When young Tom Brangwen was twenty-three years old there was
some breach between him and his chief which was never explained,
and he went away to Italy, then to America. He came home for a
while, then went to Germany; always the same good-looking,
carefully-dressed, attractive young man, in perfect health, yet
somehow outside of everything. In his dark eyes was a deep
misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he
wore his close-sitting clothes.
To Ursula he was a romantic, alluring figure. He had a grace
of bringing beautiful presents: a box of expensive sweets, such
as Cossethay had never seen; or he gave her a hair-brush and a
long slim mirror of mother-of-pearl, all pale and glimmering and
exquisite; or he sent her a little necklace of rough stones,
amethyst and opal and brilliants and garnet. He spoke other
languages easily and fluently, his nature was curiously gracious
and insinuating. With all that, he was undefinably an outsider.
He belonged to nowhere, to no society.
Anna Brangwen had left her intimacy with her father
undeveloped since the time of her marriage. At her marriage it
had been abandoned. He and she had drawn a reserve between them.
Anna went more to her mother.
Then suddenly the father died.
It happened one springtime when Ursula was about eight years
old, he, Tom Brangwen, drove off on a Saturday morning to the
market in Nottingham, saying he might not be back till late, as
there was a special show and then a meeting he had to attend.
His family understood that he would enjoy himself.
The season had been rainy and dreary. In the evening it was
pouring with rain. Fred Brangwen, unsettled, uneasy, did not go
out, as was his wont. He smoked and read and fidgeted, hearing
always the trickling of water outside. This wet, black night
seemed to cut him off and make him unsettled, aware of himself,
aware that he wanted something else, aware that he was scarcely
living. There seemed to him to be no root to his life, no place
for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad. But his
instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem.
He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not
know how to get it.
Tilly, an old woman now, came in saying that the labourers
who had been suppering up said the yard and everywhere was just
a slew of water. He heard in indifference. But he hated a
desolate, raw wetness in the world. He would leave the
Marsh.
His mother was in bed. At last he shut his book, his mind was
blank, he walked upstairs intoxicated with depression and anger,
and, intoxicated with depression and anger, locked himself into
sleep.