The Rainbow

Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If any one, it

was the mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of

the vulgar clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She

never really subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen's mystical

passion.

But Ursula was with her father. As she became adolescent,

thirteen, fourteen, she set more and more against her mother's

practical indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous,

almost wicked in her mother's attitude. What did Anna Brangwen,

in these years, care for God or Jesus or Angels? She was the

immediate life of to-day. Children were still being born to her,

she was throng with all the little activities of her family. And

almost instinctively she resented her husband's slavish service

to the Church, his dark, subject hankering to worship an unseen

God. What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young

family that needed fettling for? Let him attend to the immediate

concerns of his life, not go projecting himself towards the

ultimate.

But Ursula was all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt

against babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another

world, He was not of this world. He did not thrust His hands

under her face and, pointing to His wounds, say: "Look, Ursula Brangwen, I got these for your sake. Now do as

you're told."

To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the

distance, like a white moon at sunset, a crescent moon beckoning

as it follows the sun, out of our ken. Sometimes dark clouds

standing very far off, pricking up into a clear yellow band of

sunset, of a winter evening, reminded her of Calvary, sometimes

the full moon rising blood-red upon the hill terrified her with

the knowledge that Christ was now dead, hanging heavy and dead

upon the Cross.

On Sundays, this visionary world came to pass. She heard the

long hush, she knew the marriage of dark and light was taking

place. In church, the Voice sounded, re-echoing not from this

world, as if the Church itself were a shell that still spoke the

language of creation.

"The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were

fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose.

"And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with

Man, for that he also is flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred

and twenty years.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after

that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,

and they bare children unto them, the same became mighty men

which were of old, men of renown."

Over this Ursula was stirred as by a call from far off. In

those days, would not the Sons of God have found her fair, would

she not have been taken to wife by one of the Sons of God? It

was a dream that frightened her, for she could not understand

it.