第 51 页

senses too. They were to be gratified. Apart from this, he

represented the great, established, extant Idea of life, and as

this he was important and beyond question.

The good of the greatest number was all that mattered. That

which was the greatest good for them all, collectively, was the

greatest good for the individual. And so, every man must give

himself to support the state, and so labour for the greatest

good of all. One might make improvements in the state, perhaps,

but always with a view to preserving it intact.

No highest good of the community, however, would give him the

vital fulfilment of his soul. He knew this. But he did not

consider the soul of the individual sufficiently important. He

believed a man was important in so far as he represented all

humanity.

He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the

highest good of the community as it stands is no longer the

highest good of even the average individual. He thought that,

because the community represents millions of people, therefore

it must be millions of times more important than any individual,

forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many,

and is not the many themselves. Now when the statement of the

abstract good for the community has become a formula lacking in

all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the

"common good" becomes a general nuisance, representing the

vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level.

And by the highest good of the greatest number is chiefly

meant the material prosperity of all classes. Skrebensky did not

really care about his own material prosperity. If he had been

penniless--well, he would have taken his chances. Therefore

how could he find his highest good in giving up his life for the

material prosperity of everybody else! What he considered an

unimportant thing for himself he could not think worthy of every

sacrifice on behalf of other people. And that which he would

consider of the deepest importance to himself as an

individual--oh, he said, you mustn't consider the community

from that standpoint. No--no--we know what the

community wants; it wants something solid, it wants good wages,

equal opportunities, good conditions of living, that's what the

community wants. It doesn't want anything subtle or difficult.

Duty is very plain-keep in mind the material, the immediate

welfare of every man, that's all.

So there came over Skrebensky a sort of nullity, which more

and more terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless

which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster

impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of

disaster. She became morbidly sensitive, depressed,

apprehensive. It was anguish to her when she saw one rook slowly

flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill-omen. And the

foreboding became so black and so powerful in her, that she was

almost extinguished.

Yet what was the matter? At the worst he was only going away.

Why did she mind, what was it she feared? She did not know. Only

she had a black dread possessing her. When she went at night and

saw the big, flashing stars they seemed terrible, by day she was

always expecting some charge to be made against her.

He wrote in March to say that he was going to South Africa in

a short time, but before he went, he would snatch a day at the

Marsh.

As if in a painful dream, she waited suspended, unresolved.

She did not know, she could not understand. Only she felt that

all the threads of her fate were being held taut, in suspense.

She only wept sometimes as she went about, saying blindly:

"I am so fond of him, I am so fond of him."

He came. But why did he come? She looked at him for a sign.

He gave no sign. He did not even kiss her. He behaved as if he

were an affable, usual acquaintance. This was superficial, but

what did it hide? She waited for him, she wanted him to make

some sign.

So the whole of the day they wavered and avoided contact,

until evening. Then, laughing, saying he would be back in six

months' time and would tell them all about it, he shook hands

with her mother and took his leave.

Ursula accompanied him into the lane. The night was windy,

the yew trees seethed and hissed and vibrated. The wind seemed

to rush about among the chimneys and the church-tower. It was

dark.

The wind blew Ursula's face, and her clothes cleaved to her

limbs. But it was a surging, turgid wind, instinct with

compressed vigour of life. And she seemed to have lost

Skrebensky. Out there in the strong, urgent night she could not

find him.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Here," came his bodiless voice.

And groping, she touched him. A fire like lightning drenched

them.

"Anton?" she said.

"What?" he answered.

She held him with her hands in the darkness, she felt his

body again with hers.

"Don't leave me--come back to me," she said.

"Yes," he said, holding her in his arms.

But the male in him was scotched by the knowledge that she

was not under his spell nor his influence. He wanted to go away

from her. He rested in the knowledge that to-morrow he was going

away, his life was really elsewhere. His life was

elsewhere--his life was elsewhere--the centre of his

life was not what she would have. She was different--there

was a breach between them. They were hostile worlds.

"You will come back to me?" she reiterated.

"Yes," he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an

appointment, not as a man returning to his fulfilment.

So she kissed him, and went indoors, lost. He walked down to

the Marsh abstracted. The contact with her hurt him, and

threatened him. He shrank, he had to be free of her spirit. For

she would stand before him, like the angel before Balaam, and

drive him back with a sword from the way he was going, into a

wilderness.

The next day she went to the station to see him go. She

looked at him, she turned to him, but he was always so strange

and null--so null. He was so collected. She thought it was

that which made him null. Strangely nothing he was.

Ursula stood near him with a mute, pale face which he would

rather not see. There seemed some shame at the very root of

life, cold, dead shame for her.

The three made a noticeable group on the station; the girl in

her fur cap and tippet and her olive green costume, pale, tense

with youth, isolated, unyielding; the soldierly young man in a

crush hat and a heavy overcoat, his face rather pale and

reserved above his purple scarf, his whole figure neutral; then

the elder man, a fashionable bowler hat pressed low over his

dark brows, his face warm-coloured and calm, his whole figure

curiously suggestive of full-blooded indifference; he was the

eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his

own life he would have no drama.

