The Rainbow | Page 2

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 own scope 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 take precedence 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?