The Rainbow

In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew

like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery

heavens, and flew cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by

the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety,

and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the

day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by

the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed

heavy with the accumulation from the living day.

The women were different. On them too was the drowse of

blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in

droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food

was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from

the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world

beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world

speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the

distance, and they strained to listen.

It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened

its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and

set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly round about; it was

enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats

from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp

knock of the hand. So much warmth and generating and pain and

death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and

green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with

these, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full

fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring

into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of

generation, unable to turn round.

But the woman wanted another form of life than this,

something that was not blood-intimacy. Her house faced out from

the farm-buildings and fields, looked out to the road and the

village with church and Hall and the world beyond. She stood to

see the far-off world of cities and governments and the active

scope of man, the magic land to her, where secrets were made

known and desires fulfilled. She faced outwards to where men

moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the

pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set

out to discover what was beyond, to enlarge their own scope and

range and freedom; whereas the Brangwen men faced inwards to the

teeming life of creation, which poured unresolved into their

veins.

Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house towards

the activity of man in the world at large, whilst her husband

looked out to the back at sky and harvest and beast and land,

she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting

outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered

himself in his conquest, her deepest desire hung on the battle

that she heard, far off, being waged on the edge of the unknown.

She also wanted to know, and to be of the fighting host.