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touch, even under his sight, it was there. But when he neither

saw nor touched the perfect place, it was not perfect, it was

not there. And he must make it exist.

But still the thing terrified him. Awful and threatening it

was, dangerous to a degree, even whilst he gave himself to it.

It was pure darkness, also. All the shameful things of the body

revealed themselves to him now with a sort of sinister, tropical

beauty. All the shameful, natural and unnatural acts of sensual

voluptuousness which he and the woman partook of together,

created together, they had their heavy beauty and their delight.

Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that

part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The

secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.

They accepted shame, and were one with it in their most

unlicensed pleasures. It was incorporated. It was a bud that

blossomed into beauty and heavy, fundamental gratification.

Their outward life went on much the same, but the inward life

was revolutionized. The children became less important, the

parents were absorbed in their own living.

And gradually, Brangwen began to find himself free to attend

to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently

active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man

turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could

take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity

of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted

to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.

At this time Education was in the forefront as a subject of

interest. There was the talk of new Swedish methods, of handwork

instruction, and so on. Brangwen embraced sincerely the idea of

handwork in schools. For the first time, he began to take real

interest in a public affair. He had at length, from his profound

sensual activity, developed a real purposive self.

There was talk of night-schools, and of handicraft classes.

He wanted to start a woodwork class in Cossethay, to teach

carpentry and joinery and wood-carving to the village boys, two

nights a week. This seemed to him a supremely desirable thing to

be doing. His pay would be very little--and when he had it,

he spent it all on extra wood and tools. But he was very happy

and keen in his new public spirit.

He started his night-classes in woodwork when he was thirty

years old. By this time he had five children, the last a boy.

But boy or girl mattered very little to him. He had a natural

blood-affection for his children, and he liked them as they

turned up: boys or girls. Only he was fondest of Ursula.

Somehow, she seemed to be at the back of his new night-school

venture.

The house by the yew trees was in connection with the great

human endeavour at last. It gained a new vigour thereby.

To Ursula, a child of eight, the increase in magic was

considerable. She heard all the talk, she saw the parish room

fitted up as a workshop. The parish room was a high, stone,

barn-like, ecclesiastical building standing away by itself in

the Brangwens' second garden, across the lane. She was always

attracted by its age and its stranded obsoleteness. Now she

watched preparations made, she sat on the flight of stone steps

that came down from the porch to the garden, and heard her

father and the vicar talking and planning and working. Then an

inspector came, a very strange man, and stayed talking with her

father all one evening. Everything was settled, and twelve boys

enrolled their names. It was very exciting.

But to Ursula, everything her father did was magic. Whether

he came from Ilkeston with news of the town, whether he went

across to the church with his music or his tools on a sunny

evening, whether he sat in his white surplice at the organ on

Sundays, leading the singing with his strong tenor voice, or

whether he were in the workshop with the boys, he was always a

centre of magic and fascination to her, his voice, sounding out

in command, cheerful, laconic, had always a twang in it that

sent a thrill over her blood, and hypnotized her. She seemed to

run in the shadow of some dark, potent secret of which she would

not, of whose existence even she dared not become conscious, it

cast such a spell over her, and so darkened her mind.

CHAPTER IX

THE MARSH AND THE FLOOD

There was always regular connection between the Yew Cottage

and the Marsh, yet the two households remained separate,

distinct.

After Anna's marriage, the Marsh became the home of the two

boys, Tom and Fred. Tom was a rather short, good-looking youth,

with crisp black hair and long black eyelashes and soft, dark,

possessed eyes. He had a quick intelligence. From the High

School he went to London to study. He had an instinct for

attracting people of character and energy. He gave place

entirely to the other person, and at the same time kept himself

independent. He scarcely existed except through other people.

When he was alone he was unresolved. When he was with another

man, he seemed to add himself to the other, make the other

bigger than life size. So that a few people loved him and

attained a sort of fulfilment in him. He carefully chose these

few.

He had a subtle, quick, critical intelligence, a mind that

was like a scale or balance. There was something of a woman in

all this.

In London he had been the favourite pupil of an engineer, a

clever man, who became well-known at the time when Tom Brangwen

had just finished his studies. Through this master the youth

kept acquaintance with various individual, outstanding

characters. He never asserted himself. He seemed to be there to

estimate and establish the rest. He was like a presence that

makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while still

young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and

mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet

and perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and

learned how to value others in just degree. He was there like a

judgment. Besides, he was very good-looking, of medium stature,

but beautifully proportioned, dark, with fine colouring, always

perfectly healthy.

His father allowed him a liberal pocket-money, besides which

he had a sort of post as assistant to his chief. Then from time

to time the young man appeared at the Marsh, curiously

attractive, well-dressed, reserved, having by nature a subtle,

refined manner. And he set the change in the farm.

Fred, the younger brother, was a Brangwen, large-boned,

blue-eyed, English. He was his father's very son, the two men,

father and son, were supremely at ease with one another. Fred

was succeeding to the farm.

Between the elder brother and the younger existed an almost

passionate love. Tom watched over Fred with a woman's poignant

attention and self-less care. Fred looked up to Tom as to

something miraculous, that which he himself would aspire to be,

were he great also.

So that after Anna's departure, the Marsh began to take on a

new tone. The boys were gentlemen; Tom had a rare nature and had

risen high. Fred was sensitive and fond of reading, he pondered

Ruskin and then the Agnostic writings. Like all the Brangwens,

he was very much a thing to himself, though fond of people, and

indulgent to them, having an exaggerated respect for them.

There was a rather uneasy friendship between him and one of

the young Hardys at the Hall. The two households were different,

yet the young men met on shy terms of equality.

It was young Tom Brangwen, with his dark lashes and beautiful

colouring, his soft, inscrutable nature, his strange repose and

his informed air, added to his position in London, who seemed to

emphasize the superior foreign element in the Marsh. When he

appeared, perfectly dressed, as if soft and affable, and yet

quite removed from everybody, he created an uneasiness in

people, he was reserved in the minds of the Cossethay and

Ilkeston acquaintances to a different, remote world.

He and his mother had a kind of affinity. The affection

between them was of a mute, distant character, but radical. His

father was always uneasy and slightly deferential to his eldest

son. Tom also formed the link that kept the Marsh in real

connection with the Skrebenskys, now quite important people in

their own district.

So a change in tone came over the Marsh. Tom Brangwen the

father, as he grew older, seemed to mature into a

gentleman-farmer. His figure lent itself: burly and handsome.

His face remained fresh and his blue eyes as full of light, his

thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a silky whiteness.

It was his custom to laugh a great deal, in his acquiescent,

wilful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had taken

the line of easy, good-humoured acceptance. He was not

responsible for the frame of things. Yet he was afraid of the

unknown in life.

He was fairly well-off. His wife was there with him, a

different being from himself, yet somewhere vitally connected

with him:--who was he to understand where and how? His two

sons were gentlemen. They were men distinct from himself, they

had separate beings of their own, yet they were connected with

himself. It was all adventurous and puzzling. Yet one remained

vital within one's own existence, whatever the off-shoots.

So, handsome and puzzled, he laughed and stuck to himself as

the only thing he could stick to. His youngness and the wonder

remained almost the same in him. He became indolent, he

developed a luxuriant ease. Fred did most of the farm-work, the

father saw to the more important transactions. He drove a good

mare, and sometimes he rode his cob. He drank in the hotels and

the inns with better-class farmers and proprietors, he had

well-to-do acquaintances among men. But one class suited him no

better than another.

His wife, as ever, had no acquaintances. Her hair was

threaded now with grey, her face grew older in form without

changing in expression. She seemed the same as when she had come

to the Marsh twenty-five years ago, save that her health was

more fragile. She seemed always to haunt the Marsh rather than

to live there. She was never part of the life. Something she

represented was alien there, she remained a stranger within the

gates, in some ways fixed and impervious, in some ways curiously

refining. She caused the separateness and individuality of all

the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household.

When young Tom Brangwen was twenty-three years old there was

some breach between him and his chief which was never explained,

and he went away to Italy, then to America. He came home for a

while, then went to Germany; always the same good-looking,

carefully-dressed, attractive young man, in perfect health, yet

somehow outside of everything. In his dark eyes was a deep

misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he

wore his close-sitting clothes.

To Ursula he was a romantic, alluring figure. He had a grace

of bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such

as Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a

long slim mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and

exquisite; or he sent her a little necklace of rough stones,

amethyst and opal and brilliants and garnet. He spoke other

languages easily and fluently, his nature was curiously gracious

and insinuating. With all that, he was undefinably an outsider.

He belonged to nowhere, to no society.

Anna Brangwen had left her intimacy with her father

undeveloped since the time of her marriage. At her marriage it

had been abandoned. He and she had drawn a reserve between them.

Anna went more to her mother.

Then suddenly the father died.

It happened one springtime when Ursula was about eight years

old, he, Tom Brangwen, drove off on a Saturday morning to the

market in Nottingham, saying he might not be back till late, as

there was a special show and then a meeting he had to attend.

His family understood that he would enjoy himself.

The season had been rainy and dreary. In the evening it was

pouring with rain. Fred Brangwen, unsettled, uneasy, did not go

out, as was his wont. He smoked and read and fidgeted, hearing

always the trickling of water outside. This wet, black night

seemed to cut him off and make him unsettled, aware of himself,

aware that he wanted something else, aware that he was scarcely

living. There seemed to him to be no root to his life, no place

for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad. But his

instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem.

He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not

know how to get it.

Tilly, an old woman now, came in saying that the labourers

who had been suppering up said the yard and everywhere was just

a slew of water. He heard in indifference. But he hated a

desolate, raw wetness in the world. He would leave the

Marsh.

His mother was in bed. At last he shut his book, his mind was

blank, he walked upstairs intoxicated with depression and anger,

and, intoxicated with depression and anger, locked himself into

sleep.

Tilly set slippers before the kitchen fire, and she also went

to bed, leaving the door unlocked. Then the farm was in

darkness, in the rain.

At eleven o'clock it was still raining. Tom Brangwen stood in

the yard of the "Angel", Nottingham, and buttoned his coat.

"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, "it's rained on me before.

Put 'er in, Jack, my lad, put her in--Tha'rt a rare old

cock, Jacky-boy, wi' a belly on thee as does credit to thy

drink, if not to thy corn. Co' up lass, let's get off ter th'

old homestead. Oh, my heart, what a wetness in the night!

There'll be no volcanoes after this. Hey, Jack, my beautiful

young slender feller, which of us is Noah? It seems as though

the water-works is bursted. Ducks and ayquatic fowl 'll be king

o' the castle at this rate--dove an' olive branch an' all.