The Brangwen Family Saga: The Rainbow & Women in Love. D. H. Lawrence
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soon in a white rage.
Did he believe the water turned to wine at Cana? She would drive him to the thing as a historical fact: so much rain-water-look at it-can it become grape-juice, wine? For an instant, he saw with the clear eyes of the mind and said no, his clear mind, answering her for a moment, rejected the idea. And immediately his whole soul was crying in a mad, inchoate hatred against this violation of himself. It was true for him. His mind was extinguished again at once, his blood was up. In his blood and bones, he wanted the scene, the wedding, the water brought forward from the firkins as red wine: and Christ saying to His mother: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?-mine hour is not yet come.”
And then:
“His mother saith unto the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.’”
Brangwen loved it, with his bones and blood he loved it, he could not let it go. Yet she forced him to let it go. She hated his blind attachments.
Water, natural water, could it suddenly and unnaturally turn into wine, depart from its being and at haphazard take on another being? Ah no, he knew it was wrong.
She became again the palpitating, hostile child, hateful, putting things to destruction. He became mute and dead. His own being gave him the lie. He knew it was so: wine was wine, water was water, for ever: the water had not become wine. The miracle was not a real fact. She seemed to be destroying him. He went out, dark and destroyed, his soul running its blood. And he tasted of death. Because his life was formed in these unquestioned concepts.
She, desolate again as she had been when she was a child, went away and sobbed. She did not care, she did not care whether the water had turned to wine or not. Let him believe it if he wanted to. But she knew she had won. And an ashy desolation came over her.
They were ashenly miserable for some time. Then the life began to come back. He was nothing if not dogged. He thought again of the chapter of St. John. There was a great biting pang. “But thou hast kept the good wine until now.” “The best wine!” The young man’s heart responded in a craving, in a triumph, although the knowledge that it was not true in fact bit at him like a weasel in his heart. Which was stronger, the pain of the denial, or the desire for affirmation? He was stubborn in spirit, and abode by his desire. But he would not any more affirm the miracles as true.
Very well, it was not true, the water had not turned into wine. The water had not turned into wine. But for all that he would live in his soul as if the water had turned into wine. For truth of fact, it had not. But for his soul, it had.
“Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn’t,” he said, “it doesn’t bother me. I take it for what it is.”
“And what is it?” she asked, quickly, hopefully.
“It’s the Bible,” he said.
That answer enraged her, and she despised him. She did not actively question the Bible herself. But he drove her to contempt.
And yet he did not care about the Bible, the written letter. Although he could not satisfy her, yet she knew of herself that he had something real. He was not a dogmatist. He did not believe in fact that the water turned into wine. He did not want to make a fact out of it. Indeed, his attitude was without criticism. It was purely individual. He took that which was of value to him from the Written Word, he added to his spirit. His mind he let sleep.
And she was bitter against him, that he let his mind sleep. That which was human, belonged to mankind, he would not exert. He cared only for himself. He was no Christian. Above all, Christ had asserted the brotherhood of man.
She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was immortal. Such, somewhere, was her belief, quite obscure and unformulated. She believed in the omnipotence of the human mind.
He, on the other hand, blind as a subterranean thing, just ignored the human mind and ran after his own dark-souled desires, following his own tunnelling nose. She felt often she must suffocate. And she fought him off.
Then he, knowing he was blind, fought madly back again, frantic in sensual fear. He did foolish things. He asserted himself on his rights, he arrogated the old position of master of the house.
“You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried.
“Fool!” she answered. “Fool!”
“I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried.
“Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don’t I know what a fool you are!”
He knew himself what a fool he was, and was flayed by the knowledge. Yet he went on trying to steer the ship of their dual life. He asserted his position as the captain of the ship. And captain and ship bored her. He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility. She felt no belief in it. She jeered at him as master of the house, master of their dual life. And he was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame, how her father had been a man without arrogating any authority.
He had gone on the wrong tack, and he felt it hard to give up the expedition. There was great surging and shame. Then he yielded. He had given up the master-of-the-house idea.
There was something he wanted, nevertheless, some from of mastery. Ever and anon, after his collapses into the petty and the shameful, he rose up again, and, stubborn in spirit, strong in his power to start afresh, set out once more in his male pride of being to fulfil the hidden passion of his spirit.
It began well, but it ended always in war between them, till they were both driven almost to madness. He said, she did not respect him. She laughed in hollow scorn of this. For her it was enough that she loved him.
“Respect what?” she asked.
But he always answered the wrong thing. And though she cudgelled her brains, she could not come at it.
“Why don’t you go on with your wood-carving?” she said. “Why don’t you finish your Adam and Eve?”
But she did not care for the Adam and Eve, and he never put another stroke to it. She jeered at the Eve, saying, “She is like a little marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and Eve like a doll.”
“It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she continued, “when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have, what arrogance!”
In a rage one day, after trying to work on the board, and failing, so that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up the whole panel and put it on the fire. She did not know. He went about for some days very quiet and subdued after it.
“Where is the Adam and Eve board?” she asked him.
“Burnt.”
She looked at him.
“But your carving?”
“I burned it.”
“When?”
She did not believe him.
“On Friday night.”
“When I was at the Marsh?”
“Yes.”
She said no more.
Then, when he had gone to work, she wept for a whole day, and was much chastened in spirit. So that a new, fragile flame of love came out of the ashes of this last pain.
Directly, it occurred to her that she was with child. There was a great trembling of wonder and anticipation through her soul. She wanted a child. Not that she loved babies so much, though she was touched by all young things. But she wanted to bear children. And a certain hunger in her heart wanted to unite her husband with herself, in a child.
She wanted a son. She felt, a son would be everything. She wanted to tell