第 67 页

observation, drawing joyfully in her book, if the slide were

good.

She soon made a college friend, a girl who had lived in

Florence, a girl who wore a wonderful purple or figured scarf

draped over a plain, dark dress. She was Dorothy Russell,

daughter of a south-country advocate. Dorothy lived with a

maiden aunt in Nottingham, and spent her spare moments slaving

for the Women's Social and Political Union. She was quiet and

intense, with an ivory face and dark hair looped plain over her

ears. Ursula was very fond of her, but afraid of her. She seemed

so old and so relentless towards herself. Yet she was only

twenty-two. Ursula always felt her to be a creature of fate,

like Cassandra.

The two girls had a close, stern friendship. Dorothy worked

at all things with the same passion, never sparing herself. She

came closest to Ursula during the botany hours. For she could

not draw. Ursula made beautiful and wonderful drawings of the

sections under the microscope, and Dorothy always came to learn

the manner of the drawing.

So the first year went by, in magnificent seclusion and

activity of learning. It was strenuous as a battle, her college

life, yet remote as peace.

She came to Nottingham in the morning with Gudrun. The two

sisters were distinguished wherever they went, slim, strong

girls, eager and extremely sensitive. Gudrun was the more

beautiful of the two, with her sleepy, half-languid girlishness

that looked so soft, and yet was balanced and inalterable

underneath. She wore soft, easy clothing, and hats which fell by

themselves into a careless grace.

Ursula was much more carefully dressed, but she was

self-conscious, always falling into depths of admiration of

somebody else, and modelling herself upon this other, and so

producing a hopeless incongruity. When she dressed for practical

purposes she always looked well. In winter, wearing a tweed

coat-and-skirt and a small hat of black fur pulled over her

eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move down the street in a

drifting motion of suspense and exceeding sensitive

receptivity.

At the end of the first year Ursula got through her

Intermediate Arts examination, and there came a lull in her

eager activities. She slackened off, she relaxed altogether.

Worn nervous and inflammable by the excitement of the

preparation for the examination, and by the sort of exaltation

which carried her through the crisis itself, she now fell into a

quivering passivity, her will all loosened.

The family went to Scarborough for a month. Gudrun and the

father were busy at the handicraft holiday school there, Ursula

was left a good deal with the children. But when she could, she

went off by herself.

She stood and looked out over the shining sea. It was very

beautiful to her. The tears rose hot in her heart.

Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly in to her a

passionate, unborn yearning. "There are so many dawns that have

not yet risen." It seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea,

all the unrisen dawns were appealing to her, all her unborn soul

was crying for the unrisen dawns.

As she sat looking out at the tender sea, with its lovely,

swift glimmer, the sob rose in her breast, till she caught her

lip suddenly under her teeth, and the tears were forcing

themselves from her. And in her very sob, she laughed. Why did

she cry? She did not want to cry. It was so beautiful that she

laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.

She glanced apprehensively round, hoping no one would see her

in this state.

Then came a time when the sea was rough. She watched the

water travelling in to the coast, she watched a big wave running

unnoticed, to burst in a shock of foam against a rock,

enveloping all in a great white beauty, to pour away again,

leaving the rock emerged black and teeming. Oh, and if, when the

wave burst into whiteness, it were only set free!

Sometimes she loitered along the harbour, looking at the

sea-browned sailors, who, in their close blue jerseys, lounged

on the harbour-wall, and laughed at her with impudent,

communicative eyes.

There was established a little relation between her and them.

She never would speak to them or know any more of them. Yet as

she walked by and they leaned on the sea-wall, there was

something between her and them, something keen and delightful

and painful. She liked best the young one whose fair, salty hair

tumbled over his blue eyes. He was so new and fresh and salt and

not of this world.

From Scarborough she went to her Uncle Tom's. Winifred had a

small baby, born at the end of the summer. She had become

strange and alien to Ursula. There was an unmentionable reserve

between the two women. Tom Brangwen was an attentive father, a

very domestic husband. But there was something spurious about

his domesticity, Ursula did not like him any more. Something

ugly, blatant in his nature had come out now, making him shift

everything over to a sentimental basis. A materialistic

unbeliever, he carried it all off by becoming full of human

feeling, a warm, attentive host, a generous husband, a model

citizen. And he was clever enough to rouse admiration

everywhere, and to take in his wife sufficiently. She did not

love him. She was glad to live in a state of complacent

self-deception with him, she worked according to him.

Ursula was relieved to go home. She had still two peaceful

years before her. Her future was settled for two years. She

returned to college to prepare for her final examination.

But during this year the glamour began to depart from

college. The professors were not priests initiated into the deep

mysteries of life and knowledge. After all, they were only

middle-men handling wares they had become so accustomed to that

they were oblivious of them. What was Latin?--So much dry

goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class altogether but a

sort of second-hand curio shop, where one bought curios and

learned the market-value of curios; dull curios too, on the

whole. She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by

Chinese and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops.

"Antiques"--the very word made her soul fall flat and

dead.

The life went out of her studies, why, she did not know. But

the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches,

spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France,

spurious naivete of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop,

and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a

little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually the

perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no

perception of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop

where one was further equipped for making money. The college

itself was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.

A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same

darkness and bitter gloom from which she was never safe now, the

realization of the permanent substratum of ugliness under

everything. As she came to the college in the afternoon, the

lawns were frothed with daisies, the lime trees hung tender and

sunlit and green; and oh, the deep, white froth of the daisies

was anguish to see.

For inside, inside the college, she knew she must enter the

sham workshop. All the while, it was a sham store, a sham

warehouse, with a single motive of material gain, and no

productivity. It pretended to exist by the religious virtue of

knowledge. But the religious virtue of knowledge was become a

flunkey to the god of material success.

A sort of inertia came over her. Mechanically, from habit,

she went on with her studies. But it was almost hopeless. She

could scarcely attend to anything. At the Anglo-Saxon lecture in

the afternoon, she sat looking down, out of the window, hearing

no word, of Beowulf or of anything else. Down below, in the

street, the sunny grey pavement went beside the palisade. A

woman in a pink frock, with a scarlet sunshade, crossed the

road, a little white dog running like a fleck of light about

her. The woman with the scarlet sunshade came over the road, a

lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her. Ursula watched

spell-bound. The woman with the scarlet sunshade and the

flickering terrier was gone--and whither? Whither?

In what world of reality was the woman in the pink dress

walking? To what warehouse of dead unreality was she herself

confined?

What good was this place, this college? What good was

Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer

examination questions, in order that one should have a higher

commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service

at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was

life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased

to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things,

to encumber material life.

Suddenly she threw over French. She would take honours in

botany. This was the one study that lived for her. She had

entered into the lives of the plants. She was fascinated by the

strange laws of the vegetable world. She had here a glimpse of

something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human

world.

College was barren, cheap, a temple converted to the most

vulgar, petty commerce. Had she not gone to hear the echo of

learning pulsing back to the source of the mystery?--The

source of mystery! And barrenly, the professors in their gowns

offered commercial commodity that could be turned to good

account in the examination room; ready-made stuff too, and not

really worth the money it was intended to fetch; which they all

knew.

All the time in the college now, save when she was labouring

in her botany laboratory, for there the mystery still glimmered,

she felt she was degrading herself in a kind of trade of sham

jewjaws.

Angry and stiff, she went through her last term. She would

rather be out again earning her own living. Even Brinsley Street

and Mr. Harby seemed real in comparison. Her violent hatred of

the Ilkeston School was nothing compared with the sterile

degradation of college. But she was not going back to Brinsley

Street either. She would take her B.A., and become a mistress in

some Grammar School for a time.

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly

round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure.

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would

the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway

ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a

gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always

the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then,

from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of

amorphous, squalid activity.

No matter! Every hill-top was a little different, every

valley was somehow new. Cossethay and her childhood with her

father; the Marsh and the little Church school near the Marsh,

and her grandmother and her uncles; the High School at

Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky; Anton Skrebensky and the dance

in the moonlight between the fires; then the time she could not

think of without being blasted, Winifred Inger, and the months

before becoming a school-teacher; then the horrors of Brinsley

Street, lapsing into comparative peacefulness, Maggie, and

Maggie's brother, whose influence she could still feel in her

veins, when she conjured him up; then college, and Dorothy

Russell, who was now in France, then the next move into the

world again!

Already it was a history. In every phase she was so

different. Yet she was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it

mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she

was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was

spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, of

falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She

seemed always negative in her action.

That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it

could not come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This

world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp.

This lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness, she

thought was all the world: that here all was disclosed for ever.

Yet all the time, within the darkness she had been aware of

points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming,

penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged in a great

heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle of

light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed

and the factories ground out their machine-produce and the

plants and the animals worked by the light of science and

knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc-lamp,

wherein the moths and children played in the security of

blinding light, not even knowing there was any darkness, because

they stayed in the light.

But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of

range, she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the

darkness, watching the vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers;

she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said

"Beyond our light and our order there is nothing," turning their

faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating

consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the Creator,

and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast

darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes

lurking on the edge.

Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the

darkness. For if he did he was jeered to death by the others,

who cried "Fool, anti-social knave, why would you disturb us

with bogeys? There is no darkness. We move and live and

have our being within the light, and unto us is given the

eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and comprehend the

innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool and knave, how dare

you belittle us with the darkness?"

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey

shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes