The Rainbow

When Anna was nine years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames'

school in Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her

inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked,

disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to

respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna only laughed

at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized her in superb,

childish fashion.

The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt

for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority. She was very shy,

and tortured with misery when people did not like her. On the

other hand, she cared very little for anybody save her mother,

whom she still rather resentfully worshipped, and her father,

whom she loved and patronized, but upon whom she depended. These

two, her mother and father, held her still in fee. But she was

free of other people, towards whom, on the whole, she took the

benevolent attitude. She deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or

arrogance, however. As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as

a tiger, and as aloof. She could confer favours, but, save from

her mother and father, she could receive none. She hated people

who came too near to her. Like a wild thing, she wanted her

distance. She mistrusted intimacy.

In Cossethay and Ilkeston she was always an alien. She had

plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom

she met were significant to her. They seemed part of a herd,

undistinguished. She did not take people very seriously.

She had two brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom

she was intimately related to but whom she never mingled with,

and Fred, fair and responsive, whom she adored but did not

consider as a real, separate thing. She was too much the centre

of her own universe, too little aware of anything outside.

The first person she met, who affected her as a real,

living person, whom she regarded as having definite existence,

was Baron Skrebensky, her mother's friend. He also was a Polish

exile, who had taken orders, and had received from Mr. Gladstone

a small country living in Yorkshire.

When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother

to spend a few days with the Baron Skrebensky. He was very

unhappy in his red-brick vicarage. He was vicar of a country

church, a living worth a little over two hundred pounds a year,

but he had a large parish containing several collieries, with a

new, raw, heathen population. He went to the north of England

expecting homage from the common people, for he was an

aristocrat. He was roughly, even cruelly received. But he never

understood it. He remained a fiery aristocrat. Only he had to

learn to avoid his parishioners.

Anna was very much impressed by him. He was a smallish man

with a rugged, rather crumpled face and blue eyes set very deep

and glowing. His wife was a tall thin woman, of noble Polish

family, mad with pride. He still spoke broken English, for he

had kept very close to his wife, both of them forlorn in this

strange, inhospitable country, and they always spoke in Polish

together. He was disappointed with Mrs. Brangwen's soft, natural

English, very disappointed that her child spoke no Polish.