The Rainbow

He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he

seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him

dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of

anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a

remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death,

of the shadow of revenge. When her husband died, she was

relieved. He would no longer dart about her.

England fitted her mood, its aloofness and foreignness. She

had known a little of the language before coming, and a sort of

parrot-mind made her pick it up fairly easily. But she knew

nothing of the English, nor of English life. Indeed, these did

not exist for her. She was like one walking in the Underworld,

where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with

one. She felt the English people as a potent, cold, slightly

hostile host amongst whom she walked isolated.

The English people themselves were almost deferential to her,

the Church saw that she did not want. She walked without

passion, like a shade, tormented into moments of love by the

child. Her dying husband with his tortured eyes and the skin

drawn tight over his face, he was as a vision to her, not a

reality. In a vision he was buried and put away. Then the vision

ceased, she was untroubled, time went on grey, uncoloured, like

a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape

unrolled beside her. When she rocked her baby at evening, maybe

she fell into a Polish slumber song, or she talked sometimes to

herself in Polish. Otherwise she did not think of Poland, nor of

that life to which she had belonged. It was a great blot looming

blank in its darkness. In the superficial activity of her life,

she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long

blanks and darknesses of abstraction were Polish.

So she lived for some time. Then, with slight uneasiness, she

used half to awake to the streets of London. She realized that

there was something around her, very foreign, she realized she

was in a strange place. And then, she was sent away into the

country. There came into her mind now the memory of her home

where she had been a child, the big house among the land, the

peasants of the village.

She was sent to Yorkshire, to nurse an old rector in his

rectory by the sea. This was the first shake of the kaleidoscope

that brought in front of her eyes something she must see. It

hurt her brain, the open country and the moors. It hurt her and

hurt her. Yet it forced itself upon her as something living, it

roused some potency of her childhood in her, it had some

relation to her.