虹（中文导读英文版）(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：（英）劳伦斯

出版社：清华大学出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

虹（中文导读英文版）试读：

前言

戴维·赫伯特·劳伦斯（David Herbert Lawrence，1885—1930），英国著名小说家、诗人、散文家，被誉为“英国文学史上最伟大的人物之一”。一生共创作了十多部小说，三本游记，三本短篇小说集，多首（篇）诗歌、散文、评论等。在种类繁多的作品中，小说最能代表他的文学成就。其中，《恋爱中的女人》、《查泰莱夫人的情人》、《虹》、《儿子与情人》等小说已成为20世纪世界文学的经典名作，这些小说被译成世界上几十种文字，并多次被搬上银幕，在世界上广为流传。

劳伦斯于1885年9月11日出生在英国诺丁汉郡的一个矿工家庭。他的父亲是一位矿工，所受的教育很少；母亲出身于中产阶级家庭，受过良好的教育。劳伦斯的父亲喜欢纵欲享乐，母亲却古板拘谨，这种不和谐的家庭结构对劳伦斯日后的创作产生了深远的影响。劳伦斯自小身体孱弱、敏感，他是在母爱的庇护下长大成人的，他的成名作《儿子和情人》正是带有他独特家庭经历的自传体小说。在1912年专门从事文学创作之前，劳伦斯当过会计、工人、雇员和小学教师等。1911年，劳伦斯出版了第一部长篇小说《白孔雀》。1913年发表了第一部重要小说《儿子与情人》，1915年出版了小说《虹》，1921年出版《恋爱中的女人》，1928年出版《查泰莱夫人的情人》。这些小说的核心内容，都是围绕着性展开的，劳伦斯把人对性的追求，看成是引起一切生活现象的根源。其中，长篇小说《查泰莱夫人的情人》由于毫不隐晦、直白地对性爱描写，因而被斥为淫秽作品，曾受到英国当局的抨击和查禁。除以上这些作品外，劳伦斯还出版了《亚伦之杖》（1922）、《袋鼠》（1923）等其他题材的小说；出版的诗集有《爱诗及其他》（1913）、《爱神》（1916）、《如意花》（1929）等。劳伦斯长期旅居国外，到过德国、法国、意大利等欧洲国家以及澳洲和美洲。1930年3月2日，劳伦斯病逝于法国的旺斯。

时至今日，劳伦斯仍然是全世界最受欢迎的作家之一，他的小说在世界范围内拥有广泛的读者。在中国，劳伦斯的作品同样深受中国读者的欢迎，他的小说几乎全部被引入中国，版次多得难以统计。目前，国内已出版的劳伦斯小说的形式主要有两种，一种是中文翻译版，另一种是英文原版。而其中英文原版越来越受到读者的欢迎，这主要是得益于中国人热衷于学习英文的大环境。而从英文学习的角度上来看，直接使用纯英文的学习资料更有利于英语学习。考虑到对英文内容背景的了解有助于英文阅读，使用中文导读应该是一种比较好的方式，也可以说是该类型书的第三种版本形式。采用中文导读而非中英文对照的方式进行编排，这样有利于国内读者摆脱对英文阅读依赖中文注释的习惯。基于以上原因，我们决定编译劳伦斯的四大经典之作——《查泰莱夫人的情人》、《虹》、《恋爱中的女人》和《儿子与情人》，并采用中文导读英文版的形式出版。在中文导读中，我们尽力使其贴近原作的精髓，也尽可能保留原作的风格。我们希望能够编出为当代中国读者所喜爱的经典读本。读者在阅读英文故事之前，可以先阅读中文导读内容，这样有利于了解故事背景，从而加快阅读速度。我们相信，这些经典著作的引进对加强当代中国读者，特别是青少年读者的科学素养和人文修养是非常有帮助的。

本书主要内容由王勋、纪飞等编译。参加本书故事素材搜集整理及编译工作的还有郑佳、刘乃亚、赵雪、左新杲、黄福成、冯洁、徐鑫、马启龙、王业伟、王旭敏、陈楠、王多多、邵舒丽、周丽萍、王晓旭、李永振、孟宪行、熊红华、胡国平、熊建国、徐平国、王小红等。限于我们的文学素养和英语水平，书中难免不当之处，衷心希望读者朋友批评指正。第一章　汤姆·布朗温和波兰女人的婚姻　Chapter 1　How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady导读

布朗温家族一直生活在马石农场上，他们拥有属于自己的一大片肥沃的土地，相比城市生活，他们的生活不算富裕；不过在马石，他们从来没觉得缺钱花。他们出于习惯，从来不会浪费食物，也不会乱花一分钱。他们与大自然为伴，随着一年四季的循环周而复始地劳作，男女之间分工协作，生活有条不紊。男人负责犁地，照看牲畜，眼里只有天空、庄稼和牲畜；女人负责家务，站在门口凝视远方，与男人眼中所看的世界有所区别。她想知道远方发生了什么，想知道那里的男人是如何奋斗的。女人往往会羡慕牧师的生活，牧师比她的丈夫更加思维敏捷，见多识广。既然在自己身上无法实现这样的愿望，女人就把所有的希望寄托到孩子身上，希望他们能够走出这里，见识更广的世界。

布朗温太太强烈地想了解那些有更多生活阅历的人，村里的女人和布朗温在一起会很自在，但如果没有了牧师，她们的生活就丧失了想象力，变得毫无生气和希望。在19世纪前期，马石农庄被一条运河隔成了两半，布朗温一家得到了一笔可观的耕地补偿收入。运河一端的煤矿迅速发展，使小镇逐渐繁华起来，布朗温一家人也几乎变成了商人。马石农庄仍然保持着它最初的那份安宁，大自然的美好风光并没有受到破坏。刚开始时，布朗温一家对于外界的繁华喧闹有些不适应，但现在已经习以为常。农民们经常见到全身散发着矿渣味道的矿工，也能够接受火车刺耳的鸣笛声了。

这段时期，布朗温的二儿子艾尔弗雷德·布朗温与一位嗓门奇特的希腊姑娘结了婚。这位姑娘总是不停地唠叨，不过艾尔弗雷德却很享受这份甜蜜。艾尔弗雷德从小深受母亲的宠爱，虽然他很用功学习，但除了绘画之外其他毫无长进。他对每件事情都抱怨，最后父母对他也彻底绝望放弃了；他很用心工作，因为设计了精美的绘画而渐渐富裕起来。绘画工作有时候使他身心憔悴，不过他却坚持做下去，生活中他总是沉默寡言，脾气古怪。他的妻子爱慕虚荣，艾尔弗雷德受其影响，逐渐变得热衷于房屋装饰。到后来孩子长大后，他却不顾家庭，开始到处寻欢作乐。

布朗温的三儿子是自小厌学的弗兰克。弗兰克有些独特，从小就喜欢在屠宰场里游逛，英俊的他在十八岁的时候便和同厂的女工结婚了。那姑娘能说会道，很能博得他的欢心，每年都为他生一个孩子。当弗兰克接手家族的屠宰生意时，已经对屠宰没有什么兴趣了，变得开始酗酒，总是信口雌黄，像疯子一样。

布朗温的两个女儿，大女儿爱丽丝嫁给了矿工，小女儿艾菲仍在家中。汤姆是最小的孩子，也最受大家的宠爱。在母亲的支持下，汤姆在十二岁的时候去了德比郡的文法学校读书。其实汤姆内心觉得自己在学校肯定一事无成，但由于是母亲的期望他才去的，他从不后悔这样的选择。坐在教室里的汤姆很难集中精神听课，学习几乎没什么进步；情感上他却十分成熟，渐渐瞧不起自己的无能，变得很自卑。汤姆对数学有点兴趣，喜欢用情感启发他人，学校里的老师虽然对他不抱任何希望，但还是非常肯定他的诚恳。拉丁文老师总是欺侮汤姆，这导致最后汤姆用石板砸伤了老师的头。离开学校时，汤姆十分开心。虽然在学校的时候曾经和一个男孩结成了好朋友，但分开后再也没有任何联系，这也成为汤姆在学校的快乐的回忆。

汤姆回到了自由自在的农场，他乐意在田里劳作。在田里干活时他总是保持精力充沛，对人也十分随和。在汤姆十七岁那年，老父亲摔断了脊椎骨，母亲带着孩子们继续生活。老三弗兰克对现实十分不满，经常找茬，尤其看不惯汤姆，艾菲站在汤姆这边，反对弗兰克的无礼。但艾尔弗雷德从外面回家后，家里的女性们又都撇下汤姆，站到了艾尔弗雷德那边。后来汤姆才渐渐了解，哥哥身上的那种绅士气质是吸引女人们重要的原因。

汤姆接手了农场，他对生活充满了热情，在十九岁的时候竟然喝醉后和一个妓女上了床，这让他对女人的看法变得彷徨。不过他很快又和从前一样若无其事，事实上外出的次数越来越少了。他变得沉默寡言，开始节制喝酒，初次和女人接触的场景总是浮现在他眼前。他没有再放荡自己，因为想到第一次的单调乏味让他打了退堂鼓。汤姆不知道自己到底哪里发生了变化，却时常会想起女人，这让他十分烦躁。每次一出现他心仪的正经女孩，他就会变得束手无策。想到女孩裸体的场景，他整个人会惊恐不已。遇到那些放荡的女孩，他会想到自己第一次的经历，发誓不能娶那些女人。

汤姆二十三岁那年，母亲去世了，家里只剩下他和艾菲。他有一段时间无法接受母亲去世的事实，开始对命运更加担忧。他和艾菲的关系很紧张，虽然两人都认为对方很重要，却经常吵架。汤姆再次出去放荡喝酒，又和一个水性杨花的女人上了床。在汤姆还沉浸于事后的美妙感觉，希望能够整天和那个女人一起时，女人告诉她自己天黑之前必须回家陪自己的男人。这以后，汤姆整天沉浸于自己的遐想之中，他享受着自己梦中的快乐，却又在现实中被对女人的欲望折磨着。他又开始毫无节制地喝酒，希望能够找个年轻的女人结婚，可始终没能如愿。

艾菲已经结婚了，留下了孤独的汤姆和女佣在一起。汤姆每天晚上到酒馆喝得醉醺醺地回家，早晨起来想到前一天的失态又觉得惭愧，日子就这样一天天重复着。二十八岁的汤姆已经是一个身强力壮的男子汉了，一次在马车行至山坡拐弯处时，他看到一个女人朝自己走过来。对方穿着黑衣，急冲冲地向前走着，丝毫没有注意到周围。当她听到马车声时，抬起头看了一眼；汤姆看清楚了对方的容貌之后，心里不由自主地认定了对方。在他们交换眼神的那一刻，汤姆的心已经被那个女人夺走了，可是转眼间那个女人便继续朝前走了。接下来的几天，汤姆整个人精神恍惚，几天后，他再次在家里看到那个女人从门前经过，他急切地想认识她，询问女佣蒂丽，蒂丽告诉他那个女人是牧师家新来的管家，据说是外国人，身边还带着一个三四岁的小女孩。当天晚上，汤姆来到酒馆，这次的主要目的是打听有关那个女人的消息。他得知那个女人是一个波兰医生的遗孀，名叫兰斯珂太太，汤姆顿时信心十足，仿佛那个女人已经注定属于自己。

一天，他看到兰斯珂太太领着女儿在散步，但他并没有上前打招呼，而是装着若无其事地继续往前走。等到艾菲到马石短住的那段时间，汤姆和她去了一次教堂，他远远地看着兰斯珂太太，被她的气质完全迷住。她身边的小女孩注意到汤姆的眼睛总是盯着她们，眼睛里流露出敌视的目光。艾菲注意到汤姆的不同，她不喜欢那对母女，不过并不反对弟弟娶那个女人。出乎汤姆意料的是，不久之后的一天，兰斯珂太太竟然主动找他借黄油。汤姆十分慷慨地将家里所有的黄油都给了她，这惹得蒂丽十分不满。兰斯珂太太对汤姆的坦率和热情感到有些惊讶，当她得知整个农场和房子全都属于汤姆时，更是惊讶万分。两个人的目光对视时，她感到一些不自在，和陌生人如此的靠近让她内心很矛盾，但平静地回答了汤姆有关她生活的提问。兰斯珂太太走后，汤姆整个人变得恍惚不安，他放任着自己，似乎又在等待着新生。之后，兰斯珂太太带着孩子又来过两次，但他们之间的关系没有突破。有时候，兰斯珂太太的冷淡和茫然让汤姆感到气愤，他也曾用这样的心情接待过这对母女，这让对方从麻木中惊醒。汤姆成功地闯进了兰斯珂太太的心中，她也想重新开始生活，重新接纳一个新的生命。

当汤姆独自一人在田里劳作时，会突然冒出和兰斯珂太太结婚的打算。考虑了很久，他决定向对方求婚。在这期间，他又打听到一些她的情况，她出身于波兰的名门，但也有一段痛苦的回忆。在三月份一个风雨交加的夜晚，他穿上干净的白色衬衣，梳理好胡须，鼓起勇气来到了那对母女的住处。小女孩正依偎在母亲怀里，听着母亲讲故事，等到故事讲完后，汤姆终于敲了敲门。汤姆的突然到来让兰斯珂太太有些意外，他以平静的口吻直接向她求婚。长时间的沉默后，对方竟然答应了结婚。汤姆喜出望外，紧紧地抱着对方亲吻着，沉浸在喜悦之中。等到一阵甜蜜之后，母亲提到了孩子，汤姆明白她的意思，表示自己很喜欢她的孩子。两个人互相询问了对方的一些基本情况，汤姆再次确定了对方的意见，但从她的眼睛中看到了一丝忧虑。汤姆答应第二天会找牧师谈谈，随即道了晚安离开了。兰斯珂太太脸上依然没有任何表情，他们彼此还很陌生，却要开始为在一起生活做准备。Ⅰhe Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in themeadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder Ttrees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.Two miles away, a church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town climbing assiduously up to it.Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky.So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he wasaware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.

There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager.They had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the change in their eyes from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-staring anger；through all the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is changing.

Living on rich land, on their own land, near to a growing town, they had forgotten what it was to be in straitened circumstances.They had never become rich, because there were always children, and the patrimony was divided every time.But always, at the Marsh, there was ample.

So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money.Neither were they thriftless.They were aware of the last halfpenny, and instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it would help to feed the cattle.But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease？They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth.They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds'nests no longer worth hiding.Their life and interrelations were such；feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away.The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it.They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men.They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of thehorses after their will.

In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter.Then the men sat by the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.

The women were different.On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle.But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond.They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.

It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly round about；it was enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand.So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn round.

But the woman wanted another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy.Her house faced out from the farm-buildings and fields, looked out to the road and the village with church and Hall and the world beyond.She stood to see the far-off world of cities and governments and the active scope of man, the magic land to her, where secrets were made known and desires fulfilled.She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set out to discover what was beyond, to enlarge their ownscope and range and freedom；whereas the Brangwen men faced inwards to the teeming life of creation, which poured unresolved into their veins.

Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house towards the activity of man in the world at large, whilst her husband looked out to the back at sky and harvest and beast and land, she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in his conquest, her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the edge of the unknown.She also wanted to know, and to be of the fighting host.

At home, even so near as Cossethay, was the vicar, who spoke the other, magic language, and had the other, finer bearing, both of which she could perceive, but could never attain to.The vicar moved in worlds beyond where her own menfolk existed.Did she not know her own menfolk：fresh, slow, full-built men, masterful enough, but easy, native to the earth, lacking outwardness and range of motion.Whereas the vicar, dark and dry and small beside her husband, had yet a quickness and a range of being that made Brangwen, in his large geniality, seem dull and local.She knew her husband.But in the vicar's nature was that which passed beyond her knowledge.As Brangwen had power over the cattle so the vicar had power over her husband.What was it in the vicar, that raised him above the common men as man is raised above the beast？She craved to know.She craved to achieve this higher being, if not in herself, then in her children.That which makes a man strong even if he be little and frail in body, just as any man is little and frail beside a bull, and yet stronger than the bull, what was it？It was not money nor power nor position.What power had the vicar over Tom Brangwen-none.Yet strip them and set them on a desert island, and the vicar was the master.His soul was master of the other man's.And why-why？She decided it was a question of knowledge.

The curate was poor enough, and not very efficacious as a man, either, yet he took rank with those others, the superior.She watched his children being born, she saw them running as tiny things beside their mother.And already they were separate from her own children, distinct.Why were her own children marked below the others？Why should the curate's children inevitably takeprecedence over her children, why should dominance be given them from the start？It was not money, nor even class.It was education and experience, she decided.

It was this, this education, this higher form of being, that the mother wished to give to her children, so that they too could live the supreme life on earth.For her children, at least the children of her heart, had the complete nature that should take place in equality with the living, vital people in the land, not be left behind obscure among the labourers.Why must they remain obscured and stifled all their lives, why should they suffer from lack of freedom to move？How should they learn the entry into the finer, more vivid circle of life？

Her imagination was fired by the squire's lady at Shelly Hall, who came to church at Cossethay with her little children, girls in tidy capes of beaver fur, and smart little hats, herself like a winter rose, so fair and delicate.So fair, so fine in mould, so luminous, what was it that Mrs.Hardy felt which she, Mrs.Brangwen, did not feel？How was Mrs.Hardy's nature different from that of the common women of Cossethay, in what was it beyond them？All the women of Cossethay talked eagerly about Mrs.Hardy, of her husband, her children, her guests, her dress, of her servants and her housekeeping.The lady of the Hall was the living dream of their lives, her life was the epic that inspired their lives.In her they lived imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her friend, member of Parliament for the division, they had their own Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe and the swine and the endless web.

So the women of the village were fortunate.They saw themselves in the lady of the manor, each of them lived her own fulfilment of the life of Mrs.Hardy.And the Brangwen wife of the Marsh aspired beyond herself, towards the further life of the finer woman, towards the extended being she revealed, as a traveller in his self-contained manner reveals far-off countries present in himself.But why should a knowledge of far-off countries make a man's life a different thing, finer, bigger？And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve him？It is the same thing.

The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the vicar and Lord William, lean, eager men with strange movements, men who had command of the further fields, whose lives ranged over a great extent.Ah, it was something very desirable to know, this touch of the wonderful men who had the power of thought and comprehension.The women of the village might be much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and more at their ease with him, yet if their lives had been robbed of the vicar, and of Lord William, the leading shoot would have been cut away from them, they would have been heavy and uninspired and inclined to hate.So long as the wonder of the beyond was before them, they could get along, whatever their lot.And Mrs.Hardy, and the vicar, and Lord William, these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and were visible to the eyes of Cossethay in their motion.Ⅱ

About 1840，a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley.A high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a heavy bridge.

So the Marsh was shut off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of Cossethay.

The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land.Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete.The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen.

Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-trees past the Brangwens'garden gate.

But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there, through the dark archway of the canal's square aqueduct, was a colliery spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses plastered onthe valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill of the town.

The homestead was just on the safe side of civilisation, outside the gate.The house stood bare from the road, approached by a straight garden path, along which at spring the daffodils were thick in green and yellow.At the sides of the house were bushes of lilac and guelder-rose and privet, entirely hiding the farm buildings behind.

At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards.The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man's figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.

At first the Brangwens were astonished by all this commotion around them.The building of a canal across their land made them strangers in their own place, this raw bank of earth shutting them off disconcerted them.As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain.Then the shrill whistle of the trains re-echoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the far-off come near and imminent.

As they drove home from town, the farmers of the land met the blackened colliers trooping from the pit-mouth.As they gathered the harvest, the west wind brought a faint, sulphurous smell of pit-refuse burning.As they pulled the turnips in November, the sharp clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of empty trucks shunting on the line, vibrated in their hearts with the fact of other activity going on beyond them.

The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the“Black Horse”.She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt.She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamentable complaints, when she raised her voice against her husband in particular and against everybody else after him, only made those who heard her wonder and feel affectionately towards her, even while they were irritated and impatient with her.She railedlong and loud about her husband, but always with a balanced, easy-flying voice and a quaint manner of speech that warmed his belly with pride and male triumph while he scowled with mortification at the things she said.

Consequently Brangwen himself had a humorous puckering at the eyes, a sort of fat laugh, very quiet and full, and he was spoilt like a lord of creation.He calmly did as he liked, laughed at their railing, excused himself in a teasing tone that she loved, followed his natural inclinations, and sometimes, pricked too near the quick, frightened and broke her by a deep, tense fury which seemed to fix on him and hold him for days, and which she would give anything to placate in him.They were two very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of each other, yet living in their separate ways from one root.

