CHAPTER XI. PART IV They went towards the stackyard. There he saw with something like terror the great new stacks of corn, glistening and gleaming, transfigured, silvery and present under the night blue sky, throwing dark, substantial shadows but themselves majestic and dimly present. She, like glimmering gossamer, seemed to burn among them as they rose like cold fires to the silvery bluish air. Always intangible, a burning of cold, glimmering, whitish, steely fires. He was afraid of the great moon conflagration of the corn stacks rising above him. His heart grew smaller. It began to fuse like a bead. He knew he would die. She stood for some moments out in the overwhelming luminosity of the moon. She seemed a beam of gleaming power. She was afraid of what she was. Looking at him at his shadowy, unreal, wavering presence, a sudden lust seized her to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into nothing. Her hands and wrists felt immeasurably hard and strong like blades. He waited there beside her like a shadow which she wanted to dissipate, destroy as the moonlight destroys a darkness, annihilate, have done with. She looked at him and her face gleamed bright and inspired. She tempted him. And an obstinacy in him made him put his arm round her and draw her to the shadow. She submitted. Let him try what he could do. Let him try what he could do. He leaned against the side of the stack, holding her. The stack stung him keenly with a thousand cold sharp flames. Still obstinately he held her. Intimerously his hands went over her, over the salt compact brilliance of her body. If he could but have her, how he would enjoy her. If he could but net her brilliant cold salt-burning body and the soft iron of his own hands, net her, capture her, hold her down, how madly he would enjoy her. He strove subtly, but with all his energy, to enclose her, to have her. And always she was burning and brilliant, and hard as salt and deadly. Yet obstinately all his flesh burning and corroding as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison. Still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome her.  She yielded to him, and he pressed himself upon her in extremity, his soul groaning over and over. Let me come, let me come.  She seemed to be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss. But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt, till gradually his warm soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there, fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss, and her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed. He was not anymore. Gradually she began to come to herself. Gradually a sort of daytime consciousness came back to her. Suddenly the night was struck back into its old accustomed mild reality. Gradually she realized that the night was common and ordinary, that the great blistering transcendent night did not really exist. She was overcome with slow horror. Where was she? What was this nothingness she felt? The nothingness was Skriminski. Was he really there? Who was he? He was silent. He was not there. What had happened? Had she been mad? What horrible thing had possessed her? She was filled with overpowering fear of herself, overpowering desire that it should not be, that other burning corrosive self. She was seized with a frenzied desire that what had been should never be remembered, never be thought of, never be for one moment allowed possible. She denied it with all her might. With all her might she turned away from it. She was good. She was loving. Her heart was warm. Her blood was dark and warm and soft. She laid her hand caressively on Anton's shoulder. Isn't it lovely, she said softly, coaxingly, caressingly? And she began to caress him to life again, for he was dead. And she intended that he should never know, never become aware of what had been. She would bring him back from the dead without leaving him one trace of fact to remember his annihilation by. She exerted all her ordinary warm self. She touched him. She did him homage of loving awareness, and gradually he came back to her, another man. She was soft and winning and caressing. She was his servant, his adoring slave. And she restored the whole shell of him. She restored the whole form and figure of him. But the core was gone. His pride was bolstered up. His blood ran once more in pride, but there was no core to him. As a distinct male, he had no core. His triumphant flaming, overweening heart of the intrinsic male would never beat again. He would be subject now, reciprocal. Never the indomitable thing with a core of overweening unabatable fire. She had abated that fire. She had broken him. But she caressed him. She would not have him remember what had been. She would not remember herself. Kiss me, Anton. Kiss me, she pleaded. He kissed her, but she knew he could not touch her. His arms were round her, but they had not got her. She could feel his mouth upon her, but she was not at all compelled by it. Kiss me, she whispered in acute distress. Kiss me. And he kissed her as she bade him, but his heart was hollow. She took his kisses outwardly, but her soul was empty and finished. Looking away, she saw the delicate glint of oats dangling from the side of the stack in the moonlight, something proud and royal and quite impersonal. She had been proud with them, where they were. She had been also. But in this temporary, warm world of the common place, she was a kind, good girl. She reached out yearningly for goodness and affection. She wanted to be kind and good. They went home through the night that was all pale and glowing around, with shadows and glimmerings and presences. Distinctly, she saw the flowers in the hedge bottoms. She saw the thin raked sheaves flung white upon the thorny hedge. How beautiful! How beautiful it was! She thought with anguish how wildly happy she was tonight, since he had kissed her. But as he walked with his arm round her waist, she turned with a great offering of herself to the night that glistened tremendous, a magnificent godly moon, white and candid as a bridegroom, flowers, silvery and transformed, filling up the shadows. He kissed her again under the yew-trees at home, and she left him. She ran from the intrusion of her parents at home to her bedroom, where, looking out on the moonlit country, she stretched up her arms, hard, hard in bliss, agony offering herself to the blonde, debonair presence of the night. But there was a wound of sorrow. She had hurt herself, as if she had bruised herself in annihilating him. She covered up her two young breasts with her hands, covering them to herself, and covering herself with herself. She crouched in bed to sleep. In the morning the sun shone. She got up strong in dancing. Skromensky was still at the march. He was coming to church. How lovely, how amazing life was! On the fresh Sunday morning she went out to the garden, among the yellows and the deep-vibrating reds of autumn. She smelled the earth and felt the gossamer. The cornfields across the country were pale and unreal. Everywhere was the intense silence of the Sunday morning, filled with unacquainted noises. She smelled the body of the earth. It seemed to stir its powerful flank beneath her as she stood. In the bluish air came the powerful exudation. The peace was the piece of strong, exhausted breathing. The reds and yellows and the white gleam of stubble were the quivers and motion of the last subsiding transports and clear bliss of fulfillment. The church bells were ringing when he came. She looked up in keen anticipation at his entry. But he was troubled and his pride was hurt. He seemed very much clothed. She was conscious of his tailored suit. Wasn't it lovely last night? She whispered to him. Yes, he said, but his face did not open nor become free. The service and the singing in church that morning passed unnoticed by her. She saw the colored glow of the windows, the forms of the worshipers. Only she glanced at the Book of Genesis, which was her favorite book in the Bible. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said unto them be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveeth upon the earth and upon all the fishes in the sea. Into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meet for you, even as the green herb have I given you all things. But Ursula was not moved by the history this morning, multiplying and replenishing the earth bored her. All together it seemed merely a vulgar and stock-raising sort of business. She was left quite cold by man's stock-breeding lordship over beast and fishes. And you, be ye fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply therein. In her soul she mocked at this multiplication, every cow becoming two cows, every ten turnips. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations. I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth that a bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. Destroy all flesh? Why flesh in particular? Who is this lord of flesh? After all, how big was the flood? Perhaps a few dryads and fawns had just run into the hills and the farther valleys and woods frightened, but most had gone on, blindly unaware of any flood at all, unless the nymphs should tell them. It pleased Ursula to think of the niads in Asia Minor meeting the near-age at the mouth of the streams where the sea washed against the fresh sweet tide and calling to their sisters the news of Noah's flood. They would tell him using accounts of Noah in his ark. Some nymphs would relate how they had hung on the side of the ark, peeped in and heard Noah and Shem and Ham and Jopeth sitting in their place under the rain, saying how they four were the only men on earth now because the Lord had drowned all the rest, so that they four would have everything to themselves and be masters of everything, subtenants under the great proprietor. Ursula wished she had been a nymph. She would have laughed through the window of the ark and flicked drops of the flood at Noah, before she drifted away to people who were less important in their proprietor and their flood. What was God after all?  She was surfeited of this God. She was weary of the Ursula Branguin who felt troubled about God. Whatever God was, he was, and there was no need for her to trouble about him. She felt she had now all license. Skrubensky sat beside her listening to the sermon to the voice of law and order. The very hairs of your head are all numbered. He did not believe it. He believed his own things were quite at his own disposal. You could do as you liked with your own things, so long as you left other peoples alone. Ursula caressed him and made love to him. Nevertheless, he knew she wanted to react upon him and to destroy his being. She was not with him. She was against him. But her making love to him, her complete admiration of him, in open life, gratified him. She caught him out of himself, and they were lovers, in a young romantic, almost fantastic way. He gave her a little ring. They put it in rind wine in their glass, and she drank. Then he drank. They drank till the ring lay exposed at the bottom of the glass. Then she took the simple jewel and tied it on a thread round her neck, where she wore it. He asked her for a photograph when he was going away. She went in great excitement to the photographer with five shillings.  She wandered over it and admired it. He saw only the live face of the girl. The picture hurt him. He kept it. He always remembered it, but he could scarcely bear to see it. There was a hurt to his soul in the clear, fearless face that was touched with abstraction. Its abstraction was certainly away from him. Then war was declared with the boars in South Africa, and everywhere was a fizz of excitement. He wrote that he might have to go, and he sent her a box of sweets. She was slightly dazed at the thought of his going to the war, not knowing how to feel. It was a sort of romantic situation that she knew so well in fiction she hardly understood it, in fact. Underneath the top elation was a sort of dreariness, deep as she disappointment. However, she secreted the sweets under her bed and ate them all herself when she went to bed and when she woke in the morning. All the time she felt very guilty and ashamed, but she simply did not want to share them. That box of sweets remained stuck in her mind afterwards. Why had she secreted them and eaten them every one? Why? She did not feel guilty. She only knew she ought to feel guilty, and she could not make up her mind. Curiously monumental that box of sweets stood up, now it was empty. It was a crux for her. What was she to think of it? The idea of war altogether made her feel uneasy, uneasy. When men began organized fighting with each other, it seemed to her as if the poles of the universe were cracking, and the whole might go tumbling into the bottomless pit. A horrible bottomless feeling she had. Yet, of course, there was the minted superscription of romance and the honor and even religion about war. She was very confused. Skrebensky was busy. He could not come to see her. She asked for no assurance, no security. What was between them was and could not be altered by avowals. She knew that by instinct. She trusted to the intrinsic reality. But she felt an agony of helplessness. She could do nothing. Vaguely she knew the huge powers of the world rolling and crashing together, darkly, clumsily, stupidly, yet colossal, so that one was brushed along almost as dust. Helpless. Helpless, swirling like dust. Yet she wanted so hard to rebel, to rage, to fight. But with what? Could she with her hands fight the face of the earth, beat the hills in their places? Yet her breast wanted to fight, to fight the whole world, and these two small hands were all she had to do it with. The months went by, and it was Christmas. The snowdrops came. There was a little hollow in the wood near Kasate where snowdrops grew wild. She sent him some in a box, and he wrote her a quick little note of thanks. Very grateful and wistful, he seemed. Her eyes grew childlike and puzzled. Puzzled from day to day she went on, helpless, carried along by all that must happen. He went about at his duties, giving himself up to them. At the bottom of his heart his self, the soul that aspired and had true hope of self effectuation lay as dead, stillborn, a dead weight in his womb. Who was he to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be insured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one's place in the whole, the great scheme of man's elaborate civilization. That was all. The whole mattered, but the unit, the person, had no importance except as he represented the whole. So Skrebensky left the girl out and went his way, serving what he had to serve and enduring what he had to endure without remark. To his own intrinsic life he was dead, and he could not rise again from the dead. His soul lay in the tomb. His life lay in the established order of things. He had his five senses, too. They were to be gratified. Apart from this, he represented the great, established, extant idea of life, and as this he was important and beyond question. The good of the greatest number was all that mattered. That which was the greatest good for them all collectively was the greatest good for the individual. And so every man must give himself to support the state and soul labor for the greatest good of all. One might make improvements in the state, perhaps, but always with a view to preserving it intact. No highest good of the community, however, would give him the vital fulfillment of his soul. He knew this, but he did not consider the soul of the individual sufficiently important. He believed a man was important in so far as he represented all humanity. He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the highest good of the community as it stands is no longer the highest good of even the average individual. He thought that because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many and is not the many themselves. Now when the statement of the abstract good for the community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the common good becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar conservative materialism at a low level. And by the highest good of the greatest number is chiefly meant the material prosperity of all classes. Skrubensky did not really care about his own material prosperity. If he had been penniless, well, he would have taken his chances. Therefore, how could he find his highest good in giving up his life for the material prosperity of everybody else? What he considered an unimportant thing for himself, he could not think worthy of every sacrifice on behalf of other people. And that which he would consider of the deepest importance to himself as an individual. Oh, he said you mustn't consider the community from that standpoint. No, no, we know what the community wants. It wants something solid. It wants good wages, equal opportunities, good conditions of living. That's what the community wants. It doesn't want anything subtle or difficult. Duty is very plain. Keep in mind the material, the immediate welfare of every man. That's all. So there came over Skrubensky a sort of nullity which more and more terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. She became morbidly sensitive, depressed, apprehensive. It was anguished to her when she saw one rook slowly flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill omen. And the foreboding became so black and so powerful in her that she was almost extinguished. Yet what was the matter? At the worst, she was only going away. Why did she mind? What was it she feared? She did not know.  When she went at night and saw the big flashing stars, they seemed terrible. By day she was always expecting some charge to be made against her. He wrote in March to say that he was going to South Africa in a short time, but before he went he would snatch a day at the marsh. As if in a painful dream she waited, suspended, unresolved. She did not know. She could not understand. Only she felt that all the threads of her fate were being held taut in suspense. She only wept sometimes as she went about, saying blindly, I am so fond of him. I am so fond of him. He came. But why did he come? She looked at him for a sign. He gave no sign. He did not even kiss her. He behaved as if he were an affable, usual acquaintance. This was superficial. But what did it hide? She waited for him. She wanted him to make some sign. So the whole of the day they wavered and avoided contact until evening. Then, laughing, saying he would be back in six months' time and would tell them all about it, he shook hands with her mother and took his leave. Ursula accompanied him into the lane. The night was windy. The yew-trees seethed and hissed and vibrated. The wind seemed to rush about among the chimneys and the church tower. It was dark. The wind blew Ursula's face and her clothes cleaved to her limbs. But it was a surging, turgid wind, instinct with compressed vigor of life, and she seemed to have lost Skrebensky out there in the strong, urgent night she could not find him. Where are you? she asked. Here came his bodyless voice, and groping she touched him. A fire like lightning drenched him. Anton, she said. What? he answered. She held him with her hands in the darkness. She felt his body again with hers. Don't leave me. Come back to me, she said. Yes, he said, holding her in his arms. But the mail in him was scotched by the knowledge that she was not under his spell nor his influence. He wanted to go away from her. He rested in the knowledge that tomorrow he was going away. His life was really elsewhere. His life was elsewhere. His life was elsewhere. The center of his life was not what she would have. She was different. There was a breach between them. There were hostile worlds. You will come back to me, she reiterated. Yes, he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an appointment, not as a man returning to his fulfillment. So she kissed him and went indoors, lost. He walked down to the marsh, abstracted. The contact with her hurt him and threatened him. He shrank. He had to be free of her spirit, for she would stand before him like the angel before Balaam and drive him back with a sword from the way he was going into a wilderness. The next day she went to the station to see him go. She looked at him. She turned to him, but he was always so strange and null. So null! He was so collected. She thought it was that which made him null. Strangely, nothing he was.  