THE MAN’S WORLD
Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her schooldays
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. Brangwen was
again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had died of diphtheria
in infancy.
Even this fact of her mother’s pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs.
Brangwen 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 youth’s 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. Brangwen care about, but the
children, the house, and a 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 child-bearing had kept her young and
undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when Gudrun 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 fulfilment, she
cast them off. But she remained dominant in the house. Brangwen
continued in a kind of rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with
his wife. They 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, unshakeable as ever,
Mrs. Brangwen 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. Brangwen
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.
“Ay,” said the mother, “there’s 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. She
hated her mother bitterly. 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, she turned her
back in silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with
supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child not to be
taken seriously.
Brangwen 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 a
wholesale brutality that made Ursula go white, mute, and numb. Her
feelings seemed to be becoming deadened in her, her temper hard and
cold.
Brangwen himself was in one of his states or 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 draughtsman, 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 woodcarving, 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 Cossethay, building the organ for the
church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of
beauty in 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 modelling. To his surprise he
found he could do it. Modelling 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. With a little ash in his mouth he gave
up. He continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from
classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had loved
Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of the
freshness, the naïve alertness of the early Italians. But it was only
reproduction.
Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting. But he
tried water-colour 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 modelling,
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 jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored 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 womenfolk. Then he made rings
and bracelets.
Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. 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 post-card. But it was as if she were a blank wall in his
direction, without windows or outgoing. 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 symbol of her real life. 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! She
remembered what she had written in her diary:
“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.”
Ah, 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 for ever. The tiny, vivid
germ that contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was
killed, 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 poky 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 Cossethay, within the sordid scope of Ilkeston. 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 in 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 fulfil. 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 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 workshed. 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 moustache was cut close over his wide mouth,
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. A
hot anger came over his breast and belly.
“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 harden 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.”
He wished her matric. in hell.
“And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?” he asked,
jeering.
“Fifty 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-gnat 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 lamplight fell on the burned
silver bowl that lay between him, on mallet and furnace and chisel.
Brangwen stood with a queer, catlike light on his face, almost like a
smile. But it was no smile.
“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. Her soul was full of bitterness.
She went to the Free Library in Ilkeston, copied out addresses from the
_Schoolmistress,_ 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 at 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
head-mistress and from the clergyman.
At last, however, it was finished. She had sealed the three long
envelopes. In the afternoon she went down to Ilkeston 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-Thames, 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 hopfields, where the
sun shone softly, she came out of school in the afternoon into the
shadow of the plane 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 phlox 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. Wetherall?”
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, ah, 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-Thames.
Kingston-on-Thames 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 lawns 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 empyrean.
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-Thames. 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-Thames—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, bare-headed,
standing in the sunshine grouped on either side waiting.
“Sweet Thames, 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 shadowily within
the candle-light.
“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.
“You’ve got what?” he answered, unwilling to come out of his mood of
organ-playing. 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-Thames. I must go on Thursday for an interview with the
Committee.”
“You must go on Thursday?”
“Yes.”
And she handed him the letter. He read it by the light of the candles.
“Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay, 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, then 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. All the time a sort of string was tugging, tugging him
elsewhere, miserably.
So that when he came into the house after choir-practice his face was
dark and his heart black. 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-Thames”—and then the typewritten “Miss
Ursula Brangwen, Yew Tree Cottage, Cossethay.” It was all so 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 clamour her revolt.
“If you think you’re going dancin’ off to th’ other side of London,
you’re mistaken.”
“Why not?” she cried, at once hard fixed in her will to go.
“That’s why not,” he said.
And there was silence till Mrs. Brangwen came downstairs.
“Look here, Anna,” he said, handing her the letter.
She put back her head, seeing a typewritten 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-Thames, 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 you or not, if your father
says you are not to go,” said the mother calmly.
How Ursula hated her!
“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 Ilkeston, where you can live at home?”
asked Gudrun, who hated conflicts, who could not understand Ursula’s
uneasy way, yet who must stand by her sister.
“There aren’t any places in Ilkeston,” cried Ursula. “And I’d rather go
right away.”
“If you’d asked about it, a place could have been got for you in
Ilkeston. But you had to play Miss High-an’-mighty, and go your own
way,” said her father.
“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 s’ll 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 parlour.
“C’est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenêtre qu’est-ce qui le lui renda——”
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 to-morrow. He’ll tell me on Friday.”
So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames 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
Ilkeston, because she knew Ilkeston, 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 Ilkeston. 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
class-rooms.
The headmaster, Mr. Harby, 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 sun of the school, the children would blossom
like little weeds, the teachers like tall, hard plants would burst into
rare flower.
The Monday morning came. It was the end of September, and a drizzle of
fine rain like veils round her, making her seem intimate, a world to
herself. She walked forward to the new land. The old was blotted out.
The veil would be rent that hid the new world. She was gripped hard
with suspense as she went down the hill in the rain, carrying her
dinner-bag.
Through the thin rain she saw the town, a black, extensive mount. She
must enter in upon it. She felt at once a feeling of repugnance and of
excited fulfilment. But she shrank.
She waited at the terminus for the tram. Here it was beginning. Before
her was the station to Nottingham, whence Theresa had gone to school
half an hour before; behind her was the little church school she had
attended when she was a child, when her grandmother was alive. Her
grandmother had been dead two years now. There was a strange woman at
the Marsh, with her Uncle Fred, and a small baby. Behind her was
Cossethay, and blackberries were ripe on the hedges.
As she waited at the tram-terminus she reverted swiftly to her
childhood; her teasing grandfather, with his fair beard and blue eyes,
and his big, monumental body; he had got drowned: her grandmother, whom
Ursula would sometimes say she had loved more than anyone else in the
world: the little church school, the Phillips boys; one was a soldier
in the Life Guards now, one was a collier. With a passion she clung to
the past.
But as she dreamed of it, she heard the tram-car grinding round a bend,
rumbling dully, she saw it draw into sight, and hum nearer. It sidled
round the loop at the terminus, and came to a standstill, looming above
her. Some shadowy grey people stepped from the far end, the conductor
was walking in the puddles, swinging round the pole.
She mounted into the wet, comfortless tram, whose floor was dark with
wet, whose windows were all steamed, and she sat in suspense. It had
begun, her new existence.
One other passenger mounted—a sort of charwoman with a drab, wet coat.
Ursula could not bear the waiting of the tram. The bell clanged, there
was a lurch forward. The car moved cautiously down the wet street. She
was being carried forward, into her new existence. Her heart burned
with pain and suspense, as if something were cutting her living tissue.
Often, oh often the tram seemed to stop, and wet, cloaked people
mounted and sat mute and grey in stiff rows opposite her, their
umbrellas between their knees. The windows of the tram grew more
steamy; opaque. She was shut in with these unliving, spectral people.
Even yet it did not occur to her that she was one of them. The
conductor came down issuing tickets. Each little ring of his clipper
sent a pang of dread through her. But her ticket surely was different
from the rest.
They were all going to work; she also was going to work. Her ticket was
the same. She sat trying to fit in with them. But fear was at her
bowels, she felt an unknown, terrible grip upon her.
At Bath Street she must dismount and change trams. She looked uphill.
It seemed to lead to freedom. She remembered the many Saturday
afternoons she had walked up to the shops. How free and careless she
had been!
Ah, her tram was sliding gingerly downhill. She dreaded every yard of
her conveyance. The car halted, she mounted hastily.
She kept turning her head as the car ran on, because she was uncertain
of the street. At last, her heart a flame of suspense, trembling, she
rose. The conductor rang the bell brusquely.
She was walking down a small, mean, wet street, empty of people. The
school squatted low within its railed, asphalt yard, that shone black
with rain. The building was grimy, and horrible, dry plants were
shadowily looking through the windows.
She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place seemed to
have a threatening expression, imitating the church’s architecture, for
the purpose of domineering, like a gesture of vulgar authority. She saw
that one pair of feet had paddled across the flagstone floor of the
porch. The place was silent, deserted, like an empty prison waiting the
return of tramping feet.
Ursula went forward to the teachers’ room that burrowed in a gloomy
hole. She knocked timidly.
“Come in!” called a surprised man’s voice, as from a prison cell. She
entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was
lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirt-sleeves was
rubbing a paper on a jellytray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow,
sharp face, said “Good morning,” then turned away again, and stripped
the paper off the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing
transferred, before he dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap.
Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the
narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.
“Isn’t it a nasty morning,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s not much of weather.”
But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed.
This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo.
Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof.
“Am I early?” she asked.
The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to
be sharpened to needle-points of vision.
“Twenty-five past,” he said. “You’re the second to come. I’m first this
morning.”
Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin
red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing,
pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again.
There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the
table.
“Must you do so many?” asked Ursula.
Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three
years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes
were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl
thought.
“Sixty-three,” he answered.
“So many!” she said, gently. Then she remembered.
“But they’re not all for your class, are they?” she added.
“Why aren’t they?” he replied, a fierceness in his voice.
Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his
directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never
been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were
addressing a machine.
“It is too many,” she said sympathetically.
“You’ll get about the same,” he said.
That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to
feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer,
sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened
her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature.
The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about
twenty-eight appeared.
“Oh, Ursula!” the newcomer exclaimed. “You are here early! My word,
I’ll warrant you don’t keep it up. That’s Mr. Williamson’s peg. This is
yours. Standard Five teacher always has this. Aren’t you going to take
your hat off?”
Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula’s waterproof from the peg on which it
was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had already
snatched the pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed them through her
coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat,
dun-coloured hair.
“Isn’t it a beastly morning,” she exclaimed, “beastly! And if there’s
one thing I hate above another it’s a wet Monday morning;—pack of kids
trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding ’em——”
She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying
it round her waist.
“You’ve brought an apron, haven’t you?” she said jerkily, glancing at
Ursula. “Oh—you’ll want one. You’ve no idea what a sight you’ll look
before half-past four, what with chalk and ink and kids’ dirty
feet.—Well, I can send a boy down to mamma’s for one.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Ursula.
“Oh, yes—I can send easily,” cried Miss Harby.
Ursula’s heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was
she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss
Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored
him. Ursula felt the callous crude rudeness between the two teachers.
The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were already
clattering in the porch.
“Jim Richards,” called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A boy came
sheepishly forward.
“Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?” said Miss Harby, in a
commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait for an
answer. “Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my school pinas, for
Miss Brangwen—shall you?”
The boy muttered a sheepish “Yes, miss,” and was moving away.
“Hey,” called Miss Harby. “Come here—now what are you going for? What
shall you say to mamma?”
“A school pina——” muttered the boy.
“‘Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her another school
pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she’s come without one.’”
“Yes, miss,” muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving off. Miss
Harby caught him back, holding him by the shoulder.
“What are you going to say?”
“Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss Brangwin,”
muttered the boy very sheepishly.
“Miss _Brangwen!_” laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away. “Here, you’d
better have my umbrella—wait a minute.”
The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby’s umbrella, and set
off.
“Don’t take long over it,” called Miss Harby, after him. Then she
turned to Ursula, and said brightly:
“Oh, he’s a caution, that lad—but not bad, you know.”
“No,” Ursula agreed, weakly.
The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room. Ursula
glanced down the place. Its rigid, long silence was official and
chilling. Half-way down was a glass partition, the doors of which were
open. A clock ticked re-echoing, and Miss Harby’s voice sounded double
as she said:
“This is the big room—Standard Five-Six-and-Seven.—Here’s your
place—Five——”
She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a small high
teacher’s desk facing a squadron of long benches, two high windows in
the wall opposite.
