Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
This snowy morning, he sat with a dark-bright face beside her, not
aware of her, and somehow, she felt he was conveying to strange, secret
places the love that sprang in him for her. He sat with a dark-rapt,
half-delighted face, looking at a little stained window. She saw the
ruby-coloured glass, with the shadow heaped along the bottom from the
snow outside, and the familiar yellow figure of the lamb holding the
banner, a little darkened now, but in the murky interior strangely
luminous, pregnant.
She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The lamb,
looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a forepaw, in the
cleft of which was dangerously perched a little flag with a red cross.
Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish shadows. Since she was a
child she had liked this creature, with the same feeling she felt for
the little woolly lambs on green legs that children carried home from
the fair every year. She had always liked these toys, and she had the
same amused, childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always
been uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag did
not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted it, there
was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.
Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the faintest tension
of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the uncomfortable feeling that he
was in correspondence with the creature, the lamb in the window. A cold
wonder came over her—her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless,
timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was he
doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in the glass?
Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag. Suddenly
she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the tradition seized
on her, she was transported to another world. And she hated it,
resisted it.
Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And dark,
violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he doing,
sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?
She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick up her
glove, she groped among his feet.
He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would have
pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what was amiss,
what he had been doing.
As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the chill of
antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so angry. But she was
incensed.
“Why do you never listen to the sermon?” she asked, seething with
hostility and violation.
“I do,” he said.
“You don’t—you don’t hear a single word.”
He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There was
something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge.
The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he was like this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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