"A railway-carriage," said Brangwen.
She laughed to herself.
"I know it was a great scandal: yes--a whole wagon, and
they had girls, you know, filles, naked, all the
wagon-full, and so they came down to our village. They came
through villages of the Jews, and it was a great scandal. Can
you imagine? All the countryside! And my mother, she did not
like it. Gisla said to me, 'Madame, she must not know that you
have heard such things.' "My mother, she used to cry, and she wished to beat my
father, plainly beat him. He would say, when she cried because
he sold the forest, the wood, to jingle money in his pocket, and
go to Warsaw or Paris or Kiev, when she said he must take back
his word, he must not sell the forest, he would stand and say,
'I know, I know, I have heard it all, I have heard it all
before. Tell me some new thing. I know, I know, I know.' Oh, but
can you understand, I loved him when he stood there under the
door, saying only, 'I know, I know, I know it all already.' She
could not change him, no, not if she killed herself for it. And
she could change everybody else, but him, she could not change
him----"
Brangwen could not understand. He had pictures of a
cattle-truck full of naked girls riding from nowhere to nowhere,
of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said,
"I know, I know"; of Jews running down the street shouting in
Yiddish, "Don't do it, don't do it," and being cut down by
demented peasants--she called them "cattle"--whilst
she looked on interested and even amused; of tutors and
governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him.
And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to
him, arrogating a curious superiority to him, a distance between
them, something strange and foreign and outside his life,
talking, rattling, without rhyme or reason, laughing when he was
shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind
and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability
of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had
nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he was a
peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a
nothing. He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew
so well, and wondering whether it was really there, the window,
the chest of drawers, or whether it was merely a figment in the
atmosphere. And gradually he grew into a raging fury against
her. But because he was so much amazed, and there was as yet
such a distance between them, and she was such an amazing thing
to him, with all wonder opening out behind her, he made no
retaliation on her. Only he lay still and wide-eyed with rage,
inarticulate, not understanding, but solid with hostility.