It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious, unliving light
in the room changed her character. She thought it was the rainy
morning. Then she looked up again, because of the horrid feeling of
being shut in a rigid, inflexible air, away from all feeling of the
ordinary day; and she noticed that the windows were of ribbed, suffused
glass.
The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed,
pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums
against the pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a
squadron, and dread filled her. This was a new world, a new life, with
which she was threatened. But still excited, she climbed into her chair
at her teacher’s desk. It was high, and her feet could not reach the
ground, but must rest on the step. Lifted up there, off the ground, she
was in office. How queer, how queer it all was! How different it was
from the mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought of her own
village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off, so lost
to her.
She was here in this hard, stark reality—reality. It was queer that she
should call this the reality, which she had never known till to-day,
and which now so filled her with dread and dislike, that she wished she
might go away. This was the reality, and Cossethay, her beloved,
beautiful, wellknown Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was
minor reality. This prison of a school was reality. Here, then, she
would sit in state, the queen of scholars! Here she would realize her
dream of being the beloved teacher bringing light and joy to her
children! But the desks before her had an abstract angularity that
bruised her sentiment and made her shrink. She winced, feeling she had
been a fool in her anticipations. She had brought her feelings and her
generosity to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And
already she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of
place.
She slid down, and they returned to the teacher’s room. It was queer to
feel that one ought to alter one’s personality. She was nobody, there
was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she
must apply herself to it.
Mr. Harby was in the teachers’ room, standing before a big, open
cupboard, in which Ursula could see piles of pink blotting-paper, heaps
of shiny new books, boxes of chalk, and bottles of coloured inks. It
looked a treasure store.
The schoolmaster was a short, sturdy man, with a fine head, and a heavy
jowl. Nevertheless he was good-looking, with his shapely brows and
nose, and his great, hanging moustache. He seemed absorbed in his work,
and took no notice of Ursula’s entry. There was something insulting in
the way he could be so actively unaware of another person, so occupied.
When he had a moment of absence, he looked up from the table and said
good-morning to Ursula. There was a pleasant light in his brown eyes.
He seemed very manly and incontrovertible, like something she wanted to
push over.
“You had a wet walk,” he said to Ursula.
“Oh, I don’t mind, I’m used to it,” she replied, with a nervous little
laugh.
But already he was not listening. Her words sounded ridiculous and
babbling. He was taking no notice of her.
“You will sign your name here,” he said to her, as if she were some
child—“and the time when you come and go.”
Ursula signed her name in the time book and stood back. No one took any
further notice of her. She beat her brains for something to say, but in
vain.
“I’d let them in now,” said Mr. Harby to the thin man, who was very
hastily arranging his papers.
The assistant teacher made no sign of acquiescence, and went on with
what he was doing. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. At the last
moment Mr. Brunt slipped into his coat.
“You will go to the girls’ lobby,” said the schoolmaster to Ursula,
with a fascinating, insulting geniality, purely official and
domineering.
She went out and found Miss Harby, and another girl teacher, in the
porch. On the asphalt yard the rain was falling. A toneless bell
tang-tang-tanged drearily overhead, monotonously, insistently. It came
to an end. Then Mr. Brunt was seen, bare-headed, standing at the other
gate of the school yard, blowing shrill blasts on a whistle and looking
down the rainy, dreary street.
Boys in gangs and streams came trotting up, running past the master and
with a loud clatter of feet and voices, over the yard to the boys’
porch. Girls were running and walking through the other entrance.
In the porch where Ursula stood there was a great noise of girls, who
were tearing off their coats and hats, and hanging them on the racks
bristling with pegs. There was a smell of wet clothing, a tossing out
of wet, draggled hair, a noise of voices and feet.
The mass of girls grew greater, the rage around the pegs grew steadier,
the scholars tended to fall into little noisy gangs in the porch. Then
Violet Harby clapped her hands, clapped them louder, with a shrill
“Quiet, girls, quiet!”
There was a pause. The hubbub died down but did not cease.
“What did I say?” cried Miss Harby, shrilly.
There was almost complete silence. Sometimes a girl, rather late,
whirled into the porch and flung off her things.
“Leaders—in place,” commanded Miss Harby shrilly.
Pairs of girls in pinafores and long hair stood separate in the porch.
“Standard Four, Five, and Six—fall in,” cried Miss Harby.
There was a hubbub, which gradually resolved itself into three columns
of girls, two and two, standing smirking in the passage. In among the
peg-racks, other teachers were putting the lower classes into ranks.
Ursula stood by her own Standard Five. They were jerking their
shoulders, tossing their hair, nudging, writhing, staring, grinning,
whispering and twisting.
A sharp whistle was heard, and Standard Six, the biggest girls, set
off, led by Miss Harby. Ursula, with her Standard Five, followed after.
She stood beside a smirking, grinning row of girls, waiting in a narrow
passage. What she was herself she did not know.
Suddenly the sound of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off
hollowly down the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The
piano played on, a march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of
the big room. Mr. Harby was seen away beyond at his desk. Mr. Brunt
guarded the other door of the room. Ursula’s class pushed up. She stood
near them. They glanced and smirked and shoved.
“Go on,” said Ursula.
They tittered.
“Go on,” said Ursula, for the piano continued.
The girls broke loosely into the room. Mr. Harby, who had seemed
immersed in some occupation, away at his desk, lifted his head and
thundered:
“Halt!”
There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just starting
through the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued voice of Mr.
Brunt was heard, then the booming shout of Mr. Harby, from far down the
room:
“Who told Standard Five girls to come in like that?”
Ursula crimsoned. Her girls were glancing up at her, smirking their
accusation.
“I sent them in, Mr. Harby,” she said, in a clear, struggling voice.
There was a moment of silence. Then Mr. Harby roared from the distance.
“Go back to your places, Standard Five girls.”
The girls glanced up at Ursula, accusing, rather jeering, fugitive.
They pushed back. Ursula’s heart hardened with ignominious pain.
“Forward—march,” came Mr. Brunt’s voice, and the girls set off, keeping
time with the ranks of boys.
Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls, who stood
filling the ranks of the desks. She felt utterly nonexistent. She had
no place nor being there. She faced the block of children.
Down the room she heard the rapid firing of questions. She stood before
her class not knowing what to do. She waited painfully. Her block of
children, fifty unknown faces, watched her, hostile, ready to jeer. She
felt as if she were in torture over a fire of faces. And on every side
she was naked to them. Of unutterable length and torture the seconds
went by.
Then she gathered courage. She heard Mr. Brunt asking questions in
mental arithmetic. She stood near to her class, so that her voice need
not be raised too much, and faltering, uncertain, she said:
“Seven hats at twopence ha’penny each?”
A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence. She was
red and suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades, and she asked
for the answer.
The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do, there came
horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the children; and when,
relying on some pert little girl for information, she had started a
lesson, she did not know how to go on with it properly. The children
were her masters. She deferred to them. She could always hear Mr.
Brunt. Like a machine, always in the same hard, high, inhuman voice he
went on with his teaching, oblivious of everything. And before this
inhuman number of children she was always at bay. She could not get
away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective children,
depending on her for command, for command it hated and resented. It
made her feel she could not breathe: she must suffocate, it was so
inhuman. They were so many, that they were not children. They were a
squadron. She could not speak as she would to a child, because they
were not individual children, they were a collective, inhuman thing.
Dinner-time came, and stunned, bewildered, solitary, she went into the
teachers’ room for dinner. Never had she felt such a stranger to life
before. It seemed to her she had just disembarked from some strange
horrible state where everything was as in hell, a condition of hard,
malevolent system. And she was not really free. The afternoon drew at
her like some bondage.
The first week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to
teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came down every now
and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so
incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that
she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there
watching with the listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really
threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she
had no soul in her body. Then he went away, and his going was like a
derision. The class was his class. She was a wavering substitute. He
thrashed and bullied, he was hated. But he was master. Though she was
gentle and always considerate of her class, yet they belonged to Mr.
Harby, and they did not belong to her. Like some invincible source of
the mechanism he kept all power to himself. And the class owned his
power. And in school it was power, and power alone that mattered.
Soon Ursula came to dread him, and at the bottom of her dread was a
seed of hate, for she despised him, yet he was master of her. Then she
began to get on. All the other teachers hated him, and fanned their
hatred among themselves. For he was master of them and the children, he
stood like a wheel to make absolute his authority over the herd. That
seemed to be his one reason in life, to hold blind authority over the
school. His teachers were his subjects as much as the scholars. Only,
because they had some authority, his instinct was to detest them.
Ursula could not make herself a favourite with him. From the first
moment she set hard against him. She set against Violet Harby also. Mr.
Harby was, however, too much for her, he was something she could not
come to grips with, something too strong for her. She tried to approach
him as a young, bright girl usually approaches a man, expecting a
little chivalrous courtesy. But the fact that she was a girl, a woman,
was ignored or used as a matter for contempt against her. She did not
know what she was, nor what she must be. She wanted to remain her own
responsive, personal self.
So she taught on. She made friends with the Standard Three teacher,
Maggie Schofield. Miss Schofield was about twenty years old, a subdued
girl who held aloof from the other teachers. She was rather beautiful,
meditative, and seemed to live in another, lovelier world.
Ursula took her dinner to school, and during the second week ate it in
Miss Schofield’s room. Standard Three classroom stood by itself and had
windows on two sides, looking on to the playground. It was a passionate
relief to find such a retreat in the jarring school. For there were
pots of chrysanthemums and coloured leaves, and a big jar of berries:
there were pretty little pictures on the wall, photogravure
reproductions from Greuze, and Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence”, giving an
air of intimacy; so that the room, with its window space, its smaller,
tidier desks, its touch of pictures and flowers, made Ursula at once
glad. Here at last was a little personal touch, to which she could
respond.
It was Monday. She had been at school a week and was getting used to
the surroundings, though she was still an entire foreigner in herself.
She looked forward to having dinner with Maggie. That was the bright
spot in the day. Maggie was so strong and remote, walking with slow,
sure steps down a hard road, carrying the dream within her. Ursula went
through the class teaching as through a meaningless daze.
Her class tumbled out at midday in haphazard fashion. She did not
realize what host she was gathering against herself by her superior
tolerance, her kindness and her _laisser-aller_. They were gone, and
she was rid of them, and that was all. She hurried away to the
teachers’ room.
Mr. Brunt was crouching at the small stove, putting a little rice
pudding into the oven. He rose then, and attentively poked in a small
saucepan on the hob with a fork. Then he replaced the saucepan lid.
“Aren’t they done?” asked Ursula gaily, breaking in on his tense
absorption.
She always kept a bright, blithe manner, and was pleasant to all the
teachers. For she felt like the swan among the geese, of superior
heritage and belonging. And her pride at being the swan in this ugly
school was not yet abated.
“Not yet,” replied Mr. Brunt, laconic.
“I wonder if my dish is hot,” she said, bending down at the oven. She
half expected him to look for her, but he took no notice. She was
hungry and she poked her finger eagerly in the pot to see if her
brussels sprouts and potatoes and meat were ready. They were not.
“Don’t you think it’s rather jolly bringing dinner?” she said to Mr.
Brunt.
“I don’t know as I do,” he said, spreading a serviette on a corner of
the table, and not looking at her.
“I suppose it is too far for you to go home?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he rose and looked at her. He had the bluest,
fiercest, most pointed eyes that she had ever met. He stared at her
with growing fierceness.
“If I were you, Miss Brangwen,” he said, menacingly, “I should get a
bit tighter hand over my class.”
Ursula shrank.
“Would you?” she asked, sweetly, yet in terror. “Aren’t I strict
enough?”
“Because,” he repeated, taking no notice of her, “they’ll get you down
if you don’t tackle ’em pretty quick. They’ll pull you down, and worry
you, till Harby gets you shifted—that’s how it’ll be. You won’t be here
another six weeks”—and he filled his mouth with food—“if you don’t
tackle ’em and tackle ’em quick.”
“Oh, but——” Ursula said, resentfully, ruefully. The terror was deep in
her.
“Harby’ll not help you. This is what he’ll do—he’ll let you go on,
getting worse and worse, till either you clear out or he clears you
out. It doesn’t matter to me, except that you’ll leave a class behind
you as I hope I shan’t have to cope with.”
She heard the accusation in the man’s voice, and felt condemned. But
still, school had not yet become a definite reality to her. She was
shirking it. It was reality, but it was all outside her. And she fought
against Mr. Brunt’s representation. She did not want to realize.
“Will it be so terrible?” she said, quivering, rather beautiful, but
with a slight touch of condescension, because she would not betray her
own trepidation.
“Terrible?” said the man, turning to his potatoes again. “I dunno about
terrible.”
“I _do_ feel frightened,” said Ursula. “The children seem so——”
“What?” said Miss Harby, entering at that moment.
“Why,” said Ursula, “Mr. Brunt says I ought to tackle my class,” and
she laughed uneasily.
“Oh, you have to keep order if you want to teach,” said Miss Harby,
hard, superior, trite.
Ursula did not answer. She felt non valid before them.
“If you want to be let to _live,_ you have,” said Mr. Brunt.
“Well, if you can’t keep order, what good are you?” said Miss Harby.
“An’ you’ve got to do it by yourself,”—his voice rose like the bitter
cry of the prophets. “You’ll get no _help_ from anybody.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Miss Harby. “Some people can’t be helped.” And she
departed.
The air of hostility and disintegration, of wills working in
antagonistic subordination, was hideous. Mr. Brunt, subordinate,
afraid, acid with shame, frightened her. Ursula wanted to run. She only
wanted to clear out, not to understand.
Then Miss Schofield came in, and with her another, more restful note.
Ursula at once turned for confirmation to the newcomer. Maggie remained
personal within all this unclean system of authority.
“Is the big Anderson here?” she asked of Mr. Brunt. And they spoke of
some affair about two scholars, coldly, officially.
Miss Schofield took her brown dish, and Ursula followed with her own.
The cloth was laid in the pleasant Standard Three room, there was a jar
with two or three monthly roses on the table.
“It is so nice in here, you _have_ made it different,” said Ursula
gaily. But she was afraid. The atmosphere of the school was upon her.
“The big room,” said Miss Schofield, “ha, it’s misery to be in it!”
She too spoke with bitterness. She too lived in the ignominious
position of an upper servant hated by the master above and the class
beneath. She was, she knew, liable to attack from either side at any
minute, or from both at once, for the authorities would listen to the
complaints of parents, and both would turn round on the mongrel
authority, the teacher.
So there was a hard, bitter withholding in Maggie Schofield even as she
poured out her savoury mess of big golden beans and brown gravy.
“It is vegetarian hot-pot,” said Miss Schofield. “Would you like to try
it?”
“I should love to,” said Ursula.
Her own dinner seemed coarse and ugly beside this savoury, clean dish.
“I’ve never eaten vegetarian things,” she said, “But I should think
they can be good.”
“I’m not really a vegetarian,” said Maggie, “I don’t like to bring meat
to school.”