during the first year of her marriage, before ursula was born, anna brangwen and her husband went to visit her mother’s friend, the baron skrebensky. the latter had kept a slight connection with anna’s mother, and had always preserved some officious interest in the young girl, because she was a pure pole.
when baron skrebensky was about forty years old, his wife died, and left him raving, disconsolate. lydia had visited him then, taking anna with her. it was when the girl was fourteen years old. since then she had not seen him. she remembered him as a small sharp clergyman who cried and talked and terrified her, whilst her mother was most strangely consoling, in a foreign language.
the little baron never quite approved of anna, because she spoke no polish. still, he considered himself in some way her guardian, on lensky’s behalf, and he presented her with some old, heavy russian jewellery, the least valuable of his wife’s relics. then he lapsed out of the brangwen’s life again, though he lived only about thirty miles away.
three years later came the startling news that he had married a young english girl of good family. everybody marvelled. then came a copy of “the history of the parish of briswell, by rudolph, baron skrebensky, vicar of briswell.” it was a curious book, incoherent, full of interesting exhumations. it was dedicated: “to my wife, millicent maud pearse, in whom i embrace the generous spirit of england.”
“if he embraces no more than the spirit of england,” said tom brangwen, “it’s a bad look-out for him.”
but paying a formal visit with his wife, he found the new baroness a little, creamy-skinned, insidious thing with red-brown hair and a mouth that one must always watch, because it curved back continually in an incomprehensible, strange laugh that exposed her rather prominent teeth. she was not beautiful, yet tom brangwen was immediately under her spell. she seemed to snuggle like a kitten within his warmth, whilst she was at the same time elusive and ironical, suggesting the fine steel of her claws.
the baron was almost dotingly courteous and attentive to her. she, almost mockingly, yet quite happy, let him dote. curious little thing she was, she had the soft, creamy, elusive beauty of a ferret. tom brangwen was quite at a loss, at her mercy, and she laughed, a little breathlessly, as if tempted to cruelty. she did put fine torments on the elderly baron.
when some months later she bore a son, the baron skrebensky was loud with delight.
gradually she gathered a circle of acquaintances in the county. for she was of good family, half venetian, educated in dresden. the little foreign vicar attained to a social status which almost satisfied his maddened pride.m
therefore the brangwens were surprised when the invitation came for anna and her young husband to pay a visit to briswell vicarage. for the skrebenskys were now moderately well off, millicent skrebensky having some fortune of her own.
anna took her best clothes, recovered her best high-school manner, and arrived with her husband. will brangwen, ruddy, bright, with long limbs and a small head, like some uncouth bird, was not changed in the least. the little baroness was smiling, showing her teeth. she had a real charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel. anna at once respected her, and was on her guard before her, instinctively attracted by the strange, childlike surety of the baroness, yet mistrusting it, fascinated. the little baron was now quite white-haired, very brittle. he was wizened and wrinkled, yet fiery, unsubdued. anna looked at his lean body, at his small, fine lean legs and lean hands as he sat talking, and she flushed. she recognised the quality of the male in him, his lean, concentrated age, his informed fire, his faculty for sharp, deliberate response. he was so detached, so purely objective. a woman was thoroughly outside him. there was no confusion. so he could give that fine, deliberate response.
he was something separate and interesting; his hard, intrinsic being, whittled down by age to an essentiality and a directness almost death-like, cruel, was yet so unswervingly sure in its action, so distinct in its surety, that she was attracted to him. she watched his cool, hard, separate fire, fascinated by it. would she rather have it than her husband’s diffuse heat, than his blind, hot youth?
she seemed to be breathing high, sharp air, as if she had just come out of a hot room. these strange skrebenskys made her aware of another, freer element, in which each person was detached and isolated. was not this her natural element? was not the close brangwen life stifling her?
meanwhile the little baroness, with always a subtle light stirring of her full, lustrous, hazel eyes, was playing with will brangwen. he was not quick enough to see all her movements. yet he watched her steadily, with unchanging, lit-up eyes. she was a strange creature to him. but she had no power over him. she flushed, and was irritated. yet she glanced again and again at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she despised him. she despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had nothing for her. yet it angered her as if she were jealous. he watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. but he himself was not implicated. he was different in kind. she was all lambent, biting flames, he was a red fire glowing steadily. she could get nothing out of him. so she made him flush darkly by assuming a biting, subtle class-superiority. he flushed, but still he did not object. he was too different.
her little boy came in with the nurse. he was a quick, slight child, with fine preceptiveness, and a cool transitoriness in his interest. at once he treated will brangwen as an outsider. he stayed by anna for a moment, acknowledged her, then was gone again, quick, observant, restless, with a glance of interest at everything.
the father adored him, and spoke to him in polish. it was queer, the stiff, aristocratic manner of the father with the child, the distance in the relationship, the classic fatherhood on the one hand, the filial subordination on the other. they played together, in their different degrees very separate, two different beings, differing as it were in rank rather than in relationship. and the baroness smiled, smiled, smiled, always smiled, showing her rather protruding teeth, having always a mysterious attraction and charm.
anna realised how different her own life might have been, how different her own living. her soul stirred, she became as another person. her intimacy with her husband passed away, the curious enveloping brangwen intimacy, so warm, so close, so stifling, when one seemed always to be in contact with the other person, like a blood-relation, was annulled. she denied it, this close relationship with her young husband. he and she were not one. his heat was not always to suffuse her, suffuse her, through her mind and her individuality, till she was of one heat with him, till she had not her own self apart. she wanted her own life. he seemed to lap her and suffuse her with his being, his hot life, till she did not know whether she were herself, or whether she were another creature, united with him in a world of close blood-intimacy that closed over her and excluded her from all the cool outside.
she wanted her own, old, sharp self, detached, detached, active but not absorbed, active for her own part, taking and giving, but never absorbed. whereas he wanted this strange absorption with her, which still she resisted. but she was partly helpless against it. she had lived so long in tom brangwen’s love, beforehand.
from the skrebensky’s, they went to will brangwen’s beloved lincoln cathedral, because it was not far off. he had promised her, that one by one, they should visit all the cathedrals of england. they began with lincoln, which he knew well.
he began to get excited as the time drew near to set off. what was it that changed him so much? she was almost angry, coming as she did from the skrebensky’s. but now he ran on alone. his very breast seemed to open its doors to watch for the great church brooding over the town. his soul ran ahead.
when he saw the cathedral in the distance, dark blue lifted watchful in the sky, his heart leapt. it was the sign in heaven, it was the spirit hovering like a dove, like an eagle over the earth. he turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange, ecstatic grin.
“there she is,” he said.
the “she” irritated her. why “she”? it was “it”. what was the cathedral, a big building, a thing of the past, obsolete, to excite him to such a pitch? she began to stir herself to readiness.
they passed up the steep hill, he eager as a pilgrim arriving at the shrine. as they came near the precincts, with castle on one side and cathedral on the other, his veins seemed to break into fiery blossom, he was transported.
they had passed through the gate, and the great west front was before them, with all its breadth and ornament.
“it is a false front,” he said, looking at the golden stone and the twin towers, and loving them just the same. in a little ecstasy he found himself in the porch, on the brink of the unrevealed. he looked up to the lovely unfolding of the stone. he was to pass within to the perfect womb.
then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. his soul leapt, soared up into the great church. his body stood still, absorbed by the height. his soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.
she too was overcome with wonder and awe. she followed him in his progress. here, the twilight was the very essence of life, the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day. here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life’s day would blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound immemorial silence.
away from time, always outside of time! between east and west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before germination, silenced after death. containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle of silence. spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts, the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will embrace again.
here in the church, “before” and “after” were folded together, all was contained in oneness. brangwen came to his consummation. out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light. through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after death. then between-while he had pushed open the doors of the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the beginning and the end were one.
here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. there his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated.
and there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met the thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of ecstasy. this was all, this was everything. till he came to himself in the world below. then again he gathered himself together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.
she too was overcome, but silenced rather than tuned to the place. she loved it as a world not quite her own, she resented his transports and ecstasies. his passion in the cathedral at first awed her, then made her angry. after all, there was the sky outside, and in here, in this mysterious half-night, when his soul leapt with the pillars upwards, it was not to the stars and the crystalline dark space, but to meet and clasp with the answering impulse of leaping stone, there in the dusk and secrecy of the roof. the far-off clinching and mating of the arches, the leap and thrust of the stone, carrying a great roof overhead, awed and silenced her.
but yet-yet she remembered that the open sky was no blue vault, no dark dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a space where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above them always higher.
the cathedral roused her too. but she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the ultimate confine. his soul would have liked it to be so: here, here is all, complete, eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no illusion of time, of night and day passing by, but only perfectly proportioned space and movement clinching and renewing, and passion surging its way into great waves to the altar, recurrence of ecstasy.
her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the threshold of eternity, in reverence and fear and joy. but ever she hung back in the transit, mistrusting the culmination of the altar. she was not to be flung forward on the lift and lift of passionate flights, to be cast at last upon the altar steps as upon the shore of the unknown. there was a great joy and a verity in it. but even in the dazed swoon of the cathedral, she claimed another right. the altar was barren, its lights gone out. god burned no more in that bush. it was dead matter lying there. she claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. she had always a sense of being roofed in.
so that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the infinite in a great mass, triumphant and flinging its own course. she wanted to get out of this fixed, leaping, forward-travelling movement, to rise from it as a bird rises with wet, limp feet from the sea, to lift herself as a bird lifts its breast and thrusts its body from the pulse and heave of a sea that bears it forward to an unwilling conclusion, tear herself away like a bird on wings, and in open space where there is clarity, rise up above the fixed, surcharged motion, a separate speck that hangs suspended, moves this way and that, seeing and answering before it sinks again, having chosen or found the direction in which it shall be carried forward.
and it was as if she must grasp at something, as if her wings were too weak to lift her straight off the heaving motion. so she caught sight of the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.
these sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. they knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. they winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church. “however much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in,” the little faces mocked.
apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very littleness.
“oh, look!” cried anna. “oh, look how adorable, the faces! look at her.”
brangwen looked unwillingly. this was the voice of the serpent in his eden. she pointed him to a plump, sly, malicious little face carved in stone.
“he knew her, the man who carved her,” said anna. “i’m sure she was his wife.”
“it isn’t a woman at all, it’s a man,” said brangwen curtly.
“do you think so?-no! that isn’t a man. that is no man’s face.”
her voice sounded rather jeering. he laughed shortly, and went on. but she would not go forward with him. she loitered about the carvings. and he could not go forward without her. he waited impatient of this counteraction. she was spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral. his brows began to gather.
“oh, this is good!” she cried again. “here is the same woman-look!-only he’s made her cross! isn’t it lovely! hasn’t he made her hideous to a degree?” she laughed with pleasure. “didn’t he hate her? he must have been a nice man! look at her-isn’t it awfully good-just like a shrewish woman. he must have enjoyed putting her in like that. he got his own back on her, didn’t he?”
“it’s a man’s face, no woman’s at all-a monk’s-clean shaven,” he said.
she laughed with a pouf! of laughter.
“you hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don’t you?” she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. and she laughed with malicious triumph.
she had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion he had. she was glad. he was bitterly angry. strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. he was disillusioned. that which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter-but dead, dead.
his mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. he hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. soon he would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand, without one belief in which to rest.
yet somewhere in him he responded more deeply to the sly little face that knew better, than he had done before to the perfect surge of his cathedral.
nevertheless for the time being his soul was wretched and homeless, and he could not bear to think of anna’s ousting him from his beloved realities. he wanted his cathedral; he wanted to satisfy his blind passion. and he could not any more. something intervened.
they went home again, both of them altered. she had some new reverence for that which he wanted, he felt that his cathedrals would never again be to him as they had been. before, he had thought them absolute. but now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless confusion.
he had felt, before, that could he but go through the great door and look down the gloom towards the far-off, concluding wonder of the altar, that then, with the windows suspended around like tablets of jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything must move on to eternity.
but now, somehow, sadly and disillusioned, he realised that the doorway was no doorway. it was too narrow, it was false. outside the cathedral were many flying spirits that could never be sifted through the jewelled gloom. he had lost his absolute.
he listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. he crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
there was life outside the church. there was much that the church did not include. he thought of god, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. that was something great and free. he thought of the ruins of the grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.
still he loved the church. as a symbol, he loved it. he tended it for what it tried to represent, rather than for that which it did represent. still he loved it. the little church across his garden-wall drew him, he gave it loving attention. but he went to take charge of it, to preserve it. it was as an old, sacred thing to him. he looked after the stone and woodwork, mending the organ and restoring a piece of broken carving, repairing the church furniture. later, he became choir-master also.
his life was shifting its centre, becoming more superficial. he had failed to become really articulate, failed to find real expression. he had to continue in the old form. but in spirit, he was uncreated.
anna was absorbed in the child now, she left her husband to take his own way. she was willing now to postpone all adventure into unknown realities. she had the child, her palpable and immediate future was the child. if her soul had found no utterance, her womb had.
the church that neighboured with his house became very intimate and dear to him. he cherished it, he had it entirely in his charge. if he could find no new activity, he would be happy cherishing the old, dear form of worship. he knew this little, whitewashed church. in its shadowy atmosphere he sank back into being. he liked to sink himself in its hush as a stone sinks into water.
he went across his garden, mounted the wall by the little steps, and entered the hush and peace of the church. as the heavy door clanged to behind him, his feet re-echoed in the aisle, his heart re-echoed with a little passion of tenderness and mystic peace. he was also slightly ashamed, like a man who has failed, who lapses back for his fulfilment.
he loved to light the candles at the organ, and sitting there alone in the little glow, practise the hymns and chants for the service. the whitewashed arches retreated into darkness, the sound of the organ and the organ-pedals died away upon the unalterable stillness of the church, there were faint, ghostly noises in the tower, and then the music swelled out again, loudly, triumphantly.
he ceased to fret about his life. he relaxed his will, and let everything go. what was between him and his wife was a great thing, if it was not everything. she had conquered, really. let him wait, and abide, wait and abide. she and the baby and himself, they were one. the organ rang out his protestation. his soul lay in the darkness as he pressed the keys of the organ.
to anna, the baby was a complete bliss and fulfilment. her desires sank into abeyance, her soul was in bliss over the baby. it was rather a delicate child, she had trouble to rear it. she never for a moment thought it would die. it was a delicate infant, therefore it behoved her to make it strong. she threw herself into the labour, the child was everything. her imagination was all occupied here. she was a mother. it was enough to handle the new little limbs, the new little body, hear the new little voice crying in the stillness. all the future rang to her out of the sound of the baby’s crying and cooing, she balanced the coming years of life in her hands, as she nursed the child. the passionate sense of fulfilment, of the future germinated in her, made her vivid and powerful. all the future was in her hands, in the hands of the woman. and before this baby was ten months old, she was again with child. she seemed to be in the fecund of storm life, every moment was full and busy with productiveness to her. she felt like the earth, the mother of everything.
brangwen occupied himself with the church, he played the organ, he trained the choir-boys, he taught a sunday-school class of youths. he was happy enough. there was an eager, yearning kind of happiness in him as he taught the boys on sundays. he was all the time exciting himself with the proximity of some secret that he had not yet fathomed.