There were four sons and two daughters.The eldest boy ran away early to sea, and did not come back.After this the mother was more the node and centre of attraction in the home.The second boy, Alfred, whom the mother admired most, was the most reserved.He was sent to school in Ilkeston and made some progress.But in spite of his dogged, yearning effort, he could not get beyond the rudiments of anything, save of drawing.At this, in which he had some power, he worked, as if it were his hope.After much grumbling and savage rebellion against everything, after much trying and shifting about, when his father was incensed against him and his mother almost despairing, he became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham.

He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming fairly well-off.But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for him to pedgill away at the lace designing, working from the tiny squares of his paper, counting and plotting and niggling.He did it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels within him, adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost.And he came back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly man.

He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the household, mad when anything clumsy or grossoccurred.Later, when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid, almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure, neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm.

Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything to do with learning.From the first he hung round the slaughter-house which stood away in the third yard at the back of the farm.The Brangwens had always killed their own meat, and supplied the neighbourhood.Out of this grew a regular butcher's business in connection with the farm.

As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood that ran across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the crew-yard, by the sight of the man carrying across to the meat-shed a huge side of beef, with the kidneys showing, embedded in their heavy laps of fat.

He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular features something like a later Roman youth.He was more easily excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in character.At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale, plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and made a fool of him.When he had taken over the butchery business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of contempt made him neglectful of it.He drank, and was often to be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family.Effie, the younger, remained at home.

The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his brothers, so had belonged rather to the company of his sisters.He was his mother's favourite.She roused herself to determination, and sent him forcibly away to a grammar-school in Derby when he was twelve years old.He did not want to go, and his father would have given way, but Mrs.Brangwen had set her heart on it.Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body, with full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the family failed before her.

So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first.He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him, but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge his constitution.He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would cut a sorry figure at school.But he took the infliction as inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his being were wrong, and his mother's conception right.If he could have been what he liked, he would have been that which his mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was.He would have been clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman.It was her aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration for any boy.But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as he told his mother very early, with regard to himself；much to her mortification and chagrin.

When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his physical inability to study.He sat gripped, making himself pale and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in what he had to learn.But it was no good.If he beat down his first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he went very little further.He could not learn deliberately.His mind simply did not work.

In feeling he was developed, sensitive to the atmosphere around him, brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate.So he had a low opinion of himself.He knew his own limitation.He knew that his brain was a slow hopeless good-for-nothing.So he was humble.

But at the same time his feelings were more discriminating than those of most of the boys, and he was confused.He was more sensuously developed, more refined in instinct than they.For their mechanical stupidity he hated them, and suffered cruel contempt for them.But when it came to mental things, then he was at a disadvantage.He was at their mercy.He was a fool.He had not the power to controvert even the most stupid argument, so that he was forced to admit things he did not in the least believe.And having admitted them, he did not know whether he believed them or not；he rather thought he did.

But he loved anyone who could convey enlightenment to him through feeling.He sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher of literature read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson's“Ulysses”，or Shelley's“Ode to the West Wind”.His lips parted, his eyes filled with a strained, almost suffering light.And the teacher read on, fired by his power over the boy.Tom Brangwen was moved by this experience beyond all calculation, he almost dreaded it, it was so deep.But when, almost secretly and shamefully, he came to take the book himself, and began the words“Oh wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being，”the very fact of the print caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over his skin, the blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting passion of rage and incompetence.He threw the book down and walked over it and went out to the cricket field.And he hated books as if they were his enemies.He hated them worse than ever he hated any person.

He could not voluntarily control his attention.His mind had no fixed habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere to start from.For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known in himself, that he could apply to learning.He did not know how to begin.Therefore he was helpless when it came to deliberate understanding or deliberate learning.

He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him, he was helpless as an idiot.So that he felt that the ground was never sure under his feet, he was nowhere.His final downfall was his complete inability to attend to a question put without suggestion.If he had to write a formal composition on the Army, he did at last learn to repeat the few facts he knew：“You can join the army at eighteen.You have to be over five foot eight.”But he had all the time a living conviction that this was a dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt.Then he reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched out what he had written, made an agonised effort to think of something in the real composition style, failed, became sullen with rage and humiliation, put the pen down and would have been torn to pieces rather than attempt to write another word.

He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar School got used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at learning, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature.Only one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage.There was a horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a slate, and then things went on as before.The teacher got little sympathy.ButBrangwen winced and could not bear to think of the deed, not even long after, when he was a grown man.

He was glad to leave school.It had not been unpleasant, he had enjoyed the companionship of the other youths, or had thought he enjoyed it, the time had passed very quickly, in endless activity.But he knew all the time that he was in an ignominious position, in this place of learning.He was aware of failure all the while, of incapacity.But he was too healthy and sanguine to be wretched, he was too much alive.Yet his soul was wretched almost to hopelessness.

He had loved one warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a consumptive type.The two had had an almost classic friendship, David and Jonathan, wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the server.But he had never felt equal with his friend, because the other's mind outpaced his, and left him ashamed, far in the rear.So the two boys went at once apart on leaving school.But Brangwen always remembered his friend that had been, kept him as a sort of light, a fine experience to remember.

Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his own again.“I have got a turnip on my shoulders, let me stick to th'fallow，”he said to his exasperated mother.He had too low an opinion of himself.But he went about at his work on the farm gladly enough, glad of the active labour and the smell of the land again, having youth and vigour and humour, and a comic wit, having the will and the power to forget his own shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional rages, but usually on good terms with everybody and everything.

When he was seventeen, his father fell from a stack and broke his neck.Then the mother and son and daughter lived on at the farm, interrupted by occasional loud-mouthed lamenting, jealous-spirited visitations from the butcher Frank, who had a grievance against the world, which he felt was always giving him less than his dues.Frank was particularly against the young Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom returned the hatred violently, his face growing red and his blue eyes staring.Effie sided with Tom against Frank.But when Alfred came, from Nottingham, heavy jowled and lowering, speaking very little, but treating those at home with some contempt, Effie andthe mother sided with him and put Tom into the shade.It irritated the youth that his elder brother should be made something of a hero by the women, just because he didn't live at home and was a lace-designer and almost a gentleman.But Alfred was something of a Prometheus Bound, so the women loved him.Tom came later to understand his brother better.

As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of the farm devolved on to him.He was only eighteen, but he was quite capable of doing everything his father had done.And of course, his mother remained as centre to the house.

The young man grew up very fresh and alert, with zest for every moment of life.He worked and rode and drove to market, he went out with companions and got tipsy occasionally and played skittles and went to the little travelling theatres.Once, when he was drunk at a public house, he went upstairs with a prostitute who seduced him.He was then nineteen.

The thing was something of a shock to him.In the close intimacy of the farm kitchen, the woman occupied the supreme position.The men deferred to her in the house, on all household points, on all points of morality and behaviour.The woman was the symbol for that further life which comprised religion and love and morality.The men placed in her hands their own conscience, they said to her“Be my conscience-keeper, be the angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming.”And the woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly in her, receiving her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger, rebelling and storming, but never for a moment really escaping in their own souls from her prerogative.They depended on her for their stability.Without her, they would have felt like straws in the wind, to be blown hither and thither at random.She was the anchor and the security, she was the restraining hand of God, at times highly to be execrated.

Now when Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, a youth fresh like a plant, rooted in his mother and his sister, found that he had lain with a prostitute woman in a common public house, he was very much startled.For him there was until that time only one kind of woman-his mother and sister.

But now？He did not know what to feel.There was a slight wonder, a pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash and of cold fear lest this was allthat would happen, lest his relations with woman were going to be no more than this nothingness；there was a slight sense of shame before the prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his inefficiency；there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of her；there was a moment of paralysed horror when he felt he might have taken a disease from her；and upon all this startled tumult of emotion, was laid the steadying hand of common sense, which said it did not matter very much, so long as he had no disease.He soon recovered balance, and really it did not matter so very much.

But it had shocked him, and put a mistrust into his heart, and emphasised his fear of what was within himself.He was, however, in a few days going about again in his own careless, happy-go-lucky fashion, his blue eyes just as clear and honest as ever, his face just as fresh, his appetite just as keen.

Or apparently so.He had, in fact, lost some of his buoyant confidence, and doubt hindered his outgoing.

For some time after this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank, more backward from companionship.The disillusion of his first carnal contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious impulses, put a bit in his mouth.He had something to lose which he was afraid of losing, which he was not sure even of possessing.This first affair did not matter much：but the business of love was, at the bottom of his soul, the most serious and terrifying of all to him.

He was tormented now with sex desire, his imagination reverted always to lustful scenes.But what really prevented his returning to a loose woman, over and above the natural squeamishness, was the recollection of the paucity of the last experience.It had been so nothing, so dribbling and functional, that he was ashamed to expose himself to the risk of a repetition of it.

He made a strong, instinctive fight to retain his native cheerfulness unimpaired.He had naturally a plentiful stream of life and humour, a sense of sufficiency and exuberance, giving ease.But now it tended to cause tension.A strained light came into his eyes, he had a slight knitting of the brows.His boisterous humour gave place to lowering silences, and days passed by in a sort of suspense.

He did not know there was any difference in him, exactly；for the most part he was filled with slow anger and resentment.But he knew he was always thinking of women, or a woman, day in, day out, and that infuriated him.He could not get free：and he was ashamed.He had one or two sweethearts, starting with them in the hope of speedy development.But when he had a nice girl, he found that he was incapable of pushing the desired development.The very presence of the girl beside him made it impossible.He could not think of her like that, he could not think of her actual nakedness.She was a girl and he liked her, and dreaded violently even the thought of uncovering her.He knew that, in these last issues of nakedness, he did not exist to her nor she to him.Again, if he had a loose girl, and things began to develop, she offended him so deeply all the time, that he never knew whether he was going to get away from her as quickly as possible, or whether he were going to take her out of inflamed necessity.Again he learnt his lesson：if he took her it was a paucity which he was forced to despise.He did not despise himself nor the girl.But he despised the net result in him of the experience-he despised it deeply and bitterly.

Then, when he was twenty-three, his mother died, and he was left at home with Effie.His mother's death was another blow out of the dark.He could not understand it, he knew it was no good his trying.One had to submit to these unforeseen blows that come unawares and leave a bruise that remains and hurts whenever it is touched.He began to be afraid of all that which was up against him.He had loved his mother.

After this, Effie and he quarrelled fiercely.They meant a very great deal to each other, but they were both under a strange, unnatural tension.He stayed out of the house as much as possible.He got a special corner for himself at the“Red Lion”at Cossethay, and became a usual figure by the fire, a fresh, fair young fellow with heavy limbs and head held back, mostly silent, though alert and attentive, very hearty in his greeting of everybody he knew, shy of strangers.He teased all the women, who liked him extremely, and he was very attentive to the talk of the men, very respectful.

To drink made him quickly flush very red in the face, and brought out the look of self-consciousness and unsureness, almost bewilderment, in his blue eyes.When he came home in this state of tipsy confusion his sister hated himand abused him, and he went off his head, like a mad bull with rage.

He had still another turn with a light-o'-love.One Whitsuntide he went a jaunt with two other young fellows, on horseback, to Matlock and thence to Bakewell.Matlock was at that time just becoming a famous beauty-spot, visited from Manchester and from the Staffordshire towns.In the hotel where the young men took lunch, were two girls, and the parties struck up a friendship.

The Miss who made up to Tom Brangwen, then twenty-four years old, was a handsome, reckless girl neglected for an afternoon by the man who had brought her out.She saw Brangwen and liked him, as all women did, for his warmth and his generous nature, and for the innate delicacy in him.But she saw he was one who would have to be brought to the scratch.However, she was roused and unsatisfied and made mischievous, so she dared anything.It would be an easy interlude, restoring her pride.

She was a handsome girl with a bosom, and dark hair and blue eyes, a girl full of easy laughter, flushed from the sun, inclined to wipe her laughing face in a very natural and taking manner.

Brangwen was in a state of wonder.He treated her with his chaffing deference, roused, but very unsure of himself, afraid to death of being too forward, ashamed lest he might be thought backward, mad with desire yet restrained by instinctive regard for women from making any definite approach, feeling all the while that his attitude was ridiculous, and flushing deep with confusion.She, however, became hard and daring as he became confused, it amused her to see him come on.

“When must you get back？”she asked.

“I'm not particular，”he said.

There the conversation again broke down.

Brangwen's companions were ready to go on.

“Art commin'，Tom，”they called，“or art for stoppin'？”

“Ay, I'm commin'，”he replied, rising reluctantly, an angry sense of futility and disappointment spreading over him.

He met the full, almost taunting look of the girl, and he trembled with unusedness.

“Shall you come an'have a look at my mare，”he said to her, with his hearty kindliness that was now shaken with trepidation.

“Oh, I should like to，”she said, rising.

And she followed him, his rather sloping shoulders and his cloth riding-gaiters, out of the room.The young men got their own horses out of the stable.

“Can you ride？”Brangwen asked her.

“I should like to if I could-I have never tried，”she said.

“Come then, an'have a try，”he said.

And he lifted her, he blushing, she laughing, into the saddle.

“I s'll slip off-it's not a lady's saddle，”she cried.

“Hold yer tight，”he said, and he led her out of the hotel gate.

The girl sat very insecurely, clinging fast.He put a hand on her waist, to support her.And he held her closely, he clasped her as in an embrace, he was weak with desire as he strode beside her.

The horse walked by the river.

“You want to sit straddle-leg，”he said to her.

“I know I do，”she said.

It was the time of very full skirts.She managed to get astride the horse, quite decently, showing an intent concern for covering her pretty leg.

“It's a lot's better this road，”she said, looking down at him.

“Ay, it is，”he said, feeling the marrow melt in his bones from the look in her eyes.“I dunno why they have that side-saddle business, twistin'a woman in two.”

“Should us leave you then-you seem to be fixed up there？”called Brangwen's companions from the road.

He went red with anger.

“Ay-don't worry，”he called back.

“How long are yer stoppin'？”they asked.

“Not after Christmas，”he said.

And the girl gave a tinkling peal of laughter.

“All right-by-bye！”called his friends.

And they cantered off, leaving him very flushed, trying to be quite normalwith the girl.But presently he had gone back to the hotel and given his horse into the charge of an ostler and had gone off with the girl into the woods, not quite knowing where he was or what he was doing.His heart thumped and he thought it the most glorious adventure, and was mad with desire for the girl.

Afterwards he glowed with pleasure.By Jove, but that was something like！He stayed the afternoon with the girl, and wanted to stay the night.She, however, told him this was impossible：her own man would be back by dark, and she must be with him.He, Brangwen, must not let on that there had been anything between them.

She gave him an intimate smile, which made him feel confused and gratified.

He could not tear himself away, though he had promised not to interfere with the girl.He stayed on at the hotel over night.He saw the other fellow at the evening meal：a small, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and a curious face, like a monkey's, but interesting, in its way almost beautiful.Brangwen guessed that he was a foreigner.He was in company with another, an Englishman, dry and hard.The four sat at table, two men and two women.Brangwen watched with all his eyes.

He saw how the foreigner treated the women with courteous contempt, as if they were pleasing animals.Brangwen's girl had put on a ladylike manner, but her voice betrayed her.She wanted to win back her man.When dessert came on, however, the little foreigner turned round from his table and calmly surveyed the room, like one unoccupied.Brangwen marvelled over the cold, animal intelligence of the face.The brown eyes were round, showing all the brown pupil, like a monkey's, and just calmly looking, perceiving the other person without referring to him at all.They rested on Brangwen.The latter marvelled at the old face turned round on him, looking at him without considering it necessary to know him at all.The eyebrows of the round, perceiving, but unconcerned eyes were rather high up, with slight wrinkles above them, just as a monkey's had.It was an old, ageless face.

The man was most amazingly a gentleman all the time, an aristocrat.Brangwen stared fascinated.The girl was pushing her crumbs about on the cloth, uneasily, flushed and angry.

As Brangwen sat motionless in the hall afterwards, too much moved and lost to know what to do, the little stranger came up to him with a beautiful smile and manner, offering a cigarette and saying：

“Will you smoke？”

Brangwen never smoked cigarettes, yet he took the one offered, fumbling painfully with thick fingers, blushing to the roots of his hair.Then he looked with his warm blue eyes at the almost sardonic, lidded eyes of the foreigner.The latter sat down beside him, and they began to talk, chiefly of horses.

Brangwen loved the other man for his exquisite graciousness, for his tact and reserve, and for his ageless, monkey-like self-surety.They talked of horses, and of Derbyshire, and of farming.The stranger warmed to the young fellow with real warmth, and Brangwen was excited.He was transported at meeting this odd, middle-aged, dry-skinned man, personally.The talk was pleasant, but that did not matter so much.It was the gracious manner, the fine contact that was all.

They talked a long while together, Brangwen flushing like a girl when the other did not understand his idiom.Then they said good night, and shook hands.Again the foreigner bowed and repeated his good night.

“Good night, and bon voyage.”

Then he turned to the stairs.

Brangwen went up to his room and lay staring out at the stars of the summer night, his whole being in a whirl.What was it all？There was a life so different from what he knew it.What was there outside his knowledge, how much？What was this that he had touched？What was he in this new influence？What did everything mean？Where was life, in that which he knew or all outside him？

He fell asleep, and in the morning had ridden away before any other visitors were awake.He shrank from seeing any of them again, in the morning.

His mind was one big excitement.The girl and the foreigner：he knew neither of their names.Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his nature, and he would be burned out of cover.Of the two experiences, perhaps the meeting with the foreigner was the more significant.But the girl-he had not settled about the girl.

He did not know.He had to leave it there, as it was.He could not sum up his experiences.

The result of these encounters was, that he dreamed day and night, absorbedly, of a voluptuous woman and of the meeting with a small, withered foreigner of ancient breeding.No sooner was his mind free, no sooner had he left his own companions, than he began to imagine an intimacy with fine-textured, subtle-mannered people such as the foreigner at Matlock, and amidst this subtle intimacy was always the satisfaction of a voluptuous woman.

He went about absorbed in the interest and the actuality of this dream.His eyes glowed, he walked with his head up, full of the exquisite pleasure of aristocratic subtlety and grace, tormented with the desire for the girl.

Then gradually the glow began to fade, and the cold material of his customary life to show through.He resented it.Was he cheated in his illusion？He balked the mean enclosure of reality, stood stubbornly like a bull at a gate, refusing to re-enter the well-known round of his own life.

He drank more than usual to keep up the glow.But it faded more and more for all that.He set his teeth at the commonplace, to which he would not submit.It resolved itself starkly before him, for all that.

He wanted to marry, to get settled somehow, to get out of the quandary he found himself in.But how？He felt unable to move his limbs.He had seen a little creature caught in bird-lime, and the sight was a nightmare to him.He began to feel mad with the rage of impotency.

He wanted something to get hold of, to pull himself out.But there was nothing.Steadfastly he looked at the young women, to find a one he could marry.But not one of them did he want.And he knew that the idea of a life among such people as the foreigner was ridiculous.

Yet he dreamed of it, and stuck to his dreams, and would not have the reality of Cossethay and Ilkeston.There he sat stubbornly in his corner at the“Red Lion”，smoking and musing and occasionally lifting his beer-pot, and saying nothing, for all the world like a gorping farm-labourer, as he said himself.

Then a fever of restless anger came upon him.He wanted to go away-right away.He dreamed of foreign parts.But somehow he had no contact with them.And it was a very strong root which held him to the Marsh, to his own house and land.

Then Effie got married, and he was left in the house with only Tilly, the cross-eyed woman-servant who had been with them for fifteen years.He felt things coming to a close.All the time, he had held himself stubbornly resistant to the action of the commonplace unreality which wanted to absorb him.But now he had to do something.

He was by nature temperate.Being sensitive and emotional, his nausea prevented him from drinking too much.

But, in futile anger, with the greatest of determination and apparent good humour, he began to drink in order to get drunk.“Damn it，”he said to himself，“you must have it one road or another-you can't hitch your horse to the shadow of a gate-post-if you've got legs you've got to rise off your backside some time or other.”

So he rose and went down to Ilkeston, rather awkwardly took his place among a gang of young bloods, stood drinks to the company, and discovered he could carry it off quite well.He had an idea that everybody in the room was a man after his own heart, that everything was glorious, everything was perfect.When somebody in alarm told him his coat pocket was on fire, he could only beam from a red, blissful face and say“Iss-all-ri-ight-iss-al'-ri-ight-it's a'right-let it be, let it be-”and he laughed with pleasure, and was rather indignant that the others should think it unnatural for his coat pocket to burn：-it was the happiest and most natural thing in the world-what？

He went home talking to himself and to the moon, that was very high and small, stumbling at the flashes of moonlight from the puddles at his feet, wondering What the Hanover！then laughing confidently to the moon, assuring her this was first class, this was.

In the morning he woke up and thought about it, and for the first time in his life, knew what it was to feel really acutely irritable, in a misery of real bad temper.After bawling and snarling at Tilly, he took himself off for very shame, to be alone.And looking at the ashen fields and the putty roads, he wondered what in the name of Hell he could do to get out of this prickly sense of disgust and physical repulsion.And he knew that this was the result of his gloriousevening.

And his stomach did not want any more brandy.He went doggedly across the fields with his terrier, and looked at everything with a jaundiced eye.

The next evening found him back again in his place at the“Red Lion”，moderate and decent.There he sat and stubbornly waited for what would happen next.

Did he, or did he not believe that he belonged to this world of Cossethay and Ilkeston？There was nothing in it he wanted.Yet could he ever get out of it？Was there anything in himself that would carry him out of it？Or was he a dunderheaded baby, not man enough to be like the other young fellows who drank a good deal and wenched a little without any question, and were satisfied.

He went on stubbornly for a time.Then the strain became too great for him.A hot, accumulated consciousness was always awake in his chest, his wrists felt swelled and quivering, his mind became full of lustful images, his eyes seemed blood-flushed.He fought with himself furiously, to remain normal.He did not seek any woman.He just went on as if he were normal.Till he must either take some action or beat his head against the wall.

Then he went deliberately to Ilkeston, in silence, intent and beaten.He drank to get drunk.He gulped down the brandy, and more brandy, till his face became pale, his eyes burning.And still he could not get free.He went to sleep in drunken unconsciousness, woke up at four o'clock in the morning and continued drinking.He would get free.Gradually the tension in him began to relax.He began to feel happy.His riveted silence was unfastened, he began to talk and babble.He was happy and at one with all the world, he was united with all flesh in a hot blood-relationship.So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire.But he had achieved his satisfaction by obliterating his own individuality, that which it depended on his manhood to preserve and develop.

So he became a bout-drinker, having at intervals these bouts of three or four days of brandy-drinking, when he was drunk for the whole time.He didnot think about it.A deep resentment burned in him.He kept aloof from any women, antagonistic.

When he was twenty-eight, a thick-limbed, stiff, fair man with fresh complexion, and blue eyes staring very straight ahead, he was coming one day down from Cossethay with a load of seed out of Nottingham.It was a time when he was getting ready for another bout of drinking, so he stared fixedly before him, watchful yet absorbed, seeing everything and aware of nothing, coiled in himself.It was early in the year.

He walked steadily beside the horse, the load clanked behind as the hill descended steeper.The road curved down-hill before him, under banks and hedges, seen only for a few yards ahead.

Slowly turning the curve at the steepest part of the slope, his horse britching between the shafts, he saw a woman approaching.But he was thinking for the moment of the horse.

Then he turned to look at her.She was dressed in black, was apparently rather small and slight, beneath her long black cloak, and she wore a black bonnet.She walked hastily, as if unseeing, her head rather forward.It was her curious, absorbed, flitting motion, as if she were passing unseen by everybody, that first arrested him.

She had heard the cart, and looked up.Her face was pale and clear, she had thick dark eyebrows and a wide mouth, curiously held.He saw her face clearly, as if by a light in the air.He saw her face so distinctly, that he ceased to coil on himself, and was suspended.

“That's her，”he said involuntarily.As the cart passed by, splashing through the thin mud, she stood back against the bank.Then, as he walked still beside his britching horse, his eyes met hers.He looked quickly away, pressing back his head, a pain of joy running through him.He could not bear to think of anything.

He turned round at the last moment.He saw her bonnet, her shape in the black cloak, the movement as she walked.Then she was gone round the bend.

She had passed by.He felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality.He went on, quiet, suspended, rarefied.He could not bear to think or to speak, nor make any sound or sign, nor change his fixed motion.He could scarcely bear to think of her face.He moved within the knowledge of her, in the world that was beyond reality.

The feeling that they had exchanged recognition possessed him like a madness, like a torment.How could he be sure, what confirmation had he？The doubt was like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness, annihilating.He kept within his breast the will to surety.They had exchanged recognition.

He walked about in this state for the next few days.And then again like a mist it began to break to let through the common, barren world.He was very gentle with man and beast, but he dreaded the starkness of disillusion cropping through again.

As he was standing with his back to the fire after dinner a few days later, he saw the woman passing.He wanted to know that she knew him, that she was aware.He wanted it said that there was something between them.So he stood anxiously watching, looking at her as she went down the road.He called to Tilly.

“Who might that be？”he asked.

Tilly, the cross-eyed woman of forty, who adored him, ran gladly to the window to look.She was glad when he asked her for anything.She craned her head over the short curtain, the little tight knob of her black hair sticking out pathetically as she bobbed about.

“Oh why”-she lifted her head and peered with her twisted, keen brown eyes-“why, you know who it is-it's her from th'vicarage-you know-”

“How do I know, you hen-bird，”he shouted.

Tilly blushed and drew her neck in and looked at him with her squinting, sharp, almost reproachful look.

“Why you do-it's the new housekeeper.”

“Ay-an'what by that？”

“Well, an'what by that？”rejoined the indignant Tilly.

“She's a woman, isn't she, housekeeper or no housekeeper？She's got more to her than that！Who is she-she's got a name？”

“Well, if she has, I don't know，”retorted Tilly, not to be badgered by this lad who had grown up into a man.

“What's her name？”he asked, more gently.

“I'm sure I couldn't tell you，”replied Tilly, on her dignity.

“An'is that all as you've gathered, as she's housekeeping at the vicarage？”

“I've'eered mention of'er name, but I couldn't remember it for my life.”

“Why, yer riddle-skulled woman o'nonsense, what have you got a headfor？”

“For what other folks'as got theirs for，”retorted Tilly, who loved nothing more than these tilts when he would call her names.

There was a lull.

“I don't believe as anybody could keep it in their head，”the woman-servant continued, tentatively.

“What？”he asked.

“Why，'er name.”

“How's that？”

“She's fra some foreign parts or other.”

“Who told you that？”

“That's all I do know, as she is.”

“An'wheer do you reckon she's from, then？”

“I don't know.They do say as she hails fra th'Pole.I don't know，”Tilly hastened to add, knowing he would attack her.

“Fra th'Pole, why do you hail fra th'Pole？Who set up that menagerie confabulation？”

“That's what they say-I don't know-”

“Who says？”

“Mrs.Bentley says as she's fra th'Pole-else she is a Pole, or summat.”

Tilly was only afraid she was landing herself deeper now.

“Who says she's a Pole？”

“They all say so.”

“Then what's brought her to these parts？”

“I couldn't tell you.She's got a little girl with her.”

“Got a little girl with her？”

“Of three or four, with a head like a fuzz-ball.”

“Black？”

“White-fair as can be, an'all of a fuzz.”

“Is there a father, then？”

“Not to my knowledge.I don't know.”

“What brought her here？”

“I couldn't say, without th'vicar axed her.”

“Is the child her child？”

“I s'd think so-they say so.”

“Who told you about her？”

“Why, Lizzie-a-Monday-we seed her goin'past.”

“You'd have to be rattling your tongues if anything went past.”

Brangwen stood musing.That evening he went up to Cossethay to the“Red Lion”，half with the intention of hearing more.

She was the widow of a Polish doctor, he gathered.Her husband had died, a refugee, in London.She spoke a bit foreign-like, but you could easily make out what she said.She had one little girl named Anna.Lensky was the woman's name, Mrs.Lensky.

Brangwen felt that here was the unreality established at last.He felt also a curious certainty about her, as if she were destined to him.It was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.

A swift change had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence.Things had all been stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before.Now they were actualities that he could handle.

He dared scarcely think of the woman.He was afraid.Only all the time he was aware of her presence not far off, he lived in her.But he dared not know her, even acquaint himself with her by thinking of her.

One day he met her walking along the road with her little girl.It was a child with a face like a bud of apple-blossom, and glistening fair hair like thistle-down sticking out in straight, wild, flamy pieces, and very dark eyes.The child clung jealously to her mother's side when he looked at her, staring with resentful black eyes.But the mother glanced at him again, almost vacantly.And the very vacancy of her look inflamed him.She had wide grey-brown eyes with very dark, fathomless pupils.He felt the fine flame running under his skin, as if all his veins had caught fire on the surface.And he went on walking without knowledge.

It was coming, he knew, his fate.The world was submitting to its transformation.He made no move：it would come, what would come.

When his sister Effie came to the Marsh for a week, he went with her for once to church.In the tiny place, with its mere dozen pews, he sat not far from the stranger.There was a fineness about her, a poignancy about the way she sat and held her head lifted.She was strange, from far off, yet so intimate.She was from far away, a presence, so close to his soul.She was not really there, sitting in Cossethay church beside her little girl.She was not living the apparent life of her days.She belonged to somewhere else.He felt it poignantly, as something real and natural.But a pang of fear for his own concrete life, that was only Cossethay, hurt him, and gave him misgiving.

Her thick dark brows almost met above her irregular nose, she had a wide, rather thick mouth.But her face was lifted to another world of life：not to heaven or death：but to some place where she still lived, in spite of her body's absence.

The child beside her watched everything with wide, black eyes.She had an odd little defiant look, her little red mouth was pinched shut.She seemed to be jealously guarding something, to be always on the alert for defence.She met Brangwen's near, vacant, intimate gaze, and a palpitating hostility, almost like a flame of pain, came into the wide, over-conscious dark eyes.

The old clergyman droned on, Cossethay sat unmoved as usual.And there was the foreign woman with a foreign air about her, inviolate, and the strange child, also foreign, jealously guarding something.

When the service was over, he walked in the way of another existence out of the church.As he went down the churchpath with his sister, behind the woman and child, the little girl suddenly broke from her mother's hand, and slipped back with quick, almost invisible movement, and was picking at something almost under Brangwen's feet.Her tiny fingers were fine and quick, but they missed the red button.

“Have you found something？”said Brangwen to her.

And he also stooped for the button.But she had got it, and she stood back with it pressed against her little coat, her black eyes flaring at him, as if to forbid him to notice her.Then, having silenced him, she turned with a swift“Mother-，”and was gone down the path.

The mother had stood watching impassive, looking not at the child, but at Brangwen.He became aware of the woman looking at him, standing there isolated yet for him dominant in her foreign existence.

He did not know what to do, and turned to his sister.But the wide grey eyes, almost vacant yet so moving, held him beyond himself.

“Mother, I may have it, mayn't I？”came the child's proud, silvery tones.“Mother”-she seemed always to be calling her mother to remember her-“mother”-and she had nothing to continue now her mother had replied“Yes, my child.”But, with ready invention, the child stumbled and ran on，“What are those people's names？”

Brangwen heard the abstract：

“I don't know, dear.”

He went on down the road as if he were not living inside himself, but somewhere outside.

“Who was that person？”his sister Effie asked.

“I couldn't tell you，”he answered unknowing.

“She's somebody very funny，”said Effie, almost in condemnation.“That child's like one bewitched.”

“Bewitched-how bewitched？”he repeated.

“You can see for yourself.The mother's plain, I must say-but the child is like a changeling.She'd be about thirty-five.”

But he took no notice.His sister talked on.

“There's your woman for you，”she continued.“You'd better marry her.”But still he took no notice.Things were as they were.

Another day, at tea-time, as he sat alone at table, there came a knock at the front door.It startled him like a portent.No one ever knocked at the front door.He rose and began slotting back the bolts, turning the big key.When he had opened the door, the strange woman stood on the threshold.

“Can you give me a pound of butter？”she asked, in a curious detached way of one speaking a foreign language.

He tried to attend to her question.She was looking at him questioningly.But underneath the question, what was there, in her very standing motionless, which affected him？

He stepped aside and she at once entered the house, as if the door had been opened to admit her.That startled him.It was the custom for everybody to wait on the doorstep till asked inside.He went into the kitchen and she followed.

His tea-things were spread on the scrubbed deal table, a big fire was burning, a dog rose from the hearth and went to her.She stood motionless just inside the kitchen.

“Tilly，”he called loudly，“have we got any butter？”

The stranger stood there like a silence in her black cloak.

“Eh？”came the shrill cry from the distance.

He shouted his question again.

“We've got what's on t'table，”answered Tilly's shrill voice out of the dairy.

Brangwen looked at the table.There was a large pat of butter on a plate, almost a pound.It was round, and stamped with acorns and oak-leaves.

“Can't you come when you're wanted？”he shouted.

“Why, what d'you want？”Tilly protested, as she came peeking inquisitively through the other door.

She saw the strange woman, stared at her with cross-eyes, but said nothing.

“Haven't we any butter？”asked Brangwen again, impatiently, as if he could command some by his question.

“I tell you there's what's on t'table，”said Tilly, impatient that she was unable to create any to his demand.“We haven't a morsel besides.”

There was a moment's silence.

The stranger spoke, in her curiously distinct, detached manner of one who must think her speech first.

“Oh, then thank you very much.I am sorry that I have come to trouble you.”

She could not understand the entire lack of manners, was slightly puzzled.Any politeness would have made the situation quite impersonal.But here it was a case of wills in confusion.Brangwen flushed at her polite speech.Still he did not let her go.

“Get summat an'wrap that up for her，”he said to Tilly, looking at the butter on the table.

And taking a clean knife, he cut off that side of the butter where it was touched.

His speech, the“for her”，penetrated slowly into the foreign woman and angered Tilly.

“Vicar has his butter fra Brown's by rights，”said the insuppressible servant-woman.“We s'll be churnin'to-morrow mornin'first thing.”

“Yes”-the long-drawn foreign yes—“yes，”said the Polish woman，“I went to Mrs.Brown's.She hasn't any more.”

Tilly bridled her head, bursting to say that, according to the etiquette of people who bought butter, it was no sort of manners whatever coming to a place cool as you like and knocking at the front door asking for a pound as a stop-gap while your other people were short.If you go to Brown's you go to Brown's, an'my butter isn't just to make shift when Brown's has got none.

Brangwen understood perfectly this unspoken speech of Tilly's.The Polish lady did not.And as she wanted butter for the vicar, and as Tilly was churning in the morning, she waited.

“Sluther up now，”said Brangwen loudly after this silence had resolved itself out；and Tilly disappeared through the inner door.

“I am afraid that I should not come, so，”said the stranger, looking at him enquiringly, as if referring to him for what it was usual to do.

He felt confused.

“How's that？”he said, trying to be genial and being only protective.

“Do you—？”she began deliberately.But she was not sure of her ground, and the conversation came to an end.Her eyes looked at him all the while, because she could not speak the language.

They stood facing each other.The dog walked away from her to him.He bent down to it.

“And how's your little girl？”he asked.

“Yes, thank you, she is very well，”was the reply, a phrase of polite speech in a foreign language merely.

“Sit you down，”he said.

And she sat in a chair, her slim arms, coming through the slits of her cloak, resting on her lap.

“You're not used to these parts，”he said, still standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, coatless, looking with curious directness at the woman.Her self-possession pleased him and inspired him, set him curiously free.It seemed to him almost brutal to feel so master of himself and of the situation.

Her eyes rested on him for a moment, questioning, as she thought of the meaning of his speech.

“No，”she said, understanding.“No—it is strange.”

“You find it middlin'rough？”he said.

Her eyes waited on him, so that he should say it again.

“Our ways are rough to you，”he repeated.

“Yes—yes, I understand.Yes, it is different, it is strange.But I was in Yorkshire—”

“Oh, well then，”he said，“it's no worse here than what they are up there.”

She did not quite understand.His protective manner, and his sureness, andhis intimacy, puzzled her.What did he mean？If he was her equal, why did he behave so without formality？

“No—”she said, vaguely, her eyes resting on him.

She saw him fresh and naive, uncouth, almost entirely beyond relationship with her.Yet he was good-looking, with his fair hair and blue eyes full of energy, and with his healthy body that seemed to take equality with her.She watched him steadily.He was difficult for her to understand, warm, uncouth, and confident as he was, sure on his feet as if he did not know what it was to be unsure.What then was it that gave him this curious stability？

She did not know.She wondered.She looked round the room he lived in.It had a close intimacy that fascinated and almost frightened her.The furniture was old and familiar as old people, the whole place seemed so kin to him, as if it partook of his being, that she was uneasy.

“It is already a long time that you have lived in this house—yes？”she asked.

“I've always lived here，”he said.

“Yes—but your people—your family？”

“We've been here above two hundred years，”he said.Her eyes were onhim all the time, wide-open and trying to grasp him.He felt that he was there for her.

“It is your own place, the house, the farm—？”

“Yes，”he said.He looked down at her and met her look.It disturbed her.She did not know him.He was a foreigner, they had nothing to do with each other.Yet his look disturbed her to knowledge of him.He was so strangely confident and direct.

“You live quite alone？”

“Yes—if you call it alone？”

She did not understand.It seemed unusual to her.What was the meaning of it？

And whenever her eyes, after watching him for some time, 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 theirwills 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 thispleasant 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 clearchildish 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 these few moments of release.Along with the child, he felt a curious strain on him, a suffering, like a fate.

The mother came down again, and began folding the child's clothes.He knocked.She opened wondering, a little bit at bay, like a foreigner, uneasy.

“Good evening，”he said.“I'll just come in a minute.”

A change went quickly over her face；she was unprepared.She looked down at him as he stood in the light from the window, holding the daffodils, the darkness behind.In his black clothes she again did not know him.She was almost afraid.

But he was already stepping on to the threshold, and closing the door behind him.She turned into the kitchen, startled out of herself by this invasion from the night.He took off his hat, and came towards her.Then he stood in the light, in his black clothes and his black stock, hat in one hand and yellow flowers in the other.She stood away, at his mercy, snatched out of herself.She did not know him, only she knew he was a man come for her.She could onlysee the dark-clad man's figure standing there upon her, and the gripped fist of flowers.She could not see the face and the living eyes.

He was watching her, without knowing her, only aware underneath of her presence.

“I come to have a word with you，”he said, striding forward to the table, laying down his hat and the flowers, which tumbled apart and lay in a loose heap.She had flinched from his advance.She had no will, no being.The wind boomed in the chimney, and he waited.He had disembarrassed his hands.Now he shut his fists.

He was aware of her standing there unknown, dread, yet related to him.

“I came up，”he said, speaking curiously matter-of-fact and level，“to ask if you'd marry me.You are free, aren't you？”

There was a long silence, whilst his blue eyes, strangely impersonal, looked into her eyes to seek an answer to the truth.He was looking for the truth out of her.And she, as if hypnotised, must answer at length.

“Yes, I am free to marry.”

The expression of his eyes changed, became less impersonal, as if he were looking almost at her, for the truth of her.Steady and intent and eternal they were, as if they would never change.They seemed to fix and to resolve her.She quivered, feeling herself created, will-less, lapsing into him, into a common will with him.

“You want me？”she said.

A pallor came over his face.

“Yes，”he said.

Still there was no response and silence.

“No，”she said, not of herself.“No, I don't know.”

He felt the tension breaking up in him, his fists slackened, he was unable to move.He stood there looking at her, helpless in his vague collapse.For the moment she had become unreal to him.Then he saw her come to him, curiously direct and as if without movement, in a sudden flow.She put her hand to his coat.

“Yes I want to，”she said, impersonally, looking at him with wide, candid, newly-opened eyes, opened now with supreme truth.He went very white as hestood, and did not move, only his eyes were held by hers, and he suffered.She seemed to see him with her newly-opened, wide eyes, almost of a child, and with a strange movement, that was agony to him, she reached slowly forward her dark face and her breast to him, with a slow insinuation of a kiss that made something break in his brain, and it was darkness over him for a few moments.

He had her in his arms, and, obliterated, was kissing her.And it was sheer, bleached agony to him, to break away from himself.She was there so small and light and accepting in his arms, like a child, and yet with such an insinuation of embrace, of infinite embrace, that he could not bear it, he could not stand.

He turned and looked for a chair, and keeping her still in his arms, sat down with her close to him, to his breast.Then, for a few seconds, he went utterly to sleep, asleep and sealed in the darkest sleep, utter, extreme oblivion.

From which he came to gradually, always holding her warm and close upon him, and she as utterly silent as he, involved in the same oblivion, the fecund darkness.

He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new birth, in the womb of darkness.Aerial and light everything was, new as a morning, fresh and newly-begun.Like a dawn the newness and the bliss filled in.And she sat utterly still with him, as if in the same.

Then she looked up at him, the wide, young eyes blazing with light.And he bent down and kissed her on the lips.And the dawn blazed in them, their new life came to pass, it was beyond all conceiving good, it was so good, that it was almost like a passing-away, a trespass.He drew her suddenly closer to him.

For soon the light began to fade in her, gradually, and as she was in his arms, her head sank, she leaned it against him, and lay still, with sunk head, a little tired, effaced because she was tired.And in her tiredness was a certain negation of him.

“There is the child，”she said, out of the long silence.

He did not understand.It was a long time since he had heard a voice.Now also he heard the wind roaring, as if it had just begun again.

“Yes，”he said, not understanding.There was a slight contraction of pain at his heart, a slight tension on his brows.Something he wanted to grasp andcould not.

“You will love her？”she said.

The quick contraction, like pain, went over him again.

“I love her now，”he said.

She lay still against him, taking his physical warmth without heed.It was great confirmation for him to feel her there, absorbing the warmth from him, giving him back her weight and her strange confidence.But where was she, that she seemed so absent？His mind was open with wonder.He did not know her.

“But I am much older than you，”she said.

“How old？”he asked.

“I am thirty-four，”she said.

“I am twenty-eight，”he said.

“Six years.”

She was oddly concerned, even as if it pleased her a little.He sat and listened and wondered.It was rather splendid, to be so ignored by her, whilst she lay against him, and he lifted her with his breathing, and felt her weight upon his living, so he had a completeness and an inviolable power.He did not interfere with her.He did not even know her.It was so strange that she lay there with her weight abandoned upon him.He was silent with delight.He felt strong, physically, carrying her on his breathing.The strange, inviolable completeness of the two of them made him feel as sure and as stable as God.Amused, he wondered what the vicar would say if he knew.

“You needn't stop here much longer, housekeeping，”he said.

“I like it also, here，”she said.“When one has been in many places, it is very nice here.”

He was silent again at this.So close on him she lay, and yet she answered him from so far away.But he did not mind.

“What was your own home like, when you were little？”he asked.

“My father was a landowner，”she replied.“It was near a river.”

This did not convey much to him.All was as vague as before.But he did not care, whilst she was so close.

“I am a landowner-a little one，”he said.

“Yes，”she said.

He had not dared to move.He sat there with his arms round her, her lying motionless on his breathing, and for a long time he did not stir.Then softly, timidly, his hand settled on the roundness of her arm, on the unknown.She seemed to lie a little closer.A hot flame licked up from his belly to his chest.

But it was too soon.She rose, and went across the room to a drawer, taking out a little tray-cloth.There was something quiet and professional about her.She had been a nurse beside her husband, both in Warsaw and in the rebellion afterwards.She proceeded to set a tray.It was as if she ignored Brangwen.He sat up, unable to bear a contradiction in her.She moved about inscrutably.

Then, as he sat there, all mused and wondering, she came near to him, looking at him with wide, grey eyes that almost smiled with a low light.But her ugly-beautiful mouth was still unmoved and sad.He was afraid.

His eyes, strained and roused with unusedness, quailed a little before her, he felt himself quailing and yet he rose, as if obedient to her, he bent and kissed her heavy, sad, wide mouth, that was kissed, and did not alter.Fear was too strong in him.Again he had not got her.

She turned away.The vicarage kitchen was untidy, and yet to him beautiful with the untidiness of her and her child.Such a wonderful remoteness there was about her, and then something in touch with him, that made his heart knock in his chest.He stood there and waited, suspended.

Again she came to him, as he stood in his black clothes, with blue eyes very bright and puzzled for her, his face tensely alive, his hair dishevelled.She came close up to him, to his intent, black-clothed body, and laid her hand on his arm.He remained unmoved.Her eyes, with a blackness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and electric away at the back of them, rejected him and absorbed him at once.But he remained himself.He breathed with difficulty, and sweat came out at the roots of his hair, on his forehead.

“Do you want to marry me？”she asked slowly, always uncertain.

He was afraid lest he could not speak.He drew breath hard, saying：

“I do.”

Then again, what was agony to him, with one hand lightly resting on his arm, she leaned forward a little, and with a strange, primeval suggestion ofembrace, held him her mouth.It was ugly-beautiful, and he could not bear it.He put his mouth on hers, and slowly, slowly the response came, gathering force and passion, till it seemed to him she was thundering at him till he could bear no more.He drew away, white, unbreathing.Only, in his blue eyes, was something of himself concentrated.And in her eyes was a little smile upon a black void.

She was drifting away from him again.And he wanted to go away.It was intolerable.He could bear no more.He must go.Yet he was irresolute.But she turned away from him.

With a little pang of anguish, of denial, it was decided.

“I'll come an'speak to the vicar to-morrow，”he said, taking his hat.

She looked at him, her eyes expressionless and full of darkness.He could see no answer.

“That'll do, won't it？”he said.

“Yes，”she answered, mere echo without body or meaning.

“Good night，”he said.

“Good night.”

He left her standing there, expressionless and void as she was.Then she went on laying the tray for the vicar.Needing the table, she put the daffodils aside on the dresser without noticing them.Only their coolness, touching her hand, remained echoing there a long while.

They were such strangers, they must for ever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him.Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact！It was unbearable.He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other.He went out into the wind.Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about.Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.Then there was a blot of cloud, and shadow.Then somewhere in the night a radiance again, like a vapour.And all the sky was teeming and tearing along, a vast disorder of flying shapes and darkness and ragged fumes of light and a great brown circling halo, then the terror of a moon running liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before she plunged under cover of cloud again.第二章　在马石农庄的生活　Chapter 2　They Liveat the Marsh导读

莉迪亚·兰斯珂以前是一位波兰地主的女儿，年轻时嫁给了医生保罗，他们婚后不久便有了两个孩子。保罗是一个激进分子，他积极从事爱国主义事业，莉迪亚也疯狂地跟随着他。为了爱国主义宣传，他们有时候会把孩子留在家中，可一次回家后发现两个孩子已经死于白喉。保罗伤心之后很快便又投入了工作，莉迪亚内心却永远留下了阴影。后来他们流亡到伦敦，在那里保罗变得暴躁不安，脾气乖戾，他失去了医院的工作，两个人几乎沦为乞丐。日渐憔悴的保罗和莉迪亚有了另一个孩子，在他最后的日子里，莉迪亚一直守护在他身边，丈夫的离开让她彻底松了口气。莉迪亚对英国的生活十分陌生，总是躲避着英国人，可英国人在她需要的时候却帮助了她。她茫然地过了一段时间，最后被送到了约克郡，在那里帮忙照顾一位牧师。乡下的大自然景色似乎唤醒了她对童年的回忆，她开始享受大自然的那份宁静，享受着大自然的春夏秋冬。后来牧师去世了，最初的那份阴暗又开始笼罩着她，她再次生活在彷徨之中。困惑和无助持续地围绕在她周围，她难以适应这里的生活，甚至有了不想活下去的想法。不过，自从她遇到汤姆之后，整个人开始发生了变化，她认为自己找到了可以依赖的人，在汤姆的身上她能够感受到安全。本能驱使她接受了汤姆的求婚，可是那天之后，她似乎又变得与世隔绝起来，这让汤姆很绝望，甚至对她产生了厌恶的感觉。一想到要和一个陌生的人结婚，他就很痛苦。在婚礼上，汤姆没有任何表情，他突然很想自由，可是已经来不及了。莉迪亚坐在那里露出了神秘的笑容，她并不后悔自己的选择，因为她需要汤姆。

汤姆不敢直视莉迪亚，他一想到自己即将靠近一个未知的女人便觉得可怕。对于一个自己什么都不了解的女人，他怎么可能会全身心地交给她呢？婚礼结束时已经是夜里了，爱与欲望让两个人紧紧地抱在一起，他们的过去和现在终于融合在一起。虽然早晨起来汤姆会觉得不安，但他又充满了自豪，因为莉迪亚已经属于自己。婚姻让他们发生了变化，汤姆开始用全新的眼光看待世界，开始期待回家，他会和狗玩，会和小女孩安娜玩。每天晚上，汤姆都十分高兴，一家人围在火炉旁，孩子被打发上床睡觉后，他就和莉迪亚坐在一起聊着天。他们互相讲述着自己的故事，有时候汤姆并不明白她在说些什么，莉迪亚的许多事情他无法理解，他会感觉到对方隐藏着很多秘密，那种惊讶和陌生使他对莉迪亚产生了一种莫名的痛恨。莉迪亚渐渐感觉到汤姆对自己的怨恨，她变得闷闷不乐，总是显得很忧郁，这种情绪让汤姆差点发疯。可当汤姆每次回家时，这种芥蒂却没有一点显示。汤姆等待着莉迪亚的靠近，两个人任由欲望驱使着，他们沉浸在对彼此的安抚和探索中，这时候陌生和未知全被抛到脑后。等到他们分开时，两个人又各自沉浸于自己的痛苦和矛盾中。莉迪亚怀孕了，她不再和汤姆亲热，汤姆有时会把自己的愤怒发泄到她身上，最后只好尽量控制自己，在外到处游逛。他觉得莉迪亚只顾自己的感受，冷漠古怪，说出了一大堆数落她的话，这些话并不是没有道理。但是汤姆的教养并不支持他做这些丧失身份的事情，重要的是汤姆并不想失去莉迪亚。

随着莉迪亚临产的日子越来越近，她对汤姆越来越冷漠，汤姆整个人变得更加烦躁。他很想让莉迪亚关注自己，最后只得从小安娜那里取得一些同情和爱。当莉迪亚像往常一样做着针线活时，那种沉默让汤姆差点崩溃。两个人之间的关系很紧张，汤姆整个人都处于一种压抑的状态，而莉迪亚有时也会哭泣。安娜成了汤姆最大的安慰，一开始她对他还是很拘谨冷漠。婚后的第一个早晨，在他和莉迪亚仍在熟睡的时候，小安娜敲开了门，她特别强调她是来找“她的妈妈”。她对汤姆充满了敌意，当她躺在母亲身边时，看到汤姆仍旧站在一边，整个人似乎受到了惊吓，紧紧地抱着母亲。小安娜无法接受母亲和汤姆住在一起，后来虽然理解了这一点，却依然很伤心。她开始对母亲不满，不喜欢母亲的所作所为，一个人经常和院子里的家禽玩耍。汤姆经常看到她在隔着栅栏呵斥大白鹅，他告诉小安娜要先把自己的名字介绍给白鹅听，那样动物们才会听话。不久之后，汤姆看到小安娜对着一群家禽介绍着自己，她说自己的爸爸是汤姆，这让汤姆心里很高兴。渐渐地，小安娜对汤姆越来越依赖，两个人的关系变得十分亲密。当然他们也会闹别扭，关系却越吵越亲近。小安娜常常坐在马车上，依偎在汤姆身边，开心地大笑着。小安娜很古怪，时而体贴，时而冷漠。在莉迪亚临产前，小安娜整个人变得很沉默，她总是对母亲充满了担心。

圣诞节过去之后，来年的一月份到来了。汤姆对万籁复苏的世界感到一阵兴奋，不管家里有多少烦恼，一切似乎都变得无关紧要。他驾着马车行驶在路上，心情十分愉快，还会时不时地和路上漂亮的姑娘打招呼，把藏在心里的痛苦暂且抛弃。莉迪亚此时正承受着痛苦，汤姆却逍遥在外，他不想再理会其他的事情，只求自己过得开心，不过快乐没有多久，痛苦再次袭来。莉迪亚临产了，屋里不停地传来女人痛苦的呻吟。汤姆坐在楼下，心灵却被痛苦的另一半牵引着，他全部身心都放在临盆的妻子身上。小安娜也吓得全身发抖，一声不吭地玩着玻璃球。后来，小安娜哭个不停，坚持着要妈妈，最后汤姆忍无可忍，全然不顾小家伙的无理取闹，强制给她换上了睡衣。小家伙还在叫着要妈妈，但是汤姆最后放弃与其争执，轻声温柔地安慰着她。他突然抱起小家伙冒着雨来到了谷仓里，小家伙果然停止了哭泣。他一手抱着小安娜，一手拿着饲料，给母牛准备着食物。小安娜对这一切充满了好奇，看着汤姆熟练地喂着母牛。父女俩静静地坐在那里，听着母牛有节奏的吃草声，不久小安娜便睡着了。汤姆安置好女儿后，走进了妻子的房间，看着疲倦的妻子还在承受着痛苦，他走了出去，任由雨水淋湿，随即又进了屋，黑夜的神秘镇住了他。

he was the daughter of a Polish landowner who, deeply in debt to

theJews, had married a German wife with money, and who had S

died just before the rebellion.Quite young, she had married Paul Lensky, an intellectual who had studied at Berlin, and had returned to Warsaw a patriot.Her mother had married a German merchant and gone away.

Lydia Lensky, married to the young doctor, became with him a patriot and an emancipee.They were poor, but they were very conceited.She learned nursing as a mark of her emancipation.They represented in Poland the new movement just begun in Russia.But they were very patriotic：and, at the same time, very“European”.

They had two children.Then came the great rebellion.Lensky, very ardentand full of words, went about inciting his countrymen.Little Poles flamed down the streets of Warsaw, on the way to shoot every Muscovite.So they crossed into the south of Russia, and it was common for six little insurgents to ride into a Jewish village, brandishing swords and words, emphasising the fact that they were going to shoot every living Muscovite.

Lensky was something of a fire-eater also.Lydia, tempered by her German blood, coming of a different family, was obliterated, carried along in her husband's emphasis of declaration, and his whirl of patriotism.He was indeed a brave man, but no bravery could quite have equalled the vividness of his talk.He worked very hard, till nothing lived in him but his eyes.And Lydia, as if drugged, followed him like a shadow, serving, echoing.Sometimes she had her two children, sometimes they were left behind.

She returned once to find them both dead of diphtheria.Her husband wept aloud, unaware of everybody.But the war went on, and soon he was back at his work.A darkness had come over Lydia's mind.She walked always in a shadow, silenced, with a strange, deep terror having hold of her, her desire was to seek satisfaction in dread, to enter a nunnery, to satisfy the 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 hypnotised 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 realised that there was something around her, very foreign, she realised 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 disturbinginfluence 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 agonyof 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 realise.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 toharbour 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 tolife, 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 let him go again.

He suffered very much from the thought of actual marriage, the intimacy and nakedness of marriage.He knew her so little.They were so foreign to each other, they were such strangers.And they could not talk to each other.When she talked, of Poland or of what had been, it was all so foreign, she scarcely communicated anything to him.And when he looked at her, an over-much reverence and fear of the unknown changed the nature of his desire into a sort of worship, holding her aloof from his physical desire, self-thwarting.

She did not know this, she did not understand.They had looked at each other, and had accepted each other.It was so, then there was nothing to balk at, it was complete between them.

At the wedding, his face was stiff and expressionless.He wanted to drink, to get rid of his forethought and afterthought, to set the moment free.But he could not.The suspense only tightened at his heart.The jesting and joviality and jolly, broad insinuation of the guests only coiled him more.He could not hear.That which was impending obsessed him, he could not get free.

She sat quiet, with a strange, still smile.She was not afraid.Having accepted him, she wanted to take him, she belonged altogether to the hour, now.No future, no past, only this, her hour.She did not even notice him, as she sat beside him at the head of the table.He was very near, their coming together was close at hand.What more！

As the time came for all the guests to go, her dark face was softly lighted, the bend of her head was proud, her grey eyes clear and dilated, so that the men could not look at her, and the women were elated by her, they served her.Very wonderful she was, as she bade farewell, her ugly wide mouth smiling with pride and recognition, her voice speaking softly and richly in the foreign accent, her dilated eyes ignoring one and all the departing guests.Her manner was gracious and fascinating, but she ignored the being of him or her to whom she gave her hand.

And Brangwen stood beside her, giving his hearty handshake to his friends, receiving their regard gratefully, glad of their attention.His heart was tormented within him, he did not try to smile.The time of his trial and his admittance, his Gethsemane and his Triumphal Entry in one, had come now.

Behind her, there was so much unknown to him.When he approached her, he came to such a terrible painful unknown.How could he embrace it and fathom it？How could he close his arms round all this darkness and hold it to his breast and give himself to it？What might not happen to him？If he stretched and strained for ever he would never be able to grasp it all, and to yield himself naked out of his own hands into the unknown power！How could a man be strong enough to take her, put his arms round her and have her, and be sure he could conquer this awful unknown next his heart？What was it then that she was, to which he must also deliver himself up, and which at the same time he must embrace, contain？

He was to be her husband.It was established so.And he wanted it more than he wanted life, or anything.She stood beside him in her silk dress, looking at him strangely, so that a certain terror, horror took possession of him, because she was strange and impending and he had no choice.He could not bear to meet her look from under her strange, thick brows.

“Is it late？”she said.

He looked at his watch.

“No-half-past eleven，”he said.And he made an excuse to go into the kitchen, leaving her standing in the room among the disorder and the drinking-glasses.

Tilly was seated beside the fire in the kitchen, her head in her hands.She started up when he entered.

“Why haven't you gone to bed？”he said.

“I thought I'd better stop an'lock up an'do，”she said.Her agitation quietened him.He gave her some little order, then returned, steadied now, almost ashamed, to his wife.She stood a moment watching him, as he moved with averted face.Then she said：

“You will be good to me, won't you？”

She was small and girlish and terrible, with a queer, wide look in her eyes.His heart leaped in him, in anguish of love and desire, he went blindly to her and took her in his arms.

“I want to，”he said as he drew her closer and closer in.She was soothed by the stress of his embrace, and remained quite still, relaxed against him, mingling in to him.And he let himself go from past and future, was reduced to the moment with her.In which he took her and was with her and there was nothing beyond, they were together in an elemental embrace beyond their superficial foreignness.But in the morning he was uneasy again.She was still foreign and unknown to him.Only, within the fear was pride, belief in himself as mate for her.And she, everything forgotten in her new hour of coming to life, radiated vigour and joy, so that he quivered to touch her.

It made a great difference to him, marriage.Things became so remote and of so little significance, as he knew the powerful source of his life, his eyes opened on a new universe, and he wondered in thinking of his triviality before.A new, calm relationship showed to him in the things he saw, in the cattle he used, the young wheat as it eddied in a wind.

And each time he returned home, he went steadily, expectantly, like a man who goes to a profound, unknown satisfaction.At dinner-time, he appeared in the doorway, hanging back a moment from entering, to see if she was there.He saw her setting the plates on the white-scrubbed table.Her arms were slim, she had a slim body and full skirts, she had a dark, shapely head with close-banded hair.Somehow it was her head, so shapely and poignant, that revealed her his woman to him.As she moved about clothed closely, fullskirted and wearing her little silk apron, her dark hair smoothly parted, her head revealed itself to him in all its subtle, intrinsic beauty, and he knew she was his woman, he knew her essence, that it was his to possess.And he seemed to live thus in contactwith her, in contact with the unknown, the unaccountable and incalculable.

They did not take much notice of each other, consciously.

“I'm betimes，”he said.

“Yes，”she answered.

He turned to the dogs, or to the child if she was there.The little Anna played about the farm, flitting constantly in to call something to her mother, to fling her arms round her mother's skirts, to be noticed, perhaps caressed, then, forgetting, to slip out again.

Then Brangwen, talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees, would be aware of his wife, as, in her tight, dark bodice and her lace fichu, she was reaching up to the corner cupboard.He realised with a sharp pang that she belonged to him, and he to her.He realised that he lived by her.Did he own her？Was she here for ever？Or might she go away？She was not really his, it was not a real marriage, this marriage between them.She might go away.He did not feel like a master, husband, father of her children.She belonged elsewhere.Any moment, she might be gone.And he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with ever-raging, ever-unsatisfied desire.He must always turn home, wherever his steps were taking him, always to her, and he could never quite reach her, he could never quite be satisfied, never be at peace, because she might go away.

At evening, he was glad.Then, when he had finished in the yard, and come in and washed himself, when the child was put to bed, he could sit on the other side of the fire with his beer on the hob and his long white pipe in his fingers, conscious of her there opposite him, as she worked at her embroidery, or as she talked to him, and he was safe with her now, till morning.She was curiously self-sufficient and did not say very much.Occasionally she lifted her head, her grey eyes shining with a strange light, that had nothing to do with him or with this place, and would tell him about herself.She seemed to be back again in the past, chiefly in her childhood or her girlhood, with her father.She very rarely talked of her first husband.But sometimes, all shining-eyed, she was back at her own home, telling him about the riotous times, the trip to Paris with her father, tales of the mad acts of the peasants when a burst of religious, self-hurting fervour had passed over the country.

She would lift her head and say：

“When they brought the railway across the country, they made afterwards smaller railways, of shorter width, to come down to our town—a hundred miles.When I was a girl, Gisla, my German gouvernante, was very shocked and she would not tell me.But I heard the servants talking.I remember, it was Pierre, the coachman.And my father, and some of his friends, landowners, they had taken a wagon, a whole railway wagon—that you travel in—”

“A railway-carriage，”said Brangwen.

