Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her schooldays were
over. She had passed the matriculation examination. Now she came home to face
that empty period between school and possible marriage.
At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the time, she would
feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded suffering, maimed. She had no
will left to think about herself. For a time she must just lapse.
But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her mother had, at
this time, the power to irritate and madden the girl continuously. There were
already seven children, yet Mrs. Brangwen was again with child, the ninth she
had borne. One had died of diphtheria in infancy.
Even this fact of her mother’s pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs.
Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in her breeding. She would not
have the existence at all of anything but the immediate, physical, common
things. Ursula inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth’s
reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can’t grasp, can’t even
distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the darkness she was up
against. And part of this darkness was her mother. To limit, as her mother did,
everything to the ring of physical considerations, and complacently to reject
the reality of anything else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen care
about, but the children, the house, and a little local gossip. And she would
not be touched, she would let nothing else live near her. She went about,
big with child, slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own
time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the children, and
feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of womanhood.
This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her young and
undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when Gudrun was born. All these
years nothing had happened save the coming of the children, nothing had
mattered but the bodies of her babies. As her children came into consciousness,
as they began to suffer their own fulfilment, she cast them off. But she
remained dominant in the house. Brangwen continued in a kind of rich drowse of
physical heat, in connection with his wife. They were neither of them quite
personal, quite defined as individuals, so much were they pervaded by the
physical heat of breeding and rearing their young.
How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close, physical, limited
life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid, unshakeable as ever, Mrs. Brangwen
went about in her dominance of physical maternity.
There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that mattered to her. She
would have the children less rude and tyrannical, she would have a place
in the house. But her mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the
cunning instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen ridiculed and held cheap
Ursula’s passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula would try to
insist, in her own home, on the right of women to take equal place with men in
the field of action and work.
“Ay,” said the mother, “there’s a good crop of
stockings lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action.”
Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened her. She hated her
mother bitterly. After a few weeks of enforced domestic life, she had had
enough of her home. The commonness, the triviality, the immediate
meaninglessness of it all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas,
she corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in silent
contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with supercilious
indifference, as if she were a pretentious child not to be taken seriously.
Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved Ursula, therefore he
always had a sense of shame, almost of betrayal, when he turned on her. So he
turned fiercely and scathingly, and with a wholesale brutality that made Ursula
go white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming deadened in her,
her temper hard and cold.
Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all these years, he
began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty years he had gone on at this
office as a draughtsman, doing work in which he had no interest, because it
seemed his allotted work. The growing up of his daughters, their developing
rejection of old forms set him also free.
He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he pushed his way out
of the earth that covered him, working always away from the physical element in
which his life was captured. Slowly, blindly, gropingly, with what initiative
was left to him, he made his way towards individual expression and individual
form.
At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving, almost to the
point where he had left off his Adam and Eve panel, when he was courting. But
now he had knowledge and skill without vision. He saw the puerility of his
young conceptions, he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived. He
now had a new strength in his sense of reality. He felt as if he were real, as
if he handled real things. He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building
the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a
knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things
that were utterances of himself.
But he could not quite hitch on—always he was too busy, too uncertain,
confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling. To his surprise he found he
could do it. Modelling in clay, in plaster, he produced beautiful
reproductions, really beautiful. Then he set-to to make a head of Ursula, in
high relief, in the Donatello manner. In his first passion, he got a beautiful
suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of concentration would not come. With a
little ash in his mouth he gave up. He continued to copy, or to make designs by
selecting motives from classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello
as he had loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of the
freshness, the naïve alertness of the early Italians. But it was only
reproduction.
Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting. But he tried
water-colour painting after the manner of any other amateur. He got his results
but was not much interested. After one or two drawings of his beloved church,
which had the same alertness as his modelling, he seemed to be incongruous with
the modern atmospheric way of painting, so that his church tower stood up,
really stood and asserted its standing, but was ashamed of its own lack of
meaning, he turned away again.
He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over reproductions of
ornament, and began to make pendants in silver and pearl and matrix. The first
things he did, in his start of discovery, were really beautiful. Those later
were more imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each for
all his womenfolk. Then he made rings and bracelets.
Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula left school, he
was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he delighted in it, almost lusted
after it.
All this time his only connection with the real outer world was through his
winter evening classes, which brought him into contact with state education.
About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely indifferent—even about
the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his
own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent.
Ursula watched the newspapers, vaguely, concerning the war in South Africa.
They made her miserable, and she tried to have as little to do with them as
possible. But Skrebensky was out there. He sent her an occasional post-card.
But it was as if she were a blank wall in his direction, without windows or
outgoing. She adhered to the Skrebensky of her memory.
Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed from the roots and
native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to it, and she was aridly
transplanted. He was really only a memory. She revived his memory with strange
passion, after the departure of Winifred. He was to her almost the symbol of
her real life. It was as if, through him, in him, she might return to her own
self, which she was before she had loved Winifred, before this deadness had
come upon her, this pitiless transplanting. But even her memories were the work
of her imagination.
She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She could not dream of
him progressively, of what he was doing now, of what relation he would have to
her now. Only sometimes she wept to think how cruelly she had suffered when he
left her—ah, how she had suffered! She remembered what she had
written in her diary:
“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.”
Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been then. For it was
remembering a dead self. All that was dead after Winifred. She knew the corpse
of her young, loving self, she knew its grave. And the young living self she
mourned for had scarcely existed, it was the creature of her imagination.
Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and unchanged. No one would
ever love her now—she would love no one. The body of love was killed in
her after Winifred, there was something of the corpse in her. She would live,
she would go on, but she would have no lovers, no lover would want her any
more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest little flame of desire was
extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid germ that contained the bud of her
real self, her real love, was killed, she would go on growing as a plant, she
would do her best to produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead
before it was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse of hope.
The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with children. What was
her life—a sordid, formless, disintegrated nothing; Ursula Brangwen a
person without worth or importance, living in the mean village of Cossethay,
within the sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula Brangwen, at seventeen, worthless
and unvalued, neither wanted nor needed by anybody, and conscious herself of
her own dead value. It would not bear thinking of.
But still her dogged pride held its own. She might be defiled, she might be a
corpse that should never be loved, she might be a core-rotten stalk living upon
the food that others provided; yet she would give in to nobody.
Gradually she became conscious that she could not go on living at home as she
was doing, without place or meaning or worth. The very children that went to
school held her uselessness in contempt. She must do something.
Her father said she had plenty to do to help her mother. From her parents she
would never get more than a hit in the face. She was not a practical person.
She thought of wild things, of running away and becoming a domestic servant, of
asking some man to take her.
She wrote to the mistress of the High School for advice.
“I cannot see very clearly what you should do, Ursula,” came the
reply, “unless you are willing to become an elementary school teacher.
You have matriculated, and that qualifies you to take a post as uncertificated
teacher in any school, at a salary of about fifty pounds a year.
“I cannot tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in your desire to do
something. You will learn that mankind is a great body of which you are one
useful member, you will take your own place at the great task which humanity is
trying to fulfil. That will give you a satisfaction and a self-respect which
nothing else could give.”
Ursula’s heart sank. It was a cold, dreary satisfaction to think of. Yet
her cold will acquiesced. This was what she wanted.
“You have an emotional nature,” the letter went on, “a quick
natural response. If only you could learn patience and self-discipline, I do
not see why you should not make a good teacher. The least you could do is to
try. You need only serve a year, or perhaps two years, as uncertificated
teacher. Then you would go to one of the training colleges, where I hope you
would take your degree. I most strongly urge and advise you to keep up your
studies always with the intention of taking a degree. That will give you a
qualification and a position in the world, and will give you more scope to
choose your own way.
“I shall be proud to see one of my girls win her own economical
independence, which means so much more than it seems. I shall be glad indeed to
know that one more of my girls has provided for herself the means of freedom to
choose for herself.”
It all sounded grim and desperate. Ursula rather hated it. But her
mother’s contempt and her father’s harshness had made her raw at
the quick, she knew the ignominy of being a hanger-on, she felt the festering
thorn of her mother’s animal estimation.
At length she had to speak. Hard and shut down and silent within herself, she
slipped out one evening to the workshed. She heard the tap-tap-tap of the
hammer upon the metal. Her father lifted his head as the door opened. His face
was ruddy and bright with instinct, as when he was a youth, his black moustache
was cut close over his wide mouth, his black hair was fine and close as ever.
But there was about him an abstraction, a sort of instrumental detachment from
human things. He was a worker. He watched his daughter’s hard,
expressionless face. A hot anger came over his breast and belly.
“What now?” he said.
“Can’t I,” she answered, looking aside, not looking at him,
“can’t I go out to work?”
“Go out to work, what for?”
His voice was so strong, and ready, and vibrant. It irritated her.
“I want some other life than this.”
A flash of strong rage arrested all his blood for a moment.
“Some other life?” he repeated. “Why, what other life do you
want?”
She hesitated.
“Something else besides housework and hanging about. And I want to earn
something.”
Her curious, brutal hardness of speech, and the fierce invincibility of her
youth, which ignored him, made him also harden with anger.
“And how do you think you’re going to earn anything?”
he asked.
“I can become a teacher—I’m qualified by my matric.”
He wished her matric. in hell.
“And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?” he asked,
jeering.
“Fifty pounds a year,” she said.
He was silent, his power taken out of his hand.
He had always hugged a secret pride in the fact that his daughters need not go
out to work. With his wife’s money and his own they had four hundred a
year. They could draw on the capital if need be later on. He was not afraid for
his old age. His daughters might be ladies.
Fifty pounds a year was a pound a week—which was enough for her to live
on independently.
“And what sort of a teacher do you think you’d make? You
haven’t the patience of a Jack-gnat with your own brothers and sisters,
let alone with a class of children. And I thought you didn’t like dirty,
board-school brats.”
“They’re not all dirty.”
“You’d find they’re not all clean.”
There was silence in the workshop. The lamplight fell on the burned silver bowl
that lay between him, on mallet and furnace and chisel. Brangwen stood with a
queer, catlike light on his face, almost like a smile. But it was no smile.
“Can I try?” she said.
“You can do what the deuce you like, and go where you like.”
Her face was fixed and expressionless and indifferent. It always sent him to a
pitch of frenzy to see it like that. He kept perfectly still.
Cold, without any betrayal of feeling, she turned and left the shed. He worked
on, with all his nerves jangled. Then he had to put down his tools and go into
the house.
In a bitter tone of anger and contempt he told his wife. Ursula was present.
There was a brief altercation, closed by Mrs. Brangwen’s saying, in a
tone of biting superiority and indifference:
“Let her find out what it’s like. She’ll soon have had
enough.”
The matter was left there. But Ursula considered herself free to act. For some
days she made no move. She was reluctant to take the cruel step of finding
work, for she shrank with extreme sensitiveness and shyness from new contact,
new situations. Then at length a sort of doggedness drove her. Her soul was
full of bitterness.
She went to the Free Library in Ilkeston, copied out addresses from the
Schoolmistress, and wrote for application forms. After two days she rose
early to meet the postman. As she expected, there were three long envelopes.
Her heart beat painfully as she went up with them to her bedroom. Her fingers
trembled, she could hardly force herself to look at the long, official forms
she had to fill in. The whole thing was so cruel, so impersonal. Yet it must be
done.
“Name (surname first):...”
In a trembling hand she wrote, “Brangwen,—Ursula.”
“Age and date of birth:...”
After a long time considering, she filled in that line.
“Qualifications, with date of Examination:...”
With a little pride she wrote:
“London Matriculation Examination.”
“Previous experience and where obtained:...”
Her heart sank as she wrote:
“None.”
Still there was much to answer. It took her two hours to fill in the three
forms. Then she had to copy her testimonials from her head-mistress and from
the clergyman.
At last, however, it was finished. She had sealed the three long envelopes. In
the afternoon she went down to Ilkeston to post them. She said nothing of it
all to her parents. As she stamped her long letters and put them into the box
at the main post-office she felt as if already she was out of the reach of her
father and mother, as if she had connected herself with the outer, greater
world of activity, the man-made world.
As she returned home, she dreamed again in her own fashion her old, gorgeous
dreams. One of her applications was to Gillingham, in Kent, one to
Kingston-on-Thames, and one to Swanwick in Derbyshire.
Gillingham was such a lovely name, and Kent was the Garden of England. So that,
in Gillingham, an old, old village by the hopfields, where the sun shone
softly, she came out of school in the afternoon into the shadow of the plane
trees by the gate, and turned down the sleepy road towards the cottage where
cornflowers poked their blue heads through the old wooden fence, and phlox
stood built up of blossom beside the path.
A delicate, silver-haired lady rose with delicate, ivory hands uplifted as
Ursula entered the room, and:
“Oh, my dear, what do you think!”
“What is it, Mrs. Wetherall?”
Frederick had come home. Nay, his manly step was heard on the stair, she saw
his strong boots, his blue trousers, his uniformed figure, and then his face,
clean and keen as an eagle’s, and his eyes lit up with the glamour of
strange seas, ah, strange seas that had woven through his soul, as he descended
into the kitchen.
This dream, with its amplifications, lasted her a mile of walking. Then she
went to Kingston-on-Thames.
Kingston-on-Thames was an old historic place just south of London. There lived
the well-born dignified souls who belonged to the metropolis, but who loved
peace. There she met a wonderful family of girls living in a large old Queen
Anne house, whose lawns sloped to the river, and in an atmosphere of stately
peace she found herself among her soul’s intimates. They loved her as
sisters, they shared with her all noble thoughts.
She was happy again. In her musings she spread her poor, clipped wings, and
flew into the pure empyrean.
Day followed day. She did not speak to her parents. Then came the return of her
testimonials from Gillingham. She was not wanted, neither at Swanwick. The
bitterness of rejection followed the sweets of hope. Her bright feathers were
in the dust again.
Then, suddenly, after a fortnight, came an intimation from Kingston-on-Thames.
She was to appear at the Education Office of that town on the following
Thursday, for an interview with the Committee. Her heart stood still. She knew
she would make the Committee accept her. Now she was afraid, now that her
removal was imminent. Her heart quivered with fear and reluctance. But
underneath her purpose was fixed.
She passed shadowily through the day, unwilling to tell her news to her mother,
waiting for her father. Suspense and fear were strong upon her. She dreaded
going to Kingston. Her easy dreams disappeared from the grasp of reality.
And yet, as the afternoon wore away, the sweetness of the dream returned again.
Kingston-on-Thames—there was such sound of dignity to her. The shadow of
history and the glamour of stately progress enveloped her. The palaces would be
old and darkened, the place of kings obscured. Yet it was a place of kings for
her—Richard and Henry and Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth. She divined great
lawns with noble trees, and terraces whose steps the water washed softly, where
the swans sometimes came to earth. Still she must see the stately, gorgeous
barge of the Queen float down, the crimson carpet put upon the landing stairs,
the gentlemen in their purple-velvet cloaks, bare-headed, standing in the
sunshine grouped on either side waiting.
“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.”
Evening came, her father returned home, sanguine and alert and detached as
ever. He was less real than her fancies. She waited whilst he ate his tea. He
took big mouthfuls, big bites, and ate unconsciously with the same abandon an
animal gives to its food.
Immediately after tea he went over to the church. It was choir-practice, and he
wanted to try the tunes on his organ.
The latch of the big door clicked loudly as she came after him, but the organ
rolled more loudly still. He was unaware. He was practicing the anthem. She saw
his small, jet-black head and alert face between the candle-flames, his slim
body sagged on the music-stool. His face was so luminous and fixed, the
movements of his limbs seemed strange, apart from him. The sound of the organ
seemed to belong to the very stone of the pillars, like sap running in them.
Then there was a close of music and silence.
“Father!” she said.
He looked round as if at an apparition. Ursula stood shadowily within the
candle-light.
“What now?” he said, not coming to earth.
It was difficult to speak to him.
“I’ve got a situation,” she said, forcing herself to speak.
“You’ve got what?” he answered, unwilling to come out of his
mood of organ-playing. He closed the music before him.
“I’ve got a situation to go to.”
Then he turned to her, still abstracted, unwilling.
“Oh, where’s that?” he said.
“At Kingston-on-Thames. I must go on Thursday for an interview with the
Committee.”
“You must go on Thursday?”
“Yes.”
And she handed him the letter. He read it by the light of the candles.
“Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay, Derbyshire.
“Dear Madam, You are requested to call at the above offices on Thursday
next, the 10th, at 11.30 a.m., for an interview with the committee, referring
to your application for the post of assistant mistress at the Wellingborough
Green Schools.”
It was very difficult for Brangwen to take in this remote and official
information, glowing as he was within the quiet of his church and his anthem
music.
“Well, you needn’t bother me with it now, need you?’ he said
impatiently, giving her back the letter.
“I’ve got to go on Thursday,” she said.
He sat motionless. Then he reached more music, and there was a rushing sound of
air, then a long, emphatic trumpet-note of the organ, as he laid his hands on
the keys. Ursula turned and went away.
He tried to give himself again to the organ. But he could not. He could not get
back. All the time a sort of string was tugging, tugging him elsewhere,
miserably.
So that when he came into the house after choir-practice his face was dark and
his heart black. He said nothing however, until all the younger children were
in bed. Ursula, however, knew what was brewing.
At length he asked:
“Where’s that letter?”
She gave it to him. He sat looking at it. “You are requested to call at
the above offices on Thursday next——” It was a cold, official
notice to Ursula herself and had nothing to do with him. So! She existed now as
a separate social individual. It was for her to answer this note, without
regard to him. He had even no right to interfere. His heart was hard and angry.
“You had to do it behind our backs, had you?” he said, with a
sneer. And her heart leapt with hot pain. She knew she was free—she had
broken away from him. He was beaten.
“You said, ‘let her try,’” she retorted, almost
apologizing to him.
He did not hear. He sat looking at the letter.
“Education Office, Kingston-on-Thames”—and then the
typewritten “Miss Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay.” It
was all so complete and so final. He could not but feel the new position Ursula
held, as recipient of that letter. It was an iron in his soul.
“Well,” he said at length, “you’re not going.”
Ursula started and could find no words to clamour her revolt.
“If you think you’re going dancin’ off to th’ other
side of London, you’re mistaken.”
“Why not?” she cried, at once hard fixed in her will to go.
“That’s why not,” he said.
And there was silence till Mrs. Brangwen came downstairs.
“Look here, Anna,” he said, handing her the letter.
She put back her head, seeing a typewritten letter, anticipating trouble from
the outside world. There was the curious, sliding motion of her eyes, as if she
shut off her sentient, maternal self, and a kind of hard trance, meaningless,
took its place. Thus, meaningless, she glanced over the letter, careful not to
take it in. She apprehended the contents with her callous, superficial mind.
Her feeling self was shut down.
“What post is it?” she asked.
“She wants to go and be a teacher in Kingston-on-Thames, at fifty pounds
a year.”
“Oh, indeed.”
The mother spoke as if it were a hostile fact concerning some stranger. She
would have let her go, out of callousness. Mrs. Brangwen would begin to grow up
again only with her youngest child. Her eldest girl was in the way now.
“She’s not going all that distance,” said the father.
“I have to go where they want me,” cried Ursula. “And
it’s a good place to go to.”
“What do you know about the place?” said her father harshly.
“And it doesn’t matter whether they want you or not, if your father
says you are not to go,” said the mother calmly.
How Ursula hated her!
“You said I was to try,” the girl cried. “Now I’ve got
a place and I’m going to go.”
“You’re not going all that distance,” said her father.
“Why don’t you get a place at Ilkeston, where you can live at
home?” asked Gudrun, who hated conflicts, who could not understand
Ursula’s uneasy way, yet who must stand by her sister.
“There aren’t any places in Ilkeston,” cried Ursula.
“And I’d rather go right away.”
“If you’d asked about it, a place could have been got for you in
Ilkeston. But you had to play Miss High-an’-mighty, and go your own
way,” said her father.
“I’ve no doubt you’d rather go right away,” said her
mother, very caustic. “And I’ve no doubt you’d find other
people didn’t put up with you for very long either. You’ve too much
opinion of yourself for your good.”
Between the girl and her mother was a feeling of pure hatred. There came a
stubborn silence. Ursula knew she must break it.
“Well, they’ve written to me, and I s’ll have to go,”
she said.
“Where will you get the money from?” asked her father.
“Uncle Tom will give it me,” she said.
Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant.
Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was abstracted, he seemed
to be abstracting himself, to make a pure statement.
“Well, you’re not going all that distance away,” he said.
“I’ll ask Mr. Burt about a place here. I’m not going to have
you by yourself at the other side of London.”
“But I’ve got to go to Kingston,” said Ursula.
“They’ve sent for me.”
“They’ll do without you,” he said.
There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of tears.
“Well,” she said, low and tense, “you can put me off this,
but I’m going to have a place. I’m not going to stop
at home.”
“Nobody wants you to stop at home,” he suddenly shouted, going
livid with rage.
She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its own arrogance, in
its own antagonistic indifference to the rest of them. This was the state in
which he wanted to kill her. She went singing into the parlour.
“C’est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenêtre qu’est-ce qui le lui renda——”
During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard, singing to herself,
making love to the children, but her soul hard and cold with regard to her
parents. Nothing more was said. The hardness and brightness lasted for four
days. Then it began to break up. So at evening she said to her father:
“Have you spoken about a place for me?”
“I spoke to Mr. Burt.”
“What did he say?”
“There’s a committee meeting to-morrow. He’ll tell me on
Friday.”
So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an exciting dream. Here
she could feel the hard, raw reality. So she knew that this would come to pass.
Because nothing was ever fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited
reality. She did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew
Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must take her freedom
where she could.
On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in Brinsley Street school.
This could most probably be secured for her, at once, without the trouble of
application.
Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor quarter, and she had
had a taste of the common children of Ilkeston. They had shouted after her and
thrown stones. Still, as a teacher, she would be in authority. And it was all
unknown. She was excited. The very forest of dry, sterile brick had some
fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly ugly, it would
purge her of some of her floating sentimentality.
She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love her. She would be
so personal. Teachers were always so hard and impersonal. There was no
vivid relationship. She would make everything personal and vivid, she would
give herself, she would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her
children, she would make them so happy, and they would prefer her to any
teacher on the face of the earth.
At Christmas she would choose such fascinating Christmas cards for them, and
she would give them such a happy party in one of the class-rooms.
The headmaster, Mr. Harby, was a short, thick-set, rather common man, she
thought. But she would hold before him the light of grace and refinement, he
would have her in such high esteem before long. She would be the gleaming sun
of the school, the children would blossom like little weeds, the teachers like
tall, hard plants would burst into rare flower.
The Monday morning came. It was the end of September, and a drizzle of fine
rain like veils round her, making her seem intimate, a world to herself. She
walked forward to the new land. The old was blotted out. The veil would be rent
that hid the new world. She was gripped hard with suspense as she went down the
hill in the rain, carrying her dinner-bag.
Through the thin rain she saw the town, a black, extensive mount. She must
enter in upon it. She felt at once a feeling of repugnance and of excited
fulfilment. But she shrank.
She waited at the terminus for the tram. Here it was beginning. Before her was
the station to Nottingham, whence Theresa had gone to school half an hour
before; behind her was the little church school she had attended when she was a
child, when her grandmother was alive. Her grandmother had been dead two years
now. There was a strange woman at the Marsh, with her Uncle Fred, and a small
baby. Behind her was Cossethay, and blackberries were ripe on the hedges.
As she waited at the tram-terminus she reverted swiftly to her childhood; her
teasing grandfather, with his fair beard and blue eyes, and his big, monumental
body; he had got drowned: her grandmother, whom Ursula would sometimes say she
had loved more than anyone else in the world: the little church school, the
Phillips boys; one was a soldier in the Life Guards now, one was a collier.
With a passion she clung to the past.
But as she dreamed of it, she heard the tram-car grinding round a bend,
rumbling dully, she saw it draw into sight, and hum nearer. It sidled round the
loop at the terminus, and came to a standstill, looming above her. Some shadowy
grey people stepped from the far end, the conductor was walking in the puddles,
swinging round the pole.
She mounted into the wet, comfortless tram, whose floor was dark with wet,
whose windows were all steamed, and she sat in suspense. It had begun, her new
existence.
One other passenger mounted—a sort of charwoman with a drab, wet coat.
Ursula could not bear the waiting of the tram. The bell clanged, there was a
lurch forward. The car moved cautiously down the wet street. She was being
carried forward, into her new existence. Her heart burned with pain and
suspense, as if something were cutting her living tissue.
Often, oh often the tram seemed to stop, and wet, cloaked people mounted and
sat mute and grey in stiff rows opposite her, their umbrellas between their
knees. The windows of the tram grew more steamy; opaque. She was shut in with
these unliving, spectral people. Even yet it did not occur to her that she was
one of them. The conductor came down issuing tickets. Each little ring of his
clipper sent a pang of dread through her. But her ticket surely was different
from the rest.
They were all going to work; she also was going to work. Her ticket was the
same. She sat trying to fit in with them. But fear was at her bowels, she felt
an unknown, terrible grip upon her.
At Bath Street she must dismount and change trams. She looked uphill. It seemed
to lead to freedom. She remembered the many Saturday afternoons she had walked
up to the shops. How free and careless she had been!
Ah, her tram was sliding gingerly downhill. She dreaded every yard of her
conveyance. The car halted, she mounted hastily.
She kept turning her head as the car ran on, because she was uncertain of the
street. At last, her heart a flame of suspense, trembling, she rose. The
conductor rang the bell brusquely.
She was walking down a small, mean, wet street, empty of people. The school
squatted low within its railed, asphalt yard, that shone black with rain. The
building was grimy, and horrible, dry plants were shadowily looking through the
windows.
She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place seemed to have a
threatening expression, imitating the church’s architecture, for the
purpose of domineering, like a gesture of vulgar authority. She saw that one
pair of feet had paddled across the flagstone floor of the porch. The place was
silent, deserted, like an empty prison waiting the return of tramping feet.
Ursula went forward to the teachers’ room that burrowed in a gloomy hole.
She knocked timidly.
“Come in!” called a surprised man’s voice, as from a prison
cell. She entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was
lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirt-sleeves was rubbing a
paper on a jellytray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow, sharp face, said
“Good morning,” then turned away again, and stripped the paper off
the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing transferred, before he
dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap.
Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the narrowness of
the room, all seemed unreal.
“Isn’t it a nasty morning,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s not much of weather.”
But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed. This
place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo. Ursula did not
know what to say. She took off her waterproof.
“Am I early?” she asked.
The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to be
sharpened to needle-points of vision.
“Twenty-five past,” he said. “You’re the second to
come. I’m first this morning.”
Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin red hands
rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing, pulling up a
corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of
curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the table.
“Must you do so many?” asked Ursula.
Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three years
old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes were blue, and
sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl thought.
“Sixty-three,” he answered.
“So many!” she said, gently. Then she remembered.
“But they’re not all for your class, are they?” she added.
“Why aren’t they?” he replied, a fierceness in his voice.
Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his
directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never been
treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were addressing a
machine.
“It is too many,” she said sympathetically.
“You’ll get about the same,” he said.
That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to feel. Still
she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling
about him that attracted her and frightened her at the same time. It was so
cold, and against his nature.
The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about twenty-eight
appeared.
“Oh, Ursula!” the newcomer exclaimed. “You are here early! My
word, I’ll warrant you don’t keep it up. That’s Mr.
Williamson’s peg. This is yours. Standard Five teacher always has this.
Aren’t you going to take your hat off?”
Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula’s waterproof from the peg on which it
was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had already snatched the
pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed them through her coat. She turned to
Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat, dun-coloured hair.
“Isn’t it a beastly morning,” she exclaimed, “beastly!
And if there’s one thing I hate above another it’s a wet Monday
morning;—pack of kids trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding
’em——”
She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying it round
her waist.
“You’ve brought an apron, haven’t you?” she said
jerkily, glancing at Ursula. “Oh—you’ll want one.
You’ve no idea what a sight you’ll look before half-past four, what
with chalk and ink and kids’ dirty feet.—Well, I can send a boy
down to mamma’s for one.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Ursula.
“Oh, yes—I can send easily,” cried Miss Harby.
Ursula’s heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was
she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss Harby had
not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored him. Ursula felt
the callous crude rudeness between the two teachers.
The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were already clattering
in the porch.
“Jim Richards,” called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A boy
came sheepishly forward.
“Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?” said Miss Harby, in a
commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait for an answer.
“Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my school pinas, for Miss
Brangwen—shall you?”
The boy muttered a sheepish “Yes, miss,” and was moving away.
“Hey,” called Miss Harby. “Come here—now what are you
going for? What shall you say to mamma?”
“A school pina——” muttered the boy.
“‘Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her another
school pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she’s come without
one.’”
“Yes, miss,” muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving off.
Miss Harby caught him back, holding him by the shoulder.
“What are you going to say?”
“Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss Brangwin,”
muttered the boy very sheepishly.
“Miss Brangwen!” laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away.
“Here, you’d better have my umbrella—wait a minute.”
The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby’s umbrella, and set off.
“Don’t take long over it,” called Miss Harby, after him. Then
she turned to Ursula, and said brightly:
“Oh, he’s a caution, that lad—but not bad, you know.”
“No,” Ursula agreed, weakly.
The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room. Ursula glanced
down the place. Its rigid, long silence was official and chilling. Half-way
down was a glass partition, the doors of which were open. A clock ticked
re-echoing, and Miss Harby’s voice sounded double as she said:
“This is the big room—Standard
Five-Six-and-Seven.—Here’s your
place—Five——”
She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a small high
teacher’s desk facing a squadron of long benches, two high windows in the
wall opposite.
It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious, unliving light in the
room changed her character. She thought it was the rainy morning. Then she
looked up again, because of the horrid feeling of being shut in a rigid,
inflexible air, away from all feeling of the ordinary day; and she noticed that
the windows were of ribbed, suffused glass.
The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed, pale
green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums against the
pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a squadron, and dread filled
her. This was a new world, a new life, with which she was threatened. But still
excited, she climbed into her chair at her teacher’s desk. It was high,
and her feet could not reach the ground, but must rest on the step. Lifted up
there, off the ground, she was in office. How queer, how queer it all was! How
different it was from the mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought
of her own village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off, so
lost to her.
She was here in this hard, stark reality—reality. It was queer that she
should call this the reality, which she had never known till to-day, and which
now so filled her with dread and dislike, that she wished she might go away.
This was the reality, and Cossethay, her beloved, beautiful, wellknown
Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was minor reality. This prison
of a school was reality. Here, then, she would sit in state, the queen of
scholars! Here she would realize her dream of being the beloved teacher
bringing light and joy to her children! But the desks before her had an
abstract angularity that bruised her sentiment and made her shrink. She winced,
feeling she had been a fool in her anticipations. She had brought her feelings
and her generosity to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And
already she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of place.
She slid down, and they returned to the teacher’s room. It was queer to
feel that one ought to alter one’s personality. She was nobody, there was
no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply
herself to it.
Mr. Harby was in the teachers’ room, standing before a big, open
cupboard, in which Ursula could see piles of pink blotting-paper, heaps of
shiny new books, boxes of chalk, and bottles of coloured inks. It looked a
treasure store.
The schoolmaster was a short, sturdy man, with a fine head, and a heavy jowl.
Nevertheless he was good-looking, with his shapely brows and nose, and his
great, hanging moustache. He seemed absorbed in his work, and took no notice of
Ursula’s entry. There was something insulting in the way he could be so
actively unaware of another person, so occupied.
When he had a moment of absence, he looked up from the table and said
good-morning to Ursula. There was a pleasant light in his brown eyes. He seemed
very manly and incontrovertible, like something she wanted to push over.
“You had a wet walk,” he said to Ursula.
“Oh, I don’t mind, I’m used to it,” she replied, with a
nervous little laugh.
But already he was not listening. Her words sounded ridiculous and babbling. He
was taking no notice of her.
“You will sign your name here,” he said to her, as if she were some
child—“and the time when you come and go.”
Ursula signed her name in the time book and stood back. No one took any further
notice of her. She beat her brains for something to say, but in vain.
“I’d let them in now,” said Mr. Harby to the thin man, who
was very hastily arranging his papers.
The assistant teacher made no sign of acquiescence, and went on with what he
was doing. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. At the last moment Mr. Brunt
slipped into his coat.
“You will go to the girls’ lobby,” said the schoolmaster to
Ursula, with a fascinating, insulting geniality, purely official and
domineering.
She went out and found Miss Harby, and another girl teacher, in the porch. On
the asphalt yard the rain was falling. A toneless bell tang-tang-tanged
drearily overhead, monotonously, insistently. It came to an end. Then Mr. Brunt
was seen, bare-headed, standing at the other gate of the school yard, blowing
shrill blasts on a whistle and looking down the rainy, dreary street.
Boys in gangs and streams came trotting up, running past the master and with a
loud clatter of feet and voices, over the yard to the boys’ porch. Girls
were running and walking through the other entrance.
In the porch where Ursula stood there was a great noise of girls, who were
tearing off their coats and hats, and hanging them on the racks bristling with
pegs. There was a smell of wet clothing, a tossing out of wet, draggled hair, a
noise of voices and feet.
The mass of girls grew greater, the rage around the pegs grew steadier, the
scholars tended to fall into little noisy gangs in the porch. Then Violet Harby
clapped her hands, clapped them louder, with a shrill “Quiet, girls,
quiet!”
There was a pause. The hubbub died down but did not cease.
“What did I say?” cried Miss Harby, shrilly.
There was almost complete silence. Sometimes a girl, rather late, whirled into
the porch and flung off her things.
“Leaders—in place,” commanded Miss Harby shrilly.
Pairs of girls in pinafores and long hair stood separate in the porch.
“Standard Four, Five, and Six—fall in,” cried Miss Harby.
There was a hubbub, which gradually resolved itself into three columns of
girls, two and two, standing smirking in the passage. In among the peg-racks,
other teachers were putting the lower classes into ranks.
Ursula stood by her own Standard Five. They were jerking their shoulders,
tossing their hair, nudging, writhing, staring, grinning, whispering and
twisting.
A sharp whistle was heard, and Standard Six, the biggest girls, set off, led by
Miss Harby. Ursula, with her Standard Five, followed after. She stood beside a
smirking, grinning row of girls, waiting in a narrow passage. What she was
herself she did not know.
Suddenly the sound of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off hollowly down
the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The piano played on, a
march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of the big room. Mr. Harby was
seen away beyond at his desk. Mr. Brunt guarded the other door of the room.
Ursula’s class pushed up. She stood near them. They glanced and smirked
and shoved.
“Go on,” said Ursula.
They tittered.
“Go on,” said Ursula, for the piano continued.
The girls broke loosely into the room. Mr. Harby, who had seemed immersed in
some occupation, away at his desk, lifted his head and thundered:
“Halt!”
There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just starting through
the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued voice of Mr. Brunt was heard,
then the booming shout of Mr. Harby, from far down the room:
“Who told Standard Five girls to come in like that?”
Ursula crimsoned. Her girls were glancing up at her, smirking their accusation.
“I sent them in, Mr. Harby,” she said, in a clear, struggling
voice. There was a moment of silence. Then Mr. Harby roared from the distance.
“Go back to your places, Standard Five girls.”
The girls glanced up at Ursula, accusing, rather jeering, fugitive. They pushed
back. Ursula’s heart hardened with ignominious pain.
“Forward—march,” came Mr. Brunt’s voice, and the girls
set off, keeping time with the ranks of boys.
Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls, who stood filling the
ranks of the desks. She felt utterly nonexistent. She had no place nor being
there. She faced the block of children.
Down the room she heard the rapid firing of questions. She stood before her
class not knowing what to do. She waited painfully. Her block of children,
fifty unknown faces, watched her, hostile, ready to jeer. She felt as if she
were in torture over a fire of faces. And on every side she was naked to them.
