The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence [75]
She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The lamb, looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a forepaw, in the cleft of which was dangerously perched a little flag with a red cross. Very pale yellow, the lamb, with greenish shadows. Since she was a child she had liked this creature, with the same feeling she felt for the little woolly lambs on green legs that children carried home from the fair every year. She had always liked these toys, and she had the same amused, childish liking for this church lamb. Yet she had always been uneasy about it. She was never sure that this lamb with a flag did not want to be more than it appeared. So she half mistrusted it, there was a mixture of dislike in her attitude to it.
Now, by a curious gathering, knitting of his eyes, the faintest tension of ecstasy on his face, he gave her the uncomfortable feeling that he was in correspondence with the creature, the lamb in the window. A cold wonder came over her—her soul was perplexed. There he sat, motionless, timeless, with the faint, bright tension on his face. What was he doing? What connection was there between him and the lamb in the glass?
Suddenly it gleamed to her dominant, this lamb with the flag. Suddenly she had a powerful mystic experience, the power of the tradition seized on her, she was transported to another world. And she hated it, resisted it.
Instantly, it was only a silly lamb in the glass again. And dark, violent hatred of her husband swept up in her. What was he doing, sitting there gleaming, carried away, soulful?
She shifted sharply, she knocked him as she pretended to pick up her glove, she groped among his feet.
He came to, rather bewildered, exposed. Anybody but her would have pitied him. She wanted to rend him. He did not know what was amiss, what he had been doing.
As they sat at dinner, in their cottage, he was dazed by the chill of antagonism from her. She did not know why she was so angry. But she was incensed.
"Why do you never listen to the sermon?" she asked, seething with hostility and violation.
"I do," he said.
"You don't—you don't hear a single word."
He retired into himself, to enjoy his own sensation. There was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge. The young girl hated to be in the house with him when he was like this.
After dinner, he retired into the parlour, continuing in the same state of abstraction, which was a burden intolerable to her. Then he went to the book-shelf and took down books to look at, that she had scarcely glanced over.
He sat absorbed over a book on the illuminations in old missals, and then over a book on paintings in churches: Italian, English, French and German. He had, when he was sixteen, discovered a Roman Catholic bookshop where he could find such things.
He turned the leaves in absorption, absorbed in looking, not thinking. He was like a man whose eyes were in his chest, she said of him later.
She came to look at the things with him. Half they fascinated her. She was puzzled, interested, and antagonistic.
It was when she came to pictures of the Pieta that she burst out.
"I do think they're loathsome," she cried.
"What?" he said, surprised, abstracted.
"Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be worshipped."
"You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread," he said slowly.
"Does it," she cried. "Then it's worse. I don't want to see your chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it to me. Can't you see it's horrible?"
"It isn't me, it's Christ."
"What if it is, it's you! And it's horrible, you wallowing in your own dead body, and thinking of eating it in the Sacrament."
"You've to take it for what it means."
"It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and then worshipped—what else?"
They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof.
"And I think that lamb in Church," she said, "is the biggest joke in the parish——"
She burst into a "Pouf" of ridiculing laughter.
"It might be, to those that see nothing in it," he said. "You know it's the symbol of Christ, of His innocence and sacrifice."