The Rainbow | Page 7

Tom into the shade. It irritated the youth that his elder
brother should be made something of a hero by the women, just
because he didn't live at home and was a lace-designer and almost a
gentleman. But Alfred was something of a Prometheus Bound, so the
women loved him. Tom came later to understand his brother better.
As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of the farm
devolved on to him. He was only eighteen, but he was quite capable of
doing everything his father had done. And of course, his mother
remained as centre to the house.
The young man grew up very fresh and alert, with zest for every
moment of life. He worked and rode and drove to market, he went out
with companions and got tipsy occasionally and played skittles and
went to the little travelling theatres. Once, when he was drunk at a
public house, he went upstairs with a prostitute who seduced him. He
was then nineteen.
The thing was something of a shock to him. In the close intimacy of the
farm kitchen, the woman occupied the supreme position. The men
deferred to her in the house, on all household points, on all points of
morality and behaviour. The woman was the symbol for that further life
which comprised religion and love and morality. The men placed in her
hands their own conscience, they said to her "Be my conscience-keeper,
be the angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming."
And the woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly in her,
receiving her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger, rebelling
and storming, but never for a moment really escaping in their own
souls from her prerogative. They depended on her for their stability.
Without her, they would have felt like straws in the wind, to be blown
hither and thither at random. She was the anchor and the security, she
was the restraining hand of God, at times highly to be execrated.
Now when Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, a youth fresh like a plant,
rooted in his mother and his sister, found that he had lain with a
prostitute woman in a common public house, he was very much startled.
For him there was until that time only one kind of woman-his mother

and sister.
But now? He did not know what to feel. There was a slight wonder, a
pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash and of cold fear
lest this was all that would happen, lest his relations with woman were
going to be no more than this nothingness; there was a slight sense of
shame before the prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his
inefficiency; there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of her; there
was a moment of paralysed horror when he felt he might have taken a
disease from her; and upon all this startled tumult of emotion, was laid
the steadying hand of common sense, which said it did not matter very
much, so long as he had no disease. He soon recovered balance, and
really it did not matter so very much.
But it had shocked him, and put a mistrust into his heart, and
emphasised his fear of what was within himself. He was, however, in a
few days going about again in his own careless, happy-go-lucky
fashion, his blue eyes just as clear and honest as ever, his face just as
fresh, his appetite just as keen.
Or apparently so. He had, in fact, lost some of his buoyant confidence,
and doubt hindered his outgoing.
For some time after this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank,
more backward from companionship. The disillusion of his first carnal
contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a
woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious
impulses, put a bit in his mouth. He had something to lose which he
was afraid of losing, which he was not sure even of possessing. This
first affair did not matter much: but the business of love was, at the
bottom of his soul, the most serious and terrifying of all to him.
He was tormented now with sex desire, his imagination reverted always
to lustful scenes. But what really prevented his returning to a loose
woman, over and above the natural squeamishness, was the recollection
of the paucity of the last experience. It had been so nothing, so
dribbling and functional, that he was ashamed to expose himself to the
risk of a repetition of it.

He made a strong, instinctive fight to retain his native cheerfulness
unimpaired. He had naturally a plentiful stream of life and humour, a
sense of sufficiency and exuberance, giving ease.