The train was rushing up. Ursula's heart heaved, but the ice

was frozen too strong upon it.

"Good-bye," she said, lifting her hand, her face laughing

with her peculiar, blind, almost dazzling laugh. She wondered

what he was doing, when he stooped and kissed her. He should be

shaking hands and going.

"Good-bye," she said again.

He picked up his little bag and turned his back on her. There

was a hurry along the train. Ah, here was his carriage. He took

his seat. Tom Brangwen shut the door, and the two men shook

hands as the whistle went.

"Good-bye--and good luck," said Brangwen.

"Thank you--good-bye."

The train moved off. Skrebensky stood at the carriage window,

waving, but not really looking to the two figures, the girl and

the warm-coloured, almost effeminately-dressed man Ursula waved

her handkerchief. The train gathered speed, it grew smaller and

smaller. Still it ran in a straight line. The speck of white

vanished. The rear of the train was small in the distance. Still

she stood on the platform, feeling a great emptiness about her.

In spite of herself her mouth was quivering: she did not want to

cry: her heart was dead cold.

Her Uncle Tom had gone to an automatic machine, and was

getting matches.

"Would you like some sweets?" he said, turning round.

Her face was covered with tears, she made curious, downward

grimaces with her mouth, to get control. Yet her heart was not

crying--it was cold and earthy.

"What kind would you like--any?" persisted her

uncle.

"I should love some peppermint drops," she said, in a

strange, normal voice, from her distorted face. But in a few

moments she had gained control of herself, and was still,

detached.

"Let us go into the town," he said, and he rushed her into a

train, moving to the town station. They went to a cafe to drink

coffee, she sat looking at people in the street, and a great

wound was in her breast, a cold imperturbability in her

soul.

This cold imperturbability of spirit continued in her now. It

was as if some disillusion had frozen upon her, a hard

disbelief. Part of her had gone cold, apathetic. She was too

young, too baffled to understand, or even to know that she

suffered much. And she was too deeply hurt to submit.

She had her blind agonies, when she wanted him, she wanted

him. But from the moment of his departure, he had become a

visionary thing of her own. All her roused torment and passion

and yearning she turned to him.

She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.

Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, she went

and wrote:

"If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down."

It meant so much to her, that sentence--she put into it

all the anguish of her youth and her young passion and yearning.

She called to him from her heart wherever she went, her limbs

vibrated with anguish towards him wherever she was, the

radiating force of her soul seemed to travel to him, endlessly,

endlessly, and in her soul's own creation, find him.

But who was he, and where did he exist? In her own desire

only.

She received a post-card from him, and she put it in her

bosom. It did not mean much to her, really. The second day, she

lost it, and never even remembered she had had it, till some

days afterwards.

The long weeks went by. There came the constant bad news of

the war. And she felt as if all, outside there in the world,

were a hurt, a hurt against her. And something in her soul

remained cold, apathetic, unchanging.

Her life was always only partial at this time, never did she

live completely. There was the cold, unliving part of her. Yet

she was madly sensitive. She could not bear herself. When a

dirty, red-eyed old woman came begging of her in the street, she

started away as from an unclean thing. And then, when the old

woman shouted acrid insults after her, she winced, her limbs

palpitated with insane torment, she could not bear herself.

Whenever she thought of the red-eyed old woman, a sort of

madness ran in inflammation over her flesh and her brain, she

almost wanted to kill herself.

And in this state, her sexual life flamed into a kind of

disease within her. She was so overwrought and sensitive, that

the mere touch of coarse wool seemed to tear her nerves.

CHAPTER XII

SHAME

Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying

for her matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she

had very little intelligence when she was disjointed from

happiness. Stubbornness and a consciousness of impending fate

kept her half-heartedly pinned to it. She knew that soon she

would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread

was that she would be prevented. An all-containing will in her

for complete independence, complete social independence,

complete independence from any personal authority, kept her

dullishly at her studies. For she knew that she had always her

price of ransom--her femaleness. She was always a woman,

and what she could not get because she was a human being, fellow

to the rest of mankind, she would get because she was a female,

other than the man. In her femaleness she felt a secret riches,

a reserve, she had always the price of freedom.

However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last

resource. The other things should be tried first. There was the

mysterious man's world to be adventured upon, the world of daily

work and duty, and existence as a working member of the

community. Against this she had a subtle grudge. She wanted to

make her conquest also of this man's world.

So she ground away at her work, never giving it up. Some

things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French,

mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and

Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of

English literature. Why should one remember the things one read?

Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated

her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history

puzzled her and made her ponder, but the political parts angered

her, and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she get a

poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from

her studies; one afternoon, reading As You Like It; once when,

with her blood, she heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how

the blood beat in a Roman's body; so that ever after she felt

she knew the Romans by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of

English Grammar, because it gave her pleasure to detect the live

movements of words and sentences; and mathematics, the very

sight of the letters in Algebra, had a real lure for her.

She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her

face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were

not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the

unknown.

Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion

in her. When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were

folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer