The Rainbow

"It's a man's face, no woman's at all--a

monk's--clean shaven," he said.

She laughed with a pouf! of laughter.

"You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don't

you?" she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she

laughed with malicious triumph.

She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed

the passion he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive

as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him.

He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute,

containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a

shapely heap of dead matter--but dead, dead.

His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her

for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he

would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand,

without one belief in which to rest.

Yet somewhere in him he responded more deeply to the sly

little face that knew better, than he had done before to the

perfect surge of his cathedral.

Nevertheless for the time being his soul was wretched and

homeless, and he could not bear to think of Anna's ousting him

from his beloved realities. He wanted his cathedral; he wanted

to satisfy his blind passion. And he could not any more.

Something intervened.

They went home again, both of them altered. She had some new

reverence for that which he wanted, he felt that his cathedrals

would never again be to him as they had been. Before, he had

thought them absolute. But now he saw them crouching under the

sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside,

but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas

before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a

reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless

confusion.

He had felt, before, that could he but go through the great

door and look down the gloom towards the far-off, concluding

wonder of the altar, that then, with the windows suspended

around like tablets of jewels, emanating their own glory, then

he had arrived. Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came

near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality

gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through

which all and everything must move on to eternity.

But now, somehow, sadly and disillusioned, he realized that

the doorway was no doorway. It was too narrow, it was false.

Outside the cathedral were many flying spirits that could never

be sifted through the jewelled gloom. He had lost his

absolute.

He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note

which the cathedrals did not include: something free and

careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with

dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing

was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was

glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.