Of unutterable length and torture the seconds went by.
Then she gathered courage. She heard Mr. Brunt asking questions in mental
arithmetic. She stood near to her class, so that her voice need not be raised
too much, and faltering, uncertain, she said:
“Seven hats at twopence ha’penny each?”
A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence. She was red and
suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades, and she asked for the answer.
The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do, there came
horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the children; and when, relying
on some pert little girl for information, she had started a lesson, she did not
know how to go on with it properly. The children were her masters. She deferred
to them. She could always hear Mr. Brunt. Like a machine, always in the same
hard, high, inhuman voice he went on with his teaching, oblivious of
everything. And before this inhuman number of children she was always at bay.
She could not get away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective
children, depending on her for command, for command it hated and resented. It
made her feel she could not breathe: she must suffocate, it was so inhuman.
They were so many, that they were not children. They were a squadron. She could
not speak as she would to a child, because they were not individual children,
they were a collective, inhuman thing.
Dinner-time came, and stunned, bewildered, solitary, she went into the
teachers’ room for dinner. Never had she felt such a stranger to life
before. It seemed to her she had just disembarked from some strange horrible
state where everything was as in hell, a condition of hard, malevolent system.
And she was not really free. The afternoon drew at her like some bondage.
The first week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and
she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now and then to her
class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by,
bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and
non-existent. But he stood there watching with the listening-genial smile of
the eyes, that was really threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on
teaching, she felt she had no soul in her body. Then he went away, and his
going was like a derision. The class was his class. She was a wavering
substitute. He thrashed and bullied, he was hated. But he was master. Though
she was gentle and always considerate of her class, yet they belonged to Mr.
Harby, and they did not belong to her. Like some invincible source of the
mechanism he kept all power to himself. And the class owned his power. And in
school it was power, and power alone that mattered.
Soon Ursula came to dread him, and at the bottom of her dread was a seed of
hate, for she despised him, yet he was master of her. Then she began to get on.
All the other teachers hated him, and fanned their hatred among themselves. For
he was master of them and the children, he stood like a wheel to make absolute
his authority over the herd. That seemed to be his one reason in life, to hold
blind authority over the school. His teachers were his subjects as much as the
scholars. Only, because they had some authority, his instinct was to detest
them.
Ursula could not make herself a favourite with him. From the first moment she
set hard against him. She set against Violet Harby also. Mr. Harby was,
however, too much for her, he was something she could not come to grips with,
something too strong for her. She tried to approach him as a young, bright girl
usually approaches a man, expecting a little chivalrous courtesy. But the fact
that she was a girl, a woman, was ignored or used as a matter for contempt
against her. She did not know what she was, nor what she must be. She wanted to
remain her own responsive, personal self.
So she taught on. She made friends with the Standard Three teacher, Maggie
Schofield. Miss Schofield was about twenty years old, a subdued girl who held
aloof from the other teachers. She was rather beautiful, meditative, and seemed
to live in another, lovelier world.
Ursula took her dinner to school, and during the second week ate it in Miss
Schofield’s room. Standard Three classroom stood by itself and had
windows on two sides, looking on to the playground. It was a passionate relief
to find such a retreat in the jarring school. For there were pots of
chrysanthemums and coloured leaves, and a big jar of berries: there were pretty
little pictures on the wall, photogravure reproductions from Greuze, and
Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence”, giving an air of intimacy; so
that the room, with its window space, its smaller, tidier desks, its touch of
pictures and flowers, made Ursula at once glad. Here at last was a little
personal touch, to which she could respond.
It was Monday. She had been at school a week and was getting used to the
surroundings, though she was still an entire foreigner in herself. She looked
forward to having dinner with Maggie. That was the bright spot in the day.
Maggie was so strong and remote, walking with slow, sure steps down a hard
road, carrying the dream within her. Ursula went through the class teaching as
through a meaningless daze.
Her class tumbled out at midday in haphazard fashion. She did not realize what
host she was gathering against herself by her superior tolerance, her kindness
and her laisser-aller. They were gone, and she was rid of them, and that
was all. She hurried away to the teachers’ room.
Mr. Brunt was crouching at the small stove, putting a little rice pudding into
the oven. He rose then, and attentively poked in a small saucepan on the hob
with a fork. Then he replaced the saucepan lid.
“Aren’t they done?” asked Ursula gaily, breaking in on his
tense absorption.
She always kept a bright, blithe manner, and was pleasant to all the teachers.
For she felt like the swan among the geese, of superior heritage and belonging.
And her pride at being the swan in this ugly school was not yet abated.
“Not yet,” replied Mr. Brunt, laconic.
“I wonder if my dish is hot,” she said, bending down at the oven.
She half expected him to look for her, but he took no notice. She was hungry
and she poked her finger eagerly in the pot to see if her brussels sprouts and
potatoes and meat were ready. They were not.
“Don’t you think it’s rather jolly bringing dinner?”
she said to Mr. Brunt.
“I don’t know as I do,” he said, spreading a serviette on a
corner of the table, and not looking at her.
“I suppose it is too far for you to go home?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he rose and looked at her. He had the bluest,
fiercest, most pointed eyes that she had ever met. He stared at her with
growing fierceness.
“If I were you, Miss Brangwen,” he said, menacingly, “I
should get a bit tighter hand over my class.”
Ursula shrank.
“Would you?” she asked, sweetly, yet in terror. “Aren’t
I strict enough?”
“Because,” he repeated, taking no notice of her,
“they’ll get you down if you don’t tackle ’em pretty
quick. They’ll pull you down, and worry you, till Harby gets you
shifted—that’s how it’ll be. You won’t be here another
six weeks”—and he filled his mouth with food—“if you
don’t tackle ’em and tackle ’em quick.”
“Oh, but——” Ursula said, resentfully, ruefully. The
terror was deep in her.
“Harby’ll not help you. This is what he’ll
do—he’ll let you go on, getting worse and worse, till either you
clear out or he clears you out. It doesn’t matter to me, except that
you’ll leave a class behind you as I hope I shan’t have to cope
with.”
She heard the accusation in the man’s voice, and felt condemned. But
still, school had not yet become a definite reality to her. She was shirking
it. It was reality, but it was all outside her. And she fought against Mr.
Brunt’s representation. She did not want to realize.
“Will it be so terrible?” she said, quivering, rather beautiful,
but with a slight touch of condescension, because she would not betray her own
trepidation.
“Terrible?” said the man, turning to his potatoes again. “I
dunno about terrible.”
“I do feel frightened,” said Ursula. “The children
seem so——”
“What?” said Miss Harby, entering at that moment.
“Why,” said Ursula, “Mr. Brunt says I ought to tackle my
class,” and she laughed uneasily.
“Oh, you have to keep order if you want to teach,” said Miss Harby,
hard, superior, trite.
Ursula did not answer. She felt non valid before them.
“If you want to be let to live, you have,” said Mr. Brunt.
“Well, if you can’t keep order, what good are you?” said Miss
Harby.
“An’ you’ve got to do it by yourself,”—his voice
rose like the bitter cry of the prophets. “You’ll get no
help from anybody.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Miss Harby. “Some people can’t be
helped.” And she departed.
The air of hostility and disintegration, of wills working in antagonistic
subordination, was hideous. Mr. Brunt, subordinate, afraid, acid with shame,
frightened her. Ursula wanted to run. She only wanted to clear out, not to
understand.
Then Miss Schofield came in, and with her another, more restful note. Ursula at
once turned for confirmation to the newcomer. Maggie remained personal within
all this unclean system of authority.
“Is the big Anderson here?” she asked of Mr. Brunt. And they spoke
of some affair about two scholars, coldly, officially.
Miss Schofield took her brown dish, and Ursula followed with her own. The cloth
was laid in the pleasant Standard Three room, there was a jar with two or three
monthly roses on the table.
“It is so nice in here, you have made it different,” said
Ursula gaily. But she was afraid. The atmosphere of the school was upon her.
“The big room,” said Miss Schofield, “ha, it’s misery
to be in it!”
She too spoke with bitterness. She too lived in the ignominious position of an
upper servant hated by the master above and the class beneath. She was, she
knew, liable to attack from either side at any minute, or from both at once,
for the authorities would listen to the complaints of parents, and both would
turn round on the mongrel authority, the teacher.
So there was a hard, bitter withholding in Maggie Schofield even as she poured
out her savoury mess of big golden beans and brown gravy.
“It is vegetarian hot-pot,” said Miss Schofield. “Would you
like to try it?”
“I should love to,” said Ursula.
Her own dinner seemed coarse and ugly beside this savoury, clean dish.
“I’ve never eaten vegetarian things,” she said, “But I
should think they can be good.”
“I’m not really a vegetarian,” said Maggie, “I
don’t like to bring meat to school.”
“No,” said Ursula, “I don’t think I do either.”
And again her soul rang an answer to a new refinement, a new liberty. If all
vegetarian things were as nice as this, she would be glad to escape the slight
uncleanness of meat.
“How good!” she cried.
“Yes,” said Miss Schofield, and she proceeded to tell her the
receipt. The two girls passed on to talk about themselves. Ursula told all
about the High School, and about her matriculation, bragging a little. She felt
so poor here, in this ugly place. Miss Schofield listened with brooding,
handsome face, rather gloomy.
“Couldn’t you have got to some better place than this?” she
asked at length.
“I didn’t know what it was like,” said Ursula, doubtfully.
“Ah!” said Miss Schofield, and she turned aside her head with a
bitter motion.
“Is it as horrid as it seems?” asked Ursula, frowning lightly, in
fear.
“It is,” said Miss Schofield, bitterly. “Ha!—it is
hateful!”
Ursula’s heart sank, seeing even Miss Schofield in the deadly bondage.
“It is Mr. Harby,” said Maggie Schofield, breaking forth.
“I don’t think I could live again in the big room—Mr.
Brunt’s voice and Mr. Harby—ah——”
She turned aside her head with a deep hurt. Some things she could not bear.
“Is Mr. Harby really horrid?” asked Ursula, venturing into her own
dread.
“He!—why, he’s just a bully,” said Miss Schofield,
raising her shamed dark eyes, that flamed with tortured contempt.
“He’s not bad as long as you keep in with him, and refer to him,
and do everything in his way—but—it’s all so mean!
It’s just a question of fighting on both sides—and those great
louts——”
She spoke with difficulty and with increased bitterness. She had evidently
suffered. Her soul was raw with ignominy. Ursula suffered in response.
“But why is it so horrid?” she asked, helplessly.
“You can’t do anything,” said Miss Schofield.
“He’s against you on one side and he sets the children against you
on the other. The children are simply awful. You’ve got to make
them do everything. Everything, everything has got to come out of you. Whatever
they learn, you’ve got to force it into them—and that’s how
it is.”
Ursula felt her heart fail inside her. Why must she grasp all this, why must
she force learning on fifty-five reluctant children, having all the time an
ugly, rude jealousy behind her, ready to throw her to the mercy of the herd of
children, who would like to rend her as a weaker representative of authority. A
great dread of her task possessed her. She saw Mr. Brunt, Miss Harby, Miss
Schofield, all the school-teachers, drudging unwillingly at the graceless task
of compelling many children into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the
whole set to an automatic state of obedience and attention, and then of
commanding their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. The first great
task was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind, or being. This state
must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and the will
of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the children. The point
was that the headmaster and the teachers should have one will in authority,
which should bring the will of the children into accord. But the headmaster was
narrow and exclusive. The will of the teachers could not agree with his, their
separate wills refused to be so subordinated. So there was a state of anarchy,
leaving the final judgment to the children themselves, which authority should
exist.
So there existed a set of separate wills, each straining itself to the utmost
to exert its own authority. Children will never naturally acquiesce to sitting
in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must be compelled by a stronger,
wiser will. Against which will they must always strive to revolt. So that the
first great effort of every teacher of a large class must be to bring the will
of the children into accordance with his own will. And this he can only do by
an abnegation of his personal self, and an application of a system of laws, for
the purpose of achieving a certain calculable result, the imparting of certain
knowledge. Whereas Ursula thought she was going to become the first wise
teacher by making the whole business personal, and using no compulsion. She
believed entirely in her own personality.
So that she was in a very deep mess. In the first place she was offering to a
class a relationship which only one or two of the children were sensitive
enough to appreciate, so that the mass were left outsiders, therefore against
her. Secondly, she was placing herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed
authority of Mr. Harby, so that the scholars could more safely harry her. She
did not know, but her instinct gradually warned her. She was tortured by the
voice of Mr. Brunt. On it went, jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so
monotonous, it nearly drove her mad: always the same set, harsh monotony. The
man was become a mechanism working on and on and on. But the personal man was
in subdued friction all the time. It was horrible—all hate! Must she be
like this? She could feel the ghastly necessity. She must become the
same—put away the personal self, become an instrument, an abstraction,
working upon a certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of making
them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet gradually she felt
the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was being blocked out. Often when
she went out at playtime and saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it
seemed just a fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black
and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished,
she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be
shining? There was no sky, there was no luminous atmosphere of out-of-doors.
Only the inside of the school was real—hard, concrete, real and vicious.
She would not yet, however, let school quite overcome her. She always said.
“It is not a permanency, it will come to an end.” She could always
see herself beyond the place, see the time when she had left it. On Sundays and
on holidays, when she was away at Cossethay or in the woods where the
beech-leaves were fallen, she could think of St. Philip’s Church School,
and by an effort of will put it in the picture as a dirty little low-squatting
building that made a very tiny mound under the sky, while the great beech-woods
spread immense about her, and the afternoon was spacious and wonderful.
Moreover the children, the scholars, they were insignificant little objects far
away, oh, far away. And what power had they over her free soul? A fleeting
thought of them, as she kicked her way through the beech-leaves, and they were
gone. But her will was tense against them all the time.
All the while, they pursued her. She had never had such a passionate love of
the beautiful things about her. Sitting on top of the tram-car, at evening,
sometimes school was swept away as she saw a magnificent sky settling down. And
her breast, her very hands, clamoured for the lovely flare of sunset. It was
poignant almost to agony, her reaching for it. She almost cried aloud seeing
the sundown so lovely.
For she was held away. It was no matter how she said to herself that school
existed no more once she had left it. It existed. It was within her like a dark
weight, controlling her movement. It was in vain the high-spirited, proud young
girl flung off the school and its association with her. She was Miss Brangwen,
she was Standard Five teacher, she had her most important being in her work
now.
Constantly haunting her, like a darkness hovering over her heart and
threatening to swoop down over it at every moment, was the sense that somehow,
somehow she was brought down. Bitterly she denied unto herself that she was
really a schoolteacher. Leave that to the Violet Harbys. She herself would
stand clear of the accusation. It was in vain she denied it.
Within herself some recording hand seemed to point mechanically to a negation.
She was incapable of fulfilling her task. She could never for a moment escape
from the fatal weight of the knowledge.
And so she felt inferior to Violet Harby. Miss Harby was a splendid teacher.
She could keep order and inflict knowledge on a class with remarkable
efficiency. It was no good Ursula’s protesting to herself that she was
infinitely, infinitely the superior of Violet Harby. She knew that Violet Harby
succeeded where she failed, and this in a task which was almost a test of her.
She felt something all the time wearing upon her, wearing her down. She went
about in these first weeks trying to deny it, to say she was free as ever. She
tried not to feel at a disadvantage before Miss Harby, tried to keep up the
effect of her own superiority. But a great weight was on her, which Violet
Harby could bear, and she herself could not.
Though she did not give in, she never succeeded. Her class was getting in worse
condition, she knew herself less and less secure in teaching it. Ought she to
withdraw and go home again? Ought she to say she had come to the wrong place,
and so retire? Her very life was at test.
She went on doggedly, blindly, waiting for a crisis. Mr. Harby had now begun to
persecute her. Her dread and hatred of him grew and loomed larger and larger.
She was afraid he was going to bully her and destroy her. He began to persecute
her because she could not keep her class in proper condition, because her class
was the weak link in the chain which made up the school.
One of the offences was that her class was noisy and disturbed Mr. Harby, as he
took Standard Seven at the other end of the room. She was taking composition on
a certain morning, walking in among the scholars. Some of the boys had dirty
ears and necks, their clothing smelled unpleasantly, but she could ignore it.
She corrected the writing as she went.
“When you say ‘their fur is brown’, how do you write
‘their’?” she asked.
There was a little pause; the boys were always jeeringly backward in answering.
They had begun to jeer at her authority altogether.
“Please, miss, t-h-e-i-r”, spelled a lad, loudly, with a note of
mockery.
At that moment Mr. Harby was passing.
“Stand up, Hill!” he called, in a big voice.
Everybody started. Ursula watched the boy. He was evidently poor, and rather
cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off his forehead, the rest fitted
close to his meagre head. He was pale and colourless.
“Who told you to call out?” thundered Mr. Harby.
The boy looked up and down, with a guilty air, and a cunning, cynical reserve.
“Please, sir, I was answering,” he replied, with the same humble
insolence.
“Go to my desk.”
The boy set off down the room, the big black jacket hanging in dejected folds
about him, his thin legs, rather knocked at the knees, going already with the
pauper’s crawl, his feet in their big boots scarcely lifted. Ursula
watched him in his crawling, slinking progress down the room. He was one of her
boys! When he got to the desk, he looked round, half furtively, with a sort of
cunning grin and a pathetic leer at the big boys in Standard VII. Then,
pitiable, pale, in his dejected garments, he lounged under the menace of the
headmaster’s desk, with one thin leg crooked at the knee and the foot
struck out sideways his hands in the low-hanging pockets of his man’s
jacket.
Ursula tried to get her attention back to the class. The boy gave her a little
horror, and she was at the same time hot with pity for him. She felt she wanted
to scream. She was responsible for the boy’s punishment. Mr. Harby was
looking at her handwriting on the board. He turned to the class.
“Pens down.”
The children put down their pens and looked up.
“Fold arms.”
They pushed back their books and folded arms.
Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate herself.
“What is your composition about?” asked the headmaster.
Every hand shot up. “The ——” stuttered some voice in
its eagerness to answer.
“I wouldn’t advise you to call out,” said Mr. Harby. He would
have a pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable menace that
always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes twinkling under his bushy black
eyebrows, watching the class. There was something fascinating in him, as he
stood, and again she wanted to scream. She was all jarred, she did not know
what she felt.
“Well, Alice?” he said.
“The rabbit,” piped a girl’s voice.
“A very easy subject for Standard Five.”
Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed before the class.
And she was tormented by the contradictoriness of everything. Mr. Harby stood
so strong, and so male, with his black brows and clear forehead, the heavy jaw,
the big, overhanging moustache: such a man, with strength and male power, and a
certain blind, native beauty. She might have liked him as a man. And here he
stood in some other capacity, bullying over such a trifle as a boy’s
speaking out without permission. Yet he was not a little, fussy man. He seemed
to have some cruel, stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too
small and petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would fulfil,
because he had to earn his living. He had no finer control over himself, only
this blind, dogged, wholesale will. He would keep the job going, since he must.
And this job was to make the children spell the word “caution”
correctly, and put a capital letter after a full-stop. So at this he hammered
with his suppressed hatred, always suppressing himself, till he was beside
himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he stood, short and handsome and
powerful, teaching her class. It seemed such a miserable thing for him to be
doing. He had a decent, powerful, rude soul. What did he care about the
composition on “The Rabbit”? Yet his will kept him there before the
class, threshing the trivial subject. It was habit with him now, to be so
little and vulgar, out of place. She saw the shamefulness of his position, felt
the fettered wickedness in him which would blaze out into evil rage in the long
run, so that he was like a persistent, strong creature tethered. It was really
intolerable. The jarring was torture to her. She looked over the silent,
attentive class that seemed to have crystallized into order and rigid, neutral
form. This he had it in his power to do, to crystallize the children into hard,
mute fragments, fixed under his will: his brute will, which fixed them by sheer
force.
She too must learn to subdue them to her will: she must. For it was her duty,
since the school was such. He had crystallized the class into order. But to see
him, a strong, powerful man, using all his power for such a purpose, seemed
almost horrible. There was something hideous about it. The strange, genial
light in his eye was really vicious, and ugly, his smile was one of torture. He
could not be impersonal. He could not have a clear, pure purpose, he could only
exercise his own brute will. He did not believe in the least in the education
he kept inflicting year after year upon the children. So he must bully, only
bully, even while it tortured his strong, wholesome nature with shame like a
spur always galling. He was so blind and ugly and out of place. Ursula could
not bear it as he stood there. The whole situation was wrong and ugly.
The lesson was finished, Mr. Harby went away. At the far end of the room she
heard the whistle and the thud of the cane. Her heart stood still within her.
She could not bear it, no, she could not bear it when the boy was beaten. It
made her sick. She felt that she must go out of this school, this
torture-place. And she hated the schoolmaster, thoroughly and finally. The
brute, had he no shame? He should never be allowed to continue the atrocity of
this bullying cruelty. Then Hill came crawling back, blubbering piteously.
There was something desolate about this blubbering that nearly broke her heart.
For after all, if she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never
have happened, Hill would never have called out and been caned.
She began the arithmetic lesson. But she was distracted. The boy Hill sat away
on the back desk, huddled up, blubbering and sucking his hand. It was a long
time. She dared not go near, nor speak to him. She felt ashamed before him. And
she felt she could not forgive the boy for being the huddled, blubbering
object, all wet and snivelled, which he was.
She went on correcting the sums. But there were too many children. She could
not get round the class. And Hill was on her conscience. At last he had stopped
crying, and sat bunched over his hands, playing quietly. Then he looked up at
her. His face was dirty with tears, his eyes had a curious washed look, like
the sky after rain, a sort of wanness. He bore no malice. He had already
forgotten, and was waiting to be restored to the normal position.
“Go on with your work, Hill,” she said.
The children were playing over their arithmetic, and, she knew, cheating
thoroughly. She wrote another sum on the blackboard. She could not get round
the class. She went again to the front to watch. Some were ready. Some were
not. What was she to do?
At last it was time for recreation. She gave the order to cease working, and in
some way or other got her class out of the room. Then she faced the disorderly
litter of blotted, uncorrected books, of broken rulers and chewed pens. And her
heart sank in sickness. The misery was getting deeper.
The trouble went on and on, day after day. She had always piles of books to
mark, myriads of errors to correct, a heart-wearying task that she loathed. And
the work got worse and worse. When she tried to flatter herself that the
composition grew more alive, more interesting, she had to see that the
handwriting grew more and more slovenly, the books more filthy and disgraceful.
She tried what she could, but it was of no use. But she was not going to take
it seriously. Why should she? Why should she say to herself, that it mattered,
if she failed to teach a class to write perfectly neatly? Why should she take
the blame unto herself?
Pay day came, and she received four pounds two shillings and one penny. She was
very proud that day. She had never had so much money before. And she had earned
it all herself. She sat on the top of the tram-car fingering the gold and
fearing she might lose it. She felt so established and strong, because of it.
And when she got home she said to her mother:
“It is pay day to-day, mother.”
“Ay,” said her mother, coolly.
Then Ursula put down fifty shillings on the table.
“That is my board,” she said.
“Ay,” said her mother, letting it lie.
Ursula was hurt. Yet she had paid her scot. She was free. She paid for what she
had. There remained moreover thirty-two shillings of her own. She would not
spend any, she who was naturally a spendthrift, because she could not bear to
damage her fine gold.
She had a standing ground now apart from her parents. She was something else
besides the mere daughter of William and Anna Brangwen. She was independent.
She earned her own living. She was an important member of the working
community. She was sure that fifty shillings a month quite paid for her keep.
If her mother received fifty shillings a month for each of the children, she
would have twenty pounds a month and no clothes to provide. Very well then.
Ursula was independent of her parents. She now adhered elsewhere. Now, the
‘Board of Education’ was a phrase that rang significant to her, and
she felt Whitehall far beyond her as her ultimate home. In the government, she
knew which minister had supreme control over Education, and it seemed to her
that, in some way, he was connected with her, as her father was connected with
her.
She had another self, another responsibility. She was no longer Ursula
Brangwen, daughter of William Brangwen. She was also Standard Five teacher in
St. Philip’s School. And it was a case now of being Standard Five
teacher, and nothing else. For she could not escape.
Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks passed on, there
was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There was only a girl of that name
obsessed by the fact that she could not manage her class of children. At
week-ends there came days of passionate reaction, when she went mad with the
taste of liberty, when merely to be free in the morning, to sit down at her
embroidery and stitch the coloured silks was a passion of delight. For the
prison house was always awaiting her! This was only a respite, as her chained
heart knew well. So that she seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end,
and wrung the last drop of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel frenzy.
She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her. She did not
confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how horrible she found it to be a
school-teacher. But when Sunday night came, and she felt the Monday morning at
hand, she was strung up tight with dreadful anticipation, because the strain
and the torture was near again.
She did not believe that she could ever teach that great, brutish class, in
that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if she failed, she must in some way go
under. She must admit that the man’s world was too strong for her, she
could not take her place in it; she must go down before Mr. Harby. And all her
life henceforth, she must go on, never having freed herself of the man’s
world, never having achieved the freedom of the great world of responsible
work. Maggie had taken her place there, she had even stood level with Mr. Harby
and got free of him: and her soul was always wandering in far-off valleys and
glades of poetry. Maggie was free. Yet there was something like subjection in
Maggie’s very freedom. Mr. Harby, the man, disliked the reserved woman,
Maggie. Mr. Harby, the schoolmaster, respected his teacher, Miss Schofield.
For the present, however, Ursula only envied and admired Maggie. She herself
had still to get where Maggie had got. She had still to make her footing. She
had taken up a position on Mr. Harby’s ground, and she must keep it. For
he was now beginning a regular attack on her, to drive her away out of his
school. She could not keep order. Her class was a turbulent crowd, and the weak
spot in the school’s work. Therefore she must go, and someone more useful
must come in her place, someone who could keep discipline.
The headmaster had worked himself into an obsession of fury against her. He
only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got worse as the weeks went on, she
was absolutely no good. His system, which was his very life in school, the
outcome of his bodily movement, was attacked and threatened at the point where
Ursula was included. She was the danger that threatened his body with a blow, a
fall. And blindly, thoroughly, moving from strong instinct of opposition, he
set to work to expel her.
When he punished one of her children as he had punished the boy Hill, for an
offence against himself, he made the punishment extra heavy with the
significance that the extra stroke came in because of the weak teacher who
allowed all these things to be. When he punished for an offence against her, he
punished lightly, as if offences against her were not significant. Which all
the children knew, and they behaved accordingly.
Every now and again Mr. Harby would swoop down to examine exercise books. For a
whole hour, he would be going round the class, taking book after book,
comparing page after page, whilst Ursula stood aside for all the remarks and
fault-finding to be pointed at her through the scholars. It was true, since she
had come, the composition books had grown more and more untidy, disorderly,
filthy. Mr. Harby pointed to the pages done before her regime, and to those
done after, and fell into a passion of rage. Many children he sent out to the
front with their books. And after he had thoroughly gone through the silent and
quivering class he caned the worst offenders well, in front of the others,
thundering in real passion of anger and chagrin.
“Such a condition in a class, I can’t believe it! It is simply
disgraceful! I can’t think how you have been let to get like it! Every
Monday morning I shall come down and examine these books. So don’t think
that because there is nobody paying any attention to you, that you are free to
unlearn everything you ever learned, and go back till you are not fit for
Standard Three. I shall examine all books every Monday——”
Then in a rage, he went away with his cane, leaving Ursula to confront a pale,
quivering class, whose childish faces were shut in blank resentment, fear, and
bitterness, whose souls were full of anger and contempt for her rather than of
the master, whose eyes looked at her with the cold, inhuman accusation of
children. And she could hardly make mechanical words to speak to them. When she
gave an order they obeyed with an insolent off-handedness, as if to say:
“As for you, do you think we would obey you, but for the
master?” She sent the blubbering, caned boys to their seats, knowing that
they too jeered at her and her authority, holding her weakness responsible for
what punishment had overtaken them. And she knew the whole position, so that
even her horror of physical beating and suffering sank to a deeper pain, and
became a moral judgment upon her, worse than any hurt.
She must, during the next week, watch over her books, and punish any fault. Her
soul decided it coldly. Her personal desire was dead for that day at least. She
must have nothing more of herself in school. She was to be Standard Five
teacher only. That was her duty. In school, she was nothing but Standard Five
teacher. Ursula Brangwen must be excluded.
So that, pale, shut, at last distant and impersonal, she saw no longer the
child, how his eyes danced, or how he had a queer little soul that could not be
bothered with shaping handwriting so long as he dashed down what he thought.
She saw no children, only the task that was to be done. And keeping her eyes
there, on the task, and not on the child, she was impersonal enough to punish
where she could otherwise only have sympathized, understood, and condoned, to
approve where she would have been merely uninterested before. But her interest
had no place any more.
It was agony to the impulsive, bright girl of seventeen to become distant and
official, having no personal relationship with the children. For a few days,
after the agony of the Monday, she succeeded, and had some success with her
class. But it was a state not natural to her, and she began to relax.
Then came another infliction. There were not enough pens to go round the class.
She sent to Mr. Harby for more. He came in person.
“Not enough pens, Miss Brangwen?” he said, with the smile and calm
of exceeding rage against her.
“No, we are six short,” she said, quaking.
“Oh, how is that?” he said, menacingly. Then, looking over the
class, he asked:
“How many are there here to-day?”
“Fifty-two,” said Ursula, but he did not take any notice, counting
for himself.
“Fifty-two,” he said. “And how many pens are there,
Staples?”
Ursula was now silent. He would not heed her if she answered, since he had
addressed the monitor.
“That’s a very curious thing,” said Mr. Harby, looking over
the silent class with a slight grin of fury. All the childish faces looked up
at him blank and exposed.
“A few days ago there were sixty pens for this class—now there are
forty-eight. What is forty-eight from sixty, Williams?” There was a
sinister suspense in the question. A thin, ferret-faced boy in a sailor suit
started up exaggeratedly.
“Please, sir!” he said. Then a slow, sly grin came over his face.
He did not know. There was a tense silence. The boy dropped his head. Then he
looked up again, a little cunning triumph in his eyes. “Twelve,” he
said.
“I would advise you to attend,” said the headmaster dangerously.
The boy sat down.
“Forty-eight from sixty is twelve: so there are twelve pens to account
for. Have you looked for them, Staples?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then look again.”
The scene dragged on. Two pens were found: ten were missing. Then the storm
burst.
“Am I to have you thieving, besides your dirt and bad work and bad
behaviour?” the headmaster began. “Not content with being the
worst-behaved and dirtiest class in the school, you are thieves into the
bargain, are you? It is a very funny thing! Pens don’t melt into the air:
pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What has become of
them then? They must be somewhere. What has become of them? For they must be
found, and found by Standard Five. They were lost by Standard Five, and they
must be found.”
Ursula stood and listened, her heart hard and cold. She was so much upset, that
she felt almost mad. Something in her tempted her to turn on the headmaster and
tell him to stop, about the miserable pens. But she did not. She could not.
After every session, morning and evening, she had the pens counted. Still they
were missing. And pencils and india-rubbers disappeared. She kept the class
staying behind, till the things were found. But as soon as Mr. Harby had gone
out of the room, the boys began to jump about and shout, and at last they
bolted in a body from the school.
This was drawing near a crisis. She could not tell Mr. Harby because, while he
would punish the class, he would make her the cause of the punishment, and her
class would pay her back with disobedience and derision. Already there was a
deadly hostility grown up between her and the children. After keeping in the
class, at evening, to finish some work, she would find boys dodging behind her,
calling after her: “Brangwen, Brangwen—Proud-acre.”
When she went into Ilkeston of a Saturday morning with Gudrun, she heard again
the voices yelling after her:
“Brangwen, Brangwen.”
She pretended to take no notice, but she coloured with shame at being held up
to derision in the public street. She, Ursula Brangwen of Cossethay, could not
escape from the Standard Five teacher which she was. In vain she went out to
buy ribbon for her hat. They called after her, the boys she tried to teach.
And one evening, as she went from the edge of the town into the country, stones
came flying at her. Then the passion of shame and anger surpassed her. She
walked on unheeding, beside herself. Because of the darkness she could not see
who were those that threw. But she did not want to know.
Only in her soul a change took place. Never more, and never more would she give
herself as individual to her class. Never would she, Ursula Brangwen, the girl
she was, the person she was, come into contact with those boys. She would be
Standard Five teacher, as far away personally from her class as if she had
never set foot in St. Philip’s school. She would just obliterate them
all, and keep herself apart, take them as scholars only.
So her face grew more and more shut, and over her flayed, exposed soul of a
young girl who had gone open and warm to give herself to the children, there
set a hard, insentient thing, that worked mechanically according to a system
imposed.
It seemed she scarcely saw her class the next day. She could only feel her
will, and what she would have of this class which she must grasp into
subjection. It was no good, any more, to appeal, to play upon the better
feelings of the class. Her swift-working soul realized this.
She, as teacher, must bring them all as scholars, into subjection. And this she
was going to do. All else she would forsake. She had become hard and
impersonal, almost avengeful on herself as well as on them, since the stone
throwing. She did not want to be a person, to be herself any more, after such
humiliation. She would assert herself for mastery, be only teacher. She was set
now. She was going to fight and subdue.
She knew by now her enemies in the class. The one she hated most was Williams.
He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed. He could read with
fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still.
And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something
cunning and etiolated and degenerate. Once he had thrown an ink-well at her, in
one of his mad little rages. Twice he had run home out of class. He was a
well-known character.
And he grinned up his sleeve at this girl-teacher, sometimes hanging round her
to fawn on her. But this made her dislike him more. He had a kind of leech-like
power.
From one of the children she took a supple cane, and this she determined to use
when real occasion came. One morning, at composition, she said to the boy
Williams:
“Why have you made this blot?”
“Please, miss, it fell off my pen,” he whined out, in the mocking
voice that he was so clever in using. The boys near snorted with laughter. For
Williams was an actor, he could tickle the feelings of his hearers subtly.
Particularly he could tickle the children with him into ridiculing his teacher,
or indeed, any authority of which he was not afraid. He had that peculiar gaol
instinct.
“Then you must stay in and finish another page of composition,”
said the teacher.
This was against her usual sense of justice, and the boy resented it
derisively. At twelve o’clock she caught him slinking out.
“Williams, sit down,” she said.
And there she sat, and there he sat, alone, opposite to her, on the back desk,
looking up at her with his furtive eyes every minute.
“Please, miss, I’ve got to go an errand,” he called out
insolently.
“Bring me your book,” said Ursula.
The boy came out, flapping his book along the desks. He had not written a line.
“Go back and do the writing you have to do,” said Ursula. And she
sat at her desk, trying to correct books. She was trembling and upset. And for
an hour the miserable boy writhed and grinned in his seat. At the end of that
time he had done five lines.
“As it is so late now,” said Ursula, “you will finish the
rest this evening.”
The boy kicked his way insolently down the passage.
The afternoon came again. Williams was there, glancing at her, and her heart
beat thick, for she knew it was a fight between them. She watched him.
During the geography lesson, as she was pointing to the map with her cane, the
boy continually ducked his whitish head under the desk, and attracted the
attention of other boys.
“Williams,” she said, gathering her courage, for it was critical
now to speak to him, “what are you doing?”
He lifted his face, the sore-rimmed eyes half smiling. There was something
intrinsically indecent about him. Ursula shrank away.
“Nothing,” he replied, feeling a triumph.
“What are you doing?” she repeated, her heart-beat suffocating her.
“Nothing,” replied the boy, insolently, aggrieved, comic.
“If I speak to you again, you must go down to Mr. Harby,” she said.
But this boy was a match even for Mr. Harby. He was so persistent, so cringing,
and flexible, he howled so when he was hurt, that the master hated more the
teacher who sent him than he hated the boy himself. For of the boy he was sick
of the sight. Which Williams knew. He grinned visibly.
