The Rainbow

It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of

the Church the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was

intimately mixed up with the thought of her own self. Indeed,

her soul and her own self were one and the same in her. Whereas

he seemed simply to ignore the fact of his own self, almost to

refute it. He had a soul--a dark, inhuman thing caring

nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in the gloom and

the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free, like some

strange, underground thing, abstract.

He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in

conceiving himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free

of her. In a way, she envied it him, this dark freedom and

jubilation of the soul, some strange entity in him. It

fascinated her. Again she hated it. And again, she despised him,

wanted to destroy it in him.

This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside

her, not aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to

strange, secret places the love that sprang in him for her. He

sat with a dark-rapt, half-delighted face, looking at a little

stained window. She saw the ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow

heaped along the bottom from the snow outside, and the familiar

yellow figure of the lamb holding the banner, a little darkened

now, but in the murky interior strangely luminous, pregnant.

She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The

lamb, looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a

forepaw, in the cleft of which was dangerously perched a little

flag with a red cross. Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish

shadows. Since she was a child she had liked this creature, with

the same feeling she felt for the little woolly lambs on green

legs that children carried home from the fair every year. She

had always liked these toys, and she had the same amused,

childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always been

uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag

did not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted

it, there was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.

Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the

faintest tension of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the

uncomfortable feeling that he was in correspondence with the

creature, the lamb in the window. A cold wonder came over

her--her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,

timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was

he doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in

the glass?

Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag.

Suddenly she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the

tradition seized on her, she was transported to another world.

And she hated it, resisted it.