第 60 页

his forehead, the rest fitted close to his meagre head. He was

pale and colourless.

"Who told you to call out?" thundered Mr. Harby.

The boy looked up and down, with a guilty air, and a cunning,

cynical reserve.

"Please, sir, I was answering," he replied, with the same

humble insolence.

"Go to my desk."

The boy set off down the room, the big black jacket hanging

in dejected folds about him, his thin legs, rather knocked at

the knees, going already with the pauper's crawl, his feet in

their big boots scarcely lifted. Ursula watched him in his

crawling, slinking progress down the room. He was one of her

boys! When he got to the desk, he looked round, half furtively,

with a sort of cunning grin and a pathetic leer at the big boys

in Standard VII. Then, pitiable, pale, in his dejected garments,

he lounged under the menace of the headmaster's desk, with one

thin leg crooked at the knee and the foot struck out sideways

his hands in the low-hanging pockets of his man's jacket.

Ursula tried to get her attention back to the class. The boy

gave her a little horror, and she was at the same time hot with

pity for him. She felt she wanted to scream. She was responsible

for the boy's punishment. Mr. Harby was looking at her

handwriting on the board. He turned to the class.

"Pens down."

The children put down their pens and looked up.

"Fold arms."

They pushed back their books and folded arms.

Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate

herself.

"What is your composition about?" asked the

headmaster. Every hand shot up. "The ----" stuttered

some voice in its eagerness to answer.

"I wouldn't advise you to call out," said Mr. Harby. He would

have a pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable

menace that always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes

twinkling under his bushy black eyebrows, watching the class.

There was something fascinating in him, as he stood, and again

she wanted to scream. She was all jarred, she did not know what

she felt.

"Well, Alice?" he said.

"The rabbit," piped a girl's voice.

"A very easy subject for Standard Five."

Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed

before the class. And she was tormented by the contradictoriness

of everything. Mr. Harby stood so strong, and so male, with his

black brows and clear forehead, the heavy jaw, the big,

overhanging moustache: such a man, with strength and male power,

and a certain blind, native beauty. She might have liked him as

a man. And here he stood in some other capacity, bullying over

such a trifle as a boy's speaking out without permission. Yet he

was not a little, fussy man. He seemed to have some cruel,

stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too small and

petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would

fulfil, because he had to earn his living. He had no finer

control over himself, only this blind, dogged, wholesale will.

He would keep the job going, since he must. And this job was to

make the children spell the word "caution" correctly, and put a

capital letter after a full-stop. So at this he hammered with

his suppressed hatred, always suppressing himself, till he was

beside himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he stood, short and

handsome and powerful, teaching her class. It seemed such a

miserable thing for him to be doing. He had a decent, powerful,

rude soul. What did he care about the composition on "The

Rabbit"? Yet his will kept him there before the class, threshing

the trivial subject. It was habit with him now, to be so little

and vulgar, out of place. She saw the shamefulness of his

position, felt the fettered wickedness in him which would blaze

out into evil rage in the long run, so that he was like a

persistent, strong creature tethered. It was really intolerable.

The jarring was torture to her. She looked over the silent,

attentive class that seemed to have crystallized into order and

rigid, neutral form. This he had it in his power to do, to

crystallize the children into hard, mute fragments, fixed under

his will: his brute will, which fixed them by sheer force.

She too must learn to subdue them to her will: she must. For

it was her duty, since the school was such. He had crystallized

the class into order. But to see him, a strong, powerful man,

using all his power for such a purpose, seemed almost horrible.

There was something hideous about it. The strange, genial light

in his eye was really vicious, and ugly, his smile was one of

torture. He could not be impersonal. He could not have a clear,

pure purpose, he could only exercise his own brute will. He did

not believe in the least in the education he kept inflicting

year after year upon the children. So he must bully, only bully,

even while it tortured his strong, wholesome nature with shame

like a spur always galling. He was so blind and ugly and out of

place. Ursula could not bear it as he stood there. The whole

situation was wrong and ugly.

The lesson was finished, Mr. Harby went away. At the far end

of the room she heard the whistle and the thud of the cane. Her

heart stood still within her. She could not bear it, no, she

could not bear it when the boy was beaten. It made her sick. She

felt that she must go out of this school, this torture-place.

And she hated the schoolmaster, thoroughly and finally. The

brute, had he no shame? He should never be allowed to continue

the atrocity of this bullying cruelty. Then Hill came crawling

back, blubbering piteously. There was something desolate about

this blubbering that nearly broke her heart. For after all, if

she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never

have happened, Hill would never have called out and been

caned.

She began the arithmetic lesson. But she was distracted. The

boy Hill sat away on the back desk, huddled up, blubbering and

sucking his hand. It was a long time. She dared not go near, nor

speak to him. She felt ashamed before him. And she felt she

could not forgive the boy for being the huddled, blubbering

object, all wet and snivelled, which he was.

She went on correcting the sums. But there were too many

children. She could not get round the class. And Hill was on her

conscience. At last he had stopped crying, and sat bunched over

his hands, playing quietly. Then he looked up at her. His face

was dirty with tears, his eyes had a curious washed look, like

the sky after rain, a sort of wanness. He bore no malice. He had

already forgotten, and was waiting to be restored to the normal

position.

"Go on with your work, Hill," she said.

The children were playing over their arithmetic, and, she

knew, cheating thoroughly. She wrote another sum on the

blackboard. She could not get round the class. She went again to

the front to watch. Some were ready. Some were not. What was she

to do?

At last it was time for recreation. She gave the order to

cease working, and in some way or other got her class out of the

room. Then she faced the disorderly litter of blotted,

uncorrected books, of broken rulers and chewed pens. And her

heart sank in sickness. The misery was getting deeper.

The trouble went on and on, day after day. She had always

piles of books to mark, myriads of errors to correct, a

heart-wearying task that she loathed. And the work got worse and

worse. When she tried to flatter herself that the composition

grew more alive, more interesting, she had to see that the

handwriting grew more and more slovenly, the books more filthy

and disgraceful. She tried what she could, but it was of no use.

But she was not going to take it seriously. Why should she? Why

should she say to herself, that it mattered, if she failed to

teach a class to write perfectly neatly? Why should she take the

blame unto herself?

Pay day came, and she received four pounds two shillings and

one penny. She was very proud that day. She had never had so

much money before. And she had earned it all herself. She sat on

the top of the tram-car fingering the gold and fearing she might

lose it. She felt so established and strong, because of it. And

when she got home she said to her mother:

"It is pay day to-day, mother."

"Ay," said her mother, coolly.

Then Ursula put down fifty shillings on the table.

"That is my board," she said.

"Ay," said her mother, letting it lie.

Ursula was hurt. Yet she had paid her scot. She was free. She

paid for what she had. There remained moreover thirty-two

shillings of her own. She would not spend any, she who was

naturally a spendthrift, because she could not bear to damage

her fine gold.

She had a standing ground now apart from her parents. She was

something else besides the mere daughter of William and Anna

Brangwen. She was independent. She earned her own living. She

was an important member of the working community. She was sure

that fifty shillings a month quite paid for her keep. If her

mother received fifty shillings a month for each of the

children, she would have twenty pounds a month and no clothes to

provide. Very well then.

Ursula was independent of her parents. She now adhered

elsewhere. Now, the 'Board of Education' was a phrase that rang

significant to her, and she felt Whitehall far beyond her as her

ultimate home. In the government, she knew which minister had

supreme control over Education, and it seemed to her that, in

some way, he was connected with her, as her father was connected

with her.

She had another self, another responsibility. She was no

longer Ursula Brangwen, daughter of William Brangwen. She was

also Standard Five teacher in St. Philip's School. And it was a

case now of being Standard Five teacher, and nothing else. For

she could not escape.

Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks

passed on, there was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There

was only a girl of that name obsessed by the fact that she could

not manage her class of children. At week-ends there came days

of passionate reaction, when she went mad with the taste of

liberty, when merely to be free in the morning, to sit down at

her embroidery and stitch the coloured silks was a passion of

delight. For the prison house was always awaiting her! This was

only a respite, as her chained heart knew well. So that she

seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end, and wrung the

last drop of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel

frenzy.

She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her.

She did not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how

horrible she found it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday

night came, and she felt the Monday morning at hand, she was

strung up tight with dreadful anticipation, because the strain

and the torture was near again.

She did not believe that she could ever teach that great,

brutish class, in that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if

she failed, she must in some way go under. She must admit that

the man's world was too strong for her, she could not take her

place in it; she must go down before Mr. Harby. And all her life

henceforth, she must go on, never having freed herself of the

man's world, never having achieved the freedom of the great

world of responsible work. Maggie had taken her place there, she

had even stood level with Mr. Harby and got free of him: and her

soul was always wandering in far-off valleys and glades of

poetry. Maggie was free. Yet there was something like subjection

in Maggie's very freedom. Mr. Harby, the man, disliked the

reserved woman, Maggie. Mr. Harby, the schoolmaster, respected

his teacher, Miss Schofield.

For the present, however, Ursula only envied and admired

Maggie. She herself had still to get where Maggie had got. She

had still to make her footing. She had taken up a position on

Mr. Harby's ground, and she must keep it. For he was now

beginning a regular attack on her, to drive her away out of his

school. She could not keep order. Her class was a turbulent

crowd, and the weak spot in the school's work. Therefore she

must go, and someone more useful must come in her place, someone

who could keep discipline.

The headmaster had worked himself into an obsession of fury

against her. He only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got

worse as the weeks went on, she was absolutely no good. His

system, which was his very life in school, the outcome of his

bodily movement, was attacked and threatened at the point where

Ursula was included. She was the danger that threatened his body

with a blow, a fall. And blindly, thoroughly, moving from strong

instinct of opposition, he set to work to expel her.

When he punished one of her children as he had punished the

boy Hill, for an offence against himself, he made the

punishment extra heavy with the significance that the extra

stroke came in because of the weak teacher who allowed all these

things to be. When he punished for an offence against her, he

punished lightly, as if offences against her were not

significant. Which all the children knew, and they behaved

accordingly.

Every now and again Mr. Harby would swoop down to examine

exercise books. For a whole hour, he would be going round the

class, taking book after book, comparing page after page, whilst

Ursula stood aside for all the remarks and fault-finding to be

pointed at her through the scholars. It was true, since she had

come, the composition books had grown more and more untidy,

disorderly, filthy. Mr. Harby pointed to the pages done before

her regime, and to those done after, and fell into a passion of

rage. Many children he sent out to the front with their books.

And after he had thoroughly gone through the silent and

quivering class he caned the worst offenders well, in front of

the others, thundering in real passion of anger and chagrin.