The Rainbow

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 agonized 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. But Brangwen winced and could not bear to think of the

deed, not even long after, when he was a grown man.