The Rainbow

Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And

dark, violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he

doing, sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?

She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick

up her glove, she groped among his feet.

He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would

have pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what

was amiss, what he had been doing.

As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the

chill of antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so

angry. But she was incensed.

"Why do you never listen to the sermon?" she asked, seething

with hostility and violation.

"I do," he said.

"You don't--you don't hear a single word."

He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There

was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld

refuge. The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he

was like this.

After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the

same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to

her. Then he went to the book-shelf and took down books to look

at, that she had scarcely glanced over.

He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old

missals, and then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian,

English, French and German. He had, when he was sixteen,

discovered a Roman Catholic bookshop where he could find such

things.

He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not

thinking. He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she

said of him later.

She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated

her. She was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic.

It was when she came to pictures of the Pieta that she burst

out.

"I do think they're loathsome," she cried.

"What?" he said, surprised, abstracted.

"Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be

worshipped."

"You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread," he said

slowly.

"Does it," she cried. "Then it's worse. I don't want to see

your chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it

to me. Can't you see it's horrible?"

"It isn't me, it's Christ."

"What if it is, it's you! And it's horrible, you wallowing in

your own dead body, and thinking of eating it in the

Sacrament."

"You've to take it for what it means."

"It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and

then worshipped--what else?"

They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof.

"And I think that lamb in Church," she said, "is the biggest

joke in the parish----"

She burst into a "Pouf" of ridiculing laughter.