The Rainbow

As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of

the farm devolved on to him. He was only eighteen, but he was

quite capable of doing everything his father had done. And of

course, his mother remained as centre to the house.

The young man grew up very fresh and alert, with zest for

every moment of life. He worked and rode and drove to market, he

went out with companions and got tipsy occasionally and played

skittles and went to the little travelling theatres. Once, when

he was drunk at a public house, he went upstairs with a

prostitute who seduced him. He was then nineteen.

The thing was something of a shock to him. In the close

intimacy of the farm kitchen, the woman occupied the supreme

position. The men deferred to her in the house, on all household

points, on all points of morality and behaviour. The woman was

the symbol for that further life which comprised religion and

love and morality. The men placed in her hands their own

conscience, they said to her "Be my conscience-keeper, be the

angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming." And

the woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly in her,

receiving her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger,

rebelling and storming, but never for a moment really escaping

in their own souls from her prerogative. They depended on her

for their stability. Without her, they would have felt like

straws in the wind, to be blown hither and thither at random.

She was the anchor and the security, she was the restraining

hand of God, at times highly to be execrated.

Now when Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, a youth fresh like a

plant, rooted in his mother and his sister, found that he had

lain with a prostitute woman in a common public house, he was

very much startled. For him there was until that time only one

kind of woman--his mother and sister.

But now? He did not know what to feel. There was a slight

wonder, a pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash

and of cold fear lest this was all that would happen, lest his

relations with woman were going to be no more than this

nothingness; there was a slight sense of shame before the

prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his

inefficiency; there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of

her; there was a moment of paralyzed horror when he felt he

might have taken a disease from her; and upon all this startled

tumult of emotion, was laid the steadying hand of common sense,

which said it did not matter very much, so long as he had no

disease. He soon recovered balance, and really it did not matter

so very much.