第 34 页

she's done," said Anna. "I am the one to hear that."

"It's not the things the child has done," continued the

mother, "that have put you out so much, it's because you can't

bear being spoken to by that old woman. But you haven't the

courage to turn on her when she attacks you, you bring your rage

here."

He relapsed into silence. Ursula knew that he was wrong. In

the outside, upper world, he was wrong. Already came over the

child the cold sense of the impersonal world. There she knew her

mother was right. But still her heart clamoured after her

father, for him to be right, in his dark, sensuous underworld.

But he was angry, and went his way in blackness and brutal

silence again.

The child ran about absorbed in life, quiet, full of

amusement. She did not notice things, nor changes nor

alterations. One day she would find daisies in the grass,

another day, apple-blossoms would be sprinkled white on the

ground, and she would run among it, for pleasure because it was

there. Yet again birds would be pecking at the cherries, her

father would throw cherries down from the tree all round her on

the garden. Then the fields were full of hay.

She did not remember what had been nor what would be, the

outside things were there each day. She was always herself, the

world outside was accidental. Even her mother was accidental to

her: a condition that happened to endure.

Only her father occupied any permanent position in the

childish consciousness. When he came back she remembered vaguely

how he had gone away, when he went away she knew vaguely that

she must wait for his coming back. Whereas her mother, returning

from an outing, merely became present, there was no reason for

connecting her with some previous departure.

The return or the departure of the father was the one event

which the child remembered. When he came, something woke up in

her, some yearning. She knew when he was out of joint or

irritable or tired: then she was uneasy, she could not rest.

When he was in the house, the child felt full and warm, rich

like a creature in the sunshine. When he was gone, she was

vague, forgetful. When he scolded her even, she was often more

aware of him than of herself. He was her strength and her

greater self.

Ursula was three years old when another baby girl was born.

Then the two small sisters were much together, Gudrun and

Ursula. Gudrun was a quiet child who played for hours alone,

absorbed in her fancies. She was brown-haired, fair-skinned,

strangely placid, almost passive. Yet her will was indomitable,

once set. From the first she followed Ursula's lead. Yet she was

a thing to herself, so that to watch the two together was

strange. They were like two young animals playing together but

not taking real notice of each other. Gudrun was the mother's

favourite--except that Anna always lived in her latest

baby.

The burden of so many lives depending on him wore the youth

down. He had his work in the office, which was done purely by

effort of will: he had his barren passion for the church; he had

three young children. Also at this time his health was not good.

So he was haggard and irritable, often a pest in the house. Then

he was told to go to his woodwork, or to the church.

Between him and the little Ursula there came into being a

strange alliance. They were aware of each other. He knew the

child was always on his side. But in his consciousness he

counted it for nothing. She was always for him. He took it for

granted. Yet his life was based on her, even whilst she was a

tiny child, on her support and her accord.

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always

busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of

motherhood. She seemed to exist in her own violent fruitfulness,

and it was as if the sun shone tropically on her. Her colour was

bright, her eyes full of a fecund gloom, her brown hair tumbled

loosely over her ears. She had a look of richness. No

responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her. The outside,

public life was less than nothing to her, really.

Whereas when, at twenty-six, he found himself father of four

children, with a wife who lived intrinsically like the ruddiest

lilies of the field, he let the weight of responsibility press

on him and drag him. It was then that his child Ursula strove to

be with him. She was with him, even as a baby of four, when he

was irritable and shouted and made the household unhappy. She

suffered from his shouting, but somehow it was not really him.

She wanted it to be over, she wanted to resume her normal

connection with him. When he was disagreeable, the child echoed

to the crying of some need in him, and she responded blindly.

Her heart followed him as if he had some tie with her, and some

love which he could not deliver. Her heart followed him

persistently, in its love.

But there was the dim, childish sense of her own smallness

and inadequacy, a fatal sense of worthlessness. She could not do

anything, she was not enough. She could not be important to him.

This knowledge deadened her from the first.

Still she set towards him like a quivering needle. All her

life was directed by her awareness of him, her wakefulness to

his being. And she was against her mother.

Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up.

But for him, she might have gone on like the other children,

Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine, one with the flowers and

insects and playthings, having no existence apart from the

concrete object of her attention. But her father came too near

to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of his breast woke

her up almost in pain from the transient unconsciousness of

childhood. Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before she knew

how to see. She was wakened too soon. Too soon the call had come

to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close

to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into

wakefulness by the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping

her to his body for love and for fulfilment, asking as a magnet

must always ask. From her the response had struggled dimly,

vaguely into being.

The children were dressed roughly for the country. When she

was little, Ursula pattered about in little wooden clogs, a blue

overall over her thick red dress, a red shawl crossed on her

breast and tied behind again. So she ran with her father to the

garden.

The household rose early. He was out digging by six o'clock

in the morning, he went to his work at half-past eight. And

Ursula was usually in the garden with him, though not near at

hand.

At Eastertime one year, she helped him to set potatoes. It

was the first time she had ever helped him. The occasion

remained as a picture, one of her earliest memories. They had

gone out soon after dawn. A cold wind was blowing. He had his

old trousers tucked into his boots, he wore no coat nor

waistcoat, his shirt-sleeves fluttered in the wind, his face was

ruddy and intent, in a kind of sleep. When he was at work he

neither heard nor saw. A long, thin man, looking still a youth,

with a line of black moustache above his thick mouth, and his

fine hair blown on his forehead, he worked away at the earth in

the grey first light, alone. His solitariness drew the child

like a spell.

The wind came chill over the dark-green fields. Ursula ran up

and watched him push the setting-peg in at one side of his ready

earth, stride across, and push it in the other side, pulling the

line taut and clear upon the clods intervening. Then with a

sharp cutting noise the bright spade came towards her, cutting a

grip into the new, soft earth.

He struck his spade upright and straightened himself.

"Do you want to help me?" he said.

She looked up at him from out of her little woollen

bonnet.

"Ay," he said, "you can put some taters in for me.

Look--like that--these little sprits standing

up--so much apart, you see."

And stooping down he quickly, surely placed the spritted

potatoes in the soft grip, where they rested separate and

pathetic on the heavy cold earth.

He gave her a little basket of potatoes, and strode himself

to the other end of the line. She saw him stooping, working

towards her. She was excited, and unused. She put in one potato,

then rearranged it, to make it sit nicely. Some of the sprits

were broken, and she was afraid. The responsibility excited her

like a string tying her up. She could not help looking with

dread at the string buried under the heaped-back soil. Her

father was working nearer, stooping, working nearer. She was

overcome by her responsibility. She put potatoes quickly into

the cold earth.

He came near.

"Not so close," he said, stooping over her potatoes, taking

some out and rearranging the others. She stood by with the

painful terrified helplessness of childhood. He was so unseeing

and confident, she wanted to do the thing and yet she could not.

She stood by looking on, her little blue overall fluttering in

the wind, the red woollen ends of her shawl blowing gustily.

Then he went down the row, relentlessly, turning the potatoes in

with his sharp spade-cuts. He took no notice of her, only worked

on. He had another world from hers.

She stood helplessly stranded on his world. He continued his

work. She knew she could not help him. A little bit forlorn, at

last she turned away, and ran down the garden, away from him, as

fast as she could go away from him, to forget him and his

work.

He missed her presence, her face in her red woollen bonnet,

her blue overall fluttering. She ran to where a little water ran

trickling between grass and stones. That she loved.

When he came by he said to her:

"You didn't help me much."

The child looked at him dumbly. Already her heart was heavy

because of her own disappointment. Her mouth was dumb and

pathetic. But he did not notice, he went his way.

And she played on, because of her disappointment persisting

even the more in her play. She dreaded work, because she could

not do it as he did it. She was conscious of the great breach

between them. She knew she had no power. The grown-up power to

work deliberately was a mystery to her.

He would smash into her sensitive child's world

destructively. Her mother was lenient, careless The children

played about as they would all day. Ursula was

thoughtless--why should she remember things? If across the

garden she saw the hedge had budded, and if she wanted these

greeny-pink, tiny buds for bread-and-cheese, to play at teaparty

with, over she went for them.

Then suddenly, perhaps the next day, her soul would almost

start out of her body as her father turned on her, shouting:

"Who's been tramplin' an' dancin' across where I've just

sowed seed? I know it's you, nuisance! Can you find nowhere else

to walk, but just over my seed beds? But it's like you, that

is--no heed but to follow your own greedy nose."

It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging

lines of deep little foot-prints across his work. The child was

infinitely more shocked. Her vulnerable little soul was flayed

and trampled. Why were the foot-prints there? She had not

wanted to make them. She stood dazzled with pain and shame and

unreality.

Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became

shut off and senseless, a little fixed creature whose soul had

gone hard and unresponsive. The sense of her own unreality

hardened her like a frost. She cared no longer.

And the sight of her face, shut and superior with

self-asserting indifference, made a flame of rage go over him.

He wanted to break her.

"I'll break your obstinate little face," he said, through

shut teeth, lifting his hand.

The child did not alter in the least. The look of

indifference, complete glancing indifference, as if nothing but

herself existed to her, remained fixed.

Yet far away in her, the sobs were tearing her soul. And when

he had gone, she would go and creep under the parlour sofa, and

lie clinched in the silent, hidden misery of childhood.

When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather

stiffly to play. She willed to forget. She cut off her childish

soul from memory, so that the pain, and the insult should not be

real. She asserted herself only. There was not nothing in the

world but her own self. So very soon, she came to believe in the

outward malevolence that was against her. And very early, she

learned that even her adored father was part of this

malevolence. And very early she learned to harden her soul in

resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden

herself upon her own being.

She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave

those who had made her guilty. If he had said to her, "Why,

Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?" that would have

hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him.

But she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things.

The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch,

just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk

on. This was her instinctive assumption. And when he bullied

her, she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived

in the little separate world of her own violent will.

As she grew older, five, six, seven, the connection between

her and her father was even stronger. Yet it was always

straining to break. She was always relapsing on her own violent

will into her own separate world of herself. This made him grind

his teeth with bitterness, for he still wanted her. But she

could harden herself into her own self's universe,

impregnable.

He was very fond of swimming, and in warm weather would take

her down to the canal, to a silent place, or to a big pond or

reservoir, to bathe. He would take her on his back as he went

swimming, and she clung close, feeling his strong movement under