第 55 页

her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of

enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The

commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it

all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas, she

corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in

silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with

supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child

not to be taken seriously.

Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved

Ursula, therefore he always had a sense of shame, almost of

betrayal, when he turned on her. So he turned fiercely and

scathingly, and with a wholesale brutality that made Ursula go

white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming

deadened in her, her temper hard and cold.

Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all

these years, he began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty

years he had gone on at this office as a draughtsman, doing work

in which he had no interest, because it seemed his allotted

work. The growing up of his daughters, their developing

rejection of old forms set him also free.

He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he

pushed his way out of the earth that covered him, working always

away from the physical element in which his life was captured.

Slowly, blindly, gropingly, with what initiative was left to

him, he made his way towards individual expression and

individual form.

At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving,

almost to the point where he had left off his Adam and Eve

panel, when he was courting. But now he had knowledge and skill

without vision. He saw the puerility of his young conceptions,

he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived. He now

had a new strength in his sense of reality. He felt as if he

were real, as if he handled real things. He had worked for many

years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring

the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the

plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were

utterances of himself.

But he could not quite hitch on--always he was too busy,

too uncertain, confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling.

To his surprise he found he could do it. Modelling in clay, in

plaster, he produced beautiful reproductions, really beautiful.

Then he set-to to make a head of Ursula, in high relief, in the

Donatello manner. In his first passion, he got a beautiful

suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of concentration would

not come. With a little ash in his mouth he gave up. He

continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from

classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had

loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of

the freshness, the naive alertness of the early Italians. But it

was only reproduction.

Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting.

But he tried water-colour painting after the manner of any other

amateur. He got his results but was not much interested. After

one or two drawings of his beloved church, which had the same

alertness as his modelling, he seemed to be incongruous with the

modern atmospheric way of painting, so that his church tower

stood up, really stood and asserted its standing, but was

ashamed of its own lack of meaning, he turned away again.

He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over

reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver

and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of

discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more

imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each

for all his womenfolk. Then he made rings and bracelets.

Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula

left school, he was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he

delighted in it, almost lusted after it.

All this time his only connection with the real outer world

was through his winter evening classes, which brought him into

contact with state education. About all the rest, he was

oblivious, and entirely indifferent--even about the war.

The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of

his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great

adherent.

Ursula watched the newspapers, vaguely, concerning the war in

South Africa. They made her miserable, and she tried to have as

little to do with them as possible. But Skrebensky was out

there. He sent her an occasional post-card. But it was as if she

were a blank wall in his direction, without windows or outgoing.

She adhered to the Skrebensky of her memory.

Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed

from the roots and native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to

it, and she was aridly transplanted. He was really only a

memory. She revived his memory with strange passion, after the

departure of Winifred. He was to her almost the symbol of her

real life. It was as if, through him, in him, she might return

to her own self, which she was before she had loved Winifred,

before this deadness had come upon her, this pitiless

transplanting. But even her memories were the work of her

imagination.

She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She

could not dream of him progressively, of what he was doing now,

of what relation he would have to her now. Only sometimes she

wept to think how cruelly she had suffered when he left

her--ah, how she had suffered! She remembered what

she had written in her diary:

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

Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been

then. For it was remembering a dead self. All that was dead

after Winifred. She knew the corpse of her young, loving self,

she knew its grave. And the young living self she mourned for

had scarcely existed, it was the creature of her

imagination.

Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and

unchanged. No one would ever love her now--she would love

no one. The body of love was killed in her after Winifred, there

was something of the corpse in her. She would live, she would go

on, but she would have no lovers, no lover would want her any

more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest little flame

of desire was extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid germ that

contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was killed,

she would go on growing as a plant, she would do her best to

produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead

before it was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse

of hope.

The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with

children. What was her life--a sordid, formless,

disintegrated nothing; Ursula Brangwen a person without worth or

importance, living in the mean village of Cossethay, within the

sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula Brangwen, at seventeen,

worthless and unvalued, neither wanted nor needed by anybody,

and conscious herself of her own dead value. It would not bear

thinking of.

But still her dogged pride held its own. She might be

defiled, she might be a corpse that should never be loved, she

might be a core-rotten stalk living upon the food that others

provided; yet she would give in to nobody.

Gradually she became conscious that she could not go on

living at home as she was doing, without place or meaning or

worth. The very children that went to school held her

uselessness in contempt. She must do something.

Her father said she had plenty to do to help her mother. From

her parents she would never get more than a hit in the face. She

was not a practical person. She thought of wild things, of

running away and becoming a domestic servant, of asking some man

to take her.

She wrote to the mistress of the High School for advice.

"I cannot see very clearly what you should do, Ursula," came

the reply, "unless you are willing to become an elementary

school teacher. You have matriculated, and that qualifies you to

take a post as uncertificated teacher in any school, at a salary

of about fifty pounds a year.

"I cannot tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in your

desire to do something. You will learn that mankind is a great

body of which you are one useful member, you will take your own

place at the great task which humanity is trying to fulfil. That

will give you a satisfaction and a self-respect which nothing

else could give."

Ursula's heart sank. It was a cold, dreary satisfaction to

think of. Yet her cold will acquiesced. This was what she

wanted.

"You have an emotional nature," the letter went on, "a quick

natural response. If only you could learn patience and

self-discipline, I do not see why you should not make a good

teacher. The least you could do is to try. You need only serve a

year, or perhaps two years, as uncertificated teacher. Then you

would go to one of the training colleges, where I hope you would

take your degree. I most strongly urge and advise you to keep up

your studies always with the intention of taking a degree. That

will give you a qualification and a position in the world, and

will give you more scope to choose your own way.

"I shall be proud to see one of my girls win her own

economical independence, which means so much more than it seems.

I shall be glad indeed to know that one more of my girls has

provided for herself the means of freedom to choose for

herself."

It all sounded grim and desperate. Ursula rather hated it.

But her mother's contempt and her father's harshness had made

her raw at the quick, she knew the ignominy of being a

hanger-on, she felt the festering thorn of her mother's animal

estimation.

At length she had to speak. Hard and shut down and silent

within herself, she slipped out one evening to the workshed. She

heard the tap-tap-tap of the hammer upon the metal. Her father

lifted his head as the door opened. His face was ruddy and

bright with instinct, as when he was a youth, his black

moustache was cut close over his wide mouth, his black hair was

fine and close as ever. But there was about him an abstraction,

a sort of instrumental detachment from human things. He was a

worker. He watched his daughter's hard, expressionless face. A

hot anger came over his breast and belly.

"What now?" he said.

"Can't I," she answered, looking aside, not looking at him,

"can't I go out to work?"

"Go out to work, what for?"

His voice was so strong, and ready, and vibrant. It irritated

her.

"I want some other life than this."

A flash of strong rage arrested all his blood for a

moment.

"Some other life?" he repeated. "Why, what other life do you

want?"

She hesitated.

"Something else besides housework and hanging about. And I

want to earn something."

Her curious, brutal hardness of speech, and the fierce

invincibility of her youth, which ignored him, made him also

harden with anger.

"And how do you think you're going to earn anything?"

he asked.

"I can become a teacher--I'm qualified by my

matric."

He wished her matric. in hell.

"And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?" he

asked, jeering.

"Fifty pounds a year," she said.

He was silent, his power taken out of his hand.

He had always hugged a secret pride in the fact that his

daughters need not go out to work. With his wife's money and his

own they had four hundred a year. They could draw on the capital

if need be later on. He was not afraid for his old age. His

daughters might be ladies.

Fifty pounds a year was a pound a week--which was enough

for her to live on independently.

"And what sort of a teacher do you think you'd make? You

haven't the patience of a Jack-gnat with your own brothers and

sisters, let alone with a class of children. And I thought you

didn't like dirty, board-school brats."

"They're not all dirty."

"You'd find they're not all clean."

There was silence in the workshop. The lamplight fell on the

burned silver bowl that lay between him, on mallet and furnace

and chisel. Brangwen stood with a queer, catlike light on his

face, almost like a smile. But it was no smile.

"Can I try?" she said.

"You can do what the deuce you like, and go where you

like."

Her face was fixed and expressionless and indifferent. It

always sent him to a pitch of frenzy to see it like that. He

kept perfectly still.

Cold, without any betrayal of feeling, she turned and left

the shed. He worked on, with all his nerves jangled. Then he had

to put down his tools and go into the house.

In a bitter tone of anger and contempt he told his wife.

Ursula was present. There was a brief altercation, closed by

Mrs. Brangwen's saying, in a tone of biting superiority and

indifference:

"Let her find out what it's like. She'll soon have had

enough."

The matter was left there. But Ursula considered herself free

to act. For some days she made no move. She was reluctant to

take the cruel step of finding work, for she shrank with extreme

sensitiveness and shyness from new contact, new situations. Then

at length a sort of doggedness drove her. Her soul was full of

bitterness.

She went to the Free Library in Ilkeston, copied out

addresses from the Schoolmistress, and wrote for

application forms. After two days she rose early to meet the

postman. As she expected, there were three long envelopes.

Her heart beat painfully as she went up with them to her

bedroom. Her fingers trembled, she could hardly force herself to

look at the long, official forms she had to fill in. The whole

thing was so cruel, so impersonal. Yet it must be done.

"Name (surname first):..."

In a trembling hand she wrote, "Brangwen,--Ursula."