The Rainbow

So they were together in a darkness, passionate, electric,

for ever haunting the back of the common day, never in the

light. In the light, he seemed to sleep, unknowing. Only she

knew him when the darkness set him free, and he could see with

his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark.

Then she was in a spell, then she answered his harsh,

penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke

up, electric, bristling with an unknown, overwhelming

insinuation.

By now they knew each other; she was the daytime, the

daylight, he was the shadow, put aside, but in the darkness

potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness.

She learned not to dread and to hate him, but to fill herself

with him, to give herself to his black, sensual power, that was

hidden all the daytime. And the curious rolling of the eyes, as

if she were lapsing in a trance away from her ordinary

consciousness became habitual with her, when something

threatened and opposed her in life, the conscious life.

So they remained as separate in the light, and in the thick

darkness, married. He supported her daytime authority, kept it

inviolable at last. And she, in all the darkness, belonged to

him, to his close, insinuating, hypnotic familiarity.

All his daytime activity, all his public life, was a kind of

sleep. She wanted to be free, to belong to the day. And he ran

avoiding the day in work. After tea, he went to the shed to his

carpentry or his woodcarving. He was restoring the patched,

degraded pulpit to its original form.

But he loved to have the child near him, playing by his feet.

She was a piece of light that really belonged to him, that

played within his darkness. He left the shed door on the latch.

And when, with his second sense of another presence, he knew she

was coming, he was satisfied, he was at rest. When he was alone

with her, he did not want to take notice, to talk. He wanted to

live unthinking, with her presence flickering upon him.

He always went in silence. The child would push open the shed

door, and see him working by lamplight, his sleeves rolled back.

His clothes hung about him, carelessly, like mere wrapping.

Inside, his body was concentrated with a flexible, charged power

all of its own, isolated. From when she was a tiny child Ursula

could remember his forearm, with its fine black hairs and its

electric flexibility, working at the bench through swift,

unnoticeable movements, always ambushed in a sort of

silence.

She hung a moment in the door of the shed, waiting for him to

notice her. He turned, his black, curved eyebrows arching

slightly.

"Hullo, Twittermiss!"

And he closed the door behind her. Then the child was happy

in the shed that smelled of sweet wood and resounded to the

noise of the plane or the hammer or the saw, yet was charged

with the silence of the worker. She played on, intent and

absorbed, among the shavings and the little nogs of wood. She

never touched him: his feet and legs were near, she did not

approach them.