So that the buds shrivelled from her confidence, she was chilled. She went down to the Marsh.
‘Well,’ said her father, looking at her and seeing her at the first glance, ‘what’s amiss wi’ you now?’
The tears came at the touch of his careful love.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Can’t you hit it off, you two?’ he said.
‘He’s so obstinate,’ she quivered; but her soul was obdurate itself.
‘Ay, an’ I know another who’s all that,’ said her father.
She was silent.
‘You don’t want to make yourselves miserable,’ said her father; ‘all about nowt.’
‘He isn’t miserable,’ she said.
‘I’ll back my life, if you can do nowt else, you can make him as miserable as a dog. You’d be a dab hand at that, my lass.’
‘I do nothing to make him miserable,’ she retorted.
‘Oh no—oh no! A packet o’ butterscotch, you are.’
She laughed a little.
‘You mustn’t think I want to be miserable,’ she cried. ‘I don’t.’
‘We quite readily believe it,’ retorted Brangwen. ‘Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.’
This made her think. She was rather surprised to find that she did not intend her husband to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.
Her mother came, and they all sat down to tea, talking casually.
‘Remember, child,’ said her mother, ‘that everything is not waiting for your hand just to take or leave. You mustn’t expect it. Between two people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to be just your way.’
‘Ha—nor do I. If I did I should soon find my mistake out. If I put my hand out to take anything, my hand is very soon bitten, I can tell you.’
‘Then you must mind where you put your hand,’ said her father.
Anna was rather indignant that they took the tragedy of her young married life with such equanimity.
‘You love the man right enough,’ said her father, wrinkling his forehead in distress. ‘That’s all as counts.’
‘I do love him, more shame to him,’ she cried. ‘I want to tell him—I’ve been waiting for four days now to tell him—’ her face began to quiver, the tears came. Her parents watched her in silence. She did not go on.
‘Tell him what?’ said her father.
‘That we’re going to have an infant,’ she sobbed, ‘and he’s never, never let me, not once, every time I’ve come to him, he’s been horrid to me, and I wanted to tell him, I did. And he won’t let me—he’s cruel to me.’
She sobbed as if her heart would break. Her mother went and comforted her, put her arms round her, and held her close. Her father sat with a queer, wrinkled brow, and was rather paler than usual. His heart went tense with hatred of his son-in-law.
So that, when the tale was sobbed out, and comfort administered and tea sipped, and something like calm restored to the little circle, the thought of Will Brangwen’s entry was not pleasantly entertained.
Tilly was set to watch out for him as he passed by on his way home. The little party at table heard the woman-servant’s shrill call:
‘You’ve got to come in, Will. Anna’s here.’
After a few moments, the youth entered.
‘Are you stopping?’ he asked in his hard, harsh voice.
He seemed like a blade of destruction standing there. She quivered to tears.
‘Sit you down,’ said Tom Brangwen, ‘an’ take a bit off your length.’
Will Brangwen sat down. He felt something strange in the atmosphere. He was dark browed, but his eyes had the keen, intent, sharp look, as if he could only see in the distance; which was a beauty in him, and which made Anna so angry.
‘Why does he always deny me?’ she said to herself. ‘Why is it nothing to him, what I am?’
And Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth.
‘How long are you stopping?’ the young husband asked his wife.
‘Not very long,’ she said.
‘Get your tea, lad,’ said Tom Brangwen. ‘Are you itchin’ to be off the moment you enter?’
They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her wattles made an oriflamme* tossed here and there, as she went, her grey body was like a ghost.
Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off things.
‘Where was I born, mother?’ she asked.
‘In London.’
‘And was my father’—she spoke of him as if he were merely a strange name: she could never connect herself with him—‘was he dark?’
‘He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring. He went bald, rather bald, when he was quite young,’ replied the mother, also as if telling a tale which was just old imagination.
‘Was he good-looking?’
‘Yes—he was very good-looking—rather small. I have never seen an Englishman who looked like him.’
‘Why?’
‘He was’—the mother made a quick, running movement with her hands—’his figure was alive and changing—it was never fixed. He was not in the least steady—like a running stream.’
It flashed over the youth—Anna too was like a running stream. Instantly he was in love with her again.
Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with fear, fear of the unknown, when he heard his women speak of their bygone men as of strangers they had known in passing and had taken leave of again.
In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all their hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?
The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in a dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow.
She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight.
‘I think we are going to have an infant, Bill,’ she said, from far off.
He trembled, and his fingers tightened on hers.
‘Why?’ he asked, his heart beating. ‘You don’t know?’
‘I do,’ she said.
They continued without saying any more, walking along opposite horizons, hand in hand across the intervening space, two separate people. And he trembled as if a wind blew on to him in strong gusts, out of the unseen. He was afraid. He was afraid to know he was alone. For she seemed fulfilled and separate and sufficient in her half of the world. He could not bear to know that he was cut off. Why could he not be always one with her? It was he who had given her the child. Why could she not be with him, one with him? Why must he be set in this separateness, why could she not be with him, close, close, as one with him? She must be one with him.
He held her fingers tightly in his own. She did not know what he was thinking. The blaze of light on her heart was too beautiful and dazzling, from the conception in her womb. She walked glorified, and the sound of the thrushes, of the trains in the valley, of the far-off, faint noises of the town, were her ‘Magnificat.’*
But he was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was
as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.
But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her conception, and because she was with child by him.
And she was happy in showers of sunshine. She loved her husband, as a presence, as a grateful condition. But for the moment her need was fulfilled, and now she wanted only to hold her husband by the hand in sheer happiness, without taking thought, only being glad.
He had various folios of reproductions, and among them a cheap print from Fra Angelico’s ‘Entry of the Blessed into Paradise.’* This filled Anna with bliss. The beautiful, innocent way in which the Blessed held each other by the hand as they moved towards the radiance, the real, real, angelic melody, made her weep with happiness. The floweriness, the beams of light, the linking of hands, was almost too much for her, too innocent.
Day after day came shining through the door of Paradise, day after day she entered into the brightness. The child in her shone till she herself was a beam of sunshine; and how lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew-trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows. She was full of a rich drowsiness and loneliness. How happy she was, how gorgeous it was to live: to have known herself, her husband, the passion of love and begetting; and to know that all this lived and waited and burned on around her, a terrible purifying fire, through which she had passed for once to come to this peace of golden radiance, when she was with child, and innocent, and in love with her husband and with all the many angels hand in hand. She lifted her throat to the breeze that came across the fields, and she felt it handling her like sisters fondling her, she drank it in perfume of cowslips and of appleblossoms.
And in all the happiness a black shadow, shy, wild, a beast of prey, roamed and vanished from sight, and like strands of gossamer blown across her eyes, there was a dread for her.
She was afraid when he came home at night. As yet, her fear never spoke, the shadow never rushed upon her. He was gentle, humble, he kept himself withheld. His hands were delicate upon her, and she loved them. But there ran through her the thrill, crisp as pain, for she felt the darkness and other-world still in his soft, sheathed hands.
But the summer drifted in with the silence of a miracle, she was almost always alone. All the while, went on the long, lovely drowsiness, the maidenblush roses in the garden were all shed, washed away in a pouring rain, summer drifted into autumn, and the long, vague, golden day began to close. Crimson clouds fumed about the west, and as night came on, all the sky was fuming and streaming, and the moon, far above the swiftness of vapours, was white, bleared, the night was uneasy. Suddenly the moon would appear at a clear window in the sky, looking down from far above, like a captive. And Anna did not sleep. There was a strange, dark tension about her husband.
She became aware that he was trying to force his will upon her, something, there was something he wanted, as he lay there dark and tense. And her soul sighed in weariness.
Everything was so vague and lovely, and he wanted to wake her up to the hard, hostile reality. She drew back in resistance. Still he said nothing. But she felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. And she wanted so much the joy and the vagueness and the innocence of her pregnancy. She did not want his bitter-corrosive love, she did not want it poured into her, to burn her. Why must she have it? Why, oh why was he not content, contained?
She sat many hours by the window, in those days when he drove her most with the black constraint of his will, and she watched the rain falling on the yew-trees. She was not sad, only wistful, blanched. The child under her heart was a perpetual warmth. And she was sure. The pressure was only upon her from the outside, her soul had no stripes.
Yet in her heart itself was always this same strain, tense, anxious. She was not safe, she was always exposed, she was always attacked. There was a yearning in her for a fulness of peace and blessedness. What a heavy yearning it was—so heavy.
She knew, vaguely, that all the time he was not satisfied, all the time he was trying to force something from her. Ah, how she wished she could succeed with him, in her own way! He was there, so inevitable. She lived in him also. And how she wanted to be at peace with him, at peace. She loved him. She would give him love, pure love. With a strange, rapt look on her face, she awaited his homecoming that night.
Then, when he came, she rose with her hands full of love, as of flowers, radiant, innocent. A dark spasm crossed his face. As she watched, her face shining and flower-like with innocent love, his face grew dark and tense, the cruelty gathered in his brows, his eyes turned aside, she saw the whites of his eyes as he looked aside from her. She waited, touching him with her hands. But from his body through her hands came the bitter-corrosive shock of his passion upon her, destroying her in blossom. She shrank. She rose from her knees and went away from him, to preserve herself. And it was great pain to her.
To him also it was agony. He saw the glistening, flower-like love in her face, and his heart was black because he did not want it. Not this—not this. He did not want flowery innocence. He was unsatisfied. The rage and storm of unsatisfaction tormented him ceaselessly. Why had she not satisfied him? He had satisfied her. She was satisfied, at peace, innocent round the doors of her own paradise.
And he was unsatisfied, unfulfilled, he raged in torment, wanting, wanting. It was for her to satisfy him: then let her do it. Let her not come with flowery handfuls of innocent love. He would throw these aside and trample the flowers to nothing. He would destroy her flowery, innocent bliss. Was he not entitled to satisfaction from her, and was not his heart all raging desire, his soul a black torment of unfulfilment. Let it be fulfilled in him, then, as it was fulfilled in her. He had given her her fulfilment. Let her rise up and do her part.
He was cruel to her. But all the time he was ashamed. And being ashamed, he was more cruel. For he was ashamed that he could not come to fulfilment without her. And he could not. And she would not heed him. He was shackled and in darkness of torment.
She beseeched him to work again, to do his wood-carving. But his soul was too black, He had destroyed his panel of Adam and Eve. He could not begin again, least of all now, whilst he was in this condition.
For her there was no final release, since he could not be liberated from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm. She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on him, because he harried her and wanted to destroy her.
She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations. As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit was somewhere far off.
She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no-one to exult with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced before the Unknown.
Suddenly she realised that this was what she wanted to do. Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged.
She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.
It surprised her, when it was over. She was shrinking and afraid. To what was she now exposed? She half wanted to tell her husband. Yet she shrank from him.
All the time she ran on by herself. She liked the story of David, who dan
ced before the Lord, and uncovered himself exultingly.* Why should he uncover himself to Michal, a common woman? He uncovered himself to the Lord.
‘Thou comest to me with a sword and a spear and a shield, but I come to thee in the name of the Lord:—for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hands.’*
Her heart rang to the words. She walked in her pride. And her battle was her own Lord’s, her husband was delivered over.
In these days she was oblivious of him. Who was he, to come against her? No, he was not even the Philistine, the Giant. He was like Saul proclaiming his own kingship.* She laughed in her heart. Who was he, proclaiming his kingship? She laughed in her heart with pride.
And she had to dance in exultation beyond him. Because he was in the house, she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man. On a Saturday afternoon, when she had a fire in the bedroom, again she took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer. She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lord. She was exalted over him, before the Lord.
She heard him coming up the stairs, and she flinched. She stood with the firelight on her ankles and feet, naked in the shadowy, late afternoon, fastening up her hair. He was startled. He stood in the doorway, his brows black and lowering.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, gratingly. ‘You’ll catch a cold.’
And she lifted her hands and danced again, to annul him, the light glanced on her knees as she made her slow, fine movements down the far side of the room, across the firelight. He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself to the Lord, to exultation.