in the house, he served his wife and the little matriarchy. she loved him because he was the father of her children. and she always had a physical passion for him. so he gave up trying to have the spiritual superiority and control, or even her respect for his conscious or public life. he lived simply by her physical love for him. and he served the little matriarchy, nursing the child and helping with the housework, indifferent any more of his own dignity and importance. but his abandoning of claims, his living isolated upon his own interest, made him seem unreal, unimportant.
anna was not publicly proud of him. but very soon she learned to be indifferent to public life. he was not what is called a manly man: he did not drink or smoke or arrogate importance. but he was her man, and his very indifference to all claims of manliness set her supreme in her own world with him. physically, she loved him and he satisfied her. he went alone and subsidiary always. at first it had irritated her, the outer world existed so little to him. looking at him with outside eyes, she was inclined to sneer at him. but her sneer changed to a sort of respect. she respected him, that he could serve her so simply and completely. above all, she loved to bear his children. she loved to be the source of children.
she could not understand him, his strange, dark rages and his devotion to the church. it was the church building he cared for; and yet his soul was passionate for something. he laboured cleaning the stonework, repairing the woodwork, restoring the organ, and making the singing as perfect as possible. to keep the church fabric and the church-ritual intact was his business; to have the intimate sacred building utterly in his own hands, and to make the form of service complete. there was a little bright anguish and tension on his face, and in his intent movements. he was like a lover who knows he is betrayed, but who still loves, whose love is only the more intense. the church was false, but he served it the more attentively.
during the day, at his work in the office, he kept himself suspended. he did not exist. he worked automatically till it was time to go home.
he loved with a hot heart the dark-haired little ursula, and he waited for the child to come to consciousness. now the mother monopolised the baby. but his heart waited in its darkness. his hour would come.
in the long run, he learned to submit to anna. she forced him to the spirit of her laws, whilst leaving him the letter of his own. she combated in him his devils. she suffered very much from his inexplicable and incalculable dark rages, when a blackness filled him, and a black wind seemed to sweep out of existence everything that had to do with him. she could feel herself, everything, being annihilated by him.
at first she fought him. at night, in this state, he would kneel down to say his prayers. she looked at his crouching figure.
“why are you kneeling there, pretending to pray?” she said, harshly. “do you think anybody can pray, when they are in the vile temper you are in?”
he remained crouching by the beside, motionless.
“it’s horrible,” she continued, “and such a pretence! what do you pretend you are saying? who do you pretend you are praying to?”
he still remained motionless, seething with inchoate rage, when his whole nature seemed to disintegrate. he seemed to live with a strain upon himself, and occasionally came these dark, chaotic rages, the lust for destruction. she then fought with him, and their fights were horrible, murderous. and then the passion between them came just as black and awful.
but little by little, as she learned to love him better, she would put herself aside, and when she felt one of his fits upon him, would ignore him, successfully leave him in his world, whilst she remained in her own. he had a black struggle with himself, to come back to her. for at last he learned that he would be in hell until he came back to her. so he struggled to submit to her, and she was afraid of the ugly strain in his eyes. she made love to him, and took him. then he was grateful to her love, humble.
he made himself a woodwork shed, in which to restore things which were destroyed in the church. so he had plenty to do: his wife, his child, the church, the woodwork, and his wage-earning, all occupying him. if only there were not some limit to him, some darkness across his eyes! he had to give in to it at last himself. he must submit to his own inadequacy, aware of some limit to himself, of something unformed in his own black, violent temper, and to reckon with it. but as she was more gentle with him, it became quieter.
as he sat sometimes very still, with a bright, vacant face, anna could see the suffering among the brightness. he was aware of some limit to himself, of something unformed in his very being, of some buds which were not ripe in him, some folded centres of darkness which would never develop and unfold whilst he was alive in the body. he was unready for fulfilment. something undeveloped in him limited him, there was a darkness in him which he could not unfold, which would never unfold in him.
