The Rainbow

"A railway-carriage," said Brangwen.

She laughed to herself.

"I know it was a great scandal: yes--a whole wagon, and

they had girls, you know, filles, naked, all the

wagon-full, and so they came down to our village. They came

through villages of the Jews, and it was a great scandal. Can

you imagine? All the countryside! And my mother, she did not

like it. Gisla said to me, 'Madame, she must not know that you

have heard such things.' "My mother, she used to cry, and she wished to beat my

father, plainly beat him. He would say, when she cried because

he sold the forest, the wood, to jingle money in his pocket, and

go to Warsaw or Paris or Kiev, when she said he must take back

his word, he must not sell the forest, he would stand and say,

'I know, I know, I have heard it all, I have heard it all

before. Tell me some new thing. I know, I know, I know.' Oh, but

can you understand, I loved him when he stood there under the

door, saying only, 'I know, I know, I know it all already.' She

could not change him, no, not if she killed herself for it. And

she could change everybody else, but him, she could not change

him----"

Brangwen could not understand. He had pictures of a

cattle-truck full of naked girls riding from nowhere to nowhere,

of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said,

"I know, I know"; of Jews running down the street shouting in

Yiddish, "Don't do it, don't do it," and being cut down by

demented peasants--she called them "cattle"--whilst

she looked on interested and even amused; of tutors and

governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him.

And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to

him, arrogating a curious superiority to him, a distance between

them, something strange and foreign and outside his life,

talking, rattling, without rhyme or reason, laughing when he was

shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind

and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability

of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had

nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he was a

peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a

nothing. He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew

so well, and wondering whether it was really there, the window,

the chest of drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the

atmosphere. And gradually he grew into a raging fury against

her. But because he was so much amazed, and there was as yet

such a distance between them, and she was such an amazing thing

to him, with all wonder opening out behind her, he made no

retaliation on her. Only he lay still and wide-eyed with rage,

inarticulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility.