Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
“Yi, they will. You can go in if you want to,” and he pushed open the
gate for her.
She stood irresolute, looking at the group of bluey-white geese
standing monumental under the grey, cold day.
“Go on,” he said.
She marched valiantly a few steps in. Her little body started
convulsively at the sudden, derisive can-cank-ank of the geese. A
blankness spread over her. The geese trailed away with uplifted heads
under the low grey sky.
“They don’t know you,” said Brangwen. “You should tell ’em what your
name is.”
“They’re _naughty_ to shout at me,” she flashed.
“They think you don’t live here,” he said.
Later he found her at the gate calling shrilly and imperiously:
“My name is Anna, Anna Lensky, and I live here, because Mr. Brangwen’s
my father now. He _is_, yes he _is._ And I live here.”
This pleased Brangwen very much. And gradually, without knowing it
herself, she clung to him, in her lost, childish, desolate moments,
when it was good to creep up to something big and warm, and bury her
little self in his big, unlimited being. Instinctively he was careful
of her, careful to recognize her and to give himself to her disposal.
She was difficult of her affections. For Tilly, she had a childish,
essential contempt, almost dislike, because the poor woman was such a
servant. The child would not let the serving-woman attend to her, do
intimate things for her, not for a long time. She treated her as one of
an inferior race. Brangwen did not like it.
“Why aren’t you fond of Tilly?” he asked.
“Because—because—because she looks at me with her eyes bent.”
Then gradually she accepted Tilly as belonging to the household, never
as a person.
For the first weeks, the black eyes of the child were for ever on the
watch. Brangwen, good-humoured but impatient, spoiled by Tilly, was an
easy blusterer. If for a few minutes he upset the household with his
noisy impatience, he found at the end the child glowering at him with
intense black eyes, and she was sure to dart forward her little head,
like a serpent, with her biting:
“Go away.”
“I’m _not_ going away,” he shouted, irritated at last. “Go
yourself—hustle—stir thysen—hop.” And he pointed to the door. The child
backed away from him, pale with fear. Then she gathered up courage,
seeing him become patient.
“We don’t live with _you,_” she said, thrusting forward her little head
at him. “You—you’re—you’re a bomakle.”
“A what?” he shouted.
Her voice wavered—but it came.
“A bomakle.”
“Ay, an’ you’re a comakle.”
She meditated. Then she hissed forwards her head.
“I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“A comakle.”
“No more am I a bomakle.”
He was really cross.
Other times she would say:
“My mother _doesn’t_ live here.”
“Oh, ay?”
“I want her to go away.”
“Then want’s your portion,” he replied laconically.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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