The Rainbow

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always

busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of

motherhood. She seemed to exist in her own violent fruitfulness,

and it was as if the sun shone tropically on her. Her colour was

bright, her eyes full of a fecund gloom, her brown hair tumbled

loosely over her ears. She had a look of richness. No

responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her. The outside,

public life was less than nothing to her, really.

Whereas when, at twenty-six, he found himself father of four

children, with a wife who lived intrinsically like the ruddiest

lilies of the field, he let the weight of responsibility press

on him and drag him. It was then that his child Ursula strove to

be with him. She was with him, even as a baby of four, when he

was irritable and shouted and made the household unhappy. She

suffered from his shouting, but somehow it was not really him.

She wanted it to be over, she wanted to resume her normal

connection with him. When he was disagreeable, the child echoed

to the crying of some need in him, and she responded blindly.

Her heart followed him as if he had some tie with her, and some

love which he could not deliver. Her heart followed him

persistently, in its love.

But there was the dim, childish sense of her own smallness

and inadequacy, a fatal sense of worthlessness. She could not do

anything, she was not enough. She could not be important to him.

This knowledge deadened her from the first.

Still she set towards him like a quivering needle. All her

life was directed by her awareness of him, her wakefulness to

his being. And she was against her mother.

Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up.

But for him, she might have gone on like the other children,

Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine, one with the flowers and

insects and playthings, having no existence apart from the

concrete object of her attention. But her father came too near

to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of his breast woke

her up almost in pain from the transient unconsciousness of

childhood. Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before she knew

how to see. She was wakened too soon. Too soon the call had come

to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close

to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into

wakefulness by the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping

her to his body for love and for fulfilment, asking as a magnet

must always ask. From her the response had struggled dimly,

vaguely into being.

The children were dressed roughly for the country. When she

was little, Ursula pattered about in little wooden clogs, a blue

overall over her thick red dress, a red shawl crossed on her

breast and tied behind again. So she ran with her father to the

garden.