The birds pecked busily round him, the horses were fresh and
ready, the bare branches of the trees flung themselves up like a
man yawning, taut with energy, the twigs radiated off into the
clear light. He was alive and full of zest for it all. And if
his wife were heavy, separated from him, extinguished, then, let
her be, let him remain himself. Things would be as they would
be. Meanwhile he heard the ringing crow of a cockerel in the
distance, he saw the pale shell of the moon effaced on a blue
sky.
So he shouted to the horses, and was happy. If, driving into
Ilkeston, a fresh young woman were going in to do her shopping,
he hailed her, and reined in his horse, and picked her up. Then
he was glad to have her near him, his eyes shone, his voice,
laughing, teasing in a warm fashion, made the poise of her head
more beautiful, her blood ran quicker. They were both
stimulated, the morning was fine.
What did it matter that, at the bottom of his heart, was care
and pain? It was at the bottom, let it stop at the bottom. His
wife, her suffering, her coming pain--well, it must be so.
She suffered, but he was out of doors, full in life, and it
would be ridiculous, indecent, to pull a long face and to insist
on being miserable. He was happy, this morning, driving to town,
with the hoofs of the horse spanking the hard earth. Well he was
happy, if half the world were weeping at the funeral of the
other half. And it was a jolly girl sitting beside him. And
Woman was immortal, whatever happened, whoever turned towards
death. Let the misery come when it could not be resisted.
The evening arrived later very beautiful, with a rosy flush
hovering above the sunset, and passing away into violet and
lavender, with turquoise green north and south in the sky, and
in the east, a great, yellow moon hanging heavy and radiant. It
was magnificent to walk between the sunset and the moon, on a
road where little holly trees thrust black into the rose and
lavender, and starlings flickered in droves across the light.
But what was the end of the journey? The pain came right enough,
later on, when his heart and his feet were heavy, his brain
dead, his life stopped.
One afternoon, the pains began, Mrs. Brangwen was put to bed,
the midwife came. Night fell, the shutters were closed, Brangwen
came in to tea, to the loaf and the pewter teapot, the child,
silent and quivering, playing with glass beads, the house,
empty, it seemed, or exposed to the winter night, as if it had
no walls.
Sometimes there sounded, long and remote in the house,
vibrating through everything, the moaning cry of a woman in
labour. Brangwen, sitting downstairs, was divided. His lower,
deeper self was with her, bound to her, suffering. But the big
shell of his body remembered the sound of owls that used to fly
round the farmstead when he was a boy. He was back in his youth,
a boy, haunted by the sound of the owls, waking up his brother
to speak to him. And his mind drifted away to the birds, their
solemn, dignified faces, their flight so soft and broad-winged.
And then to the birds his brother had shot, fluffy,
dust-coloured, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly
asleep. It was a queer thing, a dead owl.