Ursula turned to the map again, to go on with the geography lesson. But there
was a little ferment in the class. Williams’ spirit infected them all.
She heard a scuffle, and then she trembled inwardly. If they all turned on her
this time, she was beaten.
“Please, miss——” called a voice in distress.
She turned round. One of the boys she liked was ruefully holding out a torn
celluloid collar. She heard the complaint, feeling futile.
“Go in front, Wright,” she said.
She was trembling in every fibre. A big, sullen boy, not bad but very
difficult, slouched out to the front. She went on with the lesson, aware that
Williams was making faces at Wright, and that Wright was grinning behind her.
She was afraid. She turned to the map again. And she was afraid.
“Please, miss, Williams——” came a sharp cry, and a boy
on the back row was standing up, with drawn, pained brows, half a mocking grin
on his pain, half real resentment against Williams—“Please, miss,
he’s nipped me,”—and he rubbed his leg ruefully.
“Come in front, Williams,” she said.
The rat-like boy sat with his pale smile and did not move.
“Come in front,” she repeated, definite now.
“I shan’t,” he cried, snarling, rat-like, grinning. Something
went click in Ursula’s soul. Her face and eyes set, she went through the
class straight. The boy cowered before her glowering, fixed eyes. But she
advanced on him, seized him by the arm, and dragged him from his seat. He clung
to the form. It was the battle between him and her. Her instinct had suddenly
become calm and quick. She jerked him from his grip, and dragged him,
struggling and kicking, to the front. He kicked her several times, and clung to
the forms as he passed, but she went on. The class was on its feet in
excitement. She saw it, and made no move.
She knew if she let go the boy he would dash to the door. Already he had run
home once out of her class. So she snatched her cane from the desk, and brought
it down on him. He was writhing and kicking. She saw his face beneath her,
white, with eyes like the eyes of a fish, stony, yet full of hate and horrible
fear. And she loathed him, the hideous writhing thing that was nearly too much
for her. In horror lest he should overcome her, and yet at the heart quite
calm, she brought down the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making
inarticulate noises, and lunging vicious kicks at her. With one hand she
managed to hold him, and now and then the cane came down on him. He writhed,
like a mad thing. But the pain of the strokes cut through his writhing,
vicious, coward’s courage, bit deeper, till at last, with a long whimper
that became a yell, he went limp. She let him go, and he rushed at her, his
teeth and eyes glinting. There was a second of agonized terror in her heart: he
was a beast thing. Then she caught him, and the cane came down on him. A few
times, madly, in a frenzy, he lunged and writhed, to kick her. But again the
cane broke him, he sank with a howling yell on the floor, and like a beaten
beast lay there yelling.
Mr. Harby had rushed up towards the end of this performance.
“What’s the matter?” he roared.
Ursula felt as if something were going to break in her.
“I’ve thrashed him,” she said, her breast heaving, forcing
out the words on the last breath. The headmaster stood choked with rage,
helpless. She looked at the writhing, howling figure on the floor.
“Get up,” she said. The thing writhed away from her. She took a
step forward. She had realized the presence of the headmaster for one second,
and then she was oblivious of it again.
“Get up,” she said. And with a little dart the boy was on his feet.
His yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had been in a frenzy.
“Go and stand by the radiator,” she said.
As if mechanically, blubbering, he went.
The headmaster stood robbed of movement or speech. His face was yellow, his
hands twitched convulsively. But Ursula stood stiff not far from him. Nothing
could touch her now: she was beyond Mr. Harby. She was as if violated to death.
The headmaster muttered something, turned, and went down the room, whence, from
the far end, he was heard roaring in a mad rage at his own class.
The boy blubbered wildly by the radiator. Ursula looked at the class. There
were fifty pale, still faces watching her, a hundred round eyes fixed on her in
an attentive, expressionless stare.
“Give out the history readers,” she said to the monitors.
There was dead silence. As she stood there, she could hear again the ticking of
the clock, and the chock of piles of books taken out of the low cupboard. Then
came the faint flap of books on the desks. The children passed in silence,
their hands working in unison. They were no longer a pack, but each one
separated into a silent, closed thing.
“Take page 125, and read that chapter,” said Ursula.
There was a click of many books opened. The children found the page, and bent
their heads obediently to read. And they read, mechanically.
Ursula, who was trembling violently, went and sat in her high chair. The
blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice of Mr. Brunt, the roar of
Mr. Harby, came muffled through the glass partition. And now and then a pair of
eyes rose from the reading-book, rested on her a moment, watchful, as if
calculating impersonally, then sank again.
She sat still without moving, her eyes watching the class, unseeing. She was
quite still, and weak. She felt that she could not raise her hand from the
desk. If she sat there for ever, she felt she could not move again, nor utter a
command. It was a quarter-past four. She almost dreaded the closing of the
school, when she would be alone.
The class began to recover its ease, the tension relaxed. Williams was still
crying. Mr. Brunt was giving orders for the closing of the lesson. Ursula got
down.
“Take your place, Williams,” she said.
He dragged his feet across the room, wiping his face on his sleeve. As he sat
down, he glanced at her furtively, his eyes still redder. Now he looked like
some beaten rat.
At last the children were gone. Mr. Harby trod by heavily, without looking her
way, or speaking. Mr. Brunt hesitated as she was locking her cupboard.
“If you settle Clarke and Letts in the same way, Miss Brangwen,
you’ll be all right,” he said, his blue eyes glancing down in a
strange fellowship, his long nose pointing at her.
“Shall I?” she laughed nervously. She did not want anybody to talk
to her.
As she went along the street, clattering on the granite pavement, she was aware
of boys dodging behind her. Something struck her hand that was carrying her
bag, bruising her. As it rolled away she saw that it was a potato. Her hand was
hurt, but she gave no sign. Soon she would take the tram.
She was afraid, and strange. It was to her quite strange and ugly, like some
dream where she was degraded. She would have died rather than admit it to
anybody. She could not look at her swollen hand. Something had broken in her;
she had passed a crisis. Williams was beaten, but at a cost.
Feeling too much upset to go home, she rode a little farther into the town, and
got down from the tram at a small tea-shop. There, in the dark little place
behind the shop, she drank her tea and ate bread-and-butter. She did not taste
anything. The taking of tea was just a mechanical action, to cover over her
existence. There she sat in the dark, obscure little place, without knowing.
Only unconsciously she nursed the back of her hand, which was bruised.
When finally she took her way home, it was sunset red across the west. She did
not know why she was going home. There was nothing for her there. She had,
true, only to pretend to be normal. There was nobody she could speak to,
nowhere to go for escape. But she must keep on, under this red sunset, alone,
knowing the horror in humanity, that would destroy her, and with which she was
at war. Yet it had to be so.
In the morning again she must go to school. She got up and went without
murmuring even to herself. She was in the hands of some bigger, stronger,
coarser will.
School was fairly quiet. But she could feel the class watching her, ready to
spring on her. Her instinct was aware of the class instinct to catch her if she
were weak. But she kept cold and was guarded.
Williams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning there was a knock
at the door: someone wanted the headmaster. Mr. Harby went out, heavily,
angrily, nervously. He was afraid of irate parents. After a moment in the
passage, he came again into school.
“Sturgess,” he called to one of his larger boys. “Stand in
front of the class and write down the name of anyone who speaks. Will you come
this way, Miss Brangwen.”
He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.
Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with a whitish skin,
not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple hat.
“I called about Vernon,” said the woman, speaking in a refined
accent. There was about the woman altogether an appearance of refinement and of
cleanliness, curiously contradicted by her half beggar’s deportment, and
a sense of her being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad inside. She
was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man’s wife, but a creature
separate from society. By her dress she was not poor.
Ursula knew at once that she was Williams’ mother, and that he was
Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and well-dressed, in a sailor
suit. And he had this same peculiar, half transparent unwholesomeness, rather
like a corpse.
“I wasn’t able to send him to school to-day,” continued the
woman, with a false grace of manner. “He came home last night so
ill—he was violently sick—I thought I should have to send for the
doctor.—You know he has a weak heart.”
The woman looked at Ursula with her pale, dead eyes.
“No,” replied the girl, “I did not know.”
She stood still with repulsion and uncertainty. Mr. Harby, large and male, with
his overhanging moustache, stood by with a slight, ugly smile at the corner of
his eyes. The woman went on insidiously, not quite human:
“Oh, yes, he has had heart disease ever since he was a child. That is why
he isn’t very regular at school. And it is very bad to beat him. He was
awfully ill this morning—I shall call on the doctor as I go back.”
“Who is staying with him now, then?” put in the deep voice of the
schoolmaster, cunningly.
“Oh, I left him with a woman who comes in to help me—and who
understands him. But I shall call in the doctor on my way home.”
Ursula stood still. She felt vague threats in all this. But the woman was so
utterly strange to her, that she did not understand.
“He told me he had been beaten,” continued the woman, “and
when I undressed him to put him to bed, his body was covered with marks—I
could show them to any doctor.”
Mr. Harby looked at Ursula to answer. She began to understand. The woman was
threatening to take out a charge of assault on her son against her. Perhaps she
wanted money.
“I caned him,” she said. “He was so much trouble.”
“I’m sorry if he was troublesome,” said the woman, “but
he must have been shamefully beaten. I could show the marks to any doctor.
I’m sure it isn’t allowed, if it was known.”
“I caned him while he kept kicking me,” said Ursula, getting angry
because she was half excusing herself, Mr. Harby standing there with the
twinkle at the side of his eyes, enjoying the dilemma of the two women.
“I’m sure I’m sorry if he behaved badly,” said the
woman. “But I can’t think he deserved beating as he has been. I
can’t send him to school, and really can’t afford to pay the
doctor.—Is it allowed for the teachers to beat the children like that,
Mr. Harby?”
The headmaster refused to answer. Ursula loathed herself, and loathed Mr. Harby
with his twinkling cunning and malice on the occasion. The other miserable
woman watched her chance.
“It is an expense to me, and I have a great struggle to keep my boy
decent.”
Ursula still would not answer. She looked out at the asphalt yard, where a
dirty rag of paper was blowing.
“And it isn’t allowed to beat a child like that, I am sure,
especially when he is delicate.”
Ursula stared with a set face on the yard, as if she did not hear. She loathed
all this, and had ceased to feel or to exist.
“Though I know he is troublesome sometimes—but I think it was too
much. His body is covered with marks.”
Mr. Harby stood sturdy and unmoved, waiting now to have done, with the
twinkling, tiny wrinkles of an ironical smile at the corners of his eyes. He
felt himself master of the situation.
“And he was violently sick. I couldn’t possibly send him to school
to-day. He couldn’t keep his head up.”
Yet she had no answer.
“You will understand, sir, why he is absent,” she said, turning to
Mr. Harby.
“Oh, yes,” he said, rough and off-hand. Ursula detested him for his
male triumph. And she loathed the woman. She loathed everything.
“You will try to have it remembered, sir, that he has a weak heart. He is
so sick after these things.”
“Yes,” said the headmaster, “I’ll see about it.”
“I know he is troublesome,” the woman only addressed herself to the
male now—“but if you could have him punished without
beating—he is really delicate.”
Ursula was beginning to feel upset. Harby stood in rather superb mastery, the
woman cringing to him to tickle him as one tickles trout.
“I had come to explain why he was away this morning, sir. You will
understand.”
She held out her hand. Harby took it and let it go, surprised and angry.
“Good morning,” she said, and she gave her gloved, seedy hand to
Ursula. She was not ill-looking, and had a curious insinuating way, very
distasteful yet effective.
“Good morning, Mr. Harby, and thank you.”
The figure in the grey costume and the purple hat was going across the school
yard with a curious lingering walk. Ursula felt a strange pity for her, and
revulsion from her. She shuddered. She went into the school again.
The next morning Williams turned up, looking paler than ever, very neat and
nicely dressed in his sailor blouse. He glanced at Ursula with a half-smile:
cunning, subdued, ready to do as she told him. There was something about him
that made her shiver. She loathed the idea of having laid hands on him. His
elder brother was standing outside the gate at playtime, a youth of about
fifteen, tall and thin and pale. He raised his hat, almost like a gentleman.
But there was something subdued, insidious about him too.
“Who is it?” said Ursula.
“It’s the big Williams,” said Violet Harby roughly.
“She was here yesterday, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“It’s no good her coming—her character’s not good
enough for her to make any trouble.”
Ursula shrank from the brutality and the scandal. But it had some vague, horrid
fascination. How sordid everything seemed! She felt sorry for the queer woman
with the lingering walk, and those queer, insidious boys. The Williams in her
class was wrong somewhere. How nasty it was altogether.
So the battle went on till her heart was sick. She had several more boys to
subjugate before she could establish herself. And Mr. Harby hated her almost as
if she were a man. She knew now that nothing but a thrashing would settle some
of the big louts who wanted to play cat and mouse with her. Mr. Harby would not
give them the thrashing if he could help it. For he hated the teacher, the
stuck-up, insolent high-school miss with her independence.
“Now, Wright, what have you done this time?” he would say genially
to the boy who was sent to him from Standard Five for punishment. And he left
the lad standing, lounging, wasting his time.
So that Ursula would appeal no more to the headmaster, but, when she was driven
wild, she seized her cane, and slashed the boy who was insolent to her, over
head and ears and hands. And at length they were afraid of her, she had them in
order.
But she had paid a great price out of her own soul, to do this. It seemed as if
a great flame had gone through her and burnt her sensitive tissue. She who
shrank from the thought of physical suffering in any form, had been forced to
fight and beat with a cane and rouse all her instincts to hurt. And afterwards
she had been forced to endure the sound of their blubbering and desolation,
when she had broken them to order.
Oh, and sometimes she felt as if she would go mad. What did it matter, what did
it matter if their books were dirty and they did not obey? She would rather, in
reality, that they disobeyed the whole rules of the school, than that they
should be beaten, broken, reduced to this crying, hopeless state. She would
rather bear all their insults and insolences a thousand times than reduce
herself and them to this. Bitterly she repented having got beside herself, and
having tackled the boy she had beaten.
Yet it had to be so. She did not want to do it. Yet she had to. Oh, why, why
had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must brutalize herself to
live? Why had she become a school-teacher, why, why?
The children had forced her to the beatings. No, she did not pity them. She had
come to them full of kindness and love, and they would have torn her to pieces.
They chose Mr. Harby. Well then, they must know her as well as Mr. Harby, they
must first be subjugate to her. For she was not going to be made nought, no,
neither by them, nor by Mr. Harby, nor by all the system around her. She was
not going to be put down, prevented from standing free. It was not to be said
of her, she could not take her place and carry out her task. She would fight
and hold her place in this state also, in the world of work and man’s
convention.
She was isolated now from the life of her childhood, a foreigner in a new life,
of work and mechanical consideration. She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and
their occasional teas at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas.
Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was
never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of
religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system that
contained the vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take
form and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant
something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not
free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she were free she could
get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the
somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.
In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel move
towards freeing herself. But having more freedom she only became more
profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read
great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful
things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people;
and there remained always the want she could put no name to.
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass.
And one never knew where one was going. It was a blind fight. She had suffered
bitterly in this school of St. Philip’s. She was like a young filly that
has been broken in to the shafts, and has lost its freedom. And now she was
suffering bitterly from the agony of the shafts. The agony, the galling, the
ignominy of her breaking in. This wore into her soul. But she would never
submit. To shafts like these she would never submit for long. But she would
know them. She would serve them that she might destroy them.
She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings
in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula
saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to
Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk
about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.
But Ursula never told about Winifred Inger. That was a sort of secret side-show
to her life, never to be opened. She did not even think of it. It was the
closed door she had not the strength to open.
Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began gradually to have a new
life of her own again. She was going to college in eighteen months’ time.
Then she would take her degree, and she would—ah, she would perhaps be a
big woman, and lead a movement. Who knows?—At any rate she would go to
college in eighteen months’ time. All that mattered now was work, work.
And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St. Philip’s
School, which was always destroying her, but which she could now manage,
without spoiling all her life. She would submit to it for a time, since the
time had a definite limit.
The class-teaching itself at last became almost mechanical. It was a strain on
her, an exhausting wearying strain, always unnatural. But there was a certain
amount of pleasure in the sheer oblivion of teaching, so much work to do, so
many children to see after, so much to be done, that one’s self was
forgotten. When the work had become like habit to her, and her individual soul
was left out, had its growth elsewhere, then she could be almost happy.
Her real, individual self drew together and became more coherent during these
two years of teaching, during the struggle against the odds of class teaching.
It was always a prison to her, the school. But it was a prison where her wild,
chaotic soul became hard and independent. When she was well enough and not
tired, then she did not hate the teaching. She enjoyed getting into the swing
of work of a morning, putting forth all her strength, making the thing go. It
was for her a strenuous form of exercise. And her soul was left to rest, it had
the time of torpor in which to gather itself together in strength again. But
the teaching hours were too long, the tasks too heavy, and the disciplinary
condition of the school too unnatural for her. She was worn very thin and
quivering.
She came to school in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers wet, the little,
rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The larks quivered their song up into
the new sunshine, and the country was so glad. It was a violation to plunge
into the dust and greyness of the town.
So that she stood before her class unwilling to give herself up to the activity
of teaching, to turn her energy, that longed for the country and for joy of
early summer, into the dominating of fifty children and the transferring to
them some morsels of arithmetic. There was a little absentness about her. She
could not force herself into forgetfulness. A jar of buttercups and
fool’s-parsley in the window-bottom kept her away in the meadows, where
in the lush grass the moon-daisies were half-submerged, and a spray of pink
ragged robin. Yet before her were faces of fifty children. They were almost
like big daisies in a dimness of the grass.
A brightness was on her face, a little unreality in her teaching. She could not
quite see her children. She was struggling between two worlds, her own world of
young summer and flowers, and this other world of work. And the glimmer of her
own sunlight was between her and her class.
Then the morning passed with a strange far-awayness and quietness. Dinner-time
came, when she and Maggie ate joyously, with all the windows open. And then
they went out into St. Philip’s churchyard, where was a shadowy corner
under red hawthorn trees. And there they talked and read Shelley or Browning or
some work about “Woman and Labour”.
And when she went back to school, Ursula lived still in the shadowy corner of
the graveyard, where pink-red petals lay scattered from the hawthorn tree, like
myriad tiny shells on a beach, and a church bell sometimes rang sonorously, and
sometimes a bird called out, whilst Maggie’s voice went on low and sweet.
These days she was happy in her soul: oh, she was so happy, that she wished she
could take her joy and scatter it in armfuls broadcast. She made her children
happy, too, with a little tingling of delight. But to her, the children were
not a school class this afternoon. They were flowers, birds, little bright
animals, children, anything. They only were not Standard Five. She felt no
responsibility for them. It was for once a game, this teaching. And if they got
their sums wrong, what matter? And she would take a pleasant bit of reading.
And instead of history with dates, she would tell a lovely tale. And for
grammar, they could have a bit of written analysis that was not difficult,
because they had done it before:
“She shall be sportive as a fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs.”
She wrote that from memory, because it pleased her.
So the golden afternoon passed away and she went home happy. She had finished
her day of school, and was free to plunge into the glowing evening of
Cossethay. And she loved walking home. But it had not been school. It had been
playing at school beneath red hawthorn blossom.
She could not go on like this. The quarterly examination was coming, and her
class was not ready. It irritated her that she must drag herself away from her
happy self, and exert herself with all her strength to force, to compel this
heavy class of children to work hard at arithmetic. They did not want to work,
she did not want to compel them. And yet, some second conscience gnawed at her,
telling her the work was not properly done. It irritated her almost to madness,
and she let loose all the irritation in the class. Then followed a day of
battle and hate and violence, when she went home raw, feeling the golden
evening taken away from her, herself incarcerated in some dark, heavy place,
and chained there with a consciousness of having done badly at work.
What good was it that it was summer, that right till evening, when the
corncrakes called, the larks would mount up into the light, to sing once more
before nightfall. What good was it all, when she was out of tune, when she must
only remember the burden and shame of school that day.
And still, she hated school. Still she cried, she did not believe in it. Why
should the children learn, and why should she teach them? It was all so much
milling the wind. What folly was it that made life into this, the fulfilling of
some stupid, factitious duty? It was all so made up, so unnatural. The school,
the sums, the grammar, the quarterly examinations, the registers—it was
all a barren nothing!
Why should she give her allegiance to this world, and let it so dominate her,
that her own world of warm sun and growing, sap-filled life was turned into
nothing? She was not going to do it. She was not going to be a prisoner in the
dry, tyrannical man-world. She was not going to care about it. What did it
matter if her class did ever so badly in the quarterly examination. Let
it—what did it matter?
Nevertheless, when the time came, and the report on her class was bad, she was
miserable, and the joy of the summer was taken away from her, she was shut up
in gloom. She could not really escape from this world of system and work, out
into her fields where she was happy. She must have her place in the working
world, be a recognized member with full rights there. It was more important to
her than fields and sun and poetry, at this time. But she was only the more its
enemy.
It was a very difficult thing, she thought, during the long hours of
intermission in the summer holidays, to be herself, her happy self that enjoyed
so much to lie in the sun, to play and swim and be content, and also to be a
school-teacher getting results out of a class of children. She dreamed fondly
of the time when she need not be a teacher any more. But vaguely, she knew that
responsibility had taken place in her for ever, and as yet her prime business
was to work.
The autumn passed away, the winter was at hand. Ursula became more and more an
inhabitant of the world of work, and of what is called life. She could not see
her future, but a little way off, was college, and to the thought of this she
clung fixedly. She would go to college, and get her two or three years’
training, free of cost. Already she had applied and had her place appointed for
the coming year.
So she continued to study for her degree. She would take French, Latin,
English, mathematics and botany. She went to classes in Ilkeston, she studied
at evening. For there was this world to conquer, this knowledge to acquire,
this qualification to attain. And she worked with intensity, because of a want
inside her that drove her on. Almost everything was subordinated now to this
one desire to take her place in the world. What kind of place it was to be she
did not ask herself. The blind desire drove her on. She must take her place.
She knew she would never be much of a success as an elementary school teacher.
But neither had she failed. She hated it, but she had managed it.
Maggie had left St. Philip’s School, and had found a more congenial post.
The two girls remained friends. They met at evening classes, they studied and
somehow encouraged a firm hope each in the other. They did not know whither
they were making, nor what they ultimately wanted. But they knew they wanted
now to learn, to know and to do.
They talked of love and marriage, and the position of woman in marriage. Maggie
said that love was the flower of life, and blossomed unexpectedly and without
law, and must be plucked where it was found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of
its duration.
To Ursula this was unsatisfactory. She thought she still loved Anton
Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had not been strong enough to
acknowledge her. He had denied her. How then could she love him? How then was
love so absolute? She did not believe it. She believed that love was a way, a
means, not an end in itself, as Maggie seemed to think. And always the way of
love would be found. But whither did it lead?
“I believe there are many men in the world one might love—there is
not only one man,” said Ursula.
She was thinking of Skrebensky. Her heart was hollow with the knowledge of
Winifred Inger.
“But you must distinguish between love and passion,” said Maggie,
adding, with a touch of contempt: “Men will easily have a passion for
you, but they won’t love you.”
“Yes,” said Ursula, vehemently, the look of suffering, almost of
fanaticism, on her face. “Passion is only part of love. And it seems so
much because it can’t last. That is why passion is never happy.”
She was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in contrast with
Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable passing-away of things. Ursula
suffered bitterly at the hands of life, Maggie was always single, always
withheld, so she went in a heavy brooding sadness that was almost meat to her.
In Ursula’s last winter at St. Philip’s the friendship of the two
girls came to a climax. It was during this winter that Ursula suffered and
enjoyed most keenly Maggie’s fundamental sadness of enclosedness. Maggie
enjoyed and suffered Ursula’s struggles against the confines of her life.
And then the two girls began to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of
life wherein Maggie must remain enclosed.
