第 68 页

of the angels, whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out the

more familiar beasts of darkness. And some, having for a moment

seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyena

and the wolf; and some having given up their vanity of the

light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the

eyes of the wolf and the hyena, that it was the flash of the

sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the

angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be

denied, like the flash of fangs.

It was a little while before Easter, in her last year of

college, when Ursula was twenty-two years old, that she heard

again from Skrebensky. He had written to her once or twice from

South Africa, during the first months of his service out there

in the war, and since had sent her a post-card every now and

then, at ever longer intervals. He had become a first

lieutenant, and had stayed out in Africa. She had not heard of

him now for more than two years.

Often her thoughts returned to him. He seemed like the

gleaming dawn, yellow, radiant, of a long, grey, ashy day. The

memory of him was like the thought of the first radiant hours of

morning. And here was the blank grey ashiness of later daytime.

Ah, if he had only remained true to her, she might have known

the sunshine, without all this toil and hurt and degradation of

a spoiled day. He would have been her angel. He held the keys of

the sunshine. Still he held them. He could open to her the gates

of succeeding freedom and delight. Nay, if he had remained true

to her, he would have been the doorway to her, into the

boundless sky of happiness and plunging, inexhaustible freedom

which was the paradise of her soul. Ah, the great range he would

have opened to her, the illimitable endless space for

self-realization and delight for ever.

The one thing she believed in was in the love she had held

for him. It remained shining and complete, a thing to hark back

to. And she said to herself, when present things seemed a

failure:

"Ah, I was fond of him," as if with him the leading

flower of her life had died.

Now she heard from him again. The chief effect was pain. The

pleasure, the spontaneous joy was not there any longer. But her

will rejoiced. Her will had fixed itself to him. And the

old excitement of her dreams stirred and woke up. He was come,

the man with the wondrous lips that could send the kiss wavering

to the very end of all space. Was he come back to her? She did

not believe.

My dear Ursula, I am back in England again for a few

months before going out again, this time to India. I wonder if

you still keep the memory of our times together. I have still

got the little photograph of you. You must be changed since

then, for it is about six years ago. I am fully six years

older,--I have lived through another life since I knew you

at Cossethay. I wonder if you would care to see me. I shall come

up to Derby next week, and I would call in Nottingham, and we

might have tea together. Will you let me know? I shall look for

your answer.

Anton Skrebensky

Ursula had taken this letter from the rack in the hall at

college, and torn it open as she crossed to the Women's room.

The world seemed to dissolve away from around her, she stood

alone in clear air.

Where could she go, to be alone? She fled away, upstairs, and

through the private way to the reference library. Seizing a

book, she sat down and pondered the letter. Her heart beat, her

limbs trembled. As in a dream, she heard one gong sound in the

college, then, strangely, another. The first lecture had gone

by.

Hurriedly she took one of her note-books and began to

write.

"Dear Anton, Yes, I still have the ring. I should be very

glad to see you again. You can come here to college for me, or I

will meet you somewhere in the town. Will you let me know? Your

sincere friend----"

Trembling, she asked the librarian, who was her friend, if he

would give her an envelope. She sealed and addressed her letter,

and went out, bare-headed, to post it. When it was dropped into

the pillar-box, the world became a very still, pale place,

without confines. She wandered back to college, to her pale

dream, like a first wan light of dawn.

Skrebensky came one afternoon the following week. Day after

day, she had hurried swiftly to the letter-rack on her arrival

at college in the morning, and during the intervals between

lectures. Several times, swiftly, with secretive fingers, she

had plucked his letter down from its public prominence, and fled

across the hall holding it fast and hidden. She read her letters

in the botany laboratory, where her corner was always reserved

to her.

Several letters, and then he was coming. It was Friday

afternoon he appointed. She worked over her microscope with

feverish activity, able to give only half her attention, yet

working closely and rapidly. She had on her slide some special

stuff come up from London that day, and the professor was fussy

and excited about it. At the same time, as she focused the light

on her field, and saw the plant-animal lying shadowy in a

boundless light, she was fretting over a conversation she had

had a few days ago with Dr. Frankstone, who was a woman doctor

of physics in the college.

"No, really," Dr. Frankstone had said, "I don't see why we

should attribute some special mystery to life--do you? We

don't understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that

doesn't warrant our saying it is something special, something

different in kind and distinct from everything else in the

universe--do you think it does? May it not be that life

consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of

the same order as the activities we already know in science? I

don't see, really, why we should imagine there is a special

order of life, and life alone----"

The conversation had ended on a note of uncertainty,

indefinite, wistful. But the purpose, what was the purpose?

Electricity had no soul, light and heat had no soul. Was she

herself an impersonal force, or conjunction of forces, like one

of these? She looked still at the unicellular shadow that lay

within the field of light, under her microscope. It was alive.

She saw it move--she saw the bright mist of its ciliary

activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus, as it slid across

the plane of light. What then was its will? If it was a

conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held these

forces unified, and for what purpose were they unified?

For what purpose were the incalculable physical and chemical

activities nodalized in this shadowy, moving speck under her

microscope? What was the will which nodalized them and created

the one thing she saw? What was its intention? To be itself? Was

its purpose just mechanical and limited to itself?

It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind

the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the

nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had

passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She

could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was

not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of

self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a

being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be

oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity.

Ursula sat abstracted over her microscope, in suspense. Her

soul was busy, infinitely busy, in the new world. In the new

world, Skrebensky was waiting for her--he would be waiting

for her. She could not go yet, because her soul was engaged.

Soon she would go.

A stillness, like passing away, took hold of her. Far off,

down the corridors, she heard the gong booming five o'clock. She

must go. Yet she sat still.

The other students were pushing back their stools and putting

their microscopes away. Everything broke into turmoil. She saw,

through the window, students going down the steps, with books

under their arms, talking, all talking.

A great craving to depart came upon her. She wanted also to

be gone. She was in dread of the material world, and in dread of

her own transfiguration. She wanted to run to meet

Skrebensky--the new life, the reality.

Very rapidly she wiped her slides and put them back, cleared

her place at the bench, active, active, active. She wanted to

run to meet Skrebensky, hasten--hasten. She did not know

what she was to meet. But it would be a new beginning. She must

hurry.

She flitted down the corridor on swift feet, her razor and

note-books and pencil in one hand, her pinafore over her arm.

Her face was lifted and tense with eagerness. He might not be

there.

Issuing from the corridor, she saw him at once. She knew him

at once. Yet he was so strange. He stood with the curious

self-effacing diffidence which so frightened her in well-bred

young men whom she knew. He stood as if he wished to be unseen.

He was very well-dressed. She would not admit to herself the

chill like a sunshine of frost that came over her. This was he,

the key, the nucleus to the new world.

He saw her coming swiftly across the hall, a slim girl in a

white flannel blouse and dark skirt, with some of the

abstraction and gleam of the unknown upon her, and he started,

excited. He was very nervous. Other students were loitering

about the hall.

She laughed, with a blind, dazzled face, as she gave him her

hand. He too could not perceive her.

In a moment she was gone, to get her outdoor things. Then

again, as when she had been at school, they walked out into the

town to tea. And they went to the same tea-shop.

She knew a great difference in him. The kinship was there,

the old kinship, but he had belonged to a different world from

hers. It was as if they had cried a state of truce between him

and her, and in this truce they had met. She knew, vaguely, in

the first minute, that they were enemies come together in a

truce. Every movement and word of his was alien to her

being.

Yet still she loved the fine texture of his face, of his

skin. He was rather browner, physically stronger. He was a man

now. She thought his manliness made the strangeness in him. When

he was only a youth, fluid, he was nearer to her. She thought a

man must inevitably set into this strange separateness, cold

otherness of being. He talked, but not to her. She tried to

speak to him, but she could not reach him.

He seemed so balanced and sure, he made such a confident

presence. He was a great rider, so there was about him some of a

horseman's sureness and habitual definiteness of decision, also

some of the horseman's animal darkness. Yet his soul was only

the more wavering, vague. He seemed made up of a set of habitual

actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man

was inaccessible. She knew nothing of it. She could only feel

the dark, heavy fixity of his animal desire.

This dumb desire on his part had brought him to her? She was

puzzled, hurt by some hopeless fixity in him, that terrified her

with a cold feeling of despair. What did he want? His desires

were so underground. Why did he not admit himself? What did he

want? He wanted something that should be nameless. She shrank in

fear.

Yet she flashed with excitement. In his dark, subterranean

male soul, he was kneeling before her, darkly exposing himself.

She quivered, the dark flame ran over her. He was waiting at her

feet. He was helpless, at her mercy. She could take or reject.

If she rejected him, something would die in him. For him it was

life or death. And yet, all must be kept so dark, the

consciousness must admit nothing.

"How long," she said, "are you staying in England?"

"I am not sure--but not later than July, I believe."

Then they were both silent. He was here, in England, for six

months. They had a space of six months between them. He waited.

The same iron rigidity, as if the world were made of steel,

possessed her again. It was no use turning with flesh and blood

to this arrangement of forged metal.

Quickly, her imagination adjusted itself to the

situation.

"Have you an appointment in India?" she asked.

"Yes--I have just the six months' leave."

"Will you like being out there?"

"I think so--there's a good deal of social life, and

plenty going on--hunting, polo--and always a good

horse--and plenty of work, any amount of work."

He was always side-tracking, always side-tracking his own

soul. She could see him so well out there, in India--one of

the governing class, superimposed upon an old civilization, lord

and master of a clumsier civilization than his own. It was his

choice. He would become again an aristocrat, invested with

authority and responsibility, having a great helpless populace

beneath him. One of the ruling class, his whole being would be

given over to the fulfilling and the executing of the better

idea of the state. And in India, there would be real work to do.

The country did need the civilization which he himself

represented: it did need his roads and bridges, and the

enlightenment of which he was part. He would go to India. But

that was not her road.

Yet she loved him, the body of him, whatever his decisions

might be. He seemed to want something of her. He was waiting for

her to decide of him. It had been decided in her long ago, when

he had kissed her first. He was her lover, though good and evil

should cease. Her will never relaxed, though her heart and soul

must be imprisoned and silenced. He waited upon her, and she

accepted him. For he had come back to her.

A glow came into his face, into his fine, smooth skin, his

eyes, gold-grey, glowed intimately to her. He burned up, he

caught fire and became splendid, royal, something like a tiger.

She caught his brilliant, burnished glamour. Her heart and her

soul were shut away fast down below, hidden. She was free of