The Rainbow

As if in a painful dream, she waited suspended, unresolved.

She did not know, she could not understand. Only she felt that

all the threads of her fate were being held taut, in suspense.

She only wept sometimes as she went about, saying blindly: "I am so fond of him, I am so fond of him."

He came. But why did he come? She looked at him for a sign.

He gave no sign. He did not even kiss her. He behaved as if he

were an affable, usual acquaintance. This was superficial, but

what did it hide? She waited for him, she wanted him to make

some sign.

So the whole of the day they wavered and avoided contact,

until evening. Then, laughing, saying he would be back in six

months' time and would tell them all about it, he shook hands

with her mother and took his leave.

Ursula accompanied him into the lane. The night was windy,

the yew trees seethed and hissed and vibrated. The wind seemed

to rush about among the chimneys and the church-tower. It was

dark.

The wind blew Ursula's face, and her clothes cleaved to her

limbs. But it was a surging, turgid wind, instinct with

compressed vigour of life. And she seemed to have lost

Skrebensky. Out there in the strong, urgent night she could not

find him.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Here," came his bodiless voice.

And groping, she touched him. A fire like lightning drenched

them.

"Anton?" she said.

"What?" he answered.

She held him with her hands in the darkness, she felt his

body again with hers.

"Don't leave me--come back to me," she said.

"Yes," he said, holding her in his arms.

But the male in him was scotched by the knowledge that she

was not under his spell nor his influence. He wanted to go away

from her. He rested in the knowledge that to-morrow he was going

away, his life was really elsewhere. His life was

elsewhere--his life was elsewhere--the centre of his

life was not what she would have. She was different--there

was a breach between them. They were hostile worlds.

"You will come back to me?" she reiterated.

"Yes," he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an

appointment, not as a man returning to his fulfilment.

So she kissed him, and went indoors, lost. He walked down to

the Marsh abstracted. The contact with her hurt him, and

threatened him. He shrank, he had to be free of her spirit. For

she would stand before him, like the angel before Balaam, and

drive him back with a sword from the way he was going, into a

wilderness.

The next day she went to the station to see him go. She

looked at him, she turned to him, but he was always so strange

and null--so null. He was so collected. She thought it was

that which made him null. Strangely nothing he was.