第 8 页

instincts of dread in her, through service of a dark religion.

But she could not.

Then came the flight to London. Lensky, the little, thin man,

had got all his life locked into a resistance and could not

relax again. He lived in a sort of insane irritability, touchy,

haughty to the last degree, fractious, so that as assistant

doctor in one of the hospitals he soon became impossible. They

were almost beggars. But he kept still his great ideas of

himself, he seemed to live in a complete hallucination, where he

himself figured vivid and lordly. He guarded his wife jealously

against the ignominy of her position, rushed round her like a

brandished weapon, an amazing sight to the English eye, had her

in his power, as if he hypnotized her. She was passive, dark,

always in shadow.

He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he

seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him

dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of

anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a

remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death,

of the shadow of revenge. When her husband died, she was

relieved. He would no longer dart about her.

England fitted her mood, its aloofness and foreignness. She

had known a little of the language before coming, and a sort of

parrot-mind made her pick it up fairly easily. But she knew

nothing of the English, nor of English life. Indeed, these did

not exist for her. She was like one walking in the Underworld,

where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with

one. She felt the English people as a potent, cold, slightly

hostile host amongst whom she walked isolated.

The English people themselves were almost deferential to her,

the Church saw that she did not want. She walked without

passion, like a shade, tormented into moments of love by the

child. Her dying husband with his tortured eyes and the skin

drawn tight over his face, he was as a vision to her, not a

reality. In a vision he was buried and put away. Then the vision

ceased, she was untroubled, time went on grey, uncoloured, like

a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape

unrolled beside her. When she rocked her baby at evening, maybe

she fell into a Polish slumber song, or she talked sometimes to

herself in Polish. Otherwise she did not think of Poland, nor of

that life to which she had belonged. It was a great blot looming

blank in its darkness. In the superficial activity of her life,

she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long

blanks and darknesses of abstraction were Polish.

So she lived for some time. Then, with slight uneasiness, she

used half to awake to the streets of London. She realized that

there was something around her, very foreign, she realized she

was in a strange place. And then, she was sent away into the

country. There came into her mind now the memory of her home

where she had been a child, the big house among the land, the

peasants of the village.

She was sent to Yorkshire, to nurse an old rector in his

rectory by the sea. This was the first shake of the kaleidoscope

that brought in front of her eyes something she must see. It

hurt her brain, the open country and the moors. It hurt her and

hurt her. Yet it forced itself upon her as something living, it

roused some potency of her childhood in her, it had some

relation to her.

There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now.

And there was a strange insistence of light from the sea, to

which she must attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them,

and she stooped to the disturbing influence near her feet, she

even picked one or two flowers, faintly remembering in the new

colour of life, what had been. All the day long, as she sat at

the upper window, the light came off the sea, constantly,

constantly, without refusal, till it seemed to bear her away,

and the noise of the sea created a drowsiness in her, a

relaxation like sleep. Her automatic consciousness gave way a

little, she stumbled sometimes, she had a poignant, momentary

vision of her living child, that hurt her unspeakably. Her soul

roused to attention.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed

in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the

hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee

between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass

and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse

grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck

away down under the trees, she was startled, and wondered what

it was. Walking down, she found the bluebells around her glowing

like a presence, among the trees.

Summer came, the moors were tangled with harebells like water

in the ruts of the roads, the heather came rosy under the skies,

setting the whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past

the gorse bushes shrinking from their presence, she stepped into

the heather as into a quickening bath that almost hurt. Her

fingers moved over the clasped fingers of the child, she heard

the anxious voice of the baby, as it tried to make her talk,

distraught.

And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a

long while remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn

came with the faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter

darkened the moors, and almost savagely she turned again to

life, demanding her life back again, demanding that it should be

as it had been when she was a girl, on the land at home, under

the sky. Snow lay in great expanses, the telegraph posts strode

over the white earth, away under the gloom of the sky. And

savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this was

Poland, her youth, that all was her own again.

But there were no sledges nor bells, she did not see the

peasants coming out like new people, in their sheepskins and

their fresh, ruddy, bright faces, that seemed to become new and

vivid when the snow lit up the ground. It did not come to her,

the life of her youth, it did not come back. There was a little

agony of struggle, then a relapse into the darkness of the

convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the walls, and

Christ was white on the cross of victory.

She watched from the sick-room the snow whirl past, like

flocks of shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to

a leaden inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the

curving shore, and the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half

submerged. But near at hand on the trees the snow was soft in

bloom. Only the voice of the dying vicar spoke grey and

querulous from behind.

By the time the snowdrops were out, however, he was dead. He

was dead. But with curious equanimity the returning woman

watched the snowdrops on the edge of the grass below, blown

white in the wind, but not to be blown away. She watched them

fluttering and bobbing, the white, shut flowers, anchored by a

thread to the grey-green grass, yet never blown away, not

drifting with the wind.

As she rose in the morning, the dawn was beating up white,

gusts of light blown like a thin snowstorm from the east, blown

stronger and fiercer, till the rose appeared, and the gold, and

the sea lit up below. She was impassive and indifferent. Yet she

was outside the enclosure of darkness.

