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 paralyzed 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.