There seemed some shame at the very root of life, cold, dead shame for her. The three made a noticeable group on the station. The girl in her fur cap and tippet and her olive green costume, pale, tense with youth, isolated, unyielding. The soldierly young man in a crushed hat and a heavy overcoat, his face rather pale and reserved above his purple scarf, his whole figure neutral. Then the elder man, a fashionable bowler hat, pressed low over his dark brows, his face warm colored and calm, his whole figure curiously suggestive of full-blooded indifference. He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama. In his own life he would have no drama. The train was rushing up. Ursula's heart heaved, but the ice was frozen too strong upon it.  She wondered what he was doing when he stooped and kissed her. He should be shaking hands and going. Good-bye, she said again.  There was a hurry along the train. Ah, here is his carriage. He took his seat. Tom Brangwin shut the door and the two men shook hands as the whistle went. Good-bye and good luck, said Brangwin. Thank you. Good-bye. The train moved off. Skrubensky stood at the carriage window waving, but not really looking to the two figures, the girl and the warm colored, almost effeminately dressed man. Ursula waved her handkerchief. The train gathered speed. It grew smaller and smaller. Still it ran in a straight line. The speck of white vanished. The rear of the train was small in the distance. Still she stood on the platform, feeling a great emptiness about her. In spite of herself her mouth was quivering. She did not want to cry. Her heart was dead cold. Her uncle Tom had gone to an automatic machine and was getting matches. Would you like some sweets, he said, turning round? Her face was covered with tears. She made curious downward grimaces with her mouth to get control, yet her heart was not crying. It was cold and earthy. What kind would you like, any, persisted her uncle? I should love some peppermint drops, she said, in a strange normal voice from her distorted face. But in a few moments she had gained control of herself and was still detached. Let us go into the town, he said, and he rushed her into a train moving to the town station. They went to a cafe to drink coffee. She sat looking at people in the street and a great wound was in her breast, a cold imperturbability in her soul. This cold imperturbability of spirit continued in her now. It was as if some disillusion had frozen upon her, a hard disbelief. Part of her had gone cold, apathetic. She was too young, too baffled to understand, or even to know that she suffered much. And she was too deeply hurt to submit. She had her blind agonies when she wanted him, she wanted him. But from the moment of his departure he had become a visionary thing of her own. All her roused torment and passion and yearning she turned to him. She kept a diary in which she wrote impulsive thoughts. Seeing the moon in the sky her own heart surcharged. She went and wrote, If I were the moon I know where I would fall down. It meant so much to her, that sentence. She put into it all the anguish of her youth and her young passion and yearning. She called to him from her heart wherever she went. Her limbs vibrated with anguish towards him wherever she was. The radiating force of her soul seemed to travel to him endlessly, endlessly. And in her soul's own creation find him. But who was he and where did he exist? In her own desire only. She received a postcard from him and she put it in her bosom. It did not mean much to her really. The second day she lost it and never even remembered she had had it till some days afterwards. The long weeks went by. There came the constant bad news of the war and she felt as if all outside there in the world were a hurt, a hurt against her. And something in her soul remained cold, apathetic, unchanging. Her life was always only partial at this time. Never did she live completely. There was the cold, unliving part of her, yet she was madly sensitive. She could not bear herself. When a dirty red-eyed old woman came begging of her in the street, she started a ways from an unclean thing. And then when the old woman shouted acrid insults after her, she winced. Her limbs palpitated with insane torment. She could not bear herself. Whenever she thought of the red-eyed old woman, a sort of madness ran in inflammation over her flesh and her brain, she almost wanted to kill herself. And in this state her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her. She was so overwrought and sensitive that the mere touch of coarse wool seemed to tear her nerves. CHAPTER XII. SHAME. Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying for her matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she had very little intelligence when she was disjointed from happiness. Stubbornness and a consciousness of impending fate kept her half-heartedly pinned to it. She knew that soon she would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread was that she would be prevented.  For she knew that she had always her price of ransom, her femaleness. She was always a woman in what she could not get because she was a human being, fellow to the rest of mankind, she would get because she was a female other than the man. In her femaleness she felt a secret riches, a reserve. She had always the price of freedom. However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last resource. The other things should be tried first. There was the mysterious man's world to be adventured upon. The world of daily work and duty and existence as a working member of the community. Against this she had a subtle grudge. She wanted to make her conquest also of this man's world, so she ground away at her work never giving it up. Some things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French, mathematics, and history. Once she knew how to read French and Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should one remember the things one read? Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated her. But the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history puzzled her and made her ponder. But the political parts angered her and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she get a poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from her studies. One afternoon reading as you like it. Once when with her blood she heard a passage of Latin and she knew how the blood beat in a Roman's body, so that ever after she felt she knew the Romans by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of English grammar because it gave her pleasure to detect the live movements of words and sentences. And mathematics, the very sight of the letters and algebra, had a real lure for her. She felt so much and so confusedly at this time that her face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look as if she were not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the unknown. Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion in her. When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer, nine months hence, tiny, folded up and left there waiting, a flash of triumph and love went over her. I could never die while there was a tree, she said passionately, sententiously, standing before a great ash in worship. It was the people who somehow walked as an upright menace to her. Her life at this time was unformed, palpitating, essentially shrinking from all touch. She gave something to other people, but she was never herself since she had no self. She was not afraid nor ashamed before trees and birds in the sky, but she shrank violently from people, ashamed she was not as they were, fixed and fatic, but a wavering undefined sensibility only without form or being. Goodwin was at this time a great comfort and shield to her. The younger girl was a lithe, ferocious animal who mistrusted all approach and would have none of the petty secrecies and jealousies of schoolgirl intimacy. She would have no truck with the tamed cats, nice or not, because she believed that they were all only untamed cats with a nasty, untrustworthy habit of tameness. This was a great stand-back for Ursula, who suffered agonies when she thought a person disliked her, no matter how much she despised that other person. How could anyone dislike her, Ursula Brangling? The question terrified her and was unanswerable. She sought refuge in Goodwin's natural, proud indifference. It had been discovered that Goodwin had a talent for drawing. This solved the problem of the girl's indifference to all study. It was said of her she can draw marvelously. Suddenly Ursula found a queer awareness existed between herself and her classmistress, Miss Inger. The latter was a rather beautiful woman of twenty-eight, a fearless, seeming, clean type of modern girl whose very independence betrays her sorrow. She was clever and expert in what she did, accurate, quick commanding. To Ursula she had always given pleasure because of her clear, decided yet graceful appearance.  She always wore clean, attractive, well-fitting blouses and a well-made skirt. Everything about her was so well-ordered, betraying a fine, clear spirit, that it was a pleasure to sit in her class. Her voice was just as ringing and clear and with unwavering, finely touched modulation. Her eyes were blue, clear, proud. She gave one all together the sense of a fine, meddled, scrupulously groomed person and of an unyielding mind. Yet there was an infinite poignancy about her, a great pathos in her lonely, proudly closed mouth. It was after Skrebensky had gone that they sprang up between the mistress and the girl that strange awareness, then the unspoken intimacy that sometimes connects two people who may never even make each other's acquaintance. Before they had always been good friends in the undistinguished way of the classroom, with the professional relationship of mistress and scholar always present. Now, however, another thing came to pass. When they were in the room together they were aware of each other, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Winifred Inger felt a hot delight in the lessons when Ursula was present. Ursula felt her whole life begin when Miss Inger came into the room. Then, with the beloved subtly intimate teacher present, the girl sat as within the rays of some enriching sun whose intoxicating heat poured straight into her veins. The state of bliss when Miss Inger was present was supreme in the girl, but always eager, eager. As she went home, Ursula dreamed of the schoolmistress, made infinite dreams of things she could give her of how she might make the elder woman adore her. Miss Inger was a bachelor of art who had studied at Nunehum. She was a clergyman's daughter of good family. But what Ursula adored so much was her fine upright athletic bearing and her indomitably proud nature. She was proud and free as a man, yet exquisite as a woman. The girl's heart burned in her breast as she set off for school in the morning. So eager was her breast, so glad her feet to travel towards the beloved. Ah, Miss Inger, how straight and fine was her back, how strong her loins, how calm and free her limbs. Ursula craved ceaselessly to know if Miss Inger cared for her. As yet no definite sign had been passed between the two. Yet surely, surely Miss Inger loved her too, was fond of her, liked her at least more than the rest of the scholars in the class. Yet she was never certain. It might be that Miss Inger cared nothing for her. And yet, and yet, with blazing heart Ursula felt that if only she could speak to her, touch her, she would know. The summer term came and with it the swimming class. Miss Inger was to take the swimming class. Then Ursula trembled and was dazed with passion. Her hopes were soon to be realized. She would see Miss Inger in her bathing dress. The day came. In the great bath the water was glimmering pale emerald green, a lovely glimmering mass of color within the whitish marble-like confines. Overhead the light fell softly and the great green body of pure water moved under it as someone dived from the side. Ursula, trembling, hardly able to contain herself, pulled off her clothes, put on her tight bathing suit and opened the door of her cabin. Two girls were in the water. The mistress had not appeared. She waited. A door opened. Miss Inger came out, dressed in a rust red tunic like a Greek girl's, tied round the waist and a red silk handkerchief round her head. How lovely she looked. Her knees were so white and strong and proud and she was firm-bodied as Diana. She walked simply to the side of the bath and with a negligent movement flung herself in. For a moment Ursula watched the white, smooth, strong shoulders and the easy arms swimming, then she too dived into the water. Now, ah, now she was swimming in the same water with her dear mistress. The girl moved her limbs voluptuously and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her. I will race you Ursula, came the well modulated voice. Ursula started violently. She turned to see the warm, unfolded face of her mistress looking at her, to her. She was acknowledged. Laughing, her own beautiful startled laugh, she began to swim. The mistress was just ahead, swimming with easy strokes. Ursula could see the head put back, the water flickering upon the white shoulders, the strong legs kicking shadowy, and she swam, blinded with passion. Ah, the beauty of the firm white cool flesh, ah, the wonderful firm limbs, ah, if she did not so despise her own thin, dusky fragment of a body, if only she too were fearless and capable. She swam on eagerly, not wanting to win, only wanting to be near her mistress, to swim in a race with her. They neared the end of the bath, the deep end. Ms. Inger touched the pipe, swung herself round, and caught Ursula round the waist in the water, and held her for a moment. I won, said Ms. Inger, laughing. There was a moment of suspense. Ursula's heart was beating so fast, she clung to the rail and could not move. Her dilated, warm, unfolded, glowing face turned to the mistress, as if to her very son. Good-bye, said Ms. Inger, and she swam away to the other pupils, taking professional interest in them. Ursula was dazed. She could still feel the touch of the mistress's body against her own. Only this. Only this. The rest of the swimming-time passed like a trance. When the call was given to leave the water, Ms. Inger walked down the bath towards Ursula. Her rust-red thin tunic was clinging to her. The whole body was defined, firm and magnificent, as it seemed to the girl. I enjoyed our race, Ursula, did you, said Ms. Inger? The girl could only laugh with revealed, open, glowing face. The love was now tacitly confessed, but it was some time before any further progress was made. Ursula continued in suspense, in inflamed bliss. Then one day, when she was alone, the mistress came near to her, and touching her cheek with her fingers, said with some difficulty, Would you like to come to tea with me on Saturday, Ursula? The girl flushed all gratitude. We'll go to a lovely little bungalow on the sore, shall we? I stay the weekends there sometimes. Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came. Her thoughts burned up like a fire, if only it were Saturday, if only it were Saturday. Then Saturday came, and she set out. Ms. Inger met her in Solly, and they walked about three miles to the bungalow. It was a moist, warm, cloudy day. The bungalow is a tiny, two-room shanty, set on a steep bank. Everything in it was exquisite. In delicious privacy the two girls made tea, and then they talked. Ursula need not be home till about ten o'clock. The talk was led by a kind of spell to love. Ms. Inger was telling Ursula of a friend, how she had died in childbirth, and what she had suffered. Then she told of a prostitute, and of some of her experiences with men. As they talked thus on the little veranda of the bungalow, the night fell. There was a little warm rain. It is really stifling, said Ms. Inger. They watched a train whose lights were pale in the lingering twilight rushing across the distance. It will thunder, said Ursula. The electric suspense continued. The darkness sank. They were eclipsed. I think I shall go and bathe, said Ms. Inger, out of the cloud-black darkness. At night, said Ursula. It is best at night. Will you come? I should like to. It is quite safe. The grounds are private. We had better undress in the bungalow for fear of the rain than run down. Shily, stiffly, Ursula went into the bungalow and began to remove her clothes. The lamp was turned low. She stood in the shadow. By another chair Winifred Inger was undressing. Soon the naked shadowy figure of the elder girl came to the younger. Are you ready? she said. One moment. Ursula could hardly speak. The other naked woman stood by, stood near, silent. Ursula was ready. They ventured out into the darkness, feeling the soft air of night upon their skins. I can't see the path, said Ursula. It is here, said the voice, and the wavering pallid figure was beside her, a hand grasping her arm. And the elder held the younger close against her, close as they went down, and by the side of the water she put her arms round her and kissed her. And she lifted her and her arms close, saying softly, I shall carry you into the water. Ursula lay still in her mistress's arms, her forehead against the beloved maddening breast. I shall put you in, said Winifred. But Ursula twined her body about her mistress. After a while the rain came down and their flushed hot limbs startling, delicious. A sudden ice cold shower burst in a great weight upon them. They stood up to it with pleasure. Ursula received the stream of it upon her breasts and her limbs. It made her cold and a deep bottomless silence welled up in her as if bottomless darkness were returning upon her. So the heat vanished away. She was chilled as if from a waking up. She ran indoors, a chill non-existent thing wanting to get away. She wanted the light, the presence of other people, the external connection with the many, above all she wanted to lose herself among natural surroundings. She took her leave of her mistress and returned home. She was glad to be on the station with a crowd of Saturday night people, glad to sit in the lighted, crowded railway carriage. Only she did not want to meet anybody she knew. She did not want to talk. She was alone, immune. All this stir and see the lights and people was but the rim, the shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted very much to be on the seething partially illuminated shore, for within her was the void reality of dark space. For a time Miss Inger her mistress was gone. She was only a dark void and Ursula was free as a shade walking in an underworld of extinction, of oblivion. Ursula was glad with the kind of motionless lifeless gladness that her mistress was extinct, gone out of her. In the morning, however, the love was there again, burning, burning. She remembered yesterday and she wanted more, always more. She wanted to be with her mistress. All separation from her mistress was a restriction from living. Why could she not go to her today? Today. Why must she pace about revoked acacite whilst her mistress was elsewhere? She sat down and wrote a burning, passionate love letter. She could not help it. The two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly diffused into one, inseparable. Ursula went to Winifred's lodging. She spent there her only living hours. Winifred was very fond of water, of swimming, of rowing. She belonged to various athletic clubs. Many delicious afternoons the two girls spent in a light boat on the river. Winifred always rowing. Indeed, Winifred seemed to delight in having Ursula in her charge, in giving things to the girl, in filling and enriching her life. So that Ursula developed rapidly during the few months of her intimacy with her mistress. Winifred had had a scientific education. She had known many clever people. She wanted to bring Ursula to her own position of thought. They took religion and rid it of its dogmas, its falsehoods. Winifred humanized it all. Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing. The clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians a therocyrus. Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions into universal religion. In religion there were the two great motives of fear and love. The motive of fear was as great as the motive of love. Christianity accepted crucifixion to escape from fear.  But that which was feared was not necessarily all evil and that which was loved not necessarily all good. Fear shall become reverence and reverence is submission and identification. Love shall become triumph and triumph is delight in identification. So much she talked of religion getting the gist of many writings. In philosophy she was brought to the conclusion that the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base and must be left to the ancient worshipers of power, worship of Molak. We do not worship power in our enlightened souls. Power is degenerated to money and Napoleonic stupidity. Ursula could not help dreaming of Molak. Her God was not mild and gentle, neither lamb nor dove. He was the lion and the eagle. Not because the lion and the eagle had power, but because they were proud and strong. They were themselves. They were not passive subjects of some shepherd or pets of some loving woman or sacrifices of some priest. She was weary to death of mild passive lambs and monotonous doves. If the lamb might lie down with the lion it would be a great honor to the lamb. But the lion's powerful heart would suffer no diminishing. She loved the dignity and self-possession of lions. She did not see how lambs could love. Lambs could only be loved. They could only be afraid and tremblingly submit to fear and become sacrificial. Or they could submit to love and become beloveds. In both they were passive, raging, destructive lovers, seeking the moment when fear is greatest and triumph is greatest, the fear not greater than the triumph, the triumph not greater than the fear, these were no lambs nor doves. She stretched her own limbs like a lion or a wild horse. Her heart was relentless in its desires. It would suffer a thousand deaths, but it would still be a lion's heart when it rose from death. A fiercer lion she would be, a sureer, knowing herself different from and separate from the great conflicting universe that was not herself. Winifred Inger was also interested in the women's movement. The men will do no more. They have lost the capacity for doing, said the elder girl. They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don't come to one and love one. They come to an idea and they say, you are my idea, so they embrace themselves, as if I were any man's idea, as if I exist because a man has an idea of me, as if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act. They are all impotent. They can't take a woman. They come to their own idea every time and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry. Ursula was introduced by her friend to various women and men, educated, unsatisfied people who still moved within the smug provincial society, as if they were nearly as tame as their outward behavior showed, but who were inwardly raging and mad. It was a strange world the girl was swept into, like a chaos, like the end of the world. She was too young to understand it all, yet the inoculation passed into her through her love for her mistress. The examination came and then school was over. It was the long vacation. Winifred Inger went away to London. Ursula was left alone in Kasate. A terrible outcast almost poisonous despair possessed her. It was no use doing anything or being anything. She had no connection with other people. Her lot was isolated and deadly. There was nothing for her anywhere but this black disintegration. Yet within all the great attack of disintegration upon her, she remained herself. It was the terrible core of all her suffering that she was always herself. Never could she escape that. She could not put off being herself. She still adhered to Winifred Inger, but a sort of nausea was coming over her. She loved her mistress, but a heavy clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her from the other woman's contact. And sometimes she thought Winifred was ugly, clay-y. Her female hips seemed big and earthy. Her ankles and her arms were too thick. She wanted some fine intensity instead of this heavy cleaving of moist clay that cleaves because it has no life of its own. Winifred still loved Ursula. She had a passion for the fine flame of the girl. She served her endlessly, would have done anything for her. Come with me to London, she pleaded to the girl. I will make it nice for you. You shall do lots of things you will enjoy. No, said Ursula, stubbornly and deli. No, I don't want to go to London. I want to be by myself. Winifred knew what this meant. She knew that Ursula was beginning to reject her. The fine, unquenchable flame of the younger girl would consent no more to mingle with the perverted life of the elder woman. Winifred knew it would come, but she too was proud. At the bottom of her was a black pit of despair. She knew perfectly well that Ursula would cast her off. And that seemed like the end of her life. But she was too hopeless to rage. Wisely economizing what was left of Ursula's love, she went away to London, leaving the beloved girl alone. And after a fortnight, Ursula's letters became tender again, loving. Her uncle Tom had invited her to go and stay with him. He was managing a big new colliery in Yorkshire. Would Winifred come too? For now Ursula was imagining marriage for Winifred. She wanted her to marry her uncle Tom. Winifred knew this. She said she would come to Wiggiston. She would now let fate do as it liked with her, since there was nothing remaining to be done. Tom Brangwin also saw Ursula's intention. He too was at the end of his desires. He had done the things he had wanted to. They had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of soul, which he hid under an utterly tolerant good humor. He no longer cared about anything on earth, neither man nor woman, nor God nor humanity. He had come to a stability of nullification. He did not care any more, neither about his body nor about his soul. Only he would preserve intact his own life. Only the simple, superficial fact of living persisted. He was still healthy. He lived. Therefore he would fill each moment. That had always been his creed. It was not instinctive easiness. It was the inevitable outcome of his nature. When he was in the absolute privacy of his own life, he did as he pleased, unscrupulous without any ulterior thought. He believed neither in good nor evil. Each moment was like a separate little island, isolated from time and blank, unconditioned by time. He lived in a large new house of red brick, standing outside a mass of homogeneous red brick dwellings called Wigiston. Wigiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of eleven houses on the edge of healthy half-agricultural country. Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wigiston appeared a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure ugliness, a gray-black, mechanized road, as fault-causeways held in between a flat succession of wall window and door, a new brick channel that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly. Only now and then, in one of the house windows, vegetables or small groceries were displayed for sale. In the middle of the town was a large, open, shapeless space or marketplace of black trodden earth surrounded by the same flat material of dwellings, new red brick becoming grimy, small oblong windows and oblong doors repeated endlessly, with just at one corner a great and gaudy public house and somewhere lost on one of the sides of the square a large window opaque and darkish-green, which was the post office. The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers hanging about in gangs and groups or passing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work seemed not like living people, but like specters. The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous derility of the whole suggested death rather than life. There was no meeting place, no center, no artery, no organic formation. There it lay like the new foundations of a red brick confusion rapidly spreading like a skin disease. Just outside of this, on a little hill, was Tom Brangwin's big red brick house. It looked from the front upon the edge of the place, a meaningless squalor of ash pits and closets and irregular rows of the backs of houses, each with its small activity made sorted by barren cohesion with the rest of the small activities. Farther off was the great colliery that went night and day, and all around was the country green with two winding streams ragged with gorse and heath the darker woods in the distance. The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now when he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwin did not believe in the actuality of the place.  Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor car at the raw little station and drove through what seemed to them like the horrible raw beginnings of something. The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was fascinated by the many men who were there, groups of men standing in the streets, four or five men walking in a gang together, their dogs running behind or before. They were all decently dressed and most of them rather gaunt. The terrible gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her, like creatures with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate being within some utterly unliving shell. They passed meaninglessly along with strange isolated dignity. It was as if a hard horny shell enclosed them all. Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom's house. He was not yet at home. His house was simply but well furnished. He had taken out a dividing wall and made the whole front of the house into a large library, with one end devoted to his science. It was a handsome room, appointed as a laboratory and reading room, but giving the same sense of hard mechanical activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate, and looking out on the hideous abstraction of the town and at the green meadows and rough country beyond and at the great mathematical colliery on the other side. They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was getting stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on his brows, he looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other man of action. His color was as fresh, his health as perfect as ever. He walked like a man rather absorbed. Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library. His coat fastened incorrect, his head bald to the crown, but not shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see covered. And his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to stand in the shadow like a thing ashamed, and the clasp of his hand was so soft and yet so forceful that it chilled the heart. She was afraid of him, repelled by him and yet attracted.  Immediately he knew they were a kin. His manner was polite, almost foreign and rather cold. He still laughed in his curious animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide nose and showing his sharp teeth.  Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile, slightly cunning regard he had for Ursula, which made the girl at once so proud and so perplexed. But is this place as awful as it looks? The young girl asked, a strain in her eyes. It is just what it looks, he said. It hides nothing. Why are the men so sad? Are they sad? he replied. They seem unutterably, unutterably sad, said Ursula, out of a passionate throat. I don't think they are that. They just take it for granted. What do they take for granted? This, the pits in the place altogether. Why don't they alter it, she passionately protested. They believed they must alter themselves to fit the pits in the place, rather than alter the pits in the place to fit themselves. It is easier, he said. And you agree with them, burst out his niece, unable to bear it? You think like they do, that living human beings must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors? We could easily do without the pits. He smiled uncomfortably, cynically. Ursula felt again the revolt of hatred from him. I suppose their lives are not really so bad, said Winifred Inger, superior to the Zola-esque tragedy. He turned with his polite, distant attention. Yes, they are pretty bad. The pits are very deep and hot, and in some places wet. The men die of consumption fairly often, but they earn good wages. How gruesome, said Winifred Inger. Yes, he replied gravely. It was his grave-solid, self-contained manner which made him so much respected as a colliery manager. The servant came in to ask where they would have tea. Put it in the summer house, Mrs. Smith, he said. The fair-haired, good-looking young woman went out. Is she married and in service, asked Ursula? She is a widow. Her husband died of consumption a little while ago.  He lay there in the house place at her mother's and five or six other people in the house and died very gradually. I asked her if his death wasn't a great trouble to her. Well, she said, he was very fretful towards the last, never satisfied, never easy, always fretting and never knowing what would satisfy him. So in one way it was a relief when it was over, for him and for everybody. They had only been married two years, and she has one boy. I asked her if she hadn't been very happy. Oh, yes, sir. We was very comfortable at first till he took bad. Oh, we was very comfortable. Oh, yes. But you see, you get used to it. I've had my father and two brothers go off just the same. You get used to it. It's a horrible thing to get used to, said Winifred Inger with a shudder. Yes, he said, still smiling, but that's how they are. She'll be getting married again directly, one man or another. It does not matter very much, they're all colliers. What do you mean, asked Ursula, they're all colliers. It is with the women as with us, he replied. Her husband was John Smith Loader. We reckoned him as a loader. He reckoned himself as a loader, and so she knew he represented his job. Marriage and home is a little sideshow. The women know it right enough and take it for what it's worth. One man or another, it doesn't matter all the world. The pit matters. Around the pit there will always be the sideshows, plenty of them. He looked round at the red chaos, the rigid amorphous confusion of Wiggiston. Every man his own little sideshow, his home, but the pit owns every man. The women have what is left. What's left of this man or what is left of that? It doesn't matter altogether. The pit takes all that really matters. It is the same everywhere, burst out Winifred. It is the office or the shop or the business that gets the man. The woman gets the bit the shop can't digest. What is he at home? A man?  They know they are sold, said Tom Brangwin. That's where it is. They know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks or throws out what difference can it make? The man's sold to his job, so the women don't bother. They take what they can catch and vogue la galère. Aren't they very strict here? asked Miss Inger. Oh no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands. They're not very particular. Neither are they very interested. They go dragging along what is left from the pits. They're not interested enough to be very immoral. It all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral. Just a question of pit wages. The most moral duke in England makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality end up. Ursula sat black, sold, and very bitter, hearing the two of them talk. There seemed something ghoulish even in their very deploring of the state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish satisfaction in it. The pit was the great mistress. Ursula looked out of the window and saw the proud demon-like colliery with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless, squalid mass of the town lying aside. It was the squalid heap of sideshows. The pit was the main show, the raison d'etre of all. Well, terrible it was. There was a horrible fascination in it. Human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a moment she was dizzy. Then she recovered, felt herself in a great loneliness wherein she was sad but free. She had departed. No more would she subscribe to the great colliery, to the great machine which has taken us all captives. In her soul she was against it. She disowned even its power. It had only to be forsaken to be inane, meaningless. And she knew it was meaningless. But it needed a great passionate effort of will on her part, seeing the colliery, still to maintain her knowledge that it was meaningless. But her uncle Tom and her mistress remained there among the horde, cynically reviling the monstrous state and yet adhering to it, like a man who reviles his mistress yet who is in love with her. She knew her uncle Tom perceived what was going on, but she knew moreover that in spite of his criticism and condemnation, he still wanted the great machine. His only happy moments, his only moments of pure freedom were when he was serving the machine. Then and then only. When the machine caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself? Could he act wholly without cynicism and unreality? His real mistress was the machine. And the real mistress of Winifred was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there in the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the clog and degradation of human feeling. There, in the monstrous mechanism that held all matter, living or dead, in its service, did she achieve her consummation and her perfect unison, her immortality. Hatred sprang up in Ursula's heart. If she could, she would smash the machine. Her soul's action should be the smashing of the great machine. If she could destroy the colliery and make all the men of Wiggiston out of work, she would do it, let them starve and grub in the earth for a root rather than serve such a molak as this. She hated her uncle Tom. She hated Winifred Inger. They went down to the summer house for tea. It was a pleasant place among a few trees at the end of a tiny garden on the edge of a field. Her uncle Tom and Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to cheapen her. She was miserable and desolate, but she would never give way. Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was over between them.  She saw a clayy, inert, unquickened flesh that reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her uncle Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking. Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow. His hand was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had something marshy about him. The succulent moistness and turgidity and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh where life and decaying are one. He was repellent to her who was so dry and fine in her fire. Her very bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her. It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two weeks at Wigaston and she hated it. All was gray, dry, ash, cold and dead and ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get rid of Winifred. The girl's hatred and her sense of repulsiveness in her mistress and in her uncle seemed to throw the other two together. They drew together as if against her. In hardness and bitterness of soul Ursula knew that Winifred was become her uncle's lover. She was glad. She had loved them both. Now she wanted to be rid of them both.  Anything to get out of the fetid air she would leave them both forever, leave forever their strange, soft, half corrupt element, anything to get away. One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula's bed and put her arms around the girl, holding her to herself in spite of unwillingness, and said, Dear, my dear, shall I marry Mr. Brangwen, shall I? The clingy, heavy, muddy question weighed on Ursula intolerably. Has he asked you? She said, using all her might of hard resistance. He's asked me, said Winifred. Do you want me to marry him, Ursula? Yes, said Ursula. The arms tightened more on her. I knew you did, my sweet, and I will marry him.  I've been awfully fond of him ever since I was a child. I know, I know. I can see what you like in him. He is a man by himself. He has something apart from the rest. Yes, said Ursula.  Ha! He's not as good as you. There's something even objectionable in him. His thick thighs. Ursula was silent. But I'll marry him, my dear. It will be best. Now say you love me. A sort of profession was extorted out of the girl. Nevertheless, her mistress went away sighing to weep in her own chamber. In two days' time Ursula left Wiggiston. Miss Inger went to Nottingham. There was an engagement between her and Tom Rangwin, which the uncle seemed to vaunt as if it were an assurance of his validity. Rangwin and Winifred Inger continued engaged for another term. Then they married. Rangwin had reached the age when he wanted children. He wanted children. Neither marriage nor the domestic establishment meant anything to him. He wanted to propagate himself. He knew what he was doing. He had the instinct of a growing inertia of a thing that chooses its place of rest in which to lapse into apathy complete, profound indifference. He would let the machinery carry him. Husband, father, pit manager, warm clay lifted through the recurrent action of day after day by the great machine from which it derived its motion. As for Winifred, she was an educated woman and of the same sort as himself. She would make a good companion. She was his mate. Ursula came back to concentrate a fight with her mother. Her school days were over. She had passed the matriculation examination. Now she came home to face that empty period between school and possible marriage. At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the time. She would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded suffering, maimed. She had no will left to think about herself. For a time she must just lapse. But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her mother had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the girl continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs. Branglund was again with child. The ninth she had born. One had died of diphtheria and infancy. Even this fact of her mother's pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs. Branglund was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in her breeding, she would not have the existence at all of anything but the immediate physical common things. Ursula, inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youths reaching for some unknown ordeal that it can't grasp, can't even distinguish or conceive. Maddened she was fighting all the darkness she was up against, and part of this darkness was her mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of physical considerations and complacently to reject the reality of anything else was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Branglund care about but the children in the house and the little local gossip, and she would not be touched. She would let nothing else live near her. She went about, big with child, slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of womanhood. This long trance of complacent childbearing had kept her young and undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when Goodwin was born. All these years nothing had happened, save the coming of the children. Nothing had mattered but the bodies of her babies. As her children came into consciousness, as they began to suffer their own fulfillment, she cast them off, but she remained dominant in the house. Branglund continued in a kind of rich drows of physical heat in connection with his wife. There were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as individuals. So much were they pervaded by the physical heat of breeding and rearing their young. How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close physical, limited life of herded domesticity. Calm, placid, unshakable as ever, Mrs. Branglund went about in her dominance of physical maternity. There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that mattered to her. She would have the children less rude and tyrannical. She would have a place in the house. But her mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the cunning instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Branglund ridiculed and held cheap Ursula's passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula would try to insist in her own home on the right of women to take equal place with men in the field of action and work. A, said the mother, there is a good crop of stockings lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action. Ursula disliked mending stockings and this retort maddened her.  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.  Branglund 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 the whole sale brutality that made Ursula go white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming deadened in her. Her temper hard and cold. Branglund himself was in one of his states of 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 draftsman, 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 wood carving, 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 Cassate, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty and 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 modeling. To his surprise, he found he could do it. Modeling 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.  He continued to copy or to make designs by selecting motives from classic stuff. He loved the della rabbia 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 modeling, he turned to painting. But he tried watercolor 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 modeling, 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 jewelry, read Benvenuto Selini, poured 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 women folk. Then he made rings and bracelets. Then he took up beaten and chiseled metalwork. 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 postcard, but it was as if she were a blunderer. 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 same as he was to Winifred. He was to her almost the same as he was to Winifred.  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.  If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down. 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 forever.  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 pokey 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 Kasate, within the sordid scope of Ilksten. 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 and 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 fulfill. 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 on 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 work shed. 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 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.  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 hardened 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.  And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric? He asked, jeering, 50 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-knat 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 lamp light fell on the burnt silver bowl that lay between them, on mallet and furnace and chisel.  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.  She went to the free library in Ilkston, copied out addresses from the school mistress, 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 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. Age and date of birth. After a long time considering, she filled in that line. Qualifications with date of examination. With a little pride she wrote London matriculation examination. Previous experience and where obtained. Her heart sank as she wrote none. Still there was much to answer. It took her two hours to fill in the three forms. Then she had to copy her testimonials from her headmistress and from the clergyman. At last, however, it was finished. She had sealed the three long envelopes. In the afternoon she went down to Oaksden to post them. She said nothing of it all to her parents. As she stamped her long letters and put them into the box at the main post office, she felt as if already she was out of the reach of her father and mother, as if she had connected herself with the outer, greater world of activity, the man-made world. As she returned home she dreamed again in her own fashion her old gorgeous dreams. One of her applications was to Gillingham in Kent. One to Kingston on Tams and one to Swanwick in Derbyshire. Gillingham was such a lovely name and Kent was the Garden of England, so that in Gillingham, an old, old village by the hop fields, where the sun shone softly, she came out of school in the afternoon into the shadow of the plain trees by the gate, and turned down the sleepy road towards the cottage where cornflowers poked their blue heads through the old wooden fence, and flocks stood built up of blossom beside the path. A delicate silver-haired lady rose with delicate ivory hands uplifted as Ursula entered the room and, oh, my dear, what do you think? What is it, Mrs. Weatherall? Frederick had come home. Nay, his manly step was heard on the stair. She saw his strong boots, his blue trousers, his uniformed figure, and then his face, clean and keen as an eagle's, and his eyes lit up with the glamour of strange seas, strange seas that had woven through his soul as he descended into the kitchen. This dream, with its amplifications, lasted her a mile of walking. Then she went to Kingston on Tams. Kingston on Tams was an old historic place just south of London. There lived the well-born dignified souls who belonged to the Metropolis, but who loved peace. There she met a wonderful family of girls, living in a large old Queen Anne house, whose lawn sloped to the river, and in an atmosphere of stately peace she found herself among her soul's intimates. They loved her as sisters, they shared with her all noble thoughts. She was happy again. In her musings she spread her poor clipped wings and flew into the Pure Imperium. Day followed day, she did not speak to her parents. Then came the return of her testimonials from Gillingham. She was not wanted, neither at Swanwick. The bitterness of rejection followed the sweets of hope. Her bright feathers were in the dust again. Then suddenly, after a fortnight, came an intimation from Kingston on Tams. She was to appear at the Education Office of that town on the following Thursday, for an interview with the committee. Her heart stood still. She knew she would make the committee accept her. Now she was afraid, now that her removal was imminent. Her heart quivered with fear and reluctance, but underneath her purpose was fixed. She passed shadowily through the day, unwilling to tell her news to her mother, waiting for her father. Suspense and fear were strong upon her. She dreaded going to Kingston. Her easy dreams disappeared from the grasp of reality. And yet, as the afternoon wore away, the sweetness of the dream returned again. Kingston on Tams, there was such sound of dignity to her. The shadow of history and the glamour of stately progress enveloped her. The palaces would be old and darkened, the place of kings obscured. Yet it was a place of kings for her. Richard and Henry and Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth. She divined great lawns with noble trees and terraces whose steps the water washed softly, where the swans sometimes came to earth. Still she must see the stately gorgeous barge of the Queen float down. The crimson carpet put upon the landing stairs. The gentlemen in their purple velvet cloaks, bareheaded, standing in the sunshine, grouped on either side, waiting. Sweet Tams run softly till I end my song. Evening came. Her father returned home, sanguine and alert and detached as ever. He was less real than her fancies. She waited whilst he ate his tea. He took big mouthfuls, big bites, and ate unconsciously with the same abandon an animal gives to its food. Immediately after tea he went over to the church. It was choir practice, and he wanted to try the tunes on his organ. The latch of the big door clicked loudly as she came after him, but the organ rolled more loudly still. He was unaware. He was practicing the anthem. She saw his small jet-black head and alert face between the candle flames. His slim body sagged on the music stool. His face was so luminous and fixed, the movements of his limbs seemed strange, apart from him. The sound of the organ seemed to belong to the very stone of the pillars, like sap running in them. Then there was a close of music and silence. Father, she said, he looked round as if at an apparition. Ursula stood shadowy within the candlelight. What now, he said, not coming to earth. It was difficult to speak to him. I've got a situation, she said, forcing herself to speak.  He closed the music before him. I've got a situation to go to. Then he turned to her, still abstracted, unwilling. Oh, where's that? he said. At Kingston on Tams, I must go on Thursday for an interview with the committee.  Yes. And she handed him the letter. He read it by the light of the candles. Ursula Brangwen, Utreak Cottage, Casate, Derbyshire. Dear madam, you are requested to call at the above offices on Thursday next, the 10th, at 11.30 a.m., for an interview with the committee, referring to your application for the post of assistant mistress at the Wellingborough Green Schools. It was very difficult for Brangwen to take in this remote and official information, glowing as he was within the quiet of his church and his anthem music. Well, you needn't bother me with it now, need you? He said impatiently, giving her back the letter. I've got to go on Thursday, she said. He sat motionless. Then he reached more music, and there was a rushing sound of air than a long, emphatic trumpet note of the organ as he laid his hands on the keys. Ursula turned and went away. He tried to give himself again to the organ, but he could not. He could not get back.  He said nothing, however, until all the younger children were in bed. Ursula, however, knew what was brewing. At length he asked, Where's that letter? She gave it to him. He sat looking at it. You are requested to call at the above offices on Thursday next. It was a cold official notice to Ursula herself, and had nothing to do with him. So she existed now as a separate social individual. It was for her to answer this note without regard to him. He had even no right to interfere. His heart was hard and angry. You had to do it behind our backs, had you? He said with a sneer, and her heart leapt with hot pain. She knew she was free. She had broken away from him. He was beaten. You said, let her try. She retorted, almost apologizing to him. He did not hear. He sat looking at the letter. Education office, Kingston on Tams. And then the type written, Ms Ursula Brangwen, U Tree College, Cassate. It was also complete and so final. He could not but feel the new position Ursula held as recipient of that letter. It was an iron in his soul. Well, he said at length you're not going. Ursula started and could find no words to clamor her revolt. If you think you're going dancing off to the other side of London, you're mistaken. Why not? She cried, and once hard fixed in her will to go. That's why not, he said. And there was silence till Ms. Brangwen came downstairs. Look here, Anna, he said, handing her the letter. She put back her head, seeing a type written letter, anticipating trouble from the outside world. There was the curious sliding motion of her eyes as if she shut off her sentient maternal self, and a kind of hard trance meaningless took its place. Thus, meaningless, she glanced over the letter, careful not to take it in. She apprehended the contents with her callous superficial mind. Her feeling self was shut down. What post is it, she asked? She wants to go and be a teacher in Kingston on tans at fifty pounds a year. Oh, indeed! The mother spoke as if it were a hostile fact concerning some stranger. She would have let her go out of callousness. Mrs. Brangwen would begin to grow up again only with her youngest child. Her eldest girl was in the way now. She's not going all that distance, said the father. I have to go where they want me, cried Ursula, and it's a good place to go to. What do you know about the place? said her father harshly. And it doesn't matter whether they want to or not.  You said I was to try, the girl cried. Now I've got a place and I'm going to go. You're not going all that distance, said her father. Why don't you get a place at Elkston where you can live at home? asked Goodwin, who hated conflicts, who could not understand Ursula's uneasy way, yet who must stand by her sister. There aren't any places in Elkston, cried Ursula, and I'd rather go right away.  I've no doubt you'd rather go right away, said her mother, very caustic. And I've no doubt you'd find other people didn't put up with you for very long, either. You've too much opinion of yourself for your good. Between the girl and her mother was a feeling of pure hatred. There came a stubborn silence. Ursula knew she must break it. Well, they've written to me and I shall have to go, she said. Where will you get the money from? asked her father. Uncle Tom will give it me, she said. Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant. Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was abstracted. He seemed to be abstracting himself to make a pure statement. Well, you're not going all that distance away, he said. I'll ask Mr. Burt about a place here. I'm not going to have you by yourself at the other side of London. But I've got to go to Kingston, said Ursula. They've sent for me. They'll do without you, he said. There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of tears. Well, she said, low and tense. You can put me off this, but I'm going to have a place. I'm not going to stop at home. Nobody wants you to stop at home, he suddenly shouted, going livid with rage. She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She went singing into the parlor. During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard singing to herself, making love to the children, but her soul hard and cold with regard to her parents. Nothing more was said. The hardness and brightness lasted for four days, then it began to break up. So at evening she said to her father, have you spoken about a place for me? I spoke to Mr. Burt. What did he say? There's a committee meeting tomorrow, he'll tell me on Friday. So she waited till Friday. Kingston on Tams had been an exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So she knew that this would come to pass, because nothing was ever fulfilled, she found, except in the hard, limited reality. She did not want to be a teacher in Elkston, because she knew Elkston and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must take her freedom where she could. On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in Brinsley Street School. This could most probably be secured for her at once, without the trouble of application. Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor quarter, and she had had a taste of the common children of Elkston. They had shouted after her and thrown stones. Still as a teacher she would be in authority, and it was all unknown. She was excited. The very forest of dry, sterile brick had some fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly ugly. It would purge her of some of her floating sentimentality. She dreamed how she would make the little ugly children love her. She would be so personal. Teachers were always so hard and impersonal. There was no vivid relationship. She would make everything personal and vivid. She would give herself. She would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her children. She would make them so happy, and they would prefer her to any teacher on the face of the earth. At Christmas she would choose such fascinating Christmas cards for them, and she would give them such a happy party in one of the classrooms. The headmaster, Mr. Harvey, was a short, thick-set, rather common man, she thought, but she would hold before him the light of grace and refinement. He would have her in such high esteem before long. She would be the gleaming son of the school. The children would blossom like little weeds. The teachers, like tall, hard plants, would burst into rare flower. End of Chapter 13, Part 1