The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) 📕

Uncle Tom appeared, always like the cynical Bacchus in the picture. He would have a jolly wedding, a harvest supper and a wedding feast in one: a tent in the home close, and a band for dancing, and a great feast out of doors.

Fred demurred, but Tom must be satisfied. Also Laura, a handsome, clever girl, the bride, she also must have a great and jolly feast. It appealed to her educated sense. She had been to Salisbury Training College, knew folk-songs and morris-dancing.

So the preparations were begun, directed by Tom Brangwen. A marquee was set up on the home close, two large bonfires were prepared. Musicians were hired, feast made ready.

Skrebensky was to come, arriving in the morning. Ursula had a new white dress of soft crepe, and a white hat. She liked to wear white. With her black hair and clear golden skin, she looked southern, or rather tropical, like a Creole. She wore no colour whatsoever.

She trembled that day as she appeared to go down to the wedding. She was to be a bridesmaid. Skrebensky would not arrive till afternoon. The wedding was at two o’clock.

As the wedding-party returned home, Skrebensky stood in the parlour at the Marsh. Through the window he saw Tom Brangwen, who was best man, coming up the garden path most elegant in cutaway coat and white slip and spats, with Ursula laughing on his arm. Tom Brangwen was handsome, with his womanish colouring and dark eyes and black close-cut moustache. But there was something subtly coarse and suggestive about him for all his beauty; his strange, bestial nostrils opened so hard and wide, and his well-shaped head almost disquieting in its nakedness, rather bald from the front, and all its soft fullness betrayed.

Skrebensky saw the man rather than the woman. She saw only the slender, unchangeable youth waiting there inscrutable, like her fate. He was beyond her, with his loose, slightly horsey appearance, that made him seem very manly and foreign. Yet his face was smooth and soft and impressionable. She shook hands with him, and her voice was like the rousing of a bird startled by the dawn.

“Isn’t it nice,” she cried, “to have a wedding?”

There were bits of coloured confetti lodged on her dark hair.

Again the confusion came over him, as if he were losing himself and becoming all vague, undefined, inchoate. Yet he wanted to be hard, manly, horsey. And he followed her.

There was a light tea, and the guests scattered. The real feast was for the evening. Ursula walked out with Skrebensky through the stackyard to the fields, and up the embankment to the canal-side.

The new corn-stacks were big and golden as they went by, an army of white geese marched aside in braggart protest. Ursula was light as a white ball of down. Skrebensky drifted beside her, indefinite, his old form loosened, and another self, grey, vague, drifting out as from a bud. They talked lightly, of nothing.

The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway and the town which rose on its hill, the church tower topping all. The round white dot of the clock on the tower was distinct in the evening light.

That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the grim, alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the evening, mellow over the green water-meadows and the winding alder trees beside the river, and the pale stretches of stubble beyond. There the evening glowed softly, and even a peewit was flapping in solitude and peace.

Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the canal between. The berries on the hedges were crimson and bright red, above the leaves. The glow of evening and the wheeling of the solitary peewit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet the shuffling noise of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the town opposite, and they two walked the blue strip of waterway, the ribbon of sky between.

He was looking, Ursula thought, very beautiful, because of a flush of sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how he had learned to shoe horses and select cattle fit for killing.

“Do you like to be a soldier?” she asked.

“I am not exactly a soldier,” he replied.

“But you only do things for wars,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to go to war?”

“I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would want to go.”

A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of potent unrealities.

“Why would you want to go?”

“I should be doing something, it would be genuine. It’s a sort of toy-life as it is.”

“But what would you be doing if you went to war?”

“I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger.”

“But you’d only make them to be pulled down again when the armies had done with them. It seems just as much a game.”

“If you call war a game.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.”

A sense of hard separateness came over her.

“Why is fighting more serious than anything else?” she asked.

“You either kill or get killed⁠—and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.”

“But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,” she said.

He was silenced for a moment.

“But the result matters,” he said. “It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.”

“Not to you⁠—nor me⁠—we don’t care about Khartoum.”

“You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.”

“But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara⁠—do you?” she replied, laughing with antagonism.

“I don’t⁠—but we’ve got to back up those who do.”

“Why have we?”

“Where is the nation if we don’t?”

“But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.”

“They might say they weren’t either.”

“Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself,” she asserted brilliantly.

“You wouldn’t be yourself