The Rainbow

Skrebensky saw the man rather than the woman. She saw only

the slender, unchangeable youth waiting there inscrutable, like

her fate. He was beyond her, with his loose, slightly horsey

appearance, that made him seem very manly and foreign. Yet his

face was smooth and soft and impressionable. She shook hands

with him, and her voice was like the rousing of a bird startled

by the dawn.

"Isn't it nice," she cried, "to have a wedding?"

There were bits of coloured confetti lodged on her dark

hair.

Again the confusion came over him, as if he were losing

himself and becoming all vague, undefined, inchoate. Yet he

wanted to be hard, manly, horsey. And he followed her.

There was a light tea, and the guests scattered. The real

feast was for the evening. Ursula walked out with Skrebensky

through the stackyard to the fields, and up the embankment to

the canal-side.

The new corn-stacks were big and golden as they went by, an

army of white geese marched aside in braggart protest. Ursula

was light as a white ball of down. Skrebensky drifted beside

her, indefinite, his old from loosened, and another self, grey,

vague, drifting out as from a bud. They talked lightly, of

nothing.

The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn

hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left

was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway and the

town which rose on its hill, the church tower topping all. The

round white dot of the clock on the tower was distinct in the

evening light.

That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the

grim, alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the

evening, mellow over the green water-meadows and the winding

alder trees beside the river, and the pale stretches of stubble

beyond. There the evening glowed softly, and even a pee-wit was

flapping in solitude and peace.

Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the

canal between. The berries on the hedges were crimson and bright

red, above the leaves. The glow of evening and the wheeling of

the solitary pee-wit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet

the shuffling noise of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the

town opposite, and they two walked the blue strip of water-way,

the ribbon of sky between.

He was looking, Ursula thought, very beautiful, because of a

flush of sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how

he had learned to shoe horses and select cattle fit for

killing.

"Do you like to be a soldier?" she asked.

"I am not exactly a soldier," he replied.

"But you only do things for wars," she said.

"Yes."

"Would you like to go to war?"

"I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would

want to go."