The Rainbow

"I know your father is drowned," she said, in a curious

dismay.

The flood rose through the night, till it washed the kettle

off the hob in the kitchen. Mrs. Brangwen sat alone at a window

upstairs. She called no more. The men were busy with the pigs

and the cattle. They were coming with a boat for her.

Towards morning the rain ceased, the stars came out over the

noise and the terrifying clucking and trickling of the water.

Then there was a pallor in the east, the light began to come. In

the ruddy light of the dawn she saw the waters spreading out,

moving sluggishly, the buildings rising out of a waste of water.

Birds began to sing, drowsily, and as if slightly hoarse with

the dawn. It grew brighter. Up the second field was the great,

raw gap in the canal embankment.

Mrs. Brangwen went from window to window, watching the flood.

Somebody had brought a little boat. The light grew stronger, the

red gleam was gone off the flood-waters, day took place. Mrs.

Brangwen went from the front of the house to the back, looking

out, intent and unrelaxing, on the pallid morning of spring.

She saw a glimpse of her husband's buff coat in the floods,

as the water rolled the body against the garden hedge. She

called to the men in the boat. She was glad he was found. They

dragged him out of the hedge. They could not lift him into the

boat. Fred Brangwen jumped into the water, up to his waist, and

half carried the body of his father through the flood to the

road. Hay and twigs and dirt were in the beard and hair. The

youth pushed through the water crying loudly without tears, like

a stricken animal. The mother at the window cried, making no

trouble.

The doctor came. But the body was dead. They carried it up to

Cossethay, to Anna's house.

When Anna Brangwen heard the news, she pressed back her head

and rolled her eyes, as if something were reaching forward to

bite at her throat. She pressed back her head, her mind was

driven back to sleep. Since she had married and become a mother,

the girl she had been was forgotten. Now, the shock threatened

to break in upon her and sweep away all her intervening life,

make her as a girl of eighteen again, loving her father. So she

pressed back, away from the shock, she clung to her present

life.

It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet

clothes, his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as he came from

market, yet all sodden and inert, that the shock really broke

into her, and she was terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he

was, who had been to her the image of power and strong life.