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How frail and fine and clear she felt, like the most fragile

flower that opens in the end of winter. But the pole of night was turned and the dawn was coming in.

Very far off was her old experience--Skrebensky, her parting with him--very far off. Some things were real;

those first glamorous weeks. Before, these had seemed like hallucination. Now they seemed like common

reality. The rest was unreal. She knew that Skrebensky had never become finally real. In the weeks of

passionate ecstasy he had been with her in her desire, she had created him for the time being. But in the end he

had failed and broken down.

Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now, as she liked a memory, some bygone self. He

was something of the past, finite. He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection for him, as for

that which is past. But, when she looked with her face forward, he was not. Nay, when she looked ahead, into

the undiscovered land before her, what was there she could recognise but a fresh glow of light and inscrutable

trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose

shore she had landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the New World and the Old.

There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it would have made little difference,

however. She would have kept the child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton belonged

to the past.

There came the cablegram from Skrebensky: "I am married." An old pain and anger and contempt stirred in

her. Did he belong so utterly to the cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he was. It was good that he

was as he was. Who was she to have a man according to her own desire? It was not for her to create, but to

recognise a man created by God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She was

glad she could not create her man. She was glad she had nothing to do with his creation. She was glad that this

lay within the scope of that vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out of Eternity to

which she herself belonged.

Chapter 16 336

As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she sat at her window, she saw the people go by in the

street below, colliers, women, children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition, but visible through the

husk, the swelling and the heaving contour of the new germination. In the still, silenced forms of the colliers

she saw a sort of suspense, a waiting in pain for the new liberation; she saw the same in the false hard

confidence of the women. The confidence of the women was brittle. It would break quickly to reveal the

strength and patient effort of the new germination.

In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard

barren form of bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her

feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were all in

prison, they were all going mad.

She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their

unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new houses,

which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous

angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is

hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses,

slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses

on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the

corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry,

brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she

perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint

colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow

forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of

iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon

itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable,

making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption

of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on

the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would

quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean,

naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean

rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and

factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

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