‘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’ tomorrow 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 Browns 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, and his 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 naïve, 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 cl
ose 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 on him 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 the 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 their wills 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 this pleasant 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 die
d. 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 commonsense 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.