The Rainbow

When young Tom Brangwen was twenty-three years old there was

some breach between him and his chief which was never explained,

and he went away to Italy, then to America. He came home for a

while, then went to Germany; always the same good-looking,

carefully-dressed, attractive young man, in perfect health, yet

somehow outside of everything. In his dark eyes was a deep

misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he

wore his close-sitting clothes.

To Ursula he was a romantic, alluring figure. He had a grace

of bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such

as Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a

long slim mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and

exquisite; or he sent her a little necklace of rough stones,

amethyst and opal and brilliants and garnet. He spoke other

languages easily and fluently, his nature was curiously gracious

and insinuating. With all that, he was undefinably an outsider.

He belonged to nowhere, to no society.

Anna Brangwen had left her intimacy with her father

undeveloped since the time of her marriage. At her marriage it

had been abandoned. He and she had drawn a reserve between them.

Anna went more to her mother.

Then suddenly the father died.

It happened one springtime when Ursula was about eight years

old, he, Tom Brangwen, drove off on a Saturday morning to the

market in Nottingham, saying he might not be back till late, as

there was a special show and then a meeting he had to attend.

His family understood that he would enjoy himself.

The season had been rainy and dreary. In the evening it was

pouring with rain. Fred Brangwen, unsettled, uneasy, did not go

out, as was his wont. He smoked and read and fidgeted, hearing

always the trickling of water outside. This wet, black night

seemed to cut him off and make him unsettled, aware of himself,

aware that he wanted something else, aware that he was scarcely

living. There seemed to him to be no root to his life, no place

for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad. But his

instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem.

He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not

know how to get it.

Tilly, an old woman now, came in saying that the labourers

who had been suppering up said the yard and everywhere was just

a slew of water. He heard in indifference. But he hated a

desolate, raw wetness in the world. He would leave the

Marsh.

His mother was in bed. At last he shut his book, his mind was

blank, he walked upstairs intoxicated with depression and anger,

and, intoxicated with depression and anger, locked himself into

sleep.