She laughed to herself.

“I know it was a great scandal：yes-a whole wagon, and they had girls, you know, filles, naked, all the wagon-full, and so they came down to our village.They came through villages of the Jews, and it was a great scandal.Can you imagine？All the countryside！And my mother, she did not like it.Gisla said to me，‘Madame, she must not know that you have heard such things.'

“My mother, she used to cry, and she wished to beat my father, plainly beat him.He would say, when she cried because he sold the forest, the wood, to jingle money in his pocket, and go to Warsaw or Paris or Kiev, when she said he must take back his word, he must not sell the forest, he would stand and say，‘I know, I know, I have heard it all, I have heard it all before.Tell me some new thing.I know, I know, I know.'Oh, but can you understand, I loved him when he stood there under the door, saying only，‘I know, I know, I know it all already.'She could not change him, no, not if she killed herself for it.And she could change everybody else, but him, she could not change him—”

Brangwen could not understand.He had pictures of a cattle-truck full of naked girls riding from nowhere to nowhere, of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said，“I know, I know”；of Jews running down the street shouting in Yiddish，“Don't do it, don't do it，”and being cut down by demented peasants—she called them“cattle”—whilst she looked on interested and even amused；of tutors and governesses and Paris and a convent.It was too much for him.And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to him, arrogating a curious superiority to him, a distance between them, something strange and foreign and outside his life, talking, rattling, without rhyme orreason, laughing when he was shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability of any kind.Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had nothing to do with her.She was back in her childhood, he was a peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a nothing.He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew so well, and wondering whether it was really there, the window, the chest of drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the atmosphere.And gradually he grew into a raging fury against her.But because he was so much amazed, and there was as yet such a distance between them, and she was such an amazing thing to him, with all wonder opening out behind her, he made no retaliation on her.Only he lay still and wide-eyed with rage, inarticulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility.

And he remained wrathful and distinct from her, unchanged outwardly to her, but underneath a solid power of antagonism to her.Of which she became gradually aware.And it irritated her to be made aware of him as a separate power.She lapsed into a sort of sombre exclusion, a curious communion with mysterious powers, a sort of mystic, dark state which drove him and the child nearly mad.He walked about for days stiffened with resistance to her, stiff with a will to destroy her as she was.Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was connection between them again.It came on him as he was working in the fields.The tension, the bond, burst, and the passionate flood broke forward into a tremendous, magnificent rush, so that he felt he could snap off the trees as he passed, and create the world afresh.

And when he arrived home, there was no sign between them.He waited and waited till she came.And as he waited, his limbs seemed strong and splendid to him, his hands seemed like passionate servants to him, goodly, he felt a stupendous power in himself, of life, and of urgent, strong blood.

She was sure to come at last, and touch him.Then he burst into flame for her, and lost himself.They looked at each other, a deep laugh at the bottom of their eyes, and he went to take of her again, wholesale, mad to revel in the inexhaustible wealth of her, to bury himself in the depths of her in an inexhaustible exploration, she all the while revelling in that he revelled in her, tossed all her secrets aside and plunged to that which was secret to her as well, whilst she quivered with fear and the last anguish of delight.

What did it matter who they were, whether they knew each other or not？

The hour passed away again, there was severance between them, and rage and misery and bereavement for her, and deposition and toiling at the mill with slaves for him.But no matter.They had had their hour, and should it chime again, they were ready for it, ready to renew the game at the point where it was left off, on the edge of the outer darkness, when the secrets within the woman are game for the man, hunted doggedly, when the secrets of the woman are the man's adventure, and they both give themselves to the adventure.

She was with child, and there was again the silence and distance between them.She did not want him nor his secrets nor his game, he was deposed, he was cast out.He seethed with fury at the small, ugly-mouthed woman who had nothing to do with him.Sometimes his anger broke on her, but she did not cry.She turned on him like a tiger, and there was battle.

He had to learn to contain himself again, and he hated it.He hated her that she was not there for him.And he took himself off, anywhere.

But an instinct of gratitude and a knowledge that she would receive him back again, that later on she would be there for him again, prevented his straying very far.He cautiously did not go too far.He knew she might lapse into ignorance of him, lapse away from him, farther, farther, farther, till she was lost to him.He had sense enough, premonition enough in himself, to be aware of this and to measure himself accordingly.For he did not want to lose her：he did not want her to lapse away.

Cold, he called her, selfish, only caring about herself, a foreigner with a bad nature, caring really about nothing, having no proper feelings at the bottom of her, and no proper niceness.He raged, and piled up accusations that had some measure of truth in them all.But a certain grace in him forbade him from going too far.He knew, and he quivered with rage and hatred, that she was all these vile things, that she was everything vile and detestable.But he had grace at the bottom of him, which told him that, above all things, he did not want to lose her, he was not going to lose her.

So he kept some consideration for her, he preserved some relationship.He went out more often, to the“Red Lion”again, to escape the madness of sittingnext to her when she did not belong to him, when she was as absent as any woman in indifference could be.He could not stay at home.So he went to the“Red Lion”.And sometimes he got drunk.But he preserved his measure, some things between them he never forfeited.

A tormented look came into his eyes, as if something were always dogging him.He glanced sharp and quick, he could not bear to sit still doing nothing.He had to go out, to find company, to give himself away there.For he had no other outlet, he could not work to give himself out, he had not the knowledge.

As the months of her pregnancy went on, she left him more and more alone, she was more and more unaware of him, his existence was annulled.And he felt bound down, bound, unable to stir, beginning to go mad, ready to rave.For she was quiet and polite, as if he did not exist, as one is quiet and polite to a servant.

Nevertheless she was great with his child, it was his turn to submit.She sat opposite him, sewing, her foreign face inscrutable and indifferent.He felt he wanted to break her into acknowledgment of him, into awareness of him.It was insufferable that she had so obliterated him.He would smash her into regarding him.He had a raging agony of desire to do so.

But something bigger in him withheld him, kept him motionless.So he went out of the house for relief.Or he turned to the little girl for her sympathy and her love, he appealed with all his power to the small Anna.So soon they were like lovers, father and child.

For he was afraid of his wife.As she sat there with bent head, silent, working or reading, but so unutterably silent that his heart seemed under the millstone of it, she became herself like the upper millstone lying on him, crushing him, as sometimes a heavy sky lies on the earth.

Yet he knew he could not tear her away from the heavy obscurity into which she was merged.He must not try to tear her into recognition of himself, and agreement with himself.It were disastrous, impious.So, let him rage as he might, he must withhold himself.But his wrists trembled and seemed mad, seemed as if they would burst.

When, in November, the leaves came beating against the window shutters, with a lashing sound, he started, and his eyes flickered with flame.The doglooked up at him, he sunk his head to the fire.But his wife was startled.He was aware of her listening.

“They blow up with a rattle，”he said.

“What？”she asked.

“The leaves.”

She sank away again.The strange leaves beating in the wind on the wood had come nearer than she.The tension in the room was overpowering, it was difficult for him to move his head.He sat with every nerve, every vein, every fibre of muscle in his body stretched on a tension.He felt like a broken arch thrust sickeningly out from support.For her response was gone, he thrust at nothing.And he remained himself, he saved himself from crashing down into nothingness, from being squandered into fragments, by sheer tension, sheer backward resistance.

During the last months of her pregnancy, he went about in a surcharged, imminent state that did not exhaust itself.She was also depressed, and sometimes she cried.It needed so much life to begin afresh, after she had lost so lavishly.Sometimes she cried.Then he stood stiff, feeling his heart would burst.For she did not want him, she did not want even to be made aware of him.By the very puckering of her face he knew that he must stand back, leave her intact, alone.For it was the old grief come back in her, the old loss, the pain of the old life, the dead husband, the dead children.This was sacred to her, and he must not violate her with his comfort.For what she wanted she would come to him.He stood aloof with turgid heart.

He had to see her tears come, fall over her scarcely moving face, that only puckered sometimes, down on to her breast, that was so still, scarcely moving.And there was no noise, save now and again, when, with a strange, somnambulant movement, she took her handkerchief and wiped her face and blew her nose, and went on with the noiseless weeping.He knew that any offer of comfort from himself would be worse than useless, hateful to her, jangling her.She must cry.But it drove him insane.His heart was scalded, his brain hurt in his head, he went away, out of the house.

His great and chiefest source of solace was the child.She had been at first aloof from him, reserved.However friendly she might seem one day, the nextshe would have lapsed to her original disregard of him, cold, detached, at her distance.

The first morning after his marriage he had discovered it would not be so easy with the child.At the break of dawn he had started awake hearing a small voice outside the door saying plaintively：

“Mother！”

He rose and opened the door.She stood on the threshold in her night-dress, as she had climbed out of bed, black eyes staring round and hostile, her fair hair sticking out in a wild fleece.The man and child confronted each other.

“I want my mother，”she said, jealously accenting the“my”.

“Come on then，”he said gently.

“Where's my mother？”

“She's here—come on.”

The child's eyes, staring at the man with ruffled hair and beard, did not change.The mother's voice called softly.The little bare feet entered the room with trepidation.

“Mother！”

“Come, my dear.”

The small bare feet approached swiftly.

“I wondered where you were，”came the plaintive voice.The mother stretched out her arms.The child stood beside the high bed.Brangwen lightly lifted the tiny girl, with an“up-a-daisy”，then took his own place in the bed again.

“Mother！”cried the child, as in anguish.

“What, my pet？”

Anna wriggled close into her mother's arms, clinging tight, hiding from the fact of the man.Brangwen lay still, and waited.There was a long silence.

Then suddenly, Anna looked round, as if she thought he would be gone.She saw the face of the man lying upturned to the ceiling.Her black eyes stared antagonistic from her exquisite face, her arms clung tightly to her mother, afraid.He did not move for some time, not knowing what to say.His face was smooth and soft-skinned with love, his eyes full of soft light.He looked at her, scarcely moving his head, his eyes smiling.

“Have you just wakened up？”he said.

“Go away，”she retorted, with a little darting forward of the head, something like a viper.

“Nay，”he answered，“I'm not going.You can go.”

“Go away，”came the sharp little command.

“There's room for you，”he said.

“You can't send your father from his own bed, my little bird，”said her mother, pleasantly.

The child glowered at him, miserable in her impotence.

“There's room for you as well，”he said.“It's a big bed enough.”

She glowered without answering, then turned and clung to her mother.She would not allow it.

During the day she asked her mother several times：

“When are we going home, mother？”

“We are at home, darling, we live here now.This is our house, we live here with your father.”

The child was forced to accept it.But she remained against the man.As night came on, she asked：

“Where are you going to sleep, mother？”

“I sleep with the father now.”

And when Brangwen came in, the child asked fiercely：

“Why do you sleep with my mother？My mother sleeps with me，”her voice quivering.

“You come as well, an'sleep with both of us，”he coaxed.

“Mother！”she cried, turning, appealing against him.

“But I must have a husband, darling.All women must have a husband.”

“And you like to have a father with your mother, don't you？”said Brangwen.

Anna glowered at him.She seemed to cogitate.

“No，”she cried fiercely at length，“no, I don't want.”And slowly her face puckered, she sobbed bitterly.He stood and watched her, sorry.But there could be no altering it.

Which, when she knew, she became quiet.He was easy with her, talkingto her, taking her to see the live creatures, bringing her the first chickens in his cap, taking her to gather the eggs, letting her throw crusts to the horse.She would easily accompany him, and take all he had to give, but she remained neutral still.

She was curiously, incomprehensibly jealous of her mother, always anxiously concerned about her.If Brangwen drove with his wife to Nottingham, Anna ran about happily enough, or unconcerned, for a long time.Then, as afternoon came on, there was only one cry—“I want my mother, I want my mother—”and a bitter, pathetic sobbing that soon had the soft-hearted Tilly sobbing too.The child's anguish was that her mother was gone, gone.

Yet as a rule, Anna seemed cold, resenting her mother, critical of her.It was：

“I don't like you to do that, mother，”or，“I don't like you to say that.”She was a sore problem to Brangwen and to all the people at the Marsh.As a rule, however, she was active, lightly flitting about the farmyard, only appearing now and again to assure herself of her mother.Happy she never seemed, but quick, sharp, absorbed, full of imagination and changeability.Tilly said she was bewitched.But it did not matter so long as she did not cry.There was something heart-rending about Anna's crying, her childish anguish seemed so utter and so timeless, as if it were a thing of all the ages.

She made playmates of the creatures of the farmyard, talking to them, telling them the stories she had from her mother, counselling them and correcting them.Brangwen found her at the gate leading to the paddock and to the duckpond.She was peering through the bars and shouting to the stately white geese, that stood in a curving line：

“You're not to call at people when they want to come.You must not do it.”

The heavy, balanced birds looked at the fierce little face and the fleece of keen hair thrust between the bars, and they raised their heads and swayed off, producing the long, can-canking, protesting noise of geese, rocking their ship-like, beautiful white bodies in a line beyond the gate.

“You're naughty, you're naughty，”cried Anna, tears of dismay and vexation in her eyes.And she stamped her slipper.

“Why, what are they doing？”said Brangwen.

“They won't let me come in，”she said, turning her flushed little face to him.

“Yi, they will.You can go in if you want to，”and he pushed open the gate for her.

She stood irresolute, looking at the group of bluey-white geese standing monumental under the grey, cold day.

“Go on，”he said.

She marched valiantly a few steps in.Her little body started convulsively at the sudden, derisive can-cank-ank of the geese.A blankness spread over her.The geese trailed away with uplifted heads under the low grey sky.

“They don't know you，”said Brangwen.“You should tell'em what your name is.”

“They're naughty to shout at me，”she flashed.

“They think you don't live here，”he said.

Later he found her at the gate calling shrilly and imperiously：

“My name is Anna, Anna Lensky, and I live here, because Mr.Brangwen's my father now.He is, yes he is.And I live here.”

This pleased Brangwen very much.And gradually, without knowing it herself, she clung to him, in her lost, childish, desolate moments, when it was good to creep up to something big and warm, and bury her little self in his big, unlimited being.Instinctively he was careful of her, careful to recognise her and to give himself to her disposal.

She was difficult of her affections.For Tilly, she had a childish, essential contempt, almost dislike, because the poor woman was such a servant.The child would not let the serving-woman attend to her, do intimate things for her, not for a long time.She treated her as one of an inferior race.Brangwen did not like it.

“Why aren't you fond of Tilly？”he asked.

“Because-because-because she looks at me with her eyes bent.”

Then gradually she accepted Tilly as belonging to the household, never as a person.

For the first weeks, the black eyes of the child were for ever on the watch.Brangwen, good-humoured but impatient, spoiled by Tilly, was an easy blusterer.If for a few minutes he upset the household with his noisy impatience, he found at the end the child glowering at him with intense black eyes, and she was sure to dart forward her little head, like a serpent, with her biting：

“Go away.”

“I'm not going away，”he shouted, irritated at last.“Go yourself-hustle-stir thysen-hop.”And he pointed to the door.The child backed away from him, pale with fear.Then she gathered up courage, seeing him become patient.

“We don't live with you，”she said, thrusting forward her little head at him.“You-you're-you're a bomakle.”

“A what？”he shouted.

Her voice wavered-but it came.

“A bomakle.”

“Ay, an'you're a comakle.”

She meditated.Then she hissed forwards her head.

“I'm not.”

“Not what？”

“A comakle.”

“No more am I a bomakle.”

He was really cross.

Other times she would say：

“My mother doesn't live here.”

“Oh, ay？”

“I want her to go away.”

“Then want's your portion，”he replied laconically.

So they drew nearer together.He would take her with him when he went out in the trap.The horse ready at the gate, he came noisily into the house, which seemed quiet and peaceful till he appeared to set everything awake.

“Now then, Topsy, pop into thy bonnet.”

The child drew herself up, resenting the indignity of the address.

“I can't fasten my bonnet myself，”she said haughtily.

“Not man enough yet，”he said, tying the ribbons under her chin with clumsy fingers.

She held up her face to him.Her little bright-red lips moved as he fumbled under her chin.

“You talk—nonsents，”she said, re-echoing one of his phrases.

“That face shouts for th'pump，”he said, and taking out a big red handkerchief, that smelled of strong tobacco, began wiping round her mouth.

“Is Kitty waiting for me？”she asked.

“Ay，”he said.“Let's finish wiping your face—it'll pass wi'a cat-lick.”

She submitted prettily.Then, when he let her go, she began to skip, with a curious flicking up of one leg behind her.

“Now my young buck-rabbit，”he said.“Slippy！”

She came and was shaken into her coat, and the two set off.She sat very close beside him in the gig, tucked tightly, feeling his big body sway, against her, very splendid.She loved the rocking of the gig, when his big, live body swayed upon her, against her.She laughed, a poignant little shrill laugh, and her black eyes glowed.

She was curiously hard, and then passionately tenderhearted.Her mother was ill, the child stole about on tip-toe in the bedroom for hours, being nurse, and doing the thing thoughtfully and diligently.Another day, her mother was unhappy.Anna would stand with her legs apart, glowering, balancing on the sides of her slippers.She laughed when the goslings wriggled in Tilly's hand, as the pellets of food were rammed down their throats with a skewer, she laughed nervously.She was hard and imperious with the animals, squandering no love, running about amongst them like a cruel mistress.

Summer came, and hay-harvest, Anna was a brown elfish mite dancing about.Tilly always marvelled over her, more than she loved her.

But always in the child was some anxious connection with the mother.So long as Mrs.Brangwen was all right, the little girl played about and took very little notice of her.But corn-harvest went by, the autumn drew on, and the mother, the later months of her pregnancy beginning, was strange and detached, Brangwen began to knit his brows, the old, unhealthy uneasiness, the unskinned susceptibility came on the child again.If she went to the fields with her father, then, instead of playing about carelessly, it was：

“I want to go home.”

“Home, why tha's nobbut this minute come.”

“I want to go home.”

“What for？What ails thee？”

“I want my mother.”

“Thy mother！Thy mother none wants thee.”

“I want to go home.”

There would be tears in a moment.

“Can ter find t'road, then？”

And he watched her scudding, silent and intent, along the hedge-bottom, at a steady, anxious pace, till she turned and was gone through the gateway.Then he saw her two fields off, still pressing forward, small and urgent.His face was clouded as he turned to plough up the stubble.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud.Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack.

Inside the house it was dark, and quiet.The child flitted uneasily round, and now and again came her plaintive, startled cry：

“Mother！”

Mrs.Brangwen was heavy and unresponsive, tired, lapsed back.Brangwen went on working out of doors.

At evening, when he came in to milk, the child would run behind him.Then, in the cosy cow-sheds, with the doors shut and the air looking warm by the light of the hanging lantern, above the branching horns of the cows, she would stand watching his hands squeezing rhythmically the teats of the placid beast, watch the froth and the leaping squirt of milk, watch his hand sometimes rubbing slowly, understandingly, upon a hanging udder.So they kept each other company, but at a distance, rarely speaking.

The darkest days of the year came on, the child was fretful, sighing as if some oppression were on her, running hither and thither without relief.And Brangwen went about at his work, heavy, his heart heavy as the sodden earth.

The winter nights fell early, the lamp was lighted before tea-time, theshutters were closed, they were all shut into the room with the tension and stress.Mrs.Brangwen went early to bed, Anna playing on the floor beside her.Brangwen sat in the emptiness of the downstairs room, smoking, scarcely conscious even of his own misery.And very often he went out to escape it.

Christmas passed, the wet, drenched, cold days of January recurred monotonously, with now and then a brilliance of blue flashing in, when Brangwen went out into a morning like crystal, when every sound rang again, and the birds were many and sudden and brusque in the hedges.Then an elation came over him in spite of everything, whether his wife were strange or sad, or whether he craved for her to be with him, it did not matter, the air rang with clear noises, the sky was like crystal, like a bell, and the earth was hard.Then he worked and was happy, his eyes shining, his cheeks flushed.And the zest of life was strong in him.

The birds pecked busily round him, the horses were fresh and ready, the bare branches of the trees flung themselves up like a man yawning, taut with energy, the twigs radiated off into the clear light.He was alive and full of zest for it all.And if his wife were heavy, separated from him, extinguished, then, let her be, let him remain himself.Things would be as they would be.Meanwhile he heard the ringing crow of a cockerel in the distance, he saw the pale shell of the moon effaced on a blue sky.

So he shouted to the horses, and was happy.If, driving into Ilkeston, a fresh young woman were going in to do her shopping, he hailed her, and reined in his horse, and picked her up.Then he was glad to have her near him, his eyes shone, his voice, laughing, teasing in a warm fashion, made the poise of her head more beautiful, her blood ran quicker.They were both stimulated, the morning was fine.

