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human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing,--the

clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The

Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ,

the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris.

Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity

was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local

religions into universal religion.

In religion there were the two great motives of fear and

love. The motive of fear was as great as the motive of love.

Christianity accepted crucifixion to escape from fear; "Do your

worst to me, that I may have no more fear of the worst." But

that which was feared was not necessarily all evil, and that

which was loved not necessarily all good. Fear shall become

reverence, and reverence is submission in identification; love

shall become triumph, and triumph is delight in

identification.

So much she talked of religion, getting the gist of many

writings. In philosophy she was brought to the conclusion that

the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products

of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear.

The motive of fear in religion is base, and must be left to the

ancient worshippers of power, worship of Moloch.

We do not worship power, in our enlightened souls. Power is

degenerated to money and Napoleonic stupidity.

Ursula could not help dreaming of Moloch. Her God was not

mild and gentle, neither Lamb nor Dove. He was the lion and the

eagle. Not because the lion and the eagle had power, but because

they were proud and strong; they were themselves, they were not

passive subjects of some shepherd, or pets of some loving woman,

or sacrifices of some priest. She was weary to death of mild,

passive lambs and monotonous doves. If the lamb might lie down

with the lion, it would be a great honour to the lamb, but the

lion's powerful heart would suffer no diminishing. She loved the

dignity and self-possession of lions.

She did not see how lambs could love. Lambs could only be

loved. They could only be afraid, and tremblingly submit to

fear, and become sacrificial; or they could submit to love, and

become beloveds. In both they were passive. Raging, destructive

lovers, seeking the moment when fear is greatest, and triumph is

greatest, the fear not greater than the triumph, the triumph not

greater than the fear, these were no lambs nor doves. She

stretched her own limbs like a lion or a wild horse, her heart

was relentless in its desires. It would suffer a thousand

deaths, but it would still be a lion's heart when it rose from

death, a fiercer lion she would be, a surer, knowing herself

different from and separate from the great, conflicting universe

that was not herself.

Winifred Inger was also interested in the Women's

Movement.

"The men will do no more,--they have lost the capacity

for doing," said the elder girl. "They fuss and talk, but they

are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert

idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don't come to one and

love one, they come to an idea, and they say 'You are my idea,'

so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man's idea! As if I

exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed

by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a

mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be

able to act; they are all impotent, they can't take a

woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that.

They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they

are hungry."

Ursula was introduced by her friend to various women and men,

educated, unsatisfied people, who still moved within the smug

provincial society as if they were nearly as tame as their

outward behaviour showed, but who were inwardly raging and

mad.

It was a strange world the girl was swept into, like a chaos,

like the end of the world. She was too young to understand it

all. Yet the inoculation passed into her, through her love for

her mistress.

The examination came, and then school was over. It was the

long vacation. Winifred Inger went away to London. Ursula was

left alone in Cossethay. A terrible, outcast, almost poisonous

despair possessed her. It was no use doing anything, or being

anything. She had no connection with other people. Her lot was

isolated and deadly. There was nothing for her anywhere, but

this black disintegration. Yet, within all the great attack of

disintegration upon her, she remained herself. It was the

terrible core of all her suffering, that she was always herself.

Never could she escape that: she could not put off being

herself.

She still adhered to Winifred Inger. But a sort of nausea was

coming over her. She loved her mistress. But a heavy, clogged

sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the other

woman's contact. And sometimes she thought Winifred was ugly,

clayey. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and

her arms were too thick. She wanted some fine intensity, instead

of this heavy cleaving of moist clay, that cleaves because it

has no life of its own.

Winifred still loved Ursula. She had a passion for the fine

flame of the girl, she served her endlessly, would have done

anything for her.

"Come with me to London," she pleaded to the girl. "I will

make it nice for you,--you shall do lots of things you will

enjoy."

"No," said Ursula, stubbornly and dully. "No, I don't want to

go to London, I want to be by myself."

Winifred knew what this meant. She knew that Ursula was

beginning to reject her. The fine, unquenchable flame of the

younger girl would consent no more to mingle with the perverted

life of the elder woman. Winifred knew it would come. But she

too was proud. At the bottom of her was a black pit of despair.

She knew perfectly well that Ursula would cast her off.

And that seemed like the end of her life. But she was too

hopeless to rage. Wisely, economizing what was left of Ursula's

love, she went away to London, leaving the beloved girl

alone.

And after a fortnight, Ursula's letters became tender again,

loving. Her Uncle Tom had invited her to go and stay with him.

He was managing a big, new colliery in Yorkshire. Would Winifred

come too?

For now Ursula was imagining marriage for Winifred. She

wanted her to marry her Uncle Tom. Winifred knew this. She said

she would come to Wiggiston. She would now let fate do as it

liked with her, since there was nothing remaining to be done.

Tom Brangwen also saw Ursula's intention. He too was at the end

of his desires. He had done the things he had wanted to. They

had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of soul, which he

hid under an utterly tolerant good-humour. He no longer cared

about anything on earth, neither man nor woman, nor God nor

humanity. He had come to a stability of nullification. He did

not care any more, neither about his body nor about his soul.

Only he would preserve intact his own life. Only the simple,

superficial fact of living persisted. He was still healthy. He

lived. Therefore he would fill each moment. That had always been

his creed. It was not instinctive easiness: it was the

inevitable outcome of his nature. When he was in the absolute

privacy of his own life, he did as he pleased, unscrupulous,

without any ulterior thought. He believed neither in good nor

evil. Each moment was like a separate little island, isolated

from time, and blank, unconditioned by time.

He lived in a large new house of red brick, standing outside

a mass of homogeneous red-brick dwellings, called Wiggiston.

Wiggiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of

eleven houses on the edge of healthy, half-agricultural country.

Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston

appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings

of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure

ugliness; a grey-black macadamized road, asphalt causeways, held

in between a flat succession of wall, window, and door, a

new-brick channel that began nowhere, and ended nowhere.

Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself

endlessly. Only now and then, in one of the house-windows

vegetables or small groceries were displayed for sale.

In the middle of the town was a large, open, shapeless space,

or market-place, of black trodden earth, surrounded by the same

flat material of dwellings, new red-brick becoming grimy, small

oblong windows, and oblong doors, repeated endlessly, with just,

at one corner, a great and gaudy public house, and somewhere

lost on one of the sides of the square, a large window opaque

and darkish green, which was the post office.

The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers

hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt

pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but

like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the

homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death

rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no

artery, no organic formation. There it lay, like the new

foundations of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a

skin-disease.

Just outside of this, on a little hill, was Tom Brangwen's

big, red-brick house. It looked from the front upon the edge of

the place, a meaningless squalor of ash-pits and closets and

irregular rows of the backs of houses, each with its small

activity made sordid by barren cohesion with the rest of the

small activities. Farther off was the great colliery that went

night and day. And all around was the country, green with two

winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the darker woods

in the distance.

The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now, when

he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in

the actuality of the place. It was like some gruesome dream,

some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete.

Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor-car at the raw

little station, and drove through what seemed to them like the

horrible raw beginnings of something. The place was a moment of

chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was

fascinated by the many men who were there--groups of men

standing in the streets, four or five men walking in a gang

together, their dogs running behind or before. They were all

decently dressed, and most of them rather gaunt. The terrible

gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her. Like creatures

with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate

being, within some utterly unliving shell, they passed

meaninglessly along, with strange, isolated dignity. It was as

if a hard, horny shell enclosed them all.

Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom's

house. He was not yet at home. His house was simply, but well

furnished. He had taken out a dividing wall, and made the whole

front of the house into a large library, with one end devoted to

his science. It was a handsome room, appointed as a laboratory

and reading room, but giving the same sense of hard, mechanical

activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate, and looking out on

the hideous abstraction of the town, and at the green meadows

and rough country beyond, and at the great, mathematical

colliery on the other side.

They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was

getting stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on

his brows, he looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other

man of action. His colour was as fresh, his health as perfect as

ever, he walked like a man rather absorbed.

Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library, his

coat fastened and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not

shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see

covered, and his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to

stand in the shadow, like a thing ashamed. And the clasp of his

hand was so soft and yet so forceful, that it chilled the heart.

She was afraid of him, repelled by him, and yet attracted.

He looked at the athletic, seemingly fearless girl, and he

detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption.

Immediately, he knew they were akin.

His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He

still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling

up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty

of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid

the strange, repellent grossness of him, the slight sense of

putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather

fat thighs and loins.

Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile,

slightly cunning regard he had for Ursula, which made the girl

at once so proud and so perplexed.

"But is this place as awful as it looks?" the young girl

asked, a strain in her eyes.

"It is just what it looks," he said. "It hides nothing."

"Why are the men so sad?"

"Are they sad?" he replied.

"They seem unutterably, unutterably sad," said Ursula, out of

a passionate throat.

"I don't think they are that. They just take it for

granted."

"What do they take for granted?"

"This--the pits and the place altogether."

"Why don't they alter it?" she passionately protested.

"They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and

the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit

themselves. It is easier," he said.

"And you agree with them," burst out his niece, unable to

bear it. "You think like they do--that living human beings

must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors. We could

easily do without the pits."

He smiled, uncomfortably, cynically. Ursula felt again the

revolt of hatred from him.