The Rainbow

I

The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in

the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder

trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles

away, a church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little

country town climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the

Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw

the church-tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he

turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something

standing above him and beyond him in the distance.

There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were

expecting something unknown, about which they were eager. They

had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of

surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing

themselves plainly, but slowly, so that one could watch the

change in their eyes from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up

laughter, to a hard blue-staring anger; through all the

irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is changing.

Living on rich land, on their own land, near to a growing

town, they had forgotten what it was to be in straitened

circumstances. They had never become rich, because there were

always children, and the patrimony was divided every time. But

always, at the Marsh, there was ample.

So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity,

working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want

of the money. Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of

the last halfpenny, and instinct made them not waste the peeling

of their apple, for it would help to feed the cattle. But heaven

and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease?

They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave

which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to

begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the

earth.

They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth,

sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in

the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn,

showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and

interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the

soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became

smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet

with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and

unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young

corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs

of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows

yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse

of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the

hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life

between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at

the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving

of the horses after their will.