What did it matter that, at the bottom of his heart, was care and pain？It was at the bottom, let it stop at the bottom.His wife, her suffering, her coming pain-well, it must be so.She suffered, but he was out of doors, full in life, and it would be ridiculous, indecent, to pull a long face and to insist on being miserable.He was happy, this morning, driving to town, with the hoofs of the horse spanking the hard earth.Well he was happy, if half the world were weeping at the funeral of the other half.And it was a jolly girl sitting besidehim.And Woman was immortal, whatever happened, whoever turned towards death.Let the misery come when it could not be resisted.

The evening arrived later very beautiful, with a rosy flush hovering above the sunset, and passing away into violet and lavender, with turquoise green north and south in the sky, and in the east, a great, yellow moon hanging heavy and radiant.It was magnificent to walk between the sunset and the moon, on a road where little holly trees thrust black into the rose and lavender, and starlings flickered in droves across the light.But what was the end of the journey？The pain came right enough, later on, when his heart and his feet were heavy, his brain dead, his life stopped.

One afternoon, the pains began, Mrs.Brangwen was put to bed, the midwife came.Night fell, the shutters were closed, Brangwen came in to tea, to the loaf and the pewter teapot, the child, silent and quivering, playing with glass beads, the house, empty, it seemed, or exposed to the winter night, as if it had no walls.

Sometimes there sounded, long and remote in the house, vibrating through everything, the moaning cry of a woman in labour.Brangwen, sitting downstairs, was divided.His lower, deeper self was with her, bound to her, suffering.But the big shell of his body remembered the sound of owls that used to fly round the farmstead when he was a boy.He was back in his youth, a boy, haunted by the sound of the owls, waking up his brother to speak to him.And his mind drifted away to the birds, their solemn, dignified faces, their flight so soft and broad-winged.And then to the birds his brother had shot, fluffy, dust-coloured, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly asleep.It was a queer thing, a dead owl.

He lifted his cup to his lips, he watched the child with the beads.But his mind was occupied with owls, and the atmosphere of his boyhood, with his brothers and sisters.Elsewhere, fundamental, he was with his wife in labour, the child was being brought forth out of their one flesh.He and she, one flesh, out of which life must be put forth.The rent was not in his body, but it was of his body.On her the blows fell, but the quiver ran through to him, to his last fibre.She must be torn asunder for life to come forth, yet still they were one flesh, and still, from further back, the life came out of him to her, and still hewas the unbroken that has the broken rock in its arms, their flesh was one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was smitten and rent, from him who quivered and yielded.

He went upstairs to her.As he came to the bedside she spoke to him in Polish.

“Is it very bad？”he asked.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her.She knew something of him, of his eyes.But she could not grasp him.She closed her eyes.

He turned away, white to the gills.

“It's not so very bad，”said the midwife.

He knew he was a strain on his wife.He went downstairs.

The child glanced up at him, frightened.

“I want my mother，”she quavered.

“Ay, but she's badly，”he said mildly, unheeding.

She looked at him with lost, frightened eyes.

“Has she got a headache？”

“No-she's going to have a baby.”

The child looked round.He was unaware of her.She was alone again in terror.

“I want my mother，”came the cry of panic.

“Let Tilly undress you，”he said.“You're tired.”

There was another silence.Again came the cry of labour.

“I want my mother，”rang automatically from the wincing, panic-stricken child, that felt cut off and lost in a horror of desolation.

Tilly came forward, her heart wrung.

“Come an'let me undress her then, pet-lamb，”she crooned.“You s'll have your mother in th'mornin'，don't you fret, my duckie；never mind, angel.”

But Anna stood upon the sofa, her back to the wall.

“I want my mother，”she cried, her little face quivering, and the great tearsof childish, utter anguish falling.

“She's poorly, my lamb, she's poorly to-night, but she'll be better by mornin'.Oh, don't cry, don’t cry, love, she doesn’t want you to cry, precious little heart, no, she doesn’t.”

Tilly took gently hold of the child's skirts.Anna snatched back her dress, and cried, in a little hysteria：

“No, you're not to undress me—I want my mother，”—and her child's face was running with grief and tears, her body shaken.

“Oh, but let Tilly undress you.Let Tilly undress you, who loves you, don't be wilful to-night.Mother's poorly, she doesn't want you to cry.”

The child sobbed distractedly, she could not hear.

“I want my mother，”she wept.

“When you're undressed, you s'll go up to see your mother—when you're undressed, pet, when you've let Tilly undress you, when you're a little jewel in your nightie, love.Oh, don’t you cry, don’t you—”

Brangwen sat stiff in his chair.He felt his brain going tighter.He crossed over the room, aware only of the maddening sobbing.

“Don't make a noise，”he said.

And a new fear shook the child from the sound of his voice.She cried mechanically, her eyes looking watchful through her tears, in terror, alert to what might happen.

“I want-my-mother，”quavered the sobbing, blind voice.

A shiver of irritation went over the man's limbs.It was the utter, persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the voice and the crying.

“You must come and be undressed，”he said, in a quiet voice that was thin with anger.

And he reached his hand and grasped her.He felt her body catch in a convulsive sob.But he too was blind, and intent, irritated into mechanical action.He began to unfasten her little apron.She would have shrunk from him, but could not.So her small body remained in his grasp, while he fumbled at the little buttons and tapes, unthinking, intent, unaware of anything but the irritation of her.Her body was held taut and resistant, he pushed off the little dress and the petticoats, revealing the white arms.She kept stiff, overpowered, violated, he went on with his task.And all the while she sobbed, choking：

“I want my mother.”

He was unheedingly silent, his face stiff.The child was now incapable of understanding, she had become a little, mechanical thing of fixed will.She wept, her body convulsed, her voice repeating the same cry.

“Eh, dear o'me！”cried Tilly, becoming distracted herself.Brangwen, slow, clumsy, blind, intent, got off all the little garments, and stood the child naked in its shift upon the sofa.

“Where's her nightie？”he asked.

Tilly brought it, and he put it on her.Anna did not move her limbs to his desire.He had to push them into place.She stood, with fixed, blind will, resistant, a small, convulsed, unchangeable thing weeping ever and repeating the same phrase.He lifted one foot after the other, pulled off slippers and socks.She was ready.

“Do you want a drink？”he asked.

She did not change.Unheeding, uncaring, she stood on the sofa, standing back, alone, her hands shut and half lifted, her face, all tears, raised and blind.And through the sobbing and choking came the broken：

“I-want-my-mother.”

“Do you want a drink？”he said again.

There was no answer.He lifted the stiff, denying body between his hands.Its stiff blindness made a flash of rage go through him.He would like to break it.

He set the child on his knee, and sat again in his chair beside the fire, the wet, sobbing, inarticulate noise going on near his ear, the child sitting stiff, not yielding to him or anything, not aware.

A new degree of anger came over him.What did it all matter？What did it matter if the mother talked Polish and cried in labour, if this child were stiff with resistance, and crying？Why take it to heart？Let the mother cry in labour, let the child cry in resistance, since they would do so.Why should he fight against it, why resist？Let it be, if it were so.Let them be as they were, if they insisted.

And in a daze he sat, offering no fight.The child cried on, the minutesticked away, a sort of torpor was on him.

It was some little time before he came to, and turned to attend to the child.He was shocked by her little wet, blinded face.A bit dazed, he pushed back the wet hair.Like a living statue of grief, her blind face cried on.

“Nay，”he said，“not as bad as that.It's not as bad as that, Anna, my child.Come, what are you crying for so much？Come, stop now, it'll make you sick.I wipe you dry, don't wet your face any more.Don't cry any more wet tears, don't, it’s better not to.Don’t cry—it’s not so bad as all that.Hush now, hush-let it be enough.”

His voice was queer and distant and calm.He looked at the child.She was beside herself now.He wanted her to stop, he wanted it all to stop, to become natural.

“Come，”he said, rising to turn away，“we'll go an'supper-up the beast.”

He took a big shawl, folded her round, and went out into the kitchen for a lantern.

“You're never taking the child out, of a night like this，”said Tilly.

“Ay, it'll quieten her，”he answered.

It was raining.The child was suddenly still, shocked, finding the rain on its face, the darkness.

“We'll just give the cows their something-to-eat, afore they go to bed，”Brangwen was saying to her, holding her close and sure.

There was a trickling of water into the butt, a burst of rain-drops sputtering on to her shawl, and the light of the lantern swinging, flashing on a wet pavement and the base of a wet wall.Otherwise it was black darkness：one breathed darkness.

He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they entered into the high, dry barn, that smelled warm even if it were not warm.He hung the lantern on the nail and shut the door.They were in another world now.The light shed softly on the timbered barn, on the whitewashed walls, and the great heap of hay；instruments cast their shadows largely, a ladder rose to the dark arch of a loft.Outside there was the driving rain, inside, the softly-illuminated stillness and calmness of the barn.

Holding the child on one arm, he set about preparing the food for the cows, filling a pan with chopped hay and brewer's grains and a little meal.The child, all wonder, watched what he did.A new being was created in her for the new conditions.Sometimes, a little spasm, eddying from the bygone storm of sobbing, shook her small body.Her eyes were wide and wondering, pathetic.She was silent, quite still.

In a sort of dream, his heart sunk to the bottom, leaving the surface of him still, quite still, he rose with the panful of food, carefully balancing the child on one arm, the pan in the other hand.The silky fringe of the shawl swayed softly, grains and hay trickled to the floor；he went along a dimly-lit passage behind the mangers, where the horns of the cows pricked out of the obscurity.The child shrank, he balanced stiffly, rested the pan on the manger wall, and tipped out the food, half to this cow, half to the next.There was a noise of chains running, as the cows lifted or dropped their heads sharply；then a contented, soothing sound, a long snuffing as the beasts ate in silence.

The journey had to be performed several times.There was the rhythmic sound of the shovel in the barn, then the man returned walking stiffly between the two weights, the face of the child peering out from the shawl.Then the next time, as he stooped, she freed her arm and put it round his neck, clinging soft and warm, making all easier.

The beasts fed, he dropped the pan and sat down on a box, to arrange the child.

“Will the cows go to sleep now？”she said, catching her breath as she spoke.

“Yes.”

“Will they eat all their stuff up first？”

“Yes.Hark at them.”

And the two sat still listening to the snuffing and breathing of cows feeding in the sheds communicating with this small barn.The lantern shed a soft, steady light from one wall.All outside was still in the rain.He looked down at the silky folds of the paisley shawl.It reminded him of his mother.She used to go to church in it.He was back again in the old irresponsibility and security, a boy at home.

The two sat very quiet.His mind, in a sort of trance, seemed to becomemore and more vague.He held the child close to him.A quivering little shudder, re-echoing from her sobbing, went down her limbs.He held her closer.Gradually she relaxed, the eyelids began to sink over her dark, watchful eyes.As she sank to sleep, his mind became blank.

When he came to, as if from sleep, he seemed to be sitting in a timeless stillness.What was he listening for？He seemed to be listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life.He remembered his wife.He must go back to her.The child was asleep, the eyelids not quite shut, showing a slight film of black pupil between.Why did she not shut her eyes？Her mouth was also a little open.

He rose quickly and went back to the house.

“Is she asleep？”whispered Tilly.

He nodded.The servant-woman came to look at the child who slept in the shawl, with cheeks flushed hot and red, and a whiteness, a wanness round the eyes.

“God-a-mercy！”whispered Tilly, shaking her head.

He pushed off his boots and went upstairs with the child.He became aware of the anxiety grasped tight at his heart, because of his wife.But he remained still.The house was silent save for the wind outside, and the noisy trickling and splattering of water in the water-butts.There was a slit of light under his wife's door.

He put the child into bed wrapped as she was in the shawl, for the sheets would be cold.Then he was afraid that she might not be able to move her arms, so he loosened her.The black eyes opened, rested on him vacantly, sank shut again.He covered her up.The last little quiver from the sobbing shook her breathing.

This was his room, the room he had had before he married.It was familiar.He remembered what it was to be a young man, untouched.

He remained suspended.The child slept, pushing her small fists from the shawl.He could tell the woman her child was asleep.But he must go to the other landing.He started.There was the sound of the owls-the moaning of the woman.What an uncanny sound！It was not human-at least to a man.

He went down to her room, entering softly.She was lying still, with eyesshut, pale, tired.His heart leapt, fearing she was dead.Yet he knew perfectly well she was not.He saw the way her hair went loose over her temples, her mouth was shut with suffering in a sort of grin.She was beautiful to him—but it was not human.He had a dread of her as she lay there.What had she to do with him？She was other than himself.

Something made him go and touch her fingers that were still grasped on the sheet.Her brown-grey eyes opened and looked at him.She did not know him as himself.But she knew him as the man.She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her：an impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male.Her eyes closed again.A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite.

When her pains began afresh, tearing her, he turned aside, and could not look.But his heart in torture was at peace, his bowels were glad.He went downstairs, and to the door, outside, lifted his face to the rain, and felt the darkness striking unseen and steadily upon him.

The swift, unseen threshing of the night upon him silenced him and he was overcome.He turned away indoors, humbly.There was the infinite world, eternal, unchanging, as well as the world of life.第三章　安娜·兰斯珂的童年时代　Chapter 3　Childhood of Anna Lensky导读

莉迪亚生了一个儿子，汤姆心里很满足，他的妻子终于成为了他孩子的母亲。儿子出生之后，莉迪亚似乎成了一个真正的英国人，可原先的活力却少了很多。在汤姆眼里，莉迪亚还是那么漂亮，充满热情的眼神使整个人焕发出光彩。莉迪亚喜欢这个婴儿，当汤姆看到她专注地给儿子喂奶时，会努力克制住自己想接近莉迪亚的冲动。莉迪亚再次接近他了，两个人又恢复了初恋时的美好感觉，只是那种兴奋消失得太快。汤姆不得不学会控制住自己，因为莉迪亚无法让他满足，他甚至开始嫉妒被她抱在怀里的孩子。汤姆希望能把自己所有的爱都倾注在莉迪亚身上，不过现在这已经不可能了，安娜成为了他的另一个爱的中心。

小弟弟出生后，安娜不再为母亲担心了。她由最初的迷惑到愤怒，最后找到了平衡。母亲原本对安娜的责任感已经转移到她的弟弟身上，安娜获得了自由。这以后，安娜真正喜欢上了汤姆，他们经常在一起学习、唱歌。他们称婴儿是“黑鸟”，两个人都开着婴儿的玩笑。安娜不喜欢和别的孩子在一起，总是一个人玩耍，经常惹得农场的帮工哈哈大笑。她喜欢和父亲一起坐马车出门，高高在上的她经常引起行人的注目。安娜经常会扯着嗓门和行人打招呼，她的行为把大家都逗乐了。当父亲在酒馆喝酒时，她会静静地坐在一边，孤傲的她会简单地回答一些大人的提问，不过整个人流露出一种“别碰我”的模样，这让大人们也不太敢继续纠缠她问一些废话。汤姆不忍心把安娜一个人留在旅馆，只好带着她一起去牛市场。脏兮兮的牛市场让安娜有些畏缩，她被父亲留在了点心摊上，一个人孤零零地坐在那里。孤独的她等了很久，父亲还是没有回来，但她忍住了，并没有哭泣。父亲卖出了牲口，又带着她去办理其他一些事情。安娜总会听到周围人询问她的来历，意识到自己总是和母亲连在一起。一天的旅程让安娜看到了很多新鲜事情，她后来成了牛市场的常客。她和父亲的一些朋友很熟悉，刚开始会瞧不起这些乡下人，但那些乡下人善良而淳朴。

汤姆很想把安娜培养成一个有教养的小姐。最近他的哥哥艾尔弗雷德和一个女人私通，经常抛弃孩子和家庭，跑到那个女人家里去。汤姆一次在车站碰到了前去和情妇约会的哥哥，他决定自己亲自去拜访一下那个女人，而他也在这次拜访中知道了很多曾经不了解的事情。他得知艾尔弗雷德很喜欢看书，经常和那个女人一起读书，他还见到了那个女人的父亲，心里很是崇拜。回到家后，他对自己乡巴佬的生活有些厌恶，开始想进入上流社会。他第一次后悔继承了农场，虽然生活很宽裕，也有一个有教养的妻子，却根本不可能过上上流社会的生活。后来，那次拜访的心情逐渐退却，他又恢复了平静，一想到哥哥的那个情妇，总觉得那女人缺少一种人性的温暖。

晚上，他有时和妻子单独在一起，有时和安娜一起玩耍。妻子总是静静地坐在一旁，一言不语，低着头做针线活。那种沉闷让人窒息，汤姆忍不住走了出去。莉迪亚拦住了他，质问他是不是不想和自己在一起，这说中了汤姆内心的秘密。妻子不停地追问他的想法，最后认为他想要找像他哥哥的情妇一样的女人，这让汤姆很吃惊。他被妻子说中了心中的想法，妻子的质问让他怒火直升。这一段对话让两个人都陷入了沉默，很长时间之后，莉迪亚主动呼唤着丈夫，汤姆走到了她身边，两个人紧紧地抱在了一起。起初，汤姆还有些拒绝，不过欲火很快使他沸腾，他想拥有她，一种神秘的力量驱使着两个人再次结合在一起，这是结婚后两个人再次融为一体。他们体会到前所未有的美妙，也发现了另一种新的生活方式。他们终于打破了长时间以来的隔阂，彼此终于了解了对方，开始了真正的家庭生活。安娜可以无忧无虑了，她可以自由自在地在父母亲的关爱和照顾下玩耍成长了。om Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his stepchildAnna.When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill of Tpleasure.He liked the confirmation of fatherhood.It gave him satisfaction to know he had a son.Buthe felt not very much outgoing to the baby itself.He was its father, that was enough.

He was glad that his wife was mother of his child.She was serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted.In the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her former self.She became now really English, really Mrs.Brangwen.Her vitality, however, seemed lowered.

She was still, to Brangwen, immeasurably beautiful.She was still passionate, with a flame of being.But the flame was not robust and present.Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but like some flower opened in the shade, that could not bear the full light.She loved the baby.But even this, with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowiness even in her mother-love.When Brangwen saw her nursing his child, happy, absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin flame.For he perceived how he must subdue himself in his approach to her.And he wanted again the robust, moral exchange of love and passion such as he had had at first with her, at one time and another, when they were matched at their highest intensity.This was the one experience for him now.And he wanted it, always, with remorseless craving.

She came to him again, with the same lifting of her mouth as had driven him almost mad with trammelled passion at first.She came to him again, and, his heart delirious in delight and readiness, he took her.And it was almost as before.

Perhaps it was quite as before.At any rate, it made him know perfection, it established in him a constant eternal knowledge.

But it died down before he wanted it to die down.She was finished, she could take no more.And he was not exhausted, he wanted to go on.But it could not be.

So he had to begin the bitter lesson, to abate himself, to take less than he wanted.For she was Woman to him, all other women were her shadows.For she had satisfied him.And he wanted it to go on.And it could not.However he raged, and, filled with suppression that became hot and bitter, hated her in his soul that she did not want him, however he had mad outbursts, and drank and made ugly scenes, still he knew, he was only kicking against the pricks.It wasnot, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him.It was that she could not.She could only want him in her own way, and to her own measure.And she had spent much life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfilment.She had taken him and given him fulfilment.She still could do so, in her own times and ways.But he must control himself, measure himself to her.

He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy.But it could not be.He must find other things than her, other centres of living.She sat close and impregnable with the child.And he was jealous of the child.

But he loved her, and time came to give some sort of course to his troublesome current of life, so that it did not foam and flood and make misery.He formed another centre of love in her child, Anna.Gradually a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child, relieving the main flood to his wife.Also he sought the company of men, he drank heavily now and again.

The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby came.Seeing the mother with the baby boy, delighted and serene and secure, Anna was at first puzzled, then gradually she became indignant, and at last her little life settled on its own swivel, she was no more strained and distorted to support her mother.She became more childish, not so abnormal, not charged with cares she could not understand.The charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had devolved elsewhere than on her.Gradually the child was freed.She became an independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own centre.

Of her own choice, she then loved Brangwen most, or most obviously.For these two made a little life together, they had a joint activity.It amused him, at evening, to teach her to count, or to say her letters.He remembered for her all the little nursery rhymes and childish songs that lay forgotten at the bottom of his brain.

At first she thought them rubbish.But he laughed, and she laughed.They became to her a huge joke.Old King Cole she thought was Brangwen.Mother Hubbard was Tilly, her mother was the old woman who lived in a shoe.It was a huge, it was a frantic delight to the child, this nonsense, after her years with her mother, after the poignant folk-tales she had had from her mother, whichalways troubled and mystified her soul.

She shared a sort of recklessness with her father, a complete, chosen carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it.He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter.The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes.Brangwen called him the blackbird.

“Hallo，”Brangwen would cry, starting as he heard the wail of the child announcing it wanted to be taken out of the cradle，“there's the blackbird tuning up.”

“The blackbird's singing，”Anna would shout with delight，“the blackbird's singing.”

“When the pie was opened，”Brangwen shouted in his bawling bass voice, going over to the cradle，“the bird began to sing.”

“Wasn't it a dainty dish to set before a king？”cried Anna, her eyes flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwen for confirmation.He sat down with the baby, saying loudly：

“Sing up, my lad, sing up.”

And the baby cried loudly, and Anna shouted lustily, dancing in wild bliss：

“Sing a song of sixpence Pocketful of posies, Ascha！Ascha！—”

Then she stopped suddenly in silence and looked at Brangwen again, her eyes flashing, as she shouted loudly and delightedly：

“I've got it wrong, I've got it wrong.”

“Oh, my sirs，”said Tilly entering，“what a racket！”

Brangwen hushed the child and Anna flipped and danced on.She loved her wild bursts of rowdiness with her father.Tilly hated it, Mrs.Brangwen did not mind.

Anna did not care much for other children.She domineered them, she treated them as if they were extremely young and incapable, to her they were little people, they were not her equals.So she was mostly alone, flying round the farm, entertaining the farm-hands and Tilly and the servant-girl, whirring on and never ceasing.

She loved driving with Brangwen in the trap.Then, sitting high up and bowling along, her passion for eminence and dominance was satisfied.She waslike a little savage in her arrogance.She thought her father important, she was installed beside him on high.And they spanked along, beside the high, flourishing hedge-tops, surveying the activity of the countryside.When people shouted a greeting to him from the road below, and Brangwen shouted jovially back, her little voice was soon heard shrilling along with his, followed by her chuckling laugh, when she looked up at her father with bright eyes, and they laughed at each other.And soon it was the custom for the passerby to sing out：“How are ter, Tom？Well, my lady！”or else，“Mornin'，Tom, mornin'，my Lass！”or else，“You're off together then？”or else，“You're lookin'rarely, you two.”

Anna would respond, with her father：“How are you, John！Good mornin'，William！Ay, makin'for Derby，”shrilling as loudly as she could.Though often, in response to“You're off out a bit then，”she would reply，“Yes, we are，”to the great joy of all.She did not like the people who saluted him and did not salute her.

She went into the public-house with him, if he had to call, and often sat beside him in the bar-parlour as he drank his beer or brandy.The landladies paid court to her, in the obsequious way landladies have.

“Well, little lady, an'what's your name？”

“Anna Brangwen，”came the immediate, haughty answer.

“Indeed it is！An'do you like driving in a trap with your father？”

“Yes，”said Anna, shy, but bored by these inanities.She had a touch-me-not way of blighting the inane inquiries of grown-up people.

“My word, she's a fawce little thing，”the landlady would say to Brangwen.

“Ay，”he answered, not encouraging comments on the child.Then there followed the present of a biscuit, or of cake, which Anna accepted as her dues.

“What does she say, that I'm a fawce little thing？”the small girl asked afterwards.

“She means your're a sharp-shins.”

Anna hesitated.She did not understand.Then she laughed at some absurdity she found.

Soon he took her every week to market with him.“I can come, can't I？”she asked every Saturday, or Thursday morning, when he made himself look fine in his dress of a gentleman farmer.And his face clouded at having to refuse her.

So at last, he overcame his own shyness, and tucked her beside him.They drove into Nottingham and put up at the“Black Swan”.So far all right.Then he wanted to leave her at the inn.But he saw her face, and knew it was impossible.So he mustered his courage, and set off with her, holding her hand, to the cattle-market.

She stared in bewilderment, flitting silent at his side.But in the cattle-market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy, filthy boots, and leathern leggins.And the road underfoot was all nasty with cow-muck.And it frightened her to see the cattle in the square pens, so many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness of men and a yelling of drovers.Also she felt her father was embarrassed by her, and ill-at-ease.

He brought her a cake at the refreshment-booth, and set her on a seat.A man hailed him.

“Good morning, Tom.That thine, then？”—and the bearded farmer jerked his head at Anna.

“Ay，”said Brangwen, deprecating.

“I did—Anna know tha'd one that old.”

“No, it's my missis's.”

“Oh, that's it！”And the man looked at Anna as if she were some odd little cattle.She glowered with black eyes.

Brangwen left her there, in charge of the barman, whilst he went to see about the selling of some young stirks.Farmers, butchers, drovers, dirty, uncouth men from whom she shrank instinctively stared down at her as she sat on her seat, then went to get their drink, talking in unabated tones.All was big and violent about her.

“Whose child met that be？”they asked of the barman.

“It belongs to Tom Brangwen.”

The child sat on in neglect, watching the door for her father.He never came；many, many men came, but not he, and she sat like a shadow.She knew one did not cry in such a place.And every man looked at her inquisitively, sheshut herself away from them.

A deep, gathering coldness of isolation took hold on her.He was never coming back.She sat on, frozen, unmoving.

When she had become blank and timeless he came, and she slipped off her seat to him, like one come back from the dead.He had sold his beast as quickly as he could.But all the business was not finished.He took her again through the hurtling welter of the cattle-market.

Then at last they turned and went out through the gate.He was always hailing one man or another, always stopping to gossip about land and cattle and horses and other things she did not understand, standing in the filth and the smell, among the legs and great boots of men.And always she heard the questions：

“What lass is that, then？I didn't know tha'd one o'that age.”

“It belongs to my missis.”

Anna was very conscious of her derivation from her mother, in the end, and of her alienation.

But at last they were away, and Brangwen went with her into a little dark, ancient eating-house in the Bridlesmith-Gate.They had cow's-tail soup, and meat and cabbage and potatoes.Other men, other people, came into the dark, vaulted place, to eat.Anna was wide-eyed and silent with wonder.

Then they went into the big market, into the corn exchange, then to shops.He bought her a little book off a stall.He loved buying things, odd things that he thought would be useful.Then they went to the“Black Swan”，and she drank milk and he brandy, and they harnessed the horse and drove off, up the Derby Road.

She was tired out with wonder and marvelling.But the next day, when she thought of it, she skipped, flipping her leg in the odd dance she did, and talked the whole time of what had happened to her, of what she had seen.It lasted her all the week.And the next Saturday she was eager to go again.

She became a familiar figure in the cattle-market, sitting waiting in the little booth.But she liked best to go to Derby.There her father had more friends.And she liked the familiarity of the smaller town, the nearness of the river, the strangeness that did not frighten her, it was so much smaller.Sheliked the covered-in market, and the old women.She liked the“George Inn”，where her father put up.The landlord was Brangwen's old friend, and Anna was made much of.She sat many a day in the cosy parlour talking to Mr.Wigginton, a fat man with red hair, the landlord.And when the farmers all gathered at twelve o'clock for dinner, she was a little heroine.

At first she would only glower or hiss at these strange men with their uncouth accent.But they were good-humoured.She was a little oddity, with her fierce, fair hair like spun glass sticking out in a flamy halo round the apple-blossom face and the black eyes, and the men liked an oddity.She kindled their attention.

She was very angry because Marriott, a gentleman-farmer from Ambergate, called her the little pole-cat.

“Why, you're a pole-cat，”he said to her.

“I'm not，”she flashed.

“You are.That's just how a pole-cat goes.”

She thought about it.

“Well, you're—you're—”she began.

“I'm what？”

She looked him up and down.

“You're a bow-leg man.”

Which he was.There was a roar of laughter.They loved her that she was indomitable.

“Ah，”said Marriott.“Only a pole-cat says that.”

“Well, I am a pole-cat，”she flamed.

There was another roar of laughter from the men.

They loved to tease her.

“Well, me little maid，”Braithwaite would say to her，“an'how's th'lamb's wool？”

He gave a tug at a glistening, pale piece of her hair.

“It's not lamb's wool，”said Anna, indignantly putting back her offended lock.

“Why, what'st ca'it then？”

“It's hair.”

“Hair！Wheriver dun they rear that sort？”

“Wheriver dun they？”she asked, in dialect, her curiosity overcoming her.

Instead of answering he shouted with joy.It was the triumph, to make herspeak dialect.

She had one enemy, the man they called Nut-Nat, or Nat-Nut, a cretin, with inturned feet, who came flap-lapping along, shoulder jerking up at every step.This poor creature sold nuts in the public-houses where he was known.He had no roof to his mouth, and the men used to mock his speech.

The first time he came into the“George”when Anna was there, she asked, after he had gone, her eyes very round：

“Why does he do that when he walks？”

“'E canna'elp'isself, Duckie, it's th'make o’th’fellow.”

She thought about it, then she laughed nervously.And then she bethought herself, her cheeks flushed, and she cried：

“He's a horrid man.”

“Nay, he's non horrid；he canna help it if he wor struck that road.”

But when poor Nat came wambling in again, she slid away.And she would not eat his nuts, if the men bought them for her.And when the farmers gambled at dominoes for them, she was angry.

“They are dirty-man's nuts，”she cried.

So a revulsion started against Nat, who had not long after to go to the workhouse.

There grew in Brangwen's heart now a secret desire to make her a lady.His brother Alfred, in Nottingham, had caused a great scandal by becoming the lover of an educated woman, a lady, widow of a doctor.Very often, Alfred Brangwen went down as a friend to her cottage, which was in Derbyshire, leaving his wife and family for a day or two, then returning to them.And no-one dared gainsay him, for he was a strong-willed, direct man, and he said he was a friend of this widow.

One day Brangwen met his brother on the station.

“Where are you going to, then？”asked the younger brother.

“I'm going down to Wirksworth.”

“You've got friends down there, I'm told.”

“Yes.”

“I s'll have to be lookin'in when I'm down that road.”

“You please yourself.”

Tom Brangwen was so curious about the woman that the next time he was in Wirksworth he asked for her house.

He found a beautiful cottage on the steep side of a hill, looking clean over the town, that lay in the bottom of the basin, and away at the old quarries on the opposite side of the space.Mrs.Forbes was in the garden.She was a tall woman with white hair.She came up the path taking off her thick gloves, laying down her shears.It was autumn.She wore a wide-brimmed hat.

Brangwen blushed to the roots of his hair, and did not know what to say.

“I thought I might look in，”he said，“knowing you were friends of my brother's.I had to come to Wirksworth.”

She saw at once that he was a Brangwen.

“Will you come in？”she said.“My father is lying down.”

She took him into a drawing-room, full of books, with a piano and a violin-stand.And they talked, she simply and easily.She was full of dignity.The room was of a kind Brangwen had never known；the atmosphere seemed open and spacious, like a mountain-top to him.

“Does my brother like reading？”he asked.

“Some things.He has been reading Herbert Spencer.And we read Browning sometimes.”

Brangwen was full of admiration, deep thrilling, almost reverential admiration.He looked at her with lit-up eyes when she said，“we read”.At last he burst out, looking round the room：

“I didn't know our Alfred was this way inclined.”

“He is quite an unusual man.”

He looked at her in amazement.She evidently had a new idea of his brother：she evidently appreciated him.He looked again at the woman.She was about forty, straight, rather hard, a curious, separate creature.Himself, he was not in love with her, there was something chilling about her.But he was filled with boundless admiration.

At tea-time he was introduced to her father, an invalid who had to behelped about, but who was ruddy and well-favoured, with snowy hair and watery blue eyes, and a courtly naive manner that again was new and strange to Brangwen, so sauve, so merry, so innocent.

His brother was this woman's lover！It was too amazing.Brangwen went home despising himself for his own poor way of life.He was a clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud.More than ever he wanted to clamber out, to this visionary polite world.

He was well off.He was as well off as Alfred, who could not have above six hundred a year, all told.He himself made about four hundred, and could make more.His investments got better every day.Why did he not do something？His wife was a lady also.

But when he got to the Marsh, he realised how fixed everything was, how the other form of life was beyond him, and he regretted for the first time that he had succeeded to the farm.He felt a prisoner, sitting safe and easy and unadventurous.He might, with risk, have done more with himself.He could neither read Browning nor Herbert Spencer, nor have access to such a room as Mrs.Forbes's.All that form of life was outside him.

But then, he said he did not want it.The excitement of the visit began to pass off.The next day he was himself, and if he thought of the other woman, there was something about her and her place that he did not like, something cold something alien, as if she were not a woman, but an inhuman being who used up human life for cold, unliving purposes.

The evening came on, he played with Anna, and then sat alone with his own wife.She was sewing.He sat very still, smoking, perturbed.He was aware of his wife's quiet figure, and quiet dark head bent over her needle.It was too quiet for him.It was too peaceful.He wanted to smash the walls down, and let the night in, so that his wife should not be so secure and quiet, sitting there.He wished the air were not so close and narrow.His wife was obliterated from him, she was in her own world, quiet, secure, unnoticed, unnoticing.He was shut down by her.

He rose to go out.He could not sit still any longer.He must get out of this oppressive, shut-down, woman-haunt.

His wife lifted her head and looked at him.

“Are you going out？”she asked.

He looked down and met her eyes.They were darker than darkness, and gave deeper space.He felt himself retreating before her, defensive, whilst her eyes followed and tracked him own.

“I was just going up to Cossethay，”he said.

She remained watching him.

“Why do you go？”she said.

His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.

“No reason particular，”he said, beginning to fill his pipe again, mechanically.

“Why do you go away so often？”she said.

“But you don't want me，”he replied.

She was silent for a while.

“You do not want to be with me any more，”she said.

It startled him.How did she know this truth？He thought it was his secret.

“Yi，”he said.

“You want to find something else，”she said.

He did not answer.“Did he？”he asked himself.

“You should not want so much attention，”she said.“You are not a baby.”

“I'm not grumbling，”he said.Yet he knew he was.

“You think you have not enough，”she said.

“How enough？”

“You think you have not enough in me.But how do you know me？What do you do to make me love you？”

He was flabbergasted.

“I never said I hadn't enough in you，”he replied.“I didn't know you wanted making to love me.What do you want？”

“You don't make it good between us any more, you are not interested.You do not make me want you.”

“And you don't make me want you, do you now？”There was a silence.They were such strangers.

“Would you like to have another woman？”she asked.

His eyes grew round, he did not know where he was.How could she, hisown wife, say such a thing？But she sat there, small and foreign and separate.It dawned upon him she did not consider herself his wife, except in so far as they agreed.She did not feel she had married him.At any rate, she was willing to allow he might want another woman.A gap, a space opened before him.

“No，”he said slowly.“What other woman should I want？”

“Like your brother，”she said.

He was silent for some time, ashamed also.

“What of her？”he said.“I didn't like the woman.”

“Yes, you liked her，”she answered persistently.

He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own heart so callously.And he was indignant.What right had she to sit there telling him these things？She was his wife, what right had she to speak to him like this, as if she were a stranger.

“I didn't，”he said.“I want no woman.”

“Yes, you would like to be like Alfred.”

His silence was one of angry frustration.He was astonished.He had told her of his visit to Wirksworth, but briefly, without interest, he thought.

As she sat with her strange dark face turned towards him, her eyes watched him, inscrutable, casting him up.He began to oppose her.She was again the active unknown facing him.Must he admit her？He resisted involuntarily.

“Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you than me？”she said.

The turbulence raged in his breast.

“I don't，”he said.

“Why do you？”she repeated.“Why do you want to deny me？”

Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely, isolated, unsure.She had seemed to him the utterly certain, satisfied, absolute, excluding him.Could she need anything？

“Why aren't you satisfied with me？—I'm not satisfied with you.Paul used to come to me and take me like a man does.You only leave me alone or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again—so that you can forget me again.”

“What am I to remember about you？”said Brangwen.

“I want you to know there is somebody there besides yourself.”

“Well, don't I know it？”

“You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing there.When Paul came to me, I was something to him—a woman, I was.To you I am nothing—it is like cattle—or nothing—”

“You make me feel as if I was nothing，”he said.

They were silent.She sat watching him.He could not move, his soul was seething and chaotic.She turned to her sewing again.But the sight of her bent before him held him and would not let him be.She was a strange, hostile, dominant thing.Yet not quite hostile.As he sat he felt his limbs were strong and hard, he sat in strength.

She was silent for a long time, stitching.He was aware, poignantly, of the round shape of her head, very intimate, compelling.She lifted her head and sighed.The blood burned in him, her voice ran to him like fire.

“Come here，”she said, unsure.

For some moments he did not move.Then he rose slowly and went across the hearth.It required an almost deathly effort of volition, or of acquiescence.He stood before her and looked down at her.Her face was shining again, her eyes were shining again like terrible laughter.It was to him terrible, how she could be transfigured.He could not look at her, it burnt his heart.

“My love！”she said.

And she put her arms round him as he stood before her round his thighs, pressing him against her breast.And her hands on him seemed to reveal to him the mould of his own nakedness, he was passionately lovely to himself.He could not bear to look at her.

“My dear！”she said.He knew she spoke a foreign language.The fear was like bliss in his heart.He looked down.Her face was shining, her eyes were full of light, she was awful.He suffered from the compulsion to her.She was the awful unknown.He bent down to her, suffering, unable to let go, unable to let himself go, yet drawn, driven.She was now the transfigured, she was wonderful, beyond him.He wanted to go.But he could not as yet kiss her.He was himself apart.Easiest he could kiss her feet.But he was too ashamed forthe actual deed, which were like an affront.She waited for him to meet her, not to bow before her and serve her.She wanted his active participation, not his submission.She put her fingers on him.And it was torture to him, that he must give himself to her actively, participate in her, that he must meet and embrace and know her, who was other than himself.There was that in him which shrank from yielding to her, resisted the relaxing towards her, opposed the mingling with her, even while he most desired it.He was afraid, he wanted to save himself.

There were a few moments of stillness.Then gradually, the tension, the withholding relaxed in him, and he began to flow towards her.She was beyond him, the unattainable.But he let go his hold on himself, he relinquished himself, and knew the subterranean force of his desire to come to her, to be with her, to mingle with her, losing himself to find her, to find himself in her.He began to approach her, to draw near.

His blood beat up in waves of desire.He wanted to come to her, to meet her.She was there, if he could reach her.The reality of her who was just beyond him absorbed him.Blind and destroyed, he pressed forward, nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of himself, he received within the darkness which should swallow him and yield him up to himself.If he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.

Their coming together now, after two years of married life, was much more wonderful to them than it had been before.It was the entry into another circle of existence, it was the baptism to another life, it was the complete confirmation.Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge, their footsteps were lit-up with discovery.Wherever they walked, it was well, the world re-echoed round them in discovery.They went gladly and forgetful.Everything was lost, and everything was found.The new world was discovered, it remained only to be explored.

They had passed through the doorway into the further space, where movement was so big, that it contained bonds and constraints and labours, andstill was complete liberty.She was the doorway to him, he to her.At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and had stood in the doorways facing each other, whilst the light flooded out from behind on to each of their faces, it was the transfiguration, glorification, the admission.

And always the light of the transfiguration burned on in their hearts.He went his way, as before, she went her way, to the rest of the world there seemed no change.But to the two of them, there was the perpetual wonder of the transfiguration.

He did not know her any better, any more precisely, now that he knew her altogether.Poland, her husband, the war—he understood no more of this in her.He did not understand her foreign nature, half German, half Polish, nor her foreign speech.But he knew her, he knew her meaning, without understanding.What she said, what she spoke, this was a blind gesture on her part.In herself she walked strong and clear, he knew her, he saluted her, was with her.What was memory after all, but the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been fulfilled？What was Paul Lensky to her, but an unfulfilled possibility to which he, Brangwen, was the reality and the fulfilment？What did it matter, that Anna Lensky was born of Lydia and Paul？God was her father and her mother.He had passed through the married pair without fully making Himself known to them.

Now He was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as they stood together.When at last they had joined hands, the house was finished, and the Lord took up his abode.And they were glad.

The days went on as before, Brangwen went out to his work, his wife nursed her child and attended in some measure to the farm.They did not think of each other-why should they？Only when she touched him, he knew her instantly, that she was with him, near him, that she was the gateway and the way out, that she was beyond, and that he was travelling in her through the beyond.Whither？-What does it matter？He responded always.When she called, he answered, when he asked, her response came at once, or at length.

Anna's soul was put at peace between them.She looked from one to theother, and she saw them established to her safety, and she was free.She played between the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud in confidence, having the assurance on her right hand and the assurance on her left.She was no longer called upon to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch.Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens, and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath, between.第四章　安娜·布朗温的少女时代　Chapter 4　Girlhood of Anna Brangwen导读

安娜九岁时被送进了考斯赛的女子学校，她无拘无束，对于周围的一切都满不在乎。安娜心里总是怀有优越感，对普通人有些蔑视；除了她喜欢的父母亲之外，她不受其他任何人的束缚。在学校里，她没有朋友，总是一个人独行。

安娜有两个弟弟，叫小汤姆和弗莱德。她虽然从不和汤姆一起玩耍，但内心却有着手足之情。对安娜来说，第一个对她有影响的人是斯科列本斯基男爵，他是她母亲的一位朋友。在她十岁时，母亲带着她到男爵那儿玩了几天。男爵身材矮小，脸上布满皱纹，深蓝色的眼睛却炯炯有神；他的妻子出身于波兰贵族家庭，十分傲慢。母亲和他们在一起时，一直用波兰语交谈，在一旁的安娜完全听不懂。安娜一直注视着男爵，她注意到男爵有时愤怒地做手势，并和母亲喋喋不休。她记不清楚男爵为何被赋予奖章，但这些象征性的东西却留给了她印象。在孩子的心中，那些东西是贵族身份的象征。

安娜已经长成了一个大姑娘，身材高挑，黑色的眼睛没有了以前那种敌意的眼神，带着柔和和机灵。这时期的她在诺丁汉的女子学校念书，一直沉浸于成为一名端庄文雅的淑女的幻想之中。起初她以为学校里的女生都很文雅，进入学校后很快便失望了，那里的人总是斤斤计较，这让她很不适应。她不再信任外部世界，也不接纳那些女孩，被其他女生排挤在外。父亲诧异为何安娜从未邀请同学到家里来玩，安娜表示不认同她们的生活方式，也拒绝被家人说服。安娜现在觉得只有在家里才是自由自在的，在马石有着外面寻找不到的气氛。她不知道该如何适应外面的社会，无论是对老师还是同学，她都不能认同。

汤姆·布朗温的言行举止赢得了周围邻居的尊敬，他们都很愿意为他效劳。布朗温太太依然我行我素，家庭成为了她的全部，外面的世界对她而言没有任何吸引力，只有孩子们成绩不好或者被欺负时会惹得她生气。安娜一心想成为高贵的小姐，但家里人的一些缺点让她困扰。布朗温一家有着自己的生活法则，与外部世界几乎隔绝，他们漠视外界的准则，一心只想着农场的生活。安娜十七岁了，喜欢父亲胜过母亲，经常会被母亲的沉默和过于自信气得发疯。安娜变得喜怒无常，有时候会和别人出去，却总是气呼呼地回家。家里的气氛很沉默，大家很少用言语交流，安娜经常会和母亲吵架，求助只能转向父亲。布朗温很担心女儿，全家人都被安娜的反常行为搞得心神不宁。

安娜寻求解脱的方法，她选择定期去做礼拜，不过很快便觉得牧师的布道全是虚伪和庸俗的。在她十八岁那年，艾尔弗雷德夫人来信说儿子威尔即将到马石这边的一家工厂做绘图员。两家关系一直很好，但自从艾尔弗雷德夫人继承了三千英镑之后，便逐渐和布朗温家人疏远了。安娜听说堂兄要过来，有些期待和好奇，因为她从来没有和年轻男子交往过，唯一了解的男人便是自己的父亲。一个星期天的早晨威尔来到了马石，他本性也是只关注自己。出乎安娜的意外，他整个人显得十分自在，丝毫没有约束。父亲对威尔的疼爱和体贴让安娜心里不安，她试图引起父亲的注意，要父亲给自己一些钱去做捐献。安娜从父亲的裤兜里掏出了钱包，从里面拿出了半英镑，最后威尔和她一起出去了，他们一起走向教堂，同行的还有弗莱德。当他们来到教堂后，弗莱德在前面引路，安娜觉得自己成了重要人物，堂兄似乎也有意让其他人知道她。在做礼拜的过程中，威尔不时给安娜一些惊喜。他唱赞美诗是男高音，这让安娜觉得十分有趣，当看到他双膝跪在地上祈祷的模样时，安娜忍不住哈哈大笑起来。整个过程中，安娜一直在大笑，这让弗莱德很纳闷，安娜解释说是因为威尔堂兄的言行举止，在唱诗班的大弟弟汤姆在吃饭时也质问姐姐同样的问题。随后，威尔讲述了自己对教堂和建筑的兴趣。安娜一边听着堂兄的描述，一边在脑海里描绘出那样的场景，突然感受到教堂的神秘和庄严，对堂兄充满了崇拜之情。

威尔时不时地会到马石农庄来，安娜完全被他吸引住了。后来他来得越来越频繁，全家人都很欢迎他。刚开始，威尔的目光一直在叔叔身上，后来转到了婶婶身上，最后索性停留在安娜身上。两个年轻人逐渐有了共同语言，经常离开长辈单独行动。汤姆·布朗温有时候会很讨厌侄子的特立独行，但依然很喜爱他；布朗温太太不喜欢女儿受侄子的影响。威尔激情四射，终于有一天晚上亲吻了安娜。他平时喜欢雕刻，送给安娜的第一个作品是刻着凤凰的印章。他们经常在一起，但仍然保持着一段距离，最多只是用亲吻表达自己的感情。

八月份的一个晚上，威尔从外面回来时被雨淋湿了，一到家里便坐着和叔叔婶婶聊起天来，这让安娜很生气。因为她现在只想单独和威尔在一起，只想抚摸着他。安娜故意拿起马灯，希望堂兄能够和自己一起出去看老鼠洞是否堵住了，可父亲认为安娜没必要过去，安娜并不理会，扔下在一旁气得满脸通红的父亲。他们两个人来到阁楼里，安娜紧紧地抱住了威尔，她向堂兄表达着自己的爱意；两个人紧紧地拥抱在一起，仿佛要融为一体。汤姆·布朗温坐不住了，他看到阁楼里两个年轻人在一起的影子，心里一阵郁闷和愤怒。他想起从前妻子生小汤姆的那个晚上，自己抱着小安娜在谷仓的情景，他受不了安娜如今想要逃离自己，惧怕自己已经老去。威尔没有和叔叔婶婶打招呼便直接回去了，安娜向他表白的话语一遍遍地在脑海里重复着，他不敢去想她那迷人的面孔，努力抑制住内心的热情。

两个年轻人相互之间默默不语，汤姆·布朗温闷闷不乐，布朗温太太依然沉浸于自己的世界之中。在秋天的一个晚上，两个年轻人不想回家，安娜提议去堆麦秸秆。他们穿过麦茬地，开始一起劳动。太阳已经下山，月亮变得越来越清澈，两个人你来我往地拎着麦秸捆，两人之间始终保持着一段距离。终于两人都到了麦秸堆旁边，威尔一把将安娜拉进了怀里，他亲吻着安娜，整个人处于兴奋的状态之中。安娜渐渐地沉醉于其中，他们互相亲吻着对方，紧紧地拥抱在夜色中，这样的场景让威尔感动得差点流下眼泪。安娜突然抽出身子，说想要回家，这让威尔束手无策，他们一起走着，威尔向安娜求婚，当天晚上便直接找到了叔叔婶婶，提出了自己的想法。布朗温太太认为威尔目前没有经济实力，汤姆·布朗温也不同意女儿和侄子的婚事。威尔带着沮丧回去了，不过他并没有打消和安娜结婚的念头。

第二天早晨，汤姆·布朗温找到了女儿，大声质问她为何要结婚，安娜坚持自己的想法，甚至指出汤姆并不是自己的亲生父亲。布朗温受到了很大的打击，安娜认为父母阻止自己和堂兄结婚的唯一理由就是因为堂兄没有金钱和地位。威尔在诺丁汉喝得酩酊大醉回来的那个晚上，叔叔布朗温将2500英镑安娜的嫁妆亲自送到他手里，威尔很冷漠，把钱交给了安娜。安娜拿到钱后大哭了一天，十分后悔当初自己对父亲的言行。布朗温抱着女儿，想到自己有妻子，为何还要抓住这个年轻的女儿，虽然过去女儿是依赖自己的，但她总有一天要拥有自己的家庭，自己的生活。布朗温看着自己依然美丽的妻子，想到自己的丑陋和贪婪，想到了自己的家庭和母亲，痛恨自己反对安娜结婚的念头。布朗温回想自己的生活，似乎真的没什么可炫耀的，只有妻子才是他生活的全部。

威尔把婚期定在圣诞节前的周末，他天天期待着那一天的到来。安娜的热情超过了威尔，她喜欢和威尔在一起，喜欢抚摸着他，他们有时候会在谷仓里拥抱在一起。安娜占有了威尔，这个结实的男人才是她唯一现实的世界。汤姆·布朗温为他们在考斯赛租了一套为期二十一年的房子，房子旁边是教堂，周围的环境和房子的装饰让威尔眼睛睁得雪亮，安娜也兴奋不已。汤姆帮助女儿布置房子，替女儿买来了很多贴心的小玩意，安娜对父亲买的东西十分感兴趣。hen Anna was nine years old, Brangwen sent her to thedames'school in Cossethay.There she went, flipping and Wdancing in her inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked, disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to respectability and by her lack of reverence.Anna only laughed at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronised her in superb, childish fashion.

The girl was at once shy and wild.She had a curious contempt for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority.She was very shy, and tortured with misery when people did not like her.On the other hand, she cared very little for anybody save her mother, whom she still rather resentfully worshipped, and her father, whom she loved and patronised, but upon whom she depended.These two, her mother and father, held her still in fee.But she was free of other people, towards whom, on the whole, she took the benevolent attitude.She deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or arrogance, however.As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof.She could confer favours, but, save from her mother and father, she could receive none.She hated people who came too near to her.Like a wild thing, she wanted her distance.Shemistrusted intimacy.

In Cossethay and Ilkeston she was always an alien.She had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends.Very few people whom she met were significant to her.They seemed part of a herd, undistinguished.She did not take people very seriously.

She had tow brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom she was intimately related to but whom she never mingled with, and Fred, fair and responsive, whom she adored but did not consider as a real, separate thing.She was too much the centre of her own universe, too little aware of anything outside.

The first person she met, who affected her as a real, living person, whom she regarded as having definite existence, was Baron Skrebensky, her mother's friend.He also was a Polish exile, who had taken orders, and had received from Mr.Gladstone a small country living in Yorkshire.

When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother to spend a few days with the Baron Skrebensky.He was very unhappy in his red-brick vicarage.He was vicar of a country church, a living worth a little over two hundred pounds a year, but he had a large parish containing several collieries, with a new, raw, heathen population.He went to the north of England expecting homage from the common people, for he was an aristocrat.He was roughly, even cruelly received.But he never understood it.He remained a fiery aristocrat.Only he had to learn to avoid his parishioners.

Anna was very much impressed by him.He was a smallish man with a rugged, rather crumpled face and blue eyes set very deep and glowing.His wife was a tall thin woman, of noble Polish family, mad with pride.He still spoke broken English, for he had kept very close to his wife, both of them forlorn in this strange, inhospitable country, and they always spoke in Polish together.He was disappointed with Mrs.Brangwen's soft, natural English, very disappointed that her child spoke no Polish.

Anna loved to watch him.She liked the big, new, rambling vicarage, desolate and stark on its hill.It was so exposed, so bleak and bold after the Marsh.The Baron talked endlessly in Polish to Mrs.Brangwen；he made furious gestures with his hands, his blue eyes were full of fire.And to Anna, there was a significance about his sharp, flinging movements.Something in her responded to his extravagance and his exuberant manner.She thought him a very wonderful person.She was shy of him, she liked him to talk to her.She felt a sense of freedom near him.

She never could tell how she knew it, but she did know that he was a knight of Malta.She could never remember whether she had seen his star, or cross, of his order or not, but it flashed in her mind, like a symbol.He at any rate represented to the child the real world, where kings and lords and princes moved and fulfilled their shining lives, whilst queens and ladies and princesses upheld the noble order.

She had recognised the Baron Skrebensky as a real person, he had had some regard for her.But when she did not see him any more, he faded and became a memory.But as a memory he was always alive to her.

Anna became a tall, awkward girl.Her eyes were still very dark and quick, but they had grown careless, they had lost their watchful, hostile look.Her fierce, spun hair turned brown, it grew heavier and was tied back.She was sent to a young ladies'school in Nottingham.

And at this period she was absorbed in becoming a young lady.She was intelligent enough, but not interested in learning.At first, she thought all the girls at school very ladylike and wonderful, and she wanted to be like them.She came to a speedy disillusion：they galled and maddened her, they were petty and mean.After the loose, generous atmosphere of her home, where little things did not count, she was always uneasy in the world, that would snap and bite at every trifle.

A quick change came over her.She mistrusted herself, she mistrusted the outer world.She did not want to go on, she did not want to go out into it, she wanted to go no further.

“What do I care about that lot of girls？”she would say to her father, contemptuously；“they are nobody.”

The trouble was that the girls would not accept Anna at her measure.They would have her according to themselves or not at all.So she was confused, seduced, she became as they were for a time, and then, in revulsion, she hated them furiously.

“Why don't you ask some of your girls here？”her father would say.

“They're not coming here，”she cried.

“And why not？”

“They're bagatelle，”she said, using one of her mother's rare phrases.

“Bagatelles or billiards, it makes no matter, they're nice young lasses enough.”

But Anna was not to be won over.She had a curious shrinking from commonplace people, and particularly from the young lady of her day.She would not go into company because of the ill-at-ease feeling other people brought upon her.And she never could decide whether it were her fault or theirs.She half respected these other people, and continuous disillusion maddened her.She wanted to respect them.Still she thought the people she did not know were wonderful.Those she knew seemed always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that irritated her beyond bearing.She would rather stay at home and avoid the rest of the world, leaving it illusory.

For at the Marsh life had indeed a certain freedom and largeness.There was no fret about money, no mean little precedence, nor care for what other people thought, because neither Mrs.Brangwen nor Brangwen could be sensible of any judgment passed on them from outside.Their lives were too separate.

So Anna was only easy at home, where the common sense and the supreme relation between her parents produced a freer standard of being than she could find outside.Where, outside the Marsh, could she find the tolerant dignity she had been brought up in？Her parents stood undiminished and unaware of criticism.The people she met outside seemed to begrudge her her very existence.They seemed to want to belittle her also.She was exceedingly reluctant to go amongst them.She depended upon her mother and her father.And yet she wanted to go out.

At school, or in the world, she was usually at fault, she felt usually that she ought to be slinking in disgrace.She never felt quite sure, in herself, whether she were wrong, or whether the others were wrong.She had not done her lessons：well, she did not see any reason why she should do her lessons, if she did not want to.Was there some occult reason why she should？Were thesepeople, schoolmistresses, representatives of some mystic Right, some Higher Good？They seemed to think so themselves.But she could not for her life see why a woman should bully and insult her because she did not know thirty lines of As You Like It.After all, what did it matter if she knew them or not？Nothing could persuade her that it was of the slightest importance.Because she despised inwardly the coarsely working nature of the mistress.Therefore she was always at outs with authority.From constant telling, she came almost to believe in her own badness, her own intrinsic inferiority.She felt that she ought always to be in a state of slinking disgrace, if she fulfilled what was expected of her.But she rebelled.She never really believed in her own badness.At the bottom of her heart she despised the other people, who carped and were loud over trifles.She despised them, and wanted revenge on them.She hated them whilst they had power over her.

Still she kept an ideal：a free, proud lady absolved from the petty ties, existing beyond petty considerations.She would see such ladies in pictures：Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was one of her models.This lady was proud and royal, and stepped indifferently over all small, mean desires：so thought Anna, in her heart.And the girl did up her hair high under a little slanting hat, her skirts were fashionably bunched up, she wore an elegant, skin-fitting coat.

Her father was delighted.Anna was very proud in her bearing, too naturally indifferent to smaller bonds to satisfy Ilkeston, which would have liked to put her down.But Brangwen was having no such thing.If she chose to be royal, royal she should be.He stood like a rock between her and the world.

After the fashion of his family, he grew stout and handsome.His blue eyes were full of light, twinkling and sensitive, his manner was deliberate, but hearty, warm.His capacity for living his own life without attention from his neighbours made them respect him.They would run to do anything for him.He did not consider them, but was open-handed towards them, so they made profit of their willingness.He liked people, so long as they remained in the background.

Mrs.Brangwen went on in her own way, following her own devices.She had her husband, her two sons and Anna.These staked out and marked her horizon.The other people were outsiders.Inside her own world, her life passedalong like a dream for her, it lapsed, and she lived within its lapse, active and always pleased, intent.She scarcely noticed the outer things at all.What was outside was outside, non-existent.She did not mind if the boys fought, so long as it was out of her presence.But if they fought when she was by, she was angry, and they were afraid of her.She did not care if they broke a window of a railway carriage or sold their watches to have a revel at the Goose Fair.Brangwen was perhaps angry over these things.To the mother they were insignificant.It was odd little things that offended her.She was furious if the boys hung around the slaughter-house, she was displeased when the school reports were bad.It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused of, so long as they were not stupid, or inferior.If they seemed to brook insult, she hated them.And it was only a certain gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her against the girl.Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother's eyes glow with curious rage.Otherwise she was pleased, indifferent.

Pursuing her splendid-lady ideal, Anna became a lofty demoiselle of sixteen, plagued by family shortcomings.She was very sensitive to her father.She knew if he had been drinking, were he ever so little affected, and she could not bear it.He flushed when he drank, the veins stood out on his temples, there was a twinkling, cavalier boisterousness in his eye, his manner was jovially overbearing and mocking.And it angered her.When she heard his loud, roaring, boisterous mockery, an anger of resentment filled her.She was quick to forestall him, the moment he came in.

“You look a sight, you do, red in the face，”she cried.

“I might look worse if I was green，”he answered.

“Boozing in Ilkeston.”

“And what's wrong wi'Il'son？”

She flounced away.He watched her with amused, twinkling eyes, yet in spite of himself said that she flouted him.

They were a curious family, a law to themselves, separate from the world, isolated, a small republic set in invisible bounds.The mother was quite indifferent to Ilkeston and Cossethay, to any claims made on her from outside, she was very shy of any outsider, exceedingly courteous, winning even.But themoment the visitor had gone, she laughed and dismissed him, he did not exist.It had been all a game to her.She was still a foreigner, unsure of her ground.But alone with her own children and husband at the Marsh, she was mistress of a little native land that lacked nothing.

She had some beliefs somewhere, never defined.She had been brought up a Roman Catholic.She had gone to the Church of England for protection.The outward form was a matter of indifference to her.Yet she had some fundamental religion.It was as if she worshipped God as a mystery, never seeking in the least to define what He was.

And inside her, the subtle sense of the Great Absolute wherein she had her being was very strong.The English dogma never reached her：the language was too foreign.Through it all she felt the great Separator who held life in His hands, gleaming, imminent, terrible, the Great Mystery, immediate beyond all telling.

She shone and gleamed to the Mystery, Whom she knew through all her senses, she glanced with strange, mystic superstitions that never found expression in the English language, never mounted to thought in English.But so she lived, within a potent, sensuous belief that included her family and contained her destiny.

To this she had reduced her husband.He existed with her entirely indifferent to the general values of the world.Her very ways, the very mark of her eyebrows were symbols and indication to him.There, on the farm with her, he lived through a mystery of life and death and creation, strange, profound ecstasies and incommunicable satisfactions, of which the rest of the world knew nothing；which made the pair of them apart and respected in the English village, for they were also well-to-do.

But Anna was only half safe within her mother's unthinking knowledge.She had a mother-of-pearl rosary that had been her own father's.What it meant to her she could never say.But the string of moonlight and silver, when she had it between her fingers, filled her with strange passion.She learned at school a little Latin, she learned an Ave Maria and a Pater Noster, she learned how to say her rosary.But that was no good.“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus.Ave Maria, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, Amen.”

It was not right, somehow.What these words meant when translated was not the same as the pale rosary meant.There was a discrepancy, a falsehood.It irritated her to say，“Dominus tecum，”or，“benedicta tu in mulieribus.”She loved the mystic words，“Ave Maria, Sancta Maria；”she was moved by“benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus，”and by“nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.”But none of it was quite real.It was not satisfactory, somehow.

She avoided her rosary, because, moving her with curious passion as it did, it meant only these not very significant things.She put it away.It was her instinct to put all these things away.It was her instinct to avoid thinking, to avoid it, to save herself.

She was seventeen, touchy, full of spirits, and very moody：quick to flush, and always uneasy, uncertain.For some reason or other, she turned more to her father, she felt almost flashes of hatred for her mother.Her mother's dark muzzle and curiously insidious ways, her mother's utter surety and confidence, her strange satisfaction, even triumph, her mother's way of laughing at things and her mother's silent overriding of vexatious propositions, most of all her mother's triumphant power maddened the girl.

She became sudden and incalculable.Often she stood at the

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