第 42 页

She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her

revolts: there was no law for her, nor any rule. She existed for

herself alone. Then ensued a long struggle with everybody, in

which she broke down at last, when she had run the full length

of her resistance, and sobbed her heart out, desolate; and

afterwards, in a chastened, washed-out, bodiless state, she

received the understanding that would not come before, and went

her way sadder and wiser.

Ursula and Gudrun went to school together. Gudrun was a shy,

quiet, wild creature, a thin slip of a thing hanging back from

notice or twisting past to disappear into her own world again.

She seemed to avoid all contact, instinctively, and pursued her

own intent way, pursuing half-formed fancies that had no

relation to anyone else.

She was not clever at all. She thought Ursula clever enough

for two. Ursula understood, so why should she, Gudrun, bother

herself? The younger girl lived her religious, responsible life

in her sister, by proxy. For herself, she was indifferent and

intent as a wild animal, and as irresponsible.

When she found herself at the bottom of the class, she

laughed, lazily, and was content, saying she was safe now. She

did not mind her father's chagrin nor her mother's tinge of

mortification.

"What do I pay for you to go to Nottingham for?" her father

asked, exasperated.

"Well, Dad, you know you needn't pay for me," she replied,

nonchalant. "I'm ready to stop at home."

She was happy at home, Ursula was not. Slim and unwilling

abroad, Gudrun was easy in her own house as a wild thing in its

lair. Whereas Ursula, attentive and keen abroad, at home was

reluctant, uneasy, unwilling to be herself, or unable.

Nevertheless Sunday remained the maximum day of the week for

both. Ursula turned passionately to it, to the sense of eternal

security it gave. She suffered anguish of fears during the

week-days, for she felt strong powers that would not recognize

her. There was upon her always a fear and a dislike of

authority. She felt she could always do as she wanted if she

managed to avoid a battle with Authority and the authorised

Powers. But if she gave herself away, she would be lost,

destroyed. There was always the menace against her.

This strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent,

ready to seize hold upon her this feeling of the grudging power

of the mob lying in wait for her, who was the exception, formed

one of the deepest influences of her life. Wherever she was, at

school, among friends, in the street, in the train, she

instinctively abated herself, made herself smaller, feigned to

be less than she was, for fear that her undiscovered self should

be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish resentment of the

commonplace, the average Self.

She was fairly safe at school, now. She knew how to take her

place there, and how much of herself to reserve. But she was

free only on Sundays. When she was but a girl of fourteen, she

began to feel a resentment growing against her in her own home.

She knew she was the disturbing influence there. But as yet, on

Sundays, she was free, really free, free to be herself, without

fear or misgiving.

Even at its stormiest, Sunday was a blessed day. Ursula woke

to it with a feeling of immense relief. She wondered why her

heart was so light. Then she remembered it was Sunday. A

gladness seemed to burst out around her, a feeling of great

freedom. The whole world was for twenty-four hours revoked, put

back. Only the Sunday world existed.

She loved the very confusion of the household. It was lucky

if the children slept till seven o'clock. Usually, soon after

six, a chirp was heard, a voice, an excited chirrup began,

announcing the creation of a new day, there was a thudding of

quick little feet, and the children were up and about,

scampering in their shirts, with pink legs and glistening,

flossy hair all clean from the Saturday's night bathing, their

souls excited by their bodies' cleanliness.

As the house began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean

children, one of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and

slatternly, with her thick, dark hair loosely coiled and

slipping over one ear, or the father, warm and comfortable, with

ruffled black hair and shirt unbuttoned at the neck.

Then the girls upstairs heard the continual:

"Now then, Billy, what are you up to?" in the father's

strong, vibrating voice: or the mother's dignified:

"I have said, Cassie, I will not have it."

It was amazing how the father's voice could ring out like a

gong, without his being in the least moved, and how the mother

could speak like a queen holding an audience, though her blouse

was sticking out all round and her hair was not fastened up and

the children were yelling a pandemonium.

Gradually breakfast was produced, and the elder girls came

down into the babel, whilst half-naked children flitted round

like the wrong ends of cherubs, as Gudrun said, watching the

bare little legs and the chubby tails appearing and

disappearing.

Gradually the young ones were captured, and nightdresses

finally removed, ready for the clean Sunday shirt. But before

the Sunday shirt was slipped over the fleecy head, away darted

the naked body, to wallow in the sheepskin which formed the

parlour rug, whilst the mother walked after, protesting sharply,

holding the shirt like a noose, and the father's bronze voice

rang out, and the naked child wallowing on its back in the deep

sheepskin announced gleefully:

"I'm bading in the sea, mother."

"Why should I walk after you with your shirt?" said the

mother. "Get up now."

"I'm bading in the sea, mother," repeated the wallowing,

naked figure.

"We say bathing, not bading," said the mother, with her

strange, indifferent dignity. "I am waiting here with your

shirt."

At length shirts were on, and stockings were paired, and

little trousers buttoned and little petticoats tied behind. The

besetting cowardice of the family was its shirking of the garter

question.

"Where are your garters, Cassie?"

"I don't know."

"Well, look for them."

But not one of the elder Brangwens would really face the

situation. After Cassie had grovelled under all the furniture

and blacked up all her Sunday cleanliness, to the infinite grief

of everybody, the garter was forgotten in the new washing of the

young face and hands.

