THE WIDENING CIRCLE
It was very burdensome to Ursula, that she was the eldest of the
family. By the time she was eleven, she had to take to school Gudrun
and Theresa and Catherine. The boy, William, always called Billy, so
that he should not be confused with his father, was a lovable, rather
delicate child of three, so he stayed at home as yet. There was another
baby girl, called Cassandra.
The children went for a time to the little church school just near the
Marsh. It was the only place within reach, and being so small, Mrs.
Brangwen felt safe in sending her children there, though the village
boys did nickname Ursula “Urtler”, and Gudrun “Good-runner”, and
Theresa “Tea-pot”.
Gudrun and Ursula were co-mates. The second child, with her long,
sleepy body and her endless chain of fancies, would have nothing to do
with realities. She was not for them, she was for her own fancies.
Ursula was the one for realities. So Gudrun left all such to her elder
sister, and trusted in her implicitly, indifferently. Ursula had a
great tenderness for her co-mate sister.
It was no good trying to make Gudrun responsible. She floated along
like a fish in the sea, perfect within the medium of her own difference
and being. Other existence did not trouble her. Only she believed in
Ursula, and trusted to Ursula.
The eldest child was very much fretted by her responsibility for the
other young ones. Especially Theresa, a sturdy, bold-eyed thing, had a
faculty for warfare.
“Our Ursula, Billy Pillins has lugged my hair.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said nothing.”
Then the Brangwen girls were in for a feud with the Pillinses, or
Phillipses.
“You won’t pull my hair again, Billy Pillins,” said Theresa, walking
with her sisters, and looking superbly at the freckled, red-haired boy.
“Why shan’t I?” retorted Billy Pillins.
“You won’t because you dursn’t,” said the tiresome Theresa.
“You come here, then, Tea-pot, an’ see if I dursna.”
Up marched Tea-pot, and immediately Billy Pillins lugged her black,
snaky locks. In a rage she flew at him. Immediately in rushed Ursula
and Gudrun, and little Katie, in clashed the other Phillipses, Clem and
Walter, and Eddie Anthony. Then there was a fray. The Brangwen girls
were well-grown and stronger than many boys. But for pinafores and long
hair, they would have carried easy victories. They went home, however,
with hair lugged and pinafores torn. It was a joy to the Phillips boys
to rip the pinafores of the Brangwen girls.
Then there was an outcry. Mrs. Brangwen _would not_ have it; no, she
would not. All her innate dignity and standoffishness rose up. Then
there was the vicar lecturing the school. “It was a sad thing that the
boys of Cossethay could not behave more like gentlemen to the girls of
Cossethay. Indeed, what kind of boy was it that should set upon a girl,
and kick her, and beat her, and tear her pinafore? That boy deserved
severe castigation, and the name of _coward,_ for no boy who was not a
_coward_—etc., etc.”
Meanwhile much hang-dog fury in the Pillinses’ hearts, much virtue in
the Brangwen girls’, particularly in Theresa’s. And the feud continued,
with periods of extraordinary amity, when Ursula was Clem Phillips’s
sweetheart, and Gudrun was Walter’s, and Theresa was Billy’s, and even
the tiny Katie had to be Eddie Ant’ny’s sweetheart. There was the
closest union. At every possible moment the little gang of Brangwens
and Phillipses flew together. Yet neither Ursula nor Gudrun would have
any real intimacy with the Phillips boys. It was a sort of fiction to
them, this alliance and this dubbing of sweethearts.
Again Mrs. Brangwen rose up.
“Ursula, I will _not_ have you raking the roads with lads, so I tell
you. Now stop it, and the rest will stop it.”
How Ursula _hated_ always to represent the little Brangwen club. She
could never be herself, no, she was always
Ursula-Gudrun-Theresa-Catherine—and later even Billy was added on to
her. Moreover, she did not want the Phillipses either. She was out of
taste with them.
However, the Brangwen-Pillins coalition readily broke down, owing to
the unfair superiority of the Brangwens. The Brangwens were rich. They
had free access to the Marsh Farm. The school teachers were almost
respectful to the girls, the vicar spoke to them on equal terms. The
Brangwen girls presumed, they tossed their heads.
“_You’re_ not ivrybody, Urtler Brangwin, ugly-mug,” said Clem Phillips,
his face going very red.
“I’m better than you, for all that,” retorted Urtler.
“You _think_ you are—wi’ a face like that—Ugly Mug,—Urtler Brangwin,”
he began to jeer, trying to set all the others in cry against her. Then
there was hostility again. How she _hated_ their jeering. She became
cold against the Phillipses. Ursula was very proud in her family. The
Brangwen girls had all a curious blind dignity, even a kind of nobility
in their bearing. By some result of breed and upbringing, they seemed
to rush along their own lives without caring that they existed to other
people. Never from the start did it occur to Ursula that other people
might hold a low opinion of her. She thought that whosoever knew her,
knew she was enough and accepted her as such. She thought it was a
world of people like herself. She suffered bitterly if she were forced
to have a low opinion of any person, and she never forgave that person.
This was maddening to many little people. All their lives, the
Brangwens were meeting folk who tried to pull them down to make them
seem little. Curiously, the mother was aware of what would happen, and
was always ready to give her children the advantage of the move.
When Ursula was twelve, and the common school and the companionship of
the village children, niggardly and begrudging, was beginning to affect
her, Anna sent her with Gudrun to the Grammar School in Nottingham.
This was a great release for Ursula. She had a passionate craving to
escape from the belittling circumstances of life, the little
jealousies, the little differences, the little meannesses. It was a
torture to her that the Phillipses were poorer and meaner than herself,
that they used mean little reservations, took petty little advantages.
She wanted to be with her equals: but not by diminishing herself. She
_did_ want Clem Phillips to be her equal. But by some puzzling, painful
fate or other, when he was really there with her, he produced in her a
tight feeling in the head. She wanted to beat her forehead, to escape.
Then she found that the way to escape was easy. One departed from the
whole circumstance. One went away to the Grammar School, and left the
little school, the meagre teachers, the Phillipses whom she had tried
to love but who had made her fail, and whom she could not forgive. She
had an instinctive fear of petty people, as a deer is afraid of dogs.
Because she was blind, she could not calculate nor estimate people. She
must think that everybody was just like herself.
She measured by the standard of her own people: her father and mother,
her grandmother, her uncles. Her beloved father, so utterly simple in
his demeanour, yet with his strong, dark soul fixed like a root in
unexpressed depths that fascinated and terrified her: her mother, so
strangely free of all money and convention and fear, entirely
indifferent to the world, standing by herself, without connection: her
grandmother, who had come from so far and was centred in so wide an
horizon: people must come up to these standards before they could be
Ursula’s people.
So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary
of Cossethay, where only limited people lived. Outside, was all
vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she would love.
Going to school by train, she must leave home at a quarter to eight in
the morning, and she did not arrive again till half-past five at
evening. Of this she was glad, for the house was small and overful. It
was a storm of movement, whence there had been no escape. She hated so
much being in charge.
The house was a storm of movement. The children were healthy and
turbulent, the mother only wanted their animal well-being. To Ursula,
as she grew a little older, it became a nightmare. When she saw, later,
a Rubens picture with storms of naked babies, and found this was called
“Fecundity”, she shuddered, and the world became abhorrent to her. She
knew as a child what it was to live amidst storms of babies, in the
heat and swelter of fecundity. And as a child, she was against her
mother, passionately against her mother, she craved for some
spirituality and stateliness.
In bad weather, home was a bedlam. Children dashed in and out of the
rain, to the puddles under the dismal yew trees, across the wet
flagstones of the kitchen, whilst the cleaning-woman grumbled and
scolded; children were swarming on the sofa, children were kicking the
piano in the parlour, to make it sound like a beehive, children were
rolling on the hearthrug, legs in air, pulling a book in two between
them, children, fiendish, ubiquitous, were stealing upstairs to find
out where our Ursula was, whispering at bedroom doors, hanging on the
latch, calling mysteriously, “Ursula! Ursula!” to the girl who had
locked herself in to read. And it was hopeless. The locked door excited
their sense of mystery, she had to open to dispel the lure. These
children hung on to her with round-eyed excited questions.
The mother flourished amid all this.
“Better have them noisy than ill,” she said.
But the growing girls, in turn, suffered bitterly. Ursula was just
coming to the stage when Andersen and Grimm were being left behind for
the “Idylls of the King” and romantic love-stories.
“Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,
Elaine the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber in a tower to the east
Guarded the sacred shield of Launcelot.”
How she loved it! How she leaned in her bedroom window with her black,
rough hair on her shoulders, and her warm face all rapt, and gazed
across at the churchyard and the little church, which was a turreted
castle, whence Launcelot would ride just now, would wave to her as he
rode by, his scarlet cloak passing behind the dark yew trees and
between the open space: whilst she, ah, she, would remain the lonely
maid high up and isolated in the tower, polishing the terrible shield,
weaving it a covering with a true device, and waiting, waiting, always
remote and high.
At which point there would be a faint scuffle on the stairs, a
light-pitched whispering outside the door, and a creaking of the latch:
then Billy, excited, whispering:
“It’s locked—it’s locked.”
Then the knocking, kicking at the door with childish knees, and the
urgent, childish:
“Ursula—our Ursula? Ursula? Eh, our Ursula?”
No reply.
“Ursula! Eh—our Ursula?” the name was shouted now. Still no answer.
“Mother, she won’t answer,” came the yell. “She’s dead.”
“Go away—I’m not dead. What do you want?” came the angry voice of the
girl.
“Open the door, our Ursula,” came the complaining cry. It was all over.
She must open the door. She heard the screech of the bucket downstairs
dragged across the flagstones as the woman washed the kitchen floor.
And the children were prowling in the bedroom, asking:
“What were you doing? What had you locked the door for?” Then she
discovered the key of the parish room, and betook herself there, and
sat on some sacks with her books. There began another dream.
She was the only daughter of the old lord, she was gifted with magic.
Day followed day of rapt silence, whilst she wandered ghost-like in the
hushed, ancient mansion, or flitted along the sleeping terraces.
Here a grave grief attacked her: that her hair was dark. She _must_
have fair hair and a white skin. She was rather bitter about her black
mane.
Never mind, she would dye it when she grew up, or bleach it in the sun,
till it was bleached fair. Meanwhile she wore a fair white coif of pure
Venetian lace.
She flitted silently along the terraces, where jewelled lizards basked
upon the stone, and did not move when her shadow fell upon them. In the
utter stillness she heard the tinkle of the fountain, and smelled the
roses whose blossoms hung rich and motionless. So she drifted, drifted
on the wistful feet of beauty, past the water and the swans, to the
noble park, where, underneath a great oak, a doe all dappled lay with
her four fine feet together, her fawn nestling sun-coloured beside her.
Oh, and this doe was her familiar. It would talk to her, because she
was a magician, it would tell her stories as if the sunshine spoke.
Then one day, she left the door of the parish room unlocked, careless
and unheeding as she always was; the children found their way in, Katie
cut her finger and howled, Billy hacked notches in the fine chisels,
and did much damage. There was a great commotion.
The crossness of the mother was soon finished. Ursula locked up the
room again, and considered all was over. Then her father came in with
the notched tools, his forehead knotted.
“Who the deuce opened the door?” he cried in anger.
“It was Ursula who opened the door,” said her mother. He had a duster
in his hand. He turned and flapped the cloth hard across the girl’s
face. The cloth stung, for a moment the girl was as if stunned. Then
she remained motionless, her face closed and stubborn. But her heart
was blazing. In spite of herself the tears surged higher, in spite of
her they surged higher.
In spite of her, her face broke, she made a curious gulping grimace,
and the tears were falling. So she went away, desolate. But her blazing
heart was fierce and unyielding. He watched her go, and a pleasurable
pain filled him, a sense of triumph and easy power, followed
immediately by acute pity.
“I’m sure that was unnecessary—to hit the girl across the face,” said
the mother coldly.
“A flip with the duster won’t hurt her,” he said.
“Nor will it do her any good.”
For days, for weeks, Ursula’s heart burned from this rebuff. She felt
so cruelly vulnerable. Did he not know how vulnerable she was, how
exposed and wincing? He, of all people, knew. And he wanted to do this
to her. He wanted to hurt her right through her closest sensitiveness,
he wanted to treat her with shame, to maim her with insult.
Her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted. She did not
forget, she did not forget, she never forgot. When she returned to her
love for her father, the seed of mistrust and defiance burned
unquenched, though covered up far from sight. She no longer belonged to
him unquestioned. Slowly, slowly, the fire of mistrust and defiance
burned in her, burned away her connection with him.
She ran a good deal alone, having a passion for all moving, active
things. She loved the little brooks. Wherever she found a little
running water, she was happy. It seemed to make her run and sing in
spirit along with it. She could sit for hours by a brook or stream, on
the roots of the alders, and watch the water hasten dancing over the
stones, or among the twigs of a fallen branch. Sometimes, little fish
vanished before they had become real, like hallucinations, sometimes
wagtails ran by the water’s brink, sometimes other little birds came to
drink. She saw a kingfisher darting blue—and then she was very happy.
The kingfisher was the key to the magic world: he was witness of the
border of enchantment.
But she must move out of the intricately woven illusion of her life:
the illusion of a father whose life was an Odyssey in an outer world;
the illusion of her grandmother, of realities so shadowy and far-off
that they became as mystic symbols:—peasant-girls with wreaths of blue
flowers in their hair, the sledges and the depths of winter; the
dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then the
multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly a princess
of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she was not really
this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her reading: out of the
multicoloured illusion of this her life, she must move on, to the
Grammar School in Nottingham.
She was shy, and she suffered. For one thing, she bit her nails, and
had a cruel consciousness in her finger-tips, a shame, an exposure. Out
of all proportion, this shame haunted her. She spent hours of torture,
conjuring how she might keep her gloves on: if she might say her hands
were scalded, if she might seem to forget to take off her gloves.
For she was going to inherit her own estate, when she went to the High
School. There, each girl was a lady. There, she was going to walk among
free souls, her co-mates and her equals, and all petty things would be
put away. Ah, if only she did not bite her nails! If only she had not
this blemish! She wanted so much to be perfect—without spot or blemish,
living the high, noble life.
It was a grief to her that her father made such a poor introduction. He
was brief as ever, like a boy saying his errand, and his clothes looked
ill-fitting and casual. Whereas Ursula would have liked robes and a
ceremonial of introduction to this, her new estate.
She made a new illusion of school. Miss Grey, the headmistress, had a
certain silvery, school-mistressy beauty of character. The school
itself had been a gentleman’s house. Dark, sombre lawns separated it
from the dark, select avenue. But its rooms were large and of good
appearance, and from the back, one looked over lawns and shrubbery,
over the trees and the grassy slope of the Arboretum, to the town which
heaped the hollow with its roofs and cupolas and its shadows.
So Ursula seated herself upon the hill of learning, looking down on the
smoke and confusion and the manufacturing, engrossed activity of the
town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar School, she fancied the
air was finer, beyond the factory smoke. She wanted to learn Latin and
Greek and French and mathematics. She trembled like a postulant when
she wrote the Greek alphabet for the first time.
She was upon another hill-slope, whose summit she had not scaled. There
was always the marvellous eagerness in her heart, to climb and to see
beyond. A Latin verb was virgin soil to her: she sniffed a new odour in
it; it meant something, though she did not know what it meant. But she
gathered it up: it was significant. When she knew that:
x2 – y2 = (x + y) (x – y)
then she felt that she had grasped something, that she was liberated
into an intoxicating air, rare and unconditioned. And she was very glad
as she wrote her French exercise:
“_J’ai donné le pain à mon petit frère_.”
In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her heart,
exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never forgot her
brown “Longman’s First French Grammar”, nor her “Via Latina” with its
red edges, nor her little grey Algebra book. There was always a magic
in them.
At learning she was quick, intelligent, instinctive, but she was not
“thorough”. If a thing did not come to her instinctively, she could not
learn it. And then, her mad rage of loathing for all lessons, her
bitter contempt of all teachers and schoolmistresses, her recoil to a
fierce, animal arrogance made her detestable.
She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her revolts: there
was no law for her, nor any rule. She existed for herself alone. Then
ensued a long struggle with everybody, in which she broke down at last,
when she had run the full length of her resistance, and sobbed her
heart out, desolate; and afterwards, in a chastened, washed-out,
bodiless state, she received the understanding that would not come
before, and went her way sadder and wiser.
Ursula and Gudrun went to school together. Gudrun was a shy, quiet,
wild creature, a thin slip of a thing hanging back from notice or
twisting past to disappear into her own world again. She seemed to
avoid all contact, instinctively, and pursued her own intent way,
pursuing half-formed fancies that had no relation to anyone else.
She was not clever at all. She thought Ursula clever enough for two.
Ursula understood, so why should she, Gudrun, bother herself? The
younger girl lived her religious, responsible life in her sister, by
proxy. For herself, she was indifferent and intent as a wild animal,
and as irresponsible.
When she found herself at the bottom of the class, she laughed, lazily,
and was content, saying she was safe now. She did not mind her father’s
chagrin nor her mother’s tinge of mortification.
“What do I pay for you to go to Nottingham for?” her father asked,
exasperated.
“Well, Dad, you know you needn’t pay for me,” she replied, nonchalant.
“I’m ready to stop at home.”
She was happy at home, Ursula was not. Slim and unwilling abroad,
Gudrun was easy in her own house as a wild thing in its lair. Whereas
Ursula, attentive and keen abroad, at home was reluctant, uneasy,
unwilling to be herself, or unable.
Nevertheless Sunday remained the maximum day of the week for both.
Ursula turned passionately to it, to the sense of eternal security it
gave. She suffered anguish of fears during the week-days, for she felt
strong powers that would not recognize her. There was upon her always a
fear and a dislike of authority. She felt she could always do as she
wanted if she managed to avoid a battle with Authority and the
authorised Powers. But if she gave herself away, she would be lost,
destroyed. There was always the menace against her.
This strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to
seize hold upon her this feeling of the grudging power of the mob lying
in wait for her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest
influences of her life. Wherever she was, at school, among friends, in
the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made
herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was, for fear that her
undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish
resentment of the commonplace, the average Self.
She was fairly safe at school, now. She knew how to take her place
there, and how much of herself to reserve. But she was free only on
Sundays. When she was but a girl of fourteen, she began to feel a
resentment growing against her in her own home. She knew she was the
disturbing influence there. But as yet, on Sundays, she was free,
really free, free to be herself, without fear or misgiving.
Even at its stormiest, Sunday was a blessed day. Ursula woke to it with
a feeling of immense relief. She wondered why her heart was so light.
Then she remembered it was Sunday. A gladness seemed to burst out
around her, a feeling of great freedom. The whole world was for
twenty-four hours revoked, put back. Only the Sunday world existed.
She loved the very confusion of the household. It was lucky if the
children slept till seven o’clock. Usually, soon after six, a chirp was
heard, a voice, an excited chirrup began, announcing the creation of a
new day, there was a thudding of quick little feet, and the children
were up and about, scampering in their shirts, with pink legs and
glistening, flossy hair all clean from the Saturday’s night bathing,
their souls excited by their bodies’ cleanliness.
As the house began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean children, one
of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and slatternly, with her
thick, dark hair loosely coiled and slipping over one ear, or the
father, warm and comfortable, with ruffled black hair and shirt
unbuttoned at the neck.
Then the girls upstairs heard the continual:
“Now then, Billy, what are you up to?” in the father’s strong,
vibrating voice: or the mother’s dignified:
“I have said, Cassie, I will not have it.”
It was amazing how the father’s voice could ring out like a gong,
without his being in the least moved, and how the mother could speak
like a queen holding an audience, though her blouse was sticking out
all round and her hair was not fastened up and the children were
yelling a pandemonium.
Gradually breakfast was produced, and the elder girls came down into
the babel, whilst half-naked children flitted round like the wrong ends
of cherubs, as Gudrun said, watching the bare little legs and the
chubby tails appearing and disappearing.
Gradually the young ones were captured, and nightdresses finally
removed, ready for the clean Sunday shirt. But before the Sunday shirt
was slipped over the fleecy head, away darted the naked body, to wallow
in the sheepskin which formed the parlour rug, whilst the mother walked
after, protesting sharply, holding the shirt like a noose, and the
father’s bronze voice rang out, and the naked child wallowing on its
back in the deep sheepskin announced gleefully:
“I’m bading in the sea, mother.”
“Why should I walk after you with your shirt?” said the mother. “Get up
now.”
“I’m bading in the sea, mother,” repeated the wallowing, naked figure.
“We say bathing, not bading,” said the mother, with her strange,
indifferent dignity. “I am waiting here with your shirt.”
At length shirts were on, and stockings were paired, and little
trousers buttoned and little petticoats tied behind. The besetting
cowardice of the family was its shirking of the garter question.
“Where are your garters, Cassie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, look for them.”
But not one of the elder Brangwens would really face the situation.
After Cassie had grovelled under all the furniture and blacked up all
her Sunday cleanliness, to the infinite grief of everybody, the garter
was forgotten in the new washing of the young face and hands.
Later, Ursula would be indignant to see Miss Cassie marching into
church from Sunday school with her stocking sluthered down to her
ankle, and a grubby knee showing.
“It’s disgraceful!” cried Ursula at dinner. “People will think we’re
pigs, and the children are never washed.”
“Never mind what people think,” said the mother superbly. “I see that
the child is bathed properly, and if I satisfy myself I satisfy
everybody. She can’t keep her stocking up and no garter, and it isn’t
the child’s fault she was let to go without one.”
The garter trouble continued in varying degrees, but till each child
wore long skirts or long trousers, it was not removed.
On this day of decorum, the Brangwen family went to church by the
high-road, making a detour outside all the garden-hedge, rather than
climb the wall into the churchyard. There was no law of this, from the
parents. The children themselves were the wardens of the Sabbath
decency, very jealous and instant with each other.
It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the house was
really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing like a strange
bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading and tale-telling and
quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were allowed. Out of doors, all
playing was to be carried on unobtrusively. If there were noise,
yelling or shouting, then some fierce spirit woke up in the father and
the elder children, so that the younger were subdued, afraid of being
excommunicated.
The children themselves preserved the Sabbath. If Ursula in her vanity
sang:
“Il était un’ bergère
Et ron-ron-ron petit patapon,”
Theresa was sure to cry:
“_That’s_ not a Sunday song, our Ursula.”
“You don’t know,” replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she wavered.
And her song faded down before she came to the end.
Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very precious to
her. She found herself in a strange, undefined place, where her spirit
could wander in dreams, unassailed.
The white-robed spirit of Christ passed between olive trees. It was a
vision, not a reality. And she herself partook of the visionary being.
There was the voice in the night calling, “Samuel, Samuel!” And still
the voice called in the night. But not this night, nor last night, but
in the unfathomed night of Sunday, of the Sabbath silence.
There was Sin, the serpent, in whom was also wisdom. There was Judas
with the money and the kiss.
But there was no _actual_ Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa across the
face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the everlasting. It was
misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from Sunday school, he was bad, he
was wicked, but he was not a Sinner.
Sin was absolute and everlasting: wickedness and badness were temporary
and relative. When Billy, catching up the local jargon, called Cassie a
“sinner”, everybody detested him. Yet when there came to the Marsh a
flippetty-floppetty foxhound puppy, he was mischievously christened
“Sinner”.
The Brangwens shrank from applying their religion to their own
immediate actions. They wanted the sense of the eternal and immortal,
not a list of rules for everyday conduct. Therefore they were
badly-behaved children, headstrong and arrogant, though their feelings
were generous. They had, moreover—intolerable to their ordinary
neighbours—a proud gesture, that did not fit with the jealous idea of
the democratic Christian. So that they were always extraordinary,
outside of the ordinary.
How bitterly Ursula resented her first acquaintance with evangelical
teachings. She got a peculiar thrill from the application of salvation
to her own personal case. “Jesus died for me, He suffered for me.”
There was a pride and a thrill in it, followed almost immediately by a
sense of dreariness. Jesus with holes in His hands and feet: it was
distasteful to her. The shadowy Jesus with the Stigmata: that was her
own vision. But Jesus the actual man, talking with teeth and lips,
telling one to put one’s finger into His wounds, like a villager
gloating in his sores, repelled her. She was enemy of those who
insisted on the humanity of Christ. If He were just a man, living in
ordinary human life, then she was indifferent.
But it was the jealousy of vulgar people which must insist on the
humanity of Christ. It was the vulgar mind which would allow nothing
extra-human, nothing beyond itself to exist. It was the dirty,
desecrating hands of the revivalists which wanted to drag Jesus into
this everyday life, to dress Jesus up in trousers and frock-coat, to
compel Him to a vulgar equality of footing. It was the impudent
suburban soul which would ask, “What would Jesus do, if he were in my
shoes?”
Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If any one, it was the
mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of the vulgar
clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She never really
subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen’s mystical passion.
But Ursula was with her father. As she became adolescent, thirteen,
fourteen, she set more and more against her mother’s practical
indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous, almost wicked in
her mother’s attitude. What did Anna Brangwen, in these years, care for
God or Jesus or Angels? She was the immediate life of to-day. Children
were still being born to her, she was throng with all the little
activities of her family. And almost instinctively she resented her
husband’s slavish service to the Church, his dark, subject hankering to
worship an unseen God. What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man
had a young family that needed fettling for? Let him attend to the
immediate concerns of his life, not go projecting himself towards the
ultimate.
But Ursula was all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt against
babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another world, He was
not of this world. He did not thrust His hands under her face and,
pointing to His wounds, say:
“Look, Ursula Brangwen, I got these for your sake. Now do as you’re
told.”
To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the distance, like a
white moon at sunset, a crescent moon beckoning as it follows the sun,
out of our ken. Sometimes dark clouds standing very far off, pricking
up into a clear yellow band of sunset, of a winter evening, reminded
her of Calvary, sometimes the full moon rising blood-red upon the hill
terrified her with the knowledge that Christ was now dead, hanging
heavy and dead upon the Cross.
On Sundays, this visionary world came to pass. She heard the long hush,
she knew the marriage of dark and light was taking place. In church,
the Voice sounded, re-echoing not from this world, as if the Church
itself were a shell that still spoke the language of creation.
“The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they
took them wives of all which they chose.
“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with Man, for
that he also is flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty
years.
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that,
when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare
children unto them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men
of renown.”
Over this Ursula was stirred as by a call from far off. In those days,
would not the Sons of God have found her fair, would she not have been
taken to wife by one of the Sons of God? It was a dream that frightened
her, for she could not understand it.
Who were the sons of God? Was not Jesus the only begotten Son? Was not
Adam the only man created from God? Yet there were men not begotten by
Adam. Who were these, and whence did they come? They too must derive
from God. Had God many offspring, besides Adam and besides Jesus,
children whose origin the children of Adam cannot recognize? And
perhaps these children, these sons of God, had known no expulsion, no
ignominy of the fall.
These came on free feet to the daughters of men, and saw they were
fair, and took them to wife, so that the women conceived and brought
forth men of renown. This was a genuine fate. She moved about in the
essential days, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men.
Nor would any comparison of myths destroy her passion in the knowledge.
Jove had become a bull, or a man, in order to love a mortal woman. He
had begotten in her a giant, a hero.
Very good, so he had, in Greece. For herself, she was no Grecian woman.
Not Jove nor Pan nor any of those gods, not even Bacchus nor Apollo,
could come to her. But the Sons of God who took to wife the daughters
of men, these were such as should take her to wife.
She clung to the secret hope, the aspiration. She lived a dual life,
one where the facts of daily life encompassed everything, being legion,
and the other wherein the facts of daily life were superseded by the
eternal truth. So utterly did she desire the Sons of God should come to
the daughters of men; and she believed more in her desire and its
fulfilment than in the obvious facts of life. The fact that a man was a
man, did not state his descent from Adam, did not exclude that he was
also one of the unhistoried, unaccountable Sons of God. As yet, she was
confused, but not denied.
Again she heard the Voice:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter into heaven.”
But it was explained, the needle’s eye was a little gateway for foot
passengers, through which the great, humped camel with his load could
not possibly squeeze himself: or perhaps at a great risk, if he were a
little camel, he might get through. For one could not absolutely
exclude the rich man from heaven, said the Sunday school teachers.
It pleased her also to know, that in the East one must use hyperbole,
or else remain unheard; because the Eastern man must see a thing
swelling to fill all heaven, or dwindled to a mere nothing, before he
is suitably impressed. She immediately sympathized with this Eastern
mind.
Yet the words continued to have a meaning that was untouched either by
the knowledge of gateways or hyperboles. The historical, or local, or
psychological interest in the words was another thing. There remained
unaltered the inexplicable value of the saying. What was this relation
between a needle’s eye, a rich man, and heaven? What sort of a needle’s
eye, what sort of a rich man, what sort of heaven? Who knows? It means
the Absolute World, and can never be more than half interpreted in
terms of the relative world.
But must one apply the speech literally? Was her father a rich man?
Couldn’t he get to heaven? Or was he only a half-rich man? Or was he
merely a poor man? At any rate, unless he gave everything away to the
poor, he would find it much harder to get to heaven. The needle’s eye
would be too tight for him. She almost wished he were penniless poor.
If one were coming to the base of it, any man was rich who was not as
poor as the poorest.
She had her qualms, when in imagination she saw her father giving away
their piano and the two cows, and the capital at the bank, to the
labourers of the district, so that they, the Brangwens, should be as
poor as the Wherrys. And she did not want it. She was impatient.
“Very well,” she thought, “we’ll forego that heaven, that’s all—at any
rate the needle’s eye sort.” And she dismissed the problem. She was not
going to be as poor as the Wherrys, not for all the sayings on
earth—the miserable squalid Wherrys.
So she reverted to the non-literal application of the scriptures. Her
father very rarely read, but he had collected many books of
reproductions, and he would sit and look at these, curiously intent,
like a child, yet with a passion that was not childish. He loved the
early Italian painters, but particularly Giotto and Fra Angelico and
Filippo Lippi. The great compositions cast a spell over him. How many
times had he turned to Raphael’s “Dispute of the Sacrament” or Fra
Angelico’s “Last Judgment” or the beautiful, complicated renderings of
the Adoration of the Magi, and always, each time, he received the same
gradual fulfilment of delight. It had to do with the establishment of a
whole mystical, architectural conception which used the human figure as
a unit. Sometimes he had to hurry home, and go to the Fra Angelico
“Last Judgment”. The pathway of open graves, the huddled earth on
either side, the seemly heaven arranged above, the singing process to
paradise on the one hand, the stuttering descent to hell on the other,
completed and satisfied him. He did not care whether or not he believed
in devils or angels. The whole conception gave him the deepest
satisfaction, and he wanted nothing more.
Ursula, accustomed to these pictures from her childhood, hunted out
their detail. She adored Fra Angelico’s flowers and light and angels,
she liked the demons and enjoyed the hell. But the representation of
the encircled God, surrounded by all the angels on high, suddenly bored
her. The figure of the Most High bored her, and roused her resentment.
Was this the culmination and the meaning of it all, this draped, null
figure? The angels were so lovely, and the light so beautiful. And only
for this, to surround such a banality for God!
She was dissatisfied, but not fit as yet to criticize. There was yet so
much to wonder over. Winter came, pine branches were torn down in the
snow, the green pine needles looked rich upon the ground. There was the
wonderful, starry, straight track of a pheasant’s footsteps across the
snow imprinted so clear; there was the lobbing mark of the rabbit, two
holes abreast, two holes following behind; the hare shoved deeper
shafts, slanting, and his two hind feet came down together and made one
large pit; the cat podded little holes, and birds made a lacy pattern.
Gradually there gathered the feeling of expectation. Christmas was
coming. In the shed, at nights, a secret candle was burning, a sound of
veiled voices was heard. The boys were learning the old mystery play of
St. George and Beelzebub. Twice a week, by lamplight, there was choir
practice in the church, for the learning of old carols Brangwen wanted
to hear. The girls went to these practices. Everywhere was a sense of
mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.
The time came near, the girls were decorating the church, with cold
fingers binding holly and fir and yew about the pillars, till a new
spirit was in the church, the stone broke out into dark, rich leaf, the
arches put forth their buds, and cold flowers rose to blossom in the
dim, mystic atmosphere. Ursula must weave mistletoe over the door, and
over the screen, and hang a silver dove from a sprig of yew, till dusk
came down, and the church was like a grove.
In the cow-shed the boys were blacking their faces for a
dress-rehearsal; the turkey hung dead, with opened, speckled wings, in
the dairy. The time was come to make pies, in readiness.
The expectation grew more tense. The star was risen into the sky, the
songs, the carols were ready to hail it. The star was the sign in the
sky. Earth too should give a sign. As evening drew on, hearts beat fast
with anticipation, hands were full of ready gifts. There were the
tremulously expectant words of the church service, the night was past
and the morning was come, the gifts were given and received, joy and
peace made a flapping of wings in each heart, there was a great burst
of carols, the Peace of the World had dawned, strife had passed away,
every hand was linked in hand, every heart was singing.
It was bitter, though, that Christmas Day, as it drew on to evening,
and night, became a sort of bank holiday, flat and stale. The morning
was so wonderful, but in the afternoon and evening the ecstasy perished
like a nipped thing, like a bud in a false spring. Alas, that Christmas
was only a domestic feast, a feast of sweetmeats and toys! Why did not
the grown-ups also change their everyday hearts, and give way to
ecstasy? Where was the ecstasy?
How passionately the Brangwens craved for it, the ecstasy. The father
was troubled, dark-faced and disconsolate, on Christmas night, because
the passion was not there, because the day was become as every day, and
hearts were not aflame. Upon the mother was a kind of absentness, as
ever, as if she were exiled for all her life. Where was the fiery heart
of joy, now the coming was fulfilled; where was the star, the Magi’s
transport, the thrill of new being that shook the earth?
Still it was there, even if it were faint and inadequate. The cycle of
creation still wheeled in the Church year. After Christmas, the ecstasy
slowly sank and changed. Sunday followed Sunday, trailing a fine
movement, a finely developed transformation over the heart of the
family. The heart that was big with joy, that had seen the star and had
followed to the inner walls of the Nativity, that there had swooned in
the great light, must now feel the light slowly withdrawing, a shadow
falling, darkening. The chill crept in, silence came over the earth,
and then all was darkness. The veil of the temple was rent, each heart
gave up the ghost, and sank dead.
They moved quietly, a little wanness on the lips of the children, at
Good Friday, feeling the shadow upon their hearts. Then, pale with a
deathly scent, came the lilies of resurrection, that shone coldly till
the Comforter was given.
But why the memory of the wounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with
healed hands and feet, sound and strong and glad? Surely the passage of
the cross and the tomb was forgotten? But no—always the memory of the
wounds, always the smell of grave-clothes? A small thing was
Resurrection, compared with the Cross and the death, in this cycle.
So the children lived the year of christianity, the epic of the soul of
mankind. Year by year the inner, unknown drama went on in them, their
hearts were born and came to fulness, suffered on the cross, gave up
the ghost, and rose again to unnumbered days, untired, having at least
this rhythm of eternity in a ragged, inconsequential life.
But it was becoming a mechanical action now, this drama: birth at
Christmas for death at Good Friday. On Easter Sunday the life-drama was
as good as finished. For the Resurrection was shadowy and overcome by
the shadow of death, the Ascension was scarce noticed, a mere
confirmation of death.
What was the hope and the fulfilment? Nay, was it all only a useless
after-death, a wan, bodiless after-death? Alas, and alas for the
passion of the human heart, that must die so long before the body was
dead.
For from the grave, after the passion and the trial of anguish, the
body rose torn and chill and colourless. Did not Christ say, “Mary!”
and when she turned with outstretched hands to him, did he not hasten
to add, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.”
Then how could the hands rejoice, or the heart be glad, seeing
themselves repulsed. Alas, for the resurrection of the dead body! Alas,
for the wavering, glimmering appearance of the risen Christ. Alas, for
the Ascension into heaven, which is a shadow within death, a complete
passing away.
Alas, that so soon the drama is over; that life is ended at
thirty-three; that the half of the year of the soul is cold and
historiless! Alas, that a risen Christ has no place with us! Alas, that
the memory of the passion of Sorrow and Death and the Grave holds
triumph over the pale fact of Resurrection!
But why? Why shall I not rise with my body whole and perfect, shining
with strong life? Why, when Mary says: Rabboni, shall I not take her in
my arms and kiss her and hold her to my breast? Why is the risen body
deadly, and abhorrent with wounds?
The Resurrection is to life, not to death. Shall I not see those who
have risen again walk here among men perfect in body and spirit, whole
and glad in the flesh, living in the flesh, loving in the flesh,
begetting children in the flesh, arrived at last to wholeness, perfect
without scar or blemish, healthy without fear of ill health? Is this
not the period of manhood and of joy and fulfilment, after the
Resurrection? Who shall be shadowed by Death and the Cross, being
risen, and who shall fear the mystic, perfect flesh that belongs to
heaven?
Can I not, then, walk this earth in gladness, being risen from sorrow?
Can I not eat with my brother happily, and with joy kiss my beloved,
after my resurrection, celebrate my marriage in the flesh with
feastings, go about my business eagerly, in the joy of my fellows? Is
heaven impatient for me, and bitter against this earth, that I should
hurry off, or that I should linger pale and untouched? Is the flesh
which was crucified become as poison to the crowds in the street, or is
it as a strong gladness and hope to them, as the first flower
blossoming out of the earth’s humus?