The Rainbow

"Ay," said the mother, "there's a good crop of stockings

lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action."

Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened

her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of

enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The

commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it

all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas, she

corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in

silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with

supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child

not to be taken seriously.

Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved

Ursula, therefore he always had a sense of shame, almost of

betrayal, when he turned on her. So he turned fiercely and

scathingly, and with a wholesale brutality that made Ursula go

white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming

deadened in her, her temper hard and cold.

Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all

these years, he began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty

years he had gone on at this office as a draughtsman, doing work

in which he had no interest, because it seemed his allotted

work. The growing up of his daughters, their developing

rejection of old forms set him also free.

He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he

pushed his way out of the earth that covered him, working always

away from the physical element in which his life was captured.

Slowly, blindly, gropingly, with what initiative was left to

him, he made his way towards individual expression and

individual form.

At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving,

almost to the point where he had left off his Adam and Eve

panel, when he was courting. But now he had knowledge and skill

without vision. He saw the puerility of his young conceptions,

he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived. He now

had a new strength in his sense of reality. He felt as if he

were real, as if he handled real things. He had worked for many

years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring

the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the

plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were

utterances of himself.

But he could not quite hitch on--always he was too busy,

too uncertain, confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling.

To his surprise he found he could do it. Modelling in clay, in

plaster, he produced beautiful reproductions, really beautiful.

Then he set-to to make a head of Ursula, in high relief, in the

Donatello manner. In his first passion, he got a beautiful

suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of concentration would

not come. With a little ash in his mouth he gave up. He

continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from

classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had

loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of

the freshness, the naive alertness of the early Italians. But it

was only reproduction.