The Rainbow
Page 81It was not right, somehow. What these words meant when
translated was not the same as the pale rosary meant. There was
a discrepancy, a falsehood. It irritated her to say, "Dominus
tecum," or, "benedicta tu in mulieribus." She loved the mystic
words, "Ave Maria, Sancta Maria;" she was moved by "benedictus
fructus ventris tui Jesus," and by "nunc et in hora mortis
nostrae." But none of it was quite real. It was not
satisfactory, somehow.
She avoided her rosary, because, moving her with curious
passion as it did, it meant only these not very
significant things. She put it away. It was her instinct to put
all these things away. It was her instinct to avoid thinking, to
avoid it, to save herself.
She was seventeen, touchy, full of spirits, and very moody:
other, she turned more to her father, she felt almost flashes of
hatred for her mother. Her mother's dark muzzle and curiously
insidious ways, her mother's utter surety and confidence, her
strange satisfaction, even triumph, her mother's way of laughing
at things and her mother's silent overriding of vexatious
propositions, most of all her mother's triumphant power maddened
the girl.
She became sudden and incalculable. Often she stood at the
window, looking out, as if she wanted to go. Sometimes she went,
she mixed with people. But always she came home in anger, as if
she were diminished, belittled, almost degraded.
There was over the house a kind of dark silence and
intensity, in which passion worked its inevitable conclusions.
interchange which made other places seem thin and unsatisfying.
Brangwen could sit silent, smoking in his chair, the mother
could move about in her quiet, insidious way, and the sense of
the two presences was powerful, sustaining. The whole
intercourse was wordless, intense and close.
But Anna was uneasy. She wanted to get away. Yet wherever she
went, there came upon her that feeling of thinness, as if she
were made smaller, belittled. She hastened home.
There she raged and interrupted the strong, settled
interchange. Sometimes her mother turned on her with a fierce,
destructive anger, in which was no pity or consideration. And
Anna shrank, afraid. She went to her father.
He would still listen to the spoken word, which fell sterile
She tried to discuss people, she wanted to know what was meant.
But her father became uneasy. He did not want to have things
dragged into consciousness. Only out of consideration for her he
listened. And there was a kind of bristling rousedness in the
room. The cat got up and stretching itself, went uneasily to the
door. Mrs. Brangwen was silent, she seemed ominous. Anna could
not go on with her fault-finding, her criticism, her expression
of dissatisfactions. She felt even her father against her. He
had a strong, dark bond with her mother, a potent intimacy that
existed inarticulate and wild, following its own course, and
savage if interrupted, uncovered.