There passed a space of shadow again, the familiarity of

dread-worship, during which she was moved, oblivious, to

Cossethay. There, at first, there was nothing--just grey

nothing. But then one morning there was a light from the yellow

jasmine caught her, and after that, morning and evening, the

persistent ringing of thrushes from the shrubbery, till her

heart, beaten upon, was forced to lift up its voice in rivalry

and answer. Little tunes came into her mind. She was full of

trouble almost like anguish. Resistant, she knew she was beaten,

and from fear of darkness turned to fear of light. She would

have hidden herself indoors, if she could. Above all, she craved

for the peace and heavy oblivion of her old state. She could not

bear to come to, to realize. The first pangs of this new

parturition were so acute, she knew she could not bear it. She

would rather remain out of life, than be torn, mutilated into

this birth, which she could not survive. She had not the

strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so

hostile. She knew she would die like an early, colourless,

scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth

mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling

life.

But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree,

when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she

forgot, she felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person,

quite glad. But she knew it was fragile, and she dreaded it. The

vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses, for his bees to roll in,

and she laughed. Then night came, with brilliant stars that she

knew of old, from her girlhood. And they flashed so bright, she

knew they were victors.

She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the

past and the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to

find a great stone lying above it, she was helpless.

The bewilderment and helplessness continued, she was

surrounded by great moving masses that must crush her. And there

was no escape. Save in the old obliviousness, the cold darkness

she strove to retain. But the vicar showed her eggs in the

thrush's nest near the back door. She saw herself the

mother-thrush upon the nest, and the way her wings were spread,

so eager down upon her secret. The tense, eager, nesting wings

moved her beyond endurance. She thought of them in the morning,

when she heard the thrush whistling as he got up, and she

thought, "Why didn't I die out there, why am I brought

here?"

She was aware of people who passed around her, not as

persons, but as looming presences. It was very difficult for her

to adjust herself. In Poland, the peasantry, the people, had

been cattle to her, they had been her cattle that she owned and

used. What were these people? Now she was coming awake, she was

lost.

But she had felt Brangwen go by almost as if he had brushed

her. She had tingled in body as she had gone on up the road.

After she had been with him in the Marsh kitchen, the voice of

her body had risen strong and insistent. Soon, she wanted him.

He was the man who had come nearest to her for her

awakening.

Always, however, between-whiles she lapsed into the old

unconsciousness, indifference and there was a will in her to

save herself from living any more. But she would wake in the

morning one day and feel her blood running, feel herself lying

open like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent

with demand.

She got to know him better, and her instinct fixed on

him--just on him. Her impulse was strong against him,

because he was not of her own sort. But one blind instinct led

her, to take him, to leave him, and then to relinquish herself

to him. It would be safety. She felt the rooted safety of him,

and the life in him. Also he was young and very fresh. The blue,

steady livingness of his eyes she enjoyed like morning. He was

very young.

Then she lapsed again to stupor and indifference. This,

however, was bound to pass. The warmth flowed through her, she

felt herself opening, unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in

full request under the sun, as the beaks of tiny birds open

flat, to receive, to receive. And unfolded she turned to him,

straight to him. And he came, slowly, afraid, held back by

uncouth fear, and driven by a desire bigger than himself.

When she opened and turned to him, then all that had been and

all that was, was gone from her, she was as new as a flower that

unsheathes itself and stands always ready, waiting, receptive.

He could not understand this. He forced himself, through lack of

understanding, to the adherence to the line of honourable

courtship and sanctioned, licensed marriage. Therefore, after he

had gone to the vicarage and asked for her, she remained for

some days held in this one spell, open, receptive to him, before

him. He was roused to chaos. He spoke to the vicar and gave in

the banns. Then he stood to wait.

She remained attentive and instinctively expectant before

him, unfolded, ready to receive him. He could not act, because

of self-fear and because of his conception of honour towards

her. So he remained in a state of chaos.

And after a few days, gradually she closed again, away from

him, was sheathed over, impervious to him, oblivious. Then a

black, bottomless despair became real to him, he knew what he

had lost. He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was

to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off

again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about

unliving.

Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding,

was plunged in a revolt that knew no bounds. Inarticulate, he

moved with her at the Marsh in violent, gloomy, wordless

passion, almost in hatred of her. Till gradually she became

aware of him, aware of herself with regard to him, her blood

stirred to life, she began to open towards him, to flow towards

him again. He waited till the spell was between them again, till

they were together within one rushing, hastening flame. And then

again he was bewildered, he was tied up as with cords, and could

not move to her. So she came to him, and unfastened the breast

of his waistcoat and his shirt, and put her hand on him, needing

to know him. For it was cruel to her, to be opened and offered

to him, yet not to know what he was, not even that he was there.

She gave herself to the hour, but he could not, and he bungled

in taking her.

So that he lived in suspense, as if only half his faculties

worked, until the wedding. She did not understand. But the

vagueness came over her again, and the days lapsed by. He could

not get definitely into touch with her. For the time being, she