The Rainbow | Page 6

west wind, thou breath of autumn's being," the very fact of the
print caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over his skin, the
blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting passion of rage
and incompetence. He threw the book down and walked over it and
went out to the cricket field. And he hated books as if they were his
enemies. He hated them worse than ever he hated any person.
He could not voluntarily control his attention. His mind had no fixed
habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere to start from.
For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known in himself, that he
could apply to learning. He did not know how to begin. Therefore he
was helpless when it came to deliberate understanding or deliberate
learning.
He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him, he was
helpless as an idiot. So that he felt that the ground was never sure under
his feet, he was nowhere. His final downfall was his complete inability
to attend to a question put without suggestion. If he had to write a
formal composition on the Army, he did at last learn to repeat the few
facts he knew: "You can join the army at eighteen. You have to be over
five foot eight." But he had all the time a living conviction that this was
a dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt. Then he
reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched out what
he had written, made an agonised effort to think of something in the
real composition style, failed, became sullen with rage and humiliation,
put the pen down and would have been torn to pieces rather than
attempt to write another word.
He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar School got
used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at learning, but
respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only one narrow,
domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue
eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a horrid scene, when the boy
laid open the master's head with a slate, and then things went on as
before. The teacher got little sympathy. But Brangwen winced and

could not bear to think of the deed, not even long after, when he was a
grown man.
He was glad to leave school. It had not been unpleasant, he had enjoyed
the companionship of the other youths, or had thought he enjoyed it,
the time had passed very quickly, in endless activity. But he knew all
the time that he was in an ignominious position, in this place of
learning. He was aware of failure all the while, of incapacity. But he
was too healthy and sanguine to be wretched, he was too much alive.
Yet his soul was wretched almost to hopelessness.
He had loved one warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a
consumptive type. The two had had an almost classic friendship, David
and Jonathan, wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the server. But he
had never felt equal with his friend, because the other's mind outpaced
his, and left him ashamed, far in the rear. So the two boys went at once
apart on leaving school. But Brangwen always remembered his friend
that had been, kept him as a sort of light, a fine experience to
remember.
Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his
own again. "I have got a turnip on my shoulders, let me stick to th'
fallow," he said to his exasperated mother. He had too low an opinion
of himself. But he went about at his work on the farm gladly enough,
glad of the active labour and the smell of the land again, having youth
and vigour and humour, and a comic wit, having the will and the power
to forget his own shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional
rages, but usually on good terms with everybody and everything.
When he was seventeen, his father fell from a stack and broke his neck.
Then the mother and son and daughter lived on at the farm, interrupted
by occasional loud-mouthed lamenting, jealous-spirited visitations
from the butcher Frank, who had a grievance against the world, which
he felt was always giving him less than his dues. Frank was particularly
against the young Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom
returned the hatred violently, his face growing red and his blue eyes
staring. Effie sided with Tom against Frank. But when Alfred came,
from Nottingham, heavy jowled and lowering, speaking very little, but

treating those at home with some contempt, Effie and the mother sided
with him and put