第 31 页

She flushed, and was irritated. Yet she glanced again and again

at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she despised him. She

despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had nothing for

her. Yet it angered her as if she were jealous. He watched her

with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. But

he himself was not implicated. He was different in kind. She was

all lambent, biting flames, he was a red fire glowing steadily.

She could get nothing out of him. So she made him flush darkly

by assuming a biting, subtle class-superiority. He flushed, but

still he did not object. He was too different.

Her little boy came in with the nurse. He was a quick, slight

child, with fine perceptiveness, and a cool transitoriness in

his interest. At once he treated Will Brangwen as an outsider.

He stayed by Anna for a moment, acknowledged her, then was gone

again, quick, observant, restless, with a glance of interest at

everything.

The father adored him, and spoke to him in Polish. It was

queer, the stiff, aristocratic manner of the father with the

child, the distance in the relationship, the classic fatherhood

on the one hand, the filial subordination on the other. They

played together, in their different degrees very separate, two

different beings, differing as it were in rank rather than in

relationship. And the baroness smiled, smiled, smiled, always

smiled, showing her rather protruding teeth, having always a

mysterious attraction and charm.

Anna realized how different her own life might have been, how

different her own living. Her soul stirred, she became as

another person. Her intimacy with her husband passed away, the

curious enveloping Brangwen intimacy, so warm, so close, so

stifling, when one seemed always to be in contact with the other

person, like a blood-relation, was annulled. She denied it, this

close relationship with her young husband. He and she were not

one. His heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her,

through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat

with him, till she had not her own self apart. She wanted her

own life. He seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being,

his hot life, till she did not know whether she were herself, or

whether she were another creature, united with him in a world of

close blood-intimacy that closed over her and excluded her from

all the cool outside.

She wanted her own, old, sharp self, detached, detached,

active but not absorbed, active for her own part, taking and

giving, but never absorbed. Whereas he wanted this strange

absorption with her, which still she resisted. But she was

partly helpless against it. She had lived so long in Tom

Brangwen's love, beforehand.

From the Skrebensky's, they went to Will Brangwen's beloved

Lincoln Cathedral, because it was not far off. He had promised

her, that one by one, they should visit all the cathedrals of

England. They began with Lincoln, which he knew well.

He began to get excited as the time drew near to set off.

What was it that changed him so much? She was almost angry,

coming as she did from the Skrebensky's. But now he ran on

alone. His very breast seemed to open its doors to watch for the

great church brooding over the town. His soul ran ahead.

When he saw the cathedral in the distance, dark blue lifted

watchful in the sky, his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven,

it was the Spirit hovering like a dove, like an eagle over the

earth. He turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth

opened with a strange, ecstatic grin.

"There she is," he said.

The "she" irritated her. Why "she"? It was "it". What was the

cathedral, a big building, a thing of the past, obsolete, to

excite him to such a pitch? She began to stir herself to

readiness.

They passed up the steep hill, he eager as a pilgrim arriving

at the shrine. As they came near the precincts, with castle on

one side and cathedral on the other, his veins seemed to break

into fiery blossom, he was transported.

They had passed through the gate, and the great west front

was before them, with all its breadth and ornament.

"It is a false front," he said, looking at the golden stone

and the twin towers, and loving them just the same. In a little

ecstasy he found himself in the porch, on the brink of the

unrevealed. He looked up to the lovely unfolding of the stone.

He was to pass within to the perfect womb.

Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom

was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her

nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body

stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the

gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great

escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of

fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.

She too was overcome with wonder and awe. She followed him in

his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life,

the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day.

Here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset

sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life's day would

blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound

immemorial silence.

Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and

west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in

silence, dark before germination, silenced after death.

Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and

transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great,

involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life

inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle

of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom

folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon

death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root

and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts,

the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has

dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will

embrace again.

Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded

together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his

consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting

aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light.

Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after

knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the

darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after

death. Then between--while he had pushed open the doors of

the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the

hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the

beginning and the end were one.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in

a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the

horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range

of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the

ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the

meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the

perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his

soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless

ecstasy, consummated.

And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this

timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met the

thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of

ecstasy. This was all, this was everything. Till he came to

himself in the world below. Then again he gathered himself

together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped,

leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the

unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the

climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.

She too was overcome, but silenced rather than tuned to the

place. She loved it as a world not quite her own, she resented

his transports and ecstasies. His passion in the cathedral at

first awed her, then made her angry. After all, there was the

sky outside, and in here, in this mysterious half-night, when

his soul leapt with the pillars upwards, it was not to the stars

and the crystalline dark space, but to meet and clasp with the

answering impulse of leaping stone, there in the dusk and

secrecy of the roof. The far-off clinching and mating of the

arches, the leap and thrust of the stone, carrying a great roof

overhead, awed and silenced her.

But yet--yet she remembered that the open sky was no

blue vault, no dark dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a

space where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above

them always higher.

The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to

the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that

closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the

ultimate confine. His soul would have liked it to be so: here,

here is all, complete, eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no

illusion of time, of night and day passing by, but only

perfectly proportioned space and movement clinching and

renewing, and passion surging its way into great waves to the

altar, recurrence of ecstasy.

Her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the

threshold of Eternity, in reverence and fear and joy. But ever

she hung back in the transit, mistrusting the culmination of the

altar. She was not to be flung forward on the lift and lift of

passionate flights, to be cast at last upon the altar steps as

upon the shore of the unknown. There was a great joy and a

verity in it. But even in the dazed swoon of the cathedral, she

claimed another right. The altar was barren, its lights gone

out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying

there. She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than

the roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in.

So that she caught at little things, which saved her from

being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps

on into the Infinite in a great mass, triumphant and flinging

its own course. She wanted to get out of this fixed, leaping,

forward-travelling movement, to rise from it as a bird rises

with wet, limp feet from the sea, to lift herself as a bird

lifts its breast and thrusts its body from the pulse and heave

of a sea that bears it forward to an unwilling conclusion, tear

herself away like a bird on wings, and in open space where there

is clarity, rise up above the fixed, surcharged motion, a

separate speck that hangs suspended, moves this way and that,

seeing and answering before it sinks again, having chosen or

found the direction in which it shall be carried forward.

And it was as if she must grasp at something, as if her wings

were too weak to lift her straight off the heaving motion. So

she caught sight of the wicked, odd little faces carved in

stone, and she stood before them arrested.

These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the

cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well,

these little imps that retorted on man's own illusion, that the

cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving

suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the

great concept of the church. "However much there is inside here,

there's a good deal they haven't got in," the little faces

mocked.

Apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards

the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate

motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of

the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very

littleness.

"Oh, look!" cried Anna. "Oh, look how adorable, the faces!

Look at her."

Brangwen looked unwillingly. This was the voice of the

serpent in his Eden. She pointed him to a plump, sly, malicious

little face carved in stone.

"He knew her, the man who carved her," said Anna. "I'm sure

she was his wife."

"It isn't a woman at all, it's a man," said Brangwen

curtly.

"Do you think so?--No! That isn't a man. That is no

man's face."

Her voice sounded rather jeering. He laughed shortly, and

went on. But she would not go forward with him. She loitered

about the carvings. And he could not go forward without her. He

waited impatient of this counteraction. She was spoiling his

passionate intercourse with the cathedral. His brows began to

gather.

"Oh, this is good!" she cried again. "Here is the same

woman--look!--only he's made her cross! Isn't it

lovely! Hasn't he made her hideous to a degree?" She laughed

with pleasure. "Didn't he hate her? He must have been a nice

man! Look at her--isn't it awfully good--just like a

shrewish woman. He must have enjoyed putting her in like that.

He got his own back on her, didn't he?"

"It's a man's face, no woman's at all--a

monk's--clean shaven," he said.

She laughed with a pouf! of laughter.

"You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don't

you?" she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she

laughed with malicious triumph.

She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed

the passion he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive

as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him.

He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute,

containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a

shapely heap of dead matter--but dead, dead.

His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her

for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he

would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand,

without one belief in which to rest.

Yet somewhere in him he responded more deeply to the sly

little face that knew better, than he had done before to the

perfect surge of his cathedral.

Nevertheless for the time being his soul was wretched and

homeless, and he could not bear to think of Anna's ousting him