The Rainbow

He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad

Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work

and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming

fairly well-off. But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in

big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for him to

pedgill away at the lace designing, working from the tiny

squares of his paper, counting and plotting and niggling. He did

it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels within him,

adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost. And he came

back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly

man.

He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some

social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his

dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the

household, mad when anything clumsy or gross occurred. Later,

when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid,

almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and

became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure,

neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm.

Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything

to do with learning. From the first he hung round the

slaughter-house which stood away in the third yard at the back

of the farm. The Brangwens had always killed their own meat, and

supplied the neighbourhood. Out of this grew a regular butcher's

business in connection with the farm.

As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood

that ran across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the

crew-yard, by the sight of the man carrying across to the

meat-shed a huge side of beef, with the kidneys showing,

embedded in their heavy laps of fat.

He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular

features something like a later Roman youth. He was more easily

excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in

character. At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale,

plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who

insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and

made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery

business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of

contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to

be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew

everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and

lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to

Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger,

remained at home.