Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. He went to
see Anna, but again there had come a reserve between them. Tom Brangwen
was gloomy, his blue eyes sombre. Anna was strange and delivered up.
Her face in its delicate colouring was mute, touched dumb and poignant.
The mother bowed her head and moved in her own dark world, that was
pregnant again with fulfilment.
Will Brangwen worked at his wood-carving. It was a passion, a passion
for him to have the chisel under his grip. Verily the passion of his
heart lifted the fine bite of steel. He was carving, as he had always
wanted, the Creation of Eve. It was a panel in low relief, for a
church. Adam lay asleep as if suffering, and God, a dim, large figure,
stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; and Eve, a
small vivid, naked female shape, was issuing like a flame towards the
hand of God, from the torn side of Adam.
Now, Will Brangwen was working at the Eve. She was thin, a keen, unripe
thing. With trembling passion, fine as a breath of air, he sent the
chisel over her belly, her hard, unripe, small belly. She was a stiff
little figure, with sharp lines, in the throes and torture and ecstasy
of her creation. But he trembled as he touched her. He had not finished
any of his figures. There was a bird on a bough overhead, lifting its
wings for flight, and a serpent wreathing up to it. It was not finished
yet. He trembled with passion, at last able to create the new, sharp
body of his Eve.
At the sides, at the far sides, at either end, were two Angels covering
their faces with their wings. They were like trees. As he went to the
Marsh, in the twilight, he felt that the Angels, with covered faces,
were standing back as he went by. The darkness was of their shadows and
the covering of their faces. When he went through the Canal bridge, the
evening glowed in its last deep colours, the sky was dark blue, the
stars glittered from afar, very remote and approaching above the
darkening cluster of the farm, above the paths of crystal along the
edge of the heavens.
She waited for him like the glow of light, and as if his face were
covered. And he dared not lift his face to look at her.
Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm
buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey
horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. Anna
and the young man went on noiselessly by the hedge, along where the
farm-carts had made dark ruts in the grass. They came through a gate
into a wide open field where still much light seemed to spread against
their faces. In the under-shadow the sheaves lay on the ground where
the reapers had left them, many sheaves like bodies prostrate in
shadowy bulk; others were riding hazily in shocks, like ships in the
haze of moonlight and of dusk, farther off.
They did not want to turn back, yet whither were they to go, towards
the moon? For they were separate, single.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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