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make them seem little. Curiously, the mother was aware of what

would happen, and was always ready to give her children the

advantage of the move.

When Ursula was twelve, and the common school and the

companionship of the village children, niggardly and begrudging,

was beginning to affect her, Anna sent her with Gudrun to the

Grammar School in Nottingham. This was a great release for

Ursula. She had a passionate craving to escape from the

belittling circumstances of life, the little jealousies, the

little differences, the little meannesses. It was a torture to

her that the Phillipses were poorer and meaner than herself,

that they used mean little reservations, took petty little

advantages. She wanted to be with her equals: but not by

diminishing herself. She did want Clem Phillips to be her

equal. But by some puzzling, painful fate or other, when he was

really there with her, he produced in her a tight feeling in the

head. She wanted to beat her forehead, to escape.

Then she found that the way to escape was easy. One departed

from the whole circumstance. One went away to the Grammar

School, and left the little school, the meagre teachers, the

Phillipses whom she had tried to love but who had made her fail,

and whom she could not forgive. She had an instinctive fear of

petty people, as a deer is afraid of dogs. Because she was

blind, she could not calculate nor estimate people. She must

think that everybody was just like herself.

She measured by the standard of her own people: her father

and mother, her grandmother, her uncles. Her beloved father, so

utterly simple in his demeanour, yet with his strong, dark soul

fixed like a root in unexpressed depths that fascinated and

terrified her: her mother, so strangely free of all money and

convention and fear, entirely indifferent to the world, standing

by herself, without connection: her grandmother, who had come

from so far and was centred in so wide an horizon: people must

come up to these standards before they could be Ursula's

people.

So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow

boundary of Cossethay, where only limited people lived. Outside,

was all vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she

would love.

Going to school by train, she must leave home at a quarter to

eight in the morning, and she did not arrive again till

half-past five at evening. Of this she was glad, for the house

was small and overful. It was a storm of movement, whence there

had been no escape. She hated so much being in charge.

The house was a storm of movement. The children were healthy

and turbulent, the mother only wanted their animal well-being.

To Ursula, as she grew a little older, it became a nightmare.

When she saw, later, a Rubens picture with storms of naked

babies, and found this was called "Fecundity", she shuddered,

and the world became abhorrent to her. She knew as a child what

it was to live amidst storms of babies, in the heat and swelter

of fecundity. And as a child, she was against her mother,

passionately against her mother, she craved for some

spirituality and stateliness.

In bad weather, home was a bedlam. Children dashed in and out

of the rain, to the puddles under the dismal yew trees, across

the wet flagstones of the kitchen, whilst the cleaning-woman

grumbled and scolded; children were swarming on the sofa,

children were kicking the piano in the parlour, to make it sound

like a beehive, children were rolling on the hearthrug, legs in

air, pulling a book in two between them, children, fiendish,

ubiquitous, were stealing upstairs to find out where our Ursula

was, whispering at bedroom doors, hanging on the latch, calling

mysteriously, "Ursula! Ursula!" to the girl who had locked

herself in to read. And it was hopeless. The locked door excited

their sense of mystery, she had to open to dispel the lure.

These children hung on to her with round-eyed excited

questions.

The mother flourished amid all this.

"Better have them noisy than ill," she said.

But the growing girls, in turn, suffered bitterly. Ursula was

just coming to the stage when Andersen and Grimm were being left

behind for the "Idylls of the King" and romantic

love-stories.

"Elaine the fair Elaine the lovable,

Elaine the lily maid of Astolat,

High in her chamber in a tower to the east

Guarded the sacred shield of Launcelot."

How she loved it! How she leaned in her bedroom window with

her black, rough hair on her shoulders, and her warm face all

rapt, and gazed across at the churchyard and the little church,

which was a turreted castle, whence Launcelot would ride just

now, would wave to her as he rode by, his scarlet cloak passing

behind the dark yew trees and between the open space: whilst

she, ah, she, would remain the lonely maid high up and isolated

in the tower, polishing the terrible shield, weaving it a

covering with a true device, and waiting, waiting, always remote

and high.

At which point there would be a faint scuffle on the stairs,

a light-pitched whispering outside the door, and a creaking of

the latch: then Billy, excited, whispering:

"It's locked--it's locked."

Then the knocking, kicking at the door with childish knees,

and the urgent, childish:

"Ursula--our Ursula? Ursula? Eh, our Ursula?"

No reply.

"Ursula! Eh--our Ursula?" the name was shouted now Still

no answer.

"Mother, she won't answer," came the yell. "She's dead."

"Go away--I'm not dead. What do you want?" came the

angry voice of the girl.

"Open the door, our Ursula," came the complaining cry. It was

all over. She must open the door. She heard the screech of the

bucket downstairs dragged across the flagstones as the woman

washed the kitchen floor. And the children were prowling in the

bedroom, asking:

"What were you doing? What had you locked the door for?" Then

she discovered the key of the parish room, and betook herself

there, and sat on some sacks with her books. There began another

dream.

She was the only daughter of the old lord, she was gifted

with magic. Day followed day of rapt silence, whilst she

wandered ghost-like in the hushed, ancient mansion, or flitted

along the sleeping terraces.

Here a grave grief attacked her: that her hair was dark. She

must have fair hair and a white skin. She was rather

bitter about her black mane.

Never mind, she would dye it when she grew up, or bleach it

in the sun, till it was bleached fair. Meanwhile she wore a fair

white coif of pure Venetian lace.

She flitted silently along the terraces, where jewelled

lizards basked upon the stone, and did not move when her shadow

fell upon them. In the utter stillness she heard the tinkle of

the fountain, and smelled the roses whose blossoms hung rich and

motionless. So she drifted, drifted on the wistful feet of

beauty, past the water and the swans, to the noble park, where,

underneath a great oak, a doe all dappled lay with her four fine

feet together, her fawn nestling sun-coloured beside her.

Oh, and this doe was her familiar. It would talk to her,

because she was a magician, it would tell her stories as if the

sunshine spoke.

Then one day, she left the door of the parish room unlocked,

careless and unheeding as she always was; the children found

their way in, Katie cut her finger and howled, Billy hacked

notches in the fine chisels, and did much damage. There was a

great commotion.

The crossness of the mother was soon finished. Ursula locked

up the room again, and considered all was over. Then her father

came in with the notched tools, his forehead knotted.

"Who the deuce opened the door?" he cried in anger.

"It was Ursula who opened the door," said her mother. He had

a duster in his hand. He turned and flapped the cloth hard

across the girl's face. The cloth stung, for a moment the girl

was as if stunned. Then she remained motionless, her face closed

and stubborn. But her heart was blazing. In spite of herself the

tears surged higher, in spite of her they surged higher.

In spite of her, her face broke, she made a curious gulping

grimace, and the tears were falling. So she went away, desolate.

But her blazing heart was fierce and unyielding. He watched her

go, and a pleasurable pain filled him, a sense of triumph and

easy power, followed immediately by acute pity.

"I'm sure that was unnecessary--to hit the girl across

the face," said the mother coldly.

"A flip with the duster won't hurt her," he said.

"Nor will it do her any good."

For days, for weeks, Ursula's heart burned from this rebuff.

She felt so cruelly vulnerable. Did he not know how vulnerable

she was, how exposed and wincing? He, of all people, knew. And

he wanted to do this to her. He wanted to hurt her right through

her closest sensitiveness, he wanted to treat her with shame, to

maim her with insult.

Her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted. She

did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot. When she

returned to her love for her father, the seed of mistrust and

defiance burned unquenched, though covered up far from sight.

She no longer belonged to him unquestioned. Slowly, slowly, the

fire of mistrust and defiance burned in her, burned away her

connection with him.

She ran a good deal alone, having a passion for all moving,

active things. She loved the little brooks. Wherever she found a

little running water, she was happy. It seemed to make her run

and sing in spirit along with it. She could sit for hours by a

brook or stream, on the roots of the alders, and watch the water

hasten dancing over the stones, or among the twigs of a fallen

branch. Sometimes, little fish vanished before they had become

real, like hallucinations, sometimes wagtails ran by the water's

brink, sometimes other little birds came to drink. She saw a

kingfisher darting blue--and then she was very happy. The

kingfisher was the key to the magic world: he was witness of the

border of enchantment.

But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of

her life: the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in

an outer world; the illusion of her grandmother, of realities so

shadowy and far-off that they became as mystic

symbols:--peasant-girls with wreaths of blue flowers in

their hair, the sledges and the depths of winter; the

dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then

the multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly

a princess of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she

was not really this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her

reading: out of the multicoloured illusion of this her life, she

must move on, to the Grammar School in Nottingham.

She was shy, and she suffered. For one thing, she bit her

nails, and had a cruel consciousness in her finger-tips, a

shame, an exposure. Out of all proportion, this shame haunted

her. She spent hours of torture, conjuring how she might keep

her gloves on: if she might say her hands were scalded, if she

might seem to forget to take off her gloves.

For she was going to inherit her own estate, when she went to

the High School. There, each girl was a lady. There, she was

going to walk among free souls, her co-mates and her equals, and

all petty things would be put away. Ah, if only she did not bite

her nails! If only she had not this blemish! She wanted so much

to be perfect--without spot or blemish, living the high,

noble life.

It was a grief to her that her father made such a poor

introduction. He was brief as ever, like a boy saying his

errand, and his clothes looked ill-fitting and casual. Whereas

Ursula would have liked robes and a ceremonial of introduction

to this, her new estate.

She made a new illusion of school. Miss Grey, the

headmistress, had a certain silvery, school-mistressy beauty of

character. The school itself had been a gentleman's house. Dark,

sombre lawns separated it from the dark, select avenue. But its

rooms were large and of good appearance, and from the back, one

looked over lawns and shrubbery, over the trees and the grassy

slope of the Arboretum, to the town which heaped the hollow with

its roofs and cupolas and its shadows.

So Ursula seated herself upon the hill of learning, looking

down on the smoke and confusion and the manufacturing, engrossed

activity of the town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar

School, she fancied the air was finer, beyond the factory smoke.

She wanted to learn Latin and Greek and French and mathematics.

She trembled like a postulant when she wrote the Greek alphabet

for the first time.

She was upon another hill-slope, whose summit she had not

scaled. There was always the marvellous eagerness in her heart,

to climb and to see beyond. A Latin verb was virgin soil to her:

she sniffed a new odour in it; it meant something, though she

did not know what it meant. But she gathered it up: it was

significant. When she knew that:

x2-y2 = (x + y)(x-y)

then she felt that she had grasped something, that she was

liberated into an intoxicating air, rare and unconditioned. And

she was very glad as she wrote her French exercise:

"J'AI DONNE LE PAIN A MON PETIT FRERE."

In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her

heart, exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never

forgot her brown "Longman's First French Grammar", nor her "Via

Latina" with its red edges, nor her little grey Algebra book.

There was always a magic in them.

At learning she was quick, intelligent, instinctive, but she

was not "thorough". If a thing did not come to her

instinctively, she could not learn it. And then, her mad rage of

loathing for all lessons, her bitter contempt of all teachers

and schoolmistresses, her recoil to a fierce, animal arrogance

made her detestable.