Later, Ursula would be indignant to see Miss Cassie marching

into church from Sunday school with her stocking sluthered down

to her ankle, and a grubby knee showing.

"It's disgraceful!" cried Ursula at dinner. "People will

think we're pigs, and the children are never washed."

"Never mind what people think," said the mother superbly. "I

see that the child is bathed properly, and if I satisfy myself I

satisfy everybody. She can't keep her stocking up and no garter,

and it isn't the child's fault she was let to go without

one."

The garter trouble continued in varying degrees, but till

each child wore long skirts or long trousers, it was not

removed.

On this day of decorum, the Brangwen family went to church by

the high-road, making a detour outside all the garden-hedge,

rather than climb the wall into the churchyard. There was no law

of this, from the parents. The children themselves were the

wardens of the Sabbath decency, very jealous and instant with

each other.

It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the

house was really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing

like a strange bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading

and tale-telling and quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were

allowed. Out of doors, all playing was to be carried on

unobtrusively. If there were noise, yelling or shouting, then

some fierce spirit woke up in the father and the elder children,

so that the younger were subdued, afraid of being

excommunicated.

The children themselves preserved the Sabbath. If Ursula in

her vanity sang:

"Il etait un' bergere

Et ron-ron-ron petit patapon,"

Theresa was sure to cry:

"That's not a Sunday song, our Ursula."

"You don't know," replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she

wavered. And her song faded down before she came to the end.

Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very

precious to her. She found herself in a strange, undefined

place, where her spirit could wander in dreams, unassailed.

The white-robed spirit of Christ passed between olive trees.

It was a vision, not a reality. And she herself partook of the

visionary being. There was the voice in the night calling,

"Samuel, Samuel!" And still the voice called in the night. But

not this night, nor last night, but in the unfathomed night of

Sunday, of the Sabbath silence.

There was Sin, the serpent, in whom was also wisdom. There

was Judas with the money and the kiss.

But there was no actual Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa

across the face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the

everlasting. It was misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from

Sunday school, he was bad, he was wicked, but he was not a

Sinner.

Sin was absolute and everlasting: wickedness and badness were

temporary and relative. When Billy, catching up the local

jargon, called Cassie a "sinner", everybody detested him. Yet

when there came to the Marsh a flippetty-floppetty foxhound

puppy, he was mischievously christened "Sinner".

The Brangwens shrank from applying their religion to their

own immediate actions. They wanted the sense of the eternal and

immortal, not a list of rules for everyday conduct. Therefore

they were badly-behaved children, headstrong and arrogant,

though their feelings were generous. They had,

moreover--intolerable to their ordinary neighbours--a

proud gesture, that did not fit with the jealous idea of the

democratic Christian. So that they were always extraordinary,

outside of the ordinary.

How bitterly Ursula resented her first acquaintance with

evangelical teachings. She got a peculiar thrill from the

application of salvation to her own personal case. "Jesus died

for me, He suffered for me." There was a pride and a thrill in

it, followed almost immediately by a sense of dreariness. Jesus

with holes in His hands and feet: it was distasteful to her. The

shadowy Jesus with the Stigmata: that was her own vision. But

Jesus the actual man, talking with teeth and lips, telling one

to put one's finger into His wounds, like a villager gloating in

his sores, repelled her. She was enemy of those who insisted on

the humanity of Christ. If He were just a man, living in

ordinary human life, then she was indifferent.

But it was the jealousy of vulgar people which must insist on

the humanity of Christ. It was the vulgar mind which would allow

nothing extra-human, nothing beyond itself to exist. It was the

dirty, desecrating hands of the revivalists which wanted to drag

Jesus into this everyday life, to dress Jesus up in trousers and

frock-coat, to compel Him to a vulgar equality of footing. It

was the impudent suburban soul which would ask, "What would

Jesus do, if he were in my shoes?"

Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If any one, it

was the mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of

the vulgar clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She

never really subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen's mystical

passion.

But Ursula was with her father. As she became adolescent,

thirteen, fourteen, she set more and more against her mother's

practical indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous,

almost wicked in her mother's attitude. What did Anna Brangwen,

in these years, care for God or Jesus or Angels? She was the

immediate life of to-day. Children were still being born to her,

she was throng with all the little activities of her family. And

almost instinctively she resented her husband's slavish service

to the Church, his dark, subject hankering to worship an unseen

God. What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young

family that needed fettling for? Let him attend to the immediate

concerns of his life, not go projecting himself towards the

ultimate.

But Ursula was all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt

against babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another

world, He was not of this world. He did not thrust His hands

under her face and, pointing to His wounds, say:

"Look, Ursula Brangwen, I got these for your sake. Now do as

you're told."

To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the

distance, like a white moon at sunset, a crescent moon beckoning

as it follows the sun, out of our ken. Sometimes dark clouds

standing very far off, pricking up into a clear yellow band of

sunset, of a winter evening, reminded her of Calvary, sometimes

the full moon rising blood-red upon the hill terrified her with

the knowledge that Christ was now dead, hanging heavy and dead

upon the Cross.

On Sundays, this visionary world came to pass. She heard the

long hush, she knew the marriage of dark and light was taking

place. In church, the Voice sounded, re-echoing not from this

world, as if the Church itself were a shell that still spoke the

language of creation.

"The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were

fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose.

"And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with

Man, for that he also is flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred

and twenty years.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after

that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,

and they bare children unto them, the same became mighty men

which were of old, men of renown."