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reality to her. She was shirking it. It was reality, but it was

all outside her. And she fought against Mr. Brunt's

representation. She did not want to realize.

"Will it be so terrible?" she said, quivering, rather

beautiful, but with a slight touch of condescension, because she

would not betray her own trepidation.

"Terrible?" said the man, turning to his potatoes again. "I

dunno about terrible."

"I do feel frightened," said Ursula. "The children seem

so----"

"What?" said Miss Harby, entering at that moment.

"Why," said Ursula, "Mr. Brunt says I ought to tackle my

class," and she laughed uneasily.

"Oh, you have to keep order if you want to teach," said Miss

Harby, hard, superior, trite.

Ursula did not answer. She felt non valid before them.

"If you want to be let to live, you have," said Mr.

Brunt.

"Well, if you can't keep order, what good are you?" said Miss

Harby.

"An' you've got to do it by yourself,"--his voice rose

like the bitter cry of the prophets. "You'll get no help

from anybody."

"Oh, indeed!" said Miss Harby. "Some people can't be helped."

And she departed.

The air of hostility and disintegration, of wills working in

antagonistic subordination, was hideous. Mr. Brunt, subordinate,

afraid, acid with shame, frightened her. Ursula wanted to run.

She only wanted to clear out, not to understand.

Then Miss Schofield came in, and with her another, more

restful note. Ursula at once turned for confirmation to the

newcomer. Maggie remained personal within all this unclean

system of authority.

"Is the big Anderson here?" she asked of Mr. Brunt. And they

spoke of some affair about two scholars, coldly, officially.

Miss Schofield took her brown dish, and Ursula followed with

her own. The cloth was laid in the pleasant Standard Three room,

there was a jar with two or three monthly roses on the

table.

"It is so nice in here, you have made it different,"

said Ursula gaily. But she was afraid. The atmosphere of the

school was upon her.

"The big room," said Miss Schofield, "ha, it's misery to be

in it!"

She too spoke with bitterness. She too lived in the

ignominious position of an upper servant hated by the master

above and the class beneath. She was, she knew, liable to attack

from either side at any minute, or from both at once, for the

authorities would listen to the complaints of parents, and both

would turn round on the mongrel authority, the teacher.

So there was a hard, bitter withholding in Maggie Schofield

even as she poured out her savoury mess of big golden beans and

brown gravy.

"It is vegetarian hot-pot," said Miss Schofield. "Would you

like to try it?"

"I should love to," said Ursula.

Her own dinner seemed coarse and ugly beside this savoury,

clean dish.

"I've never eaten vegetarian things," she said. "But I should

think they can be good."

"I'm not really a vegetarian," said Maggie, "I don't like to

bring meat to school."

"No," said Ursula, "I don't think I do either."

And again her soul rang an answer to a new refinement, a new

liberty. If all vegetarian things were as nice as this, she

would be glad to escape the slight uncleanness of meat.

"How good!" she cried.

"Yes," said Miss Schofield, and she proceeded to tell her the

receipt. The two girls passed on to talk about themselves.

Ursula told all about the High School, and about her

matriculation, bragging a little. She felt so poor here, in this

ugly place. Miss Schofield listened with brooding, handsome

face, rather gloomy.

"Couldn't you have got to some better place than this?" she

asked at length.

"I didn't know what it was like," said Ursula,

doubtfully.

"Ah!" said Miss Schofield, and she turned aside her head with

a bitter motion.

"Is it as horrid as it seems?" asked Ursula, frowning

lightly, in fear.

"It is," said Miss Schofield, bitterly. "Ha!--it is

hateful!"

Ursula's heart sank, seeing even Miss Schofield in the deadly

bondage.

"It is Mr. Harby," said Maggie Schofield, breaking forth.

"I don't think I could live again in the big

room--Mr. Brunt's voice and Mr.

Harby--ah----"

She turned aside her head with a deep hurt. Some things she

could not bear.

"Is Mr. Harby really horrid?" asked Ursula, venturing into

her own dread.

"He!--why, he's just a bully," said Miss Schofield,

raising her shamed dark eyes, that flamed with tortured

contempt. "He's not bad as long as you keep in with him, and

refer to him, and do everything in his way--but--it's

all so mean! It's just a question of fighting on both

sides--and those great louts----"

She spoke with difficulty and with increased bitterness. She

had evidently suffered. Her soul was raw with ignominy. Ursula

suffered in response.

"But why is it so horrid?" she asked, helplessly.

"You can't do anything," said Miss Schofield. "He's

against you on one side and he sets the children against you on

the other. The children are simply awful. You've got to

make them do everything. Everything, everything has got

to come out of you. Whatever they learn, you've got to force it

into them--and that's how it is."

Ursula felt her heart fail inside her. Why must she grasp all

this, why must she force learning on fifty-five reluctant

children, having all the time an ugly, rude jealousy behind her,

ready to throw her to the mercy of the herd of children, who

would like to rend her as a weaker representative of authority.

A great dread of her task possessed her. She saw Mr. Brunt, Miss

Harby, Miss Schofield, all the school-teachers, drudging

unwillingly at the graceless task of compelling many children

into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the whole set to

an automatic state of obedience and attention, and then of

commanding their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. The

first great task was to reduce sixty children to one state of

mind, or being. This state must be produced automatically,

through the will of the teacher, and the will of the whole

school authority, imposed upon the will of the children. The

point was that the headmaster and the teachers should have one

will in authority, which should bring the will of the children

into accord. But the headmaster was narrow and exclusive. The

will of the teachers could not agree with his, their separate

wills refused to be so subordinated. So there was a state of

anarchy, leaving the final judgment to the children themselves,

which authority should exist.

So there existed a set of separate wills, each straining

itself to the utmost to exert its own authority. Children will

never naturally acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting

to knowledge. They must be compelled by a stronger, wiser will.

Against which will they must always strive to revolt. So that

the first great effort of every teacher of a large class must be

to bring the will of the children into accordance with his own

will. And this he can only do by an abnegation of his personal

self, and an application of a system of laws, for the purpose of

achieving a certain calculable result, the imparting of certain

knowledge. Whereas Ursula thought she was going to become the

first wise teacher by making the whole business personal, and

using no compulsion. She believed entirely in her own

personality.

So that she was in a very deep mess. In the first place she

was offering to a class a relationship which only one or two of

the children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the

mass were left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she

was placing herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed

authority of Mr. Harby, so that the scholars could more safely

harry her. She did not know, but her instinct gradually warned

her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr. Brunt. On it went,

jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it nearly drove

her mad: always the same set, harsh monotony. The man was become

a mechanism working on and on and on. But the personal man was

in subdued friction all the time. It was horrible--all

hate! Must she be like this? She could feel the ghastly

necessity. She must become the same--put away the personal

self, become an instrument, an abstraction, working upon a

certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of making

them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet

gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun

was being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and

saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a

fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black

and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in

prison, abolished, she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will.

How then could the sky be shining? There was no sky, there was

no luminous atmosphere of out-of-doors. Only the inside of the

school was real--hard, concrete, real and vicious.

She would not yet, however, let school quite overcome her.

She always said. "It is not a permanency, it will come to an

end." She could always see herself beyond the place, see the

time when she had left it. On Sundays and on holidays, when she

was away at Cossethay or in the woods where the beech-leaves

were fallen, she could think of St. Philip's Church School, and

by an effort of will put it in the picture as a dirty little

low-squatting building that made a very tiny mound under the

sky, while the great beech-woods spread immense about her, and

the afternoon was spacious and wonderful. Moreover the children,

the scholars, they were insignificant little objects far away,

oh, far away. And what power had they over her free soul? A

fleeting thought of them, as she kicked her way through the

beech-leaves, and they were gone. But her will was tense against

them all the time.

All the while, they pursued her. She had never had such a

passionate love of the beautiful things about her. Sitting on

top of the tram-car, at evening, sometimes school was swept away

as she saw a magnificent sky settling down. And her breast, her

very hands, clamoured for the lovely flare of sunset. It was

poignant almost to agony, her reaching for it. She almost cried

aloud seeing the sundown so lovely.

For she was held away. It was no matter how she said to

herself that school existed no more once she had left it. It

existed. It was within her like a dark weight, controlling her

movement. It was in vain the high-spirited, proud young girl

flung off the school and its association with her. She was Miss

Brangwen, she was Standard Five teacher, she had her most

important being in her work now.

Constantly haunting her, like a darkness hovering over her

heart and threatening to swoop down over it at every moment, was

the sense that somehow, somehow she was brought down. Bitterly

she denied unto herself that she was really a schoolteacher.

Leave that to the Violet Harbys. She herself would stand clear

of the accusation. It was in vain she denied it.

Within herself some recording hand seemed to point

mechanically to a negation. She was incapable of fulfilling her

task. She could never for a moment escape from the fatal weight

of the knowledge.

And so she felt inferior to Violet Harby. Miss Harby was a

splendid teacher. She could keep order and inflict knowledge on

a class with remarkable efficiency. It was no good Ursula's

protesting to herself that she was infinitely, infinitely the

superior of Violet Harby. She knew that Violet Harby succeeded

where she failed, and this in a task which was almost a test of

her. She felt something all the time wearing upon her, wearing

her down. She went about in these first weeks trying to deny it,

to say she was free as ever. She tried not to feel at a

disadvantage before Miss Harby, tried to keep up the effect of

her own superiority. But a great weight was on her, which Violet

Harby could bear, and she herself could not.

Though she did not give in, she never succeeded. Her class

was getting in worse condition, she knew herself less and less

secure in teaching it. Ought she to withdraw and go home again?

Ought she to say she had come to the wrong place, and so retire?

Her very life was at test.

She went on doggedly, blindly, waiting for a crisis. Mr.

Harby had now begun to persecute her. Her dread and hatred of

him grew and loomed larger and larger. She was afraid he was

going to bully her and destroy her. He began to persecute her

because she could not keep her class in proper condition,

because her class was the weak link in the chain which made up

the school.

One of the offences was that her class was noisy and

disturbed Mr. Harby, as he took Standard Seven at the other end

of the room. She was taking composition on a certain morning,

walking in among the scholars. Some of the boys had dirty ears

and necks, their clothing smelled unpleasantly, but she could

ignore it. She corrected the writing as she went.

"When you say 'their fur is brown', how do you write

'their'?" she asked.

There was a little pause; the boys were always jeeringly

backward in answering. They had begun to jeer at her authority

altogether.

"Please, miss, t-h-e-i-r", spelled a lad, loudly, with a note

of mockery.

At that moment Mr. Harby was passing.

"Stand up, Hill!" he called, in a big voice.

Everybody started. Ursula watched the boy. He was evidently

poor, and rather cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off