to listen

to the sermon and to try to gather suggestions. That was all

very well for a while. The vicar told her to be good in this way

and in that. She went away feeling it was her highest aim to

fulfil these injunctions.

But quickly this palled. After a short time, she was not very

much interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of

something, which was not just being good, and doing one's best.

No, she wanted something else: something that was not her

ready-made duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of

social duty, and never of her self. They talked about her soul,

but somehow never managed to rouse or to implicate her soul. As

yet her soul was not brought in at all.

So that whilst she had an affection for Mr. Loverseed, the

vicar, and a protective sort of feeling for Cossethay church,

wanting always to help it and defend it, it counted very small

in her life.

Not but that she was conscious of some unsatisfaction. When

her husband was roused by the thought of the churches, then she

became hostile to the ostensible church, she hated it for not

fulfilling anything in her. The Church told her to be good: very

well, she had no idea of contradicting what it said. The Church

talked about her soul, about the welfare of mankind, as if the

saving of her soul lay in her performing certain acts conducive

to the welfare of mankind. Well and good-it was so, then.

Nevertheless, as she sat in church her face had a pathos and

poignancy. Was this what she had come to hear: how by doing this

thing and by not doing that, she could save her soul? She did

not contradict it. But the pathos of her face gave the lie.

There was something else she wanted to hear, it was something

else she asked for from the Church.

But who was she to affirm it? And what was she doing

with unsatisfied desires? She was ashamed. She ignored them and

left them out of count as much as possible, her underneath

yearnings. They angered her. She wanted to be like other people,

decently satisfied.

He angered her more than ever. Church had an irresistible

attraction for him. And he paid no more attention to that part

of the service which was Church to her, than if he had been an

angel or a fabulous beast sitting there. He simply paid no heed

to the sermon or to the meaning of the service. There was

something thick, dark, dense, powerful about him that irritated

her too deeply for her to speak of it. The Church teaching in

itself meant nothing to him. "And forgive us our trespasses as

we forgive them that trespass against us"--it simply did

not touch him. It might have been more sounds, and it would have

acted upon him in the same way. He did not want things to be

intelligible. And he did not care about his trespasses, neither

about the trespasses of his neighbour, when he was in church.

Leave that care for weekdays. When he was in church, he took no

more notice of his daily life. It was weekday stuff. As for the

welfare of mankind--he merely did not realize that there

was any such thing: except on weekdays, when he was good-natured

enough. In church, he wanted a dark, nameless emotion, the

emotion of all the great mysteries of passion.

He was not interested in the thought of himself or of

her: oh, and how that irritated her! He ignored the sermon, he

ignored the greatness of mankind, he did not admit the immediate

importance of mankind. He did not care about himself as a human

being. He did not attach any vital importance to his life in the

drafting office, or his life among men. That was just merely the

margin to the text. The verity was his connection with Anna and

his connection with the Church, his real being lay in his dark

emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute. And the

great mysterious, illuminated capitals to the text, were his

feelings with the Church.

It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of

the Church the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was

intimately mixed up with the thought of her own self. Indeed,

her soul and her own self were one and the same in her. Whereas

he seemed simply to ignore the fact of his own self, almost to

refute it. He had a soul--a dark, inhuman thing caring

nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in the gloom and

the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free, like some

strange, underground thing, abstract.

He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in

conceiving himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free

of her. In a way, she envied it him, this dark freedom and

jubilation of the soul, some strange entity in him. It

fascinated her. Again she hated it. And again, she despised him,

wanted to destroy it in him.

This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside

her, not aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to

strange, secret places the love that sprang in him for her. He

sat with a dark-rapt, half-delighted face, looking at a little

stained window. She saw the ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow

heaped along the bottom from the snow outside, and the familiar

yellow figure of the lamb holding the banner, a little darkened

now, but in the murky interior strangely luminous, pregnant.

She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The

lamb, looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a

forepaw, in the cleft of which was dangerously perched a little

flag with a red cross. Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish

shadows. Since she was a child she had liked this creature, with

the same feeling she felt for the little woolly lambs on green

legs that children carried home from the fair every year. She

had always liked these toys, and she had the same amused,

childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always been

uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag

did not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted

it, there was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.

Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the

faintest tension of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the

uncomfortable feeling that he was in correspondence with the

creature, the lamb in the window. A cold wonder came over

her--her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,

timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was

he doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in

the glass?

Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag.

Suddenly she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the

tradition seized on her, she was transported to another world.

And she hated it, resisted it.

Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And

dark, violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he

doing, sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?

She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick

up her glove, she groped among his feet.

He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would

have pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what

was amiss, what he had been doing.

As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the

chill of antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so

angry. But she was incensed.

"Why do you never listen to the sermon?" she asked, seething

with hostility and violation.

"I do," he said.

"You don't--you don't hear a single word."

He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There

was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld

refuge. The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he

was like this.

After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the

same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to

her. Then he went to the book-shelf and took down books to look

at, that she had scarcely glanced over.

He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old

missals, and then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian,