第 6 页

inevitably met his, she was aware of a heat beating up over her

consciousness. She sat motionless and in conflict. Who was this

strange man who was at once so near to her? What was happening

to her? Something in his young, warm-twinkling eyes seemed to

assume a right to her, to speak to her, to extend her his

protection. But how? Why did he speak to her? Why were his eyes

so certain, so full of light and confident, waiting for no

permission nor signal?

Tilly returned with a large leaf and found the two silent. At

once he felt it incumbent on him to speak, now the serving-woman

had come back.

"How old is your little girl?" he asked.

"Four years," she replied.

"Her father hasn't been dead long, then?" he asked.

"She was one year when he died."

"Three years?"

"Yes, three years that he is dead--yes."

Curiously quiet she was, almost abstracted, answering these

questions. She looked at him again, with some maidenhood opening

in her eyes. He felt he could not move, neither towards her nor

away from her. Something about her presence hurt him, till he

was almost rigid before her. He saw the girl's wondering look

rise in her eyes.

Tilly handed her the butter and she rose.

"Thank you very much," she said. "How much is it?"

"We'll make th' vicar a present of it," he said. "It'll do

for me goin' to church."

"It 'ud look better of you if you went to church and took th'

money for your butter," said Tilly, persistent in her claim to

him.

"You'd have to put in, shouldn't you?" he said.

"How much, please?" said the Polish woman to Tilly. Brangwen

stood by and let be.

"Then, thank you very much," she said.

"Bring your little girl down sometime to look at th' fowls

and horses," he said,--"if she'd like it."

"Yes, she would like it," said the stranger.

And she went. Brangwen stood dimmed by her departure. He

could not notice Tilly, who was looking at him uneasily, wanting

to be reassured. He could not think of anything. He felt that he

had made some invisible connection with the strange woman.

A daze had come over his mind, he had another centre of

consciousness. In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his

body, there had started another activity. It was as if a strong

light were burning there, and he was blind within it, unable to

know anything, except that this transfiguration burned between

him and her, connecting them, like a secret power.

Since she had come to the house he went about in a daze,

scarcely seeing even the things he handled, drifting, quiescent,

in a state of metamorphosis. He submitted to that which was

happening to him, letting go his will, suffering the loss of

himself, dormant always on the brink of ecstasy, like a creature

evolving to a new birth.

She came twice with her child to the farm, but there was this

lull between them, an intense calm and passivity like a torpor

upon them, so that there was no active change took place. He was

almost unaware of the child, yet by his native good humour he

gained her confidence, even her affection, setting her on a

horse to ride, giving her corn for the fowls.

Once he drove the mother and child from Ilkeston, picking

them up on the road. The child huddled close to him as if for

love, the mother sat very still. There was a vagueness, like a

soft mist over all of them, and a silence as if their wills were

suspended. Only he saw her hands, ungloved, folded in her lap,

and he noticed the wedding-ring on her finger. It excluded him:

it was a closed circle. It bound her life, the wedding-ring, it

stood for her life in which he could have no part. Nevertheless,

beyond all this, there was herself and himself which should

meet.

As he helped her down from the trap, almost lifting her, he

felt he had some right to take her thus between his hands. She

belonged as yet to that other, to that which was behind. But he

must care for her also. She was too living to be neglected.

Sometimes her vagueness, in which he was lost, made him

angry, made him rage. But he held himself still as yet. She had

no response, no being towards him. It puzzled and enraged him,

but he submitted for a long time. Then, from the accumulated

troubling of her ignoring him, gradually a fury broke out,

destructive, and he wanted to go away, to escape her.

It happened she came down to the Marsh with the child whilst

he was in this state. Then he stood over against her, strong and

heavy in his revolt, and though he said nothing, still she felt

his anger and heavy impatience grip hold of her, she was shaken

again as out of a torpor. Again her heart stirred with a quick,

out-running impulse, she looked at him, at the stranger who was

not a gentleman yet who insisted on coming into her life, and

the pain of a new birth in herself strung all her veins to a new

form. She would have to begin again, to find a new being, a new

form, to respond to that blind, insistent figure standing over

against her.

A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame

leaped up him, under his skin. She wanted it, this new life from

him, with him, yet she must defend herself against it, for it

was a destruction.

As he worked alone on the land, or sat up with his ewes at

lambing time, the facts and material of his daily life fell

away, leaving the kernel of his purpose clean. And then it came

upon him that he would marry her and she would be his life.

Gradually, even without seeing her, he came to know her. He

would have liked to think of her as of something given into his

protection, like a child without parents. But it was forbidden

him. He had to come down from this pleasant view of the case.

She might refuse him. And besides, he was afraid of her.

But during the long February nights with the ewes in labour,

looking out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he

did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only

fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the

stars in the dark heaven travelling, the whole host passing by

on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the

greater ordering.

Unless she would come to him, he must remain as a

nothingness. It was a hard experience. But, after her repeated

obliviousness to him, after he had seen so often that he did not

exist for her, after he had raged and tried to escape, and said

he was good enough by himself, he was a man, and could stand

alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night humble

himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing.

He was nothing. But with her, he would be real. If she were

now walking across the frosty grass near the sheep-shelter,

through the fretful bleating of the ewes and lambs, she would

bring him completeness and perfection. And if it should be so,

that she should come to him! It should be so--it was

ordained so.

He was a long time resolving definitely to ask her to marry

him. And he knew, if he asked her, she must really acquiesce.

She must, it could not be otherwise.

He had learned a little of her. She was poor, quite alone,

and had had a hard time in London, both before and after her

husband died. But in Poland she was a lady well born, a

landowner's daughter.

All these things were only words to him, the fact of her

superior birth, the fact that her husband had been a brilliant

doctor, the fact that he himself was her inferior in almost

every way of distinction. There was an inner reality, a logic of

the soul, which connected her with him.

One evening in March, when the wind was roaring outside, came

the moment to ask her. He had sat with his hands before him,

leaning to the fire. And as he watched the fire, he knew almost

without thinking that he was going this evening.

"Have you got a clean shirt?" he asked Tilly.

"You know you've got clean shirts," she said.

"Ay,--bring me a white one."

Tilly brought down one of the linen shirts he had inherited

from his father, putting it before him to air at the fire. She

loved him with a dumb, aching love as he sat leaning with his

arms on his knees, still and absorbed, unaware of her. Lately, a

quivering inclination to cry had come over her, when she did

anything for him in his presence. Now her hands trembled as she

spread the shirt. He was never shouting and teasing now. The

deep stillness there was in the house made her tremble.

He went to wash himself. Queer little breaks of consciousness

seemed to rise and burst like bubbles out of the depths of his

stillness.

"It's got to be done," he said as he stooped to take the

shirt out of the fender, "it's got to be done, so why balk it?"

And as he combed his hair before the mirror on the wall, he

retorted to himself, superficially: "The woman's not speechless

dumb. She's not clutterin' at the nipple. She's got the right to

please herself, and displease whosoever she likes."

This streak of common sense carried him a little further.

"Did you want anythink?" asked Tilly, suddenly appearing,

having heard him speak. She stood watching him comb his fair

beard. His eyes were calm and uninterrupted.

"Ay," he said, "where have you put the scissors?"

She brought them to him, and stood watching as, chin forward,

he trimmed his beard.

"Don't go an' crop yourself as if you was at a shearin'

contest," she said, anxiously. He blew the fine-curled hair

quickly off his lips.

He put on all clean clothes, folded his stock carefully, and

donned his best coat. Then, being ready, as grey twilight was

falling, he went across to the orchard to gather the daffodils.

The wind was roaring in the apple trees, the yellow flowers

swayed violently up and down, he heard even the fine whisper of

their spears as he stooped to break the flattened, brittle stems

of the flowers.

"What's to-do?" shouted a friend who met him as he left the

garden gate.

"Bit of courtin', like," said Brangwen.

And Tilly, in a great state of trepidation and excitement,

let the wind whisk her over the field to the big gate, whence

she could watch him go.

He went up the hill and on towards the vicarage, the wind

roaring through the hedges, whilst he tried to shelter his bunch

of daffodils by his side. He did not think of anything, only

knew that the wind was blowing.

Night was falling, the bare trees drummed and whistled. The

vicar, he knew, would be in his study, the Polish woman in the

kitchen, a comfortable room, with her child. In the darkest of

twilight, he went through the gate and down the path where a few

daffodils stooped in the wind, and shattered crocuses made a

pale, colourless ravel.

There was a light streaming on to the bushes at the back from

the kitchen window. He began to hesitate. How could he do this?

Looking through the window, he saw her seated in the

rocking-chair with the child, already in its nightdress, sitting

on her knee. The fair head with its wild, fierce hair was

drooping towards the fire-warmth, which reflected on the bright

cheeks and clear skin of the child, who seemed to be musing,

almost like a grown-up person. The mother's face was dark and

still, and he saw, with a pang, that she was away back in the

life that had been. The child's hair gleamed like spun glass,

her face was illuminated till it seemed like wax lit up from the

inside. The wind boomed strongly. Mother and child sat

motionless, silent, the child staring with vacant dark eyes into

the fire, the mother looking into space. The little girl was

almost asleep. It was her will which kept her eyes so wide.

Suddenly she looked round, troubled, as the wind shook the

house, and Brangwen saw the small lips move. The mother began to

rock, he heard the slight crunch of the rockers of the chair.

Then he heard the low, monotonous murmur of a song in a foreign

language. Then a great burst of wind, the mother seemed to have

drifted away, the child's eyes were black and dilated. Brangwen

looked up at the clouds which packed in great, alarming haste

across the dark sky.

Then there came the child's high, complaining, yet imperative

voice:

"Don't sing that stuff, mother; I don't want to hear it."

The singing died away.

"You will go to bed," said the mother.

He saw the clinging protest of the child, the unmoved

farawayness of the mother, the clinging, grasping effort of the

child. Then suddenly the clear childish challenge:

"I want you to tell me a story."

The wind blew, the story began, the child nestled against the

mother, Brangwen waited outside, suspended, looking at the wild

waving of the trees in the wind and the gathering darkness. He

had his fate to follow, he lingered there at the threshold.

The child crouched distinct and motionless, curled in against

her mother, the eyes dark and unblinking among the keen wisps of

hair, like a curled-up animal asleep but for the eyes. The

mother sat as if in shadow, the story went on as if by itself.

Brangwen stood outside seeing the night fall. He did not notice

the passage of time. The hand that held the daffodils was fixed

and cold.

The story came to an end, the mother rose at last, with the

child clinging round her neck. She must be strong, to carry so

large a child so easily. The little Anna clung round her

mother's neck. The fair, strange face of the child looked over

the shoulder of the mother, all asleep but the eyes, and these,

wide and dark, kept up the resistance and the fight with

something unseen.

When they were gone, Brangwen stirred for the first time from

the place where he stood, and looked round at the night. He

wished it were really as beautiful and familiar as it seemed in