The Rainbow | Page 3

Her imagination was fired by the squire's lady at Shelly Hall, who came
to church at Cossethay with her little children, girls in tidy capes of
beaver fur, and smart little hats, herself like a winter rose, so fair and
delicate. So fair, so fine in mould, so luminous, what was it that Mrs.
Hardy felt which she, Mrs. Brangwen, did not feel? How was Mrs.

Hardy's nature different from that of the common women of Cossethay,
in what was it beyond them? All the women of Cossethay talked
eagerly about Mrs. Hardy, of her husband, her children, her guests, her
dress, of her servants and her housekeeping. The lady of the Hall was
the living dream of their lives, her life was the epic that inspired their
lives. In her they lived imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband
who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her
friend, member of Parliament for the division, they had their own
Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe
and the swine and the endless web.
So the women of the village were fortunate. They saw themselves in
the lady of the manor, each of them lived her own fulfilment of the life
of Mrs. Hardy. And the Brangwen wife of the Marsh aspired beyond
herself, towards the further life of the finer woman, towards the
extended being she revealed, as a traveller in his self-contained manner
reveals far-off countries present in himself. But why should a
knowledge of far-off countries make a man's life a different thing, finer,
bigger? And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve
him? It is the same thing.
The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the vicar and
Lord William, lean, eager men with strange movements, men who had
command of the further fields, whose lives ranged over a great extent.
Ah, it was something very desirable to know, this touch of the
wonderful men who had the power of thought and comprehension. The
women of the village might be much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and
more at their ease with him, yet if their lives had been robbed of the
vicar, and of Lord William, the leading shoot would have been cut
away from them, they would have been heavy and uninspired and
inclined to hate. So long as the wonder of the beyond was before them,
they could get along, whatever their lot. And Mrs. Hardy, and the vicar,
and Lord William, these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and were
visible to the eyes of Cossethay in their motion.
II
About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh

Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A
high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which
passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a
heavy bridge.
So the Marsh was shut off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small
valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of
Cossethay.
The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across
their land. Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the
other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down
the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete.
The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing
supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen.
Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the old, quiet side of
the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound
along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-trees past
the Brangwens' garden gate.
But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there,
through the dark archway of the canal's square aqueduct, was a colliery
spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses
plastered on the valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill
of the town.
The homestead was just on the safe side of civilisation, outside the gate.
The house stood bare from the road, approached by a straight garden
path, along which at spring the daffodils were thick in green and yellow.
At the sides of the house were bushes of lilac and guelder-rose and
privet, entirely hiding the farm buildings behind.
At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out
of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest
wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing
its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the
canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand,