And again her soul rang an answer to a new refinement, a new liberty.
If all vegetarian things were as nice as this, she would be glad to
escape the slight uncleanness of meat.
“How good!” she cried.
“Yes,” said Miss Schofield, and she proceeded to tell her the receipt.
The two girls passed on to talk about themselves. Ursula told all about
the High School, and about her matriculation, bragging a little. She
felt so poor here, in this ugly place. Miss Schofield listened with
brooding, handsome face, rather gloomy.
“Couldn’t you have got to some better place than this?” she asked at
length.
“I didn’t know what it was like,” said Ursula, doubtfully.
“Ah!” said Miss Schofield, and she turned aside her head with a bitter
motion.
“Is it as horrid as it seems?” asked Ursula, frowning lightly, in fear.
“It is,” said Miss Schofield, bitterly. “Ha!—it is _hateful!”_
Ursula’s heart sank, seeing even Miss Schofield in the deadly bondage.
“It is Mr. Harby,” said Maggie Schofield, breaking forth.
“I don’t think I _could_ live again in the big room—Mr. Brunt’s voice
and Mr. Harby—ah——”
She turned aside her head with a deep hurt. Some things she could not
bear.
“Is Mr. Harby really horrid?” asked Ursula, venturing into her own
dread.
“He!—why, he’s just a bully,” said Miss Schofield, raising her shamed
dark eyes, that flamed with tortured contempt. “He’s not bad as long as
you keep in with him, and refer to him, and do everything in his
way—but—it’s all so _mean!_ It’s just a question of fighting on both
sides—and those great louts——”
She spoke with difficulty and with increased bitterness. She had
evidently suffered. Her soul was raw with ignominy. Ursula suffered in
response.
“But why is it so horrid?” she asked, helplessly.
“You can’t do _anything,”_ said Miss Schofield. “He’s against you on
one side and he sets the children against you on the other. The
children are simply awful. You’ve got to _make_ them do everything.
Everything, everything has got to come out of you. Whatever they learn,
you’ve got to force it into them—and that’s how it is.”
Ursula felt her heart fail inside her. Why must she grasp all this, why
must she force learning on fifty-five reluctant children, having all
the time an ugly, rude jealousy behind her, ready to throw her to the
mercy of the herd of children, who would like to rend her as a weaker
representative of authority. A great dread of her task possessed her.
She saw Mr. Brunt, Miss Harby, Miss Schofield, all the school-teachers,
drudging unwillingly at the graceless task of compelling many children
into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the whole set to an
automatic state of obedience and attention, and then of commanding
their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. The first great task
was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind, or being. This state
must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and
the will of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the
children. The point was that the headmaster and the teachers should
have one will in authority, which should bring the will of the children
into accord. But the headmaster was narrow and exclusive. The will of
the teachers could not agree with his, their separate wills refused to
be so subordinated. So there was a state of anarchy, leaving the final
judgment to the children themselves, which authority should exist.
So there existed a set of separate wills, each straining itself to the
utmost to exert its own authority. Children will never naturally
acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must
be compelled by a stronger, wiser will. Against which will they must
always strive to revolt. So that the first great effort of every
teacher of a large class must be to bring the will of the children into
accordance with his own will. And this he can only do by an abnegation
of his personal self, and an application of a system of laws, for the
purpose of achieving a certain calculable result, the imparting of
certain knowledge. Whereas Ursula thought she was going to become the
first wise teacher by making the whole business personal, and using no
compulsion. She believed entirely in her own personality.
So that she was in a very deep mess. In the first place she was
offering to a class a relationship which only one or two of the
children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the mass were
left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she was placing
herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed authority of Mr. Harby,
so that the scholars could more safely harry her. She did not know, but
her instinct gradually warned her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr.
Brunt. On it went, jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it
nearly drove her mad: always the same set, harsh monotony. The man was
become a mechanism working on and on and on. But the personal man was
in subdued friction all the time. It was horrible—all hate! Must she be
like this? She could feel the ghastly necessity. She must become the
same—put away the personal self, become an instrument, an abstraction,
working upon a certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of
making them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet
gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was
being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and saw a
luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a fantasy, like
a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black and tangled in the
teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished, she was
subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be
shining? There was no sky, there was no luminous atmosphere of
out-of-doors. Only the inside of the school was real—hard, concrete,
real and vicious.
She would not yet, however, let school quite overcome her. She always
said. “It is not a permanency, it will come to an end.” She could
always see herself beyond the place, see the time when she had left it.
On Sundays and on holidays, when she was away at Cossethay or in the
woods where the beech-leaves were fallen, she could think of St.
Philip’s Church School, and by an effort of will put it in the picture
as a dirty little low-squatting building that made a very tiny mound
under the sky, while the great beech-woods spread immense about her,
and the afternoon was spacious and wonderful. Moreover the children,
the scholars, they were insignificant little objects far away, oh, far
away. And what power had they over her free soul? A fleeting thought of
them, as she kicked her way through the beech-leaves, and they were
gone. But her will was tense against them all the time.
All the while, they pursued her. She had never had such a passionate
love of the beautiful things about her. Sitting on top of the tram-car,
at evening, sometimes school was swept away as she saw a magnificent
sky settling down. And her breast, her very hands, clamoured for the
lovely flare of sunset. It was poignant almost to agony, her reaching
for it. She almost cried aloud seeing the sundown so lovely.
For she was held away. It was no matter how she said to herself that
school existed no more once she had left it. It existed. It was within
her like a dark weight, controlling her movement. It was in vain the
high-spirited, proud young girl flung off the school and its
association with her. She was Miss Brangwen, she was Standard Five
teacher, she had her most important being in her work now.
Constantly haunting her, like a darkness hovering over her heart and
threatening to swoop down over it at every moment, was the sense that
somehow, somehow she was brought down. Bitterly she denied unto herself
that she was really a schoolteacher. Leave that to the Violet Harbys.
She herself would stand clear of the accusation. It was in vain she
denied it.
Within herself some recording hand seemed to point mechanically to a
negation. She was incapable of fulfilling her task. She could never for
a moment escape from the fatal weight of the knowledge.
And so she felt inferior to Violet Harby. Miss Harby was a splendid
teacher. She could keep order and inflict knowledge on a class with
remarkable efficiency. It was no good Ursula’s protesting to herself
that she was infinitely, infinitely the superior of Violet Harby. She
knew that Violet Harby succeeded where she failed, and this in a task
which was almost a test of her. She felt something all the time wearing
upon her, wearing her down. She went about in these first weeks trying
to deny it, to say she was free as ever. She tried not to feel at a
disadvantage before Miss Harby, tried to keep up the effect of her own
superiority. But a great weight was on her, which Violet Harby could
bear, and she herself could not.
Though she did not give in, she never succeeded. Her class was getting
in worse condition, she knew herself less and less secure in teaching
it. Ought she to withdraw and go home again? Ought she to say she had
come to the wrong place, and so retire? Her very life was at test.
She went on doggedly, blindly, waiting for a crisis. Mr. Harby had now
begun to persecute her. Her dread and hatred of him grew and loomed
larger and larger. She was afraid he was going to bully her and destroy
her. He began to persecute her because she could not keep her class in
proper condition, because her class was the weak link in the chain
which made up the school.
One of the offences was that her class was noisy and disturbed Mr.
Harby, as he took Standard Seven at the other end of the room. She was
taking composition on a certain morning, walking in among the scholars.
Some of the boys had dirty ears and necks, their clothing smelled
unpleasantly, but she could ignore it. She corrected the writing as she
went.
“When you say ‘their fur is brown’, how do you write ‘their’?” she
asked.
There was a little pause; the boys were always jeeringly backward in
answering. They had begun to jeer at her authority altogether.
“Please, miss, t-h-e-i-r”, spelled a lad, loudly, with a note of
mockery.
At that moment Mr. Harby was passing.
“Stand up, Hill!” he called, in a big voice.
Everybody started. Ursula watched the boy. He was evidently poor, and
rather cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off his forehead,
the rest fitted close to his meagre head. He was pale and colourless.
“Who told you to call out?” thundered Mr. Harby.
The boy looked up and down, with a guilty air, and a cunning, cynical
reserve.
“Please, sir, I was answering,” he replied, with the same humble
insolence.
“Go to my desk.”
The boy set off down the room, the big black jacket hanging in dejected
folds about him, his thin legs, rather knocked at the knees, going
already with the pauper’s crawl, his feet in their big boots scarcely
lifted. Ursula watched him in his crawling, slinking progress down the
room. He was one of her boys! When he got to the desk, he looked round,
half furtively, with a sort of cunning grin and a pathetic leer at the
big boys in Standard VII. Then, pitiable, pale, in his dejected
garments, he lounged under the menace of the headmaster’s desk, with
one thin leg crooked at the knee and the foot struck out sideways his
hands in the low-hanging pockets of his man’s jacket.
Ursula tried to get her attention back to the class. The boy gave her a
little horror, and she was at the same time hot with pity for him. She
felt she wanted to scream. She was responsible for the boy’s
punishment. Mr. Harby was looking at her handwriting on the board. He
turned to the class.
“Pens down.”
The children put down their pens and looked up.
“Fold arms.”
They pushed back their books and folded arms.
Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate herself.
“_What_ is your composition about?” asked the headmaster. Every hand
shot up. “The ——” stuttered some voice in its eagerness to answer.
“I wouldn’t advise you to call out,” said Mr. Harby. He would have a
pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable menace that
always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes twinkling under his
bushy black eyebrows, watching the class. There was something
fascinating in him, as he stood, and again she wanted to scream. She
was all jarred, she did not know what she felt.
“Well, Alice?” he said.
“The rabbit,” piped a girl’s voice.
“A very easy subject for Standard Five.”
Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed before the
class. And she was tormented by the contradictoriness of everything.
Mr. Harby stood so strong, and so male, with his black brows and clear
forehead, the heavy jaw, the big, overhanging moustache: such a man,
with strength and male power, and a certain blind, native beauty. She
might have liked him as a man. And here he stood in some other
capacity, bullying over such a trifle as a boy’s speaking out without
permission. Yet he was not a little, fussy man. He seemed to have some
cruel, stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too small and
petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would fulfil,
because he had to earn his living. He had no finer control over
himself, only this blind, dogged, wholesale will. He would keep the job
going, since he must. And this job was to make the children spell the
word “caution” correctly, and put a capital letter after a full-stop.
So at this he hammered with his suppressed hatred, always suppressing
himself, till he was beside himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he
stood, short and handsome and powerful, teaching her class. It seemed
such a miserable thing for him to be doing. He had a decent, powerful,
rude soul. What did he care about the composition on “The Rabbit”? Yet
his will kept him there before the class, threshing the trivial
subject. It was habit with him now, to be so little and vulgar, out of
place. She saw the shamefulness of his position, felt the fettered
wickedness in him which would blaze out into evil rage in the long run,
so that he was like a persistent, strong creature tethered. It was
really intolerable. The jarring was torture to her. She looked over the
silent, attentive class that seemed to have crystallized into order and
rigid, neutral form. This he had it in his power to do, to crystallize
the children into hard, mute fragments, fixed under his will: his brute
will, which fixed them by sheer force.
She too must learn to subdue them to her will: she must. For it was her
duty, since the school was such. He had crystallized the class into
order. But to see him, a strong, powerful man, using all his power for
such a purpose, seemed almost horrible. There was something hideous
about it. The strange, genial light in his eye was really vicious, and
ugly, his smile was one of torture. He could not be impersonal. He
could not have a clear, pure purpose, he could only exercise his own
brute will. He did not believe in the least in the education he kept
inflicting year after year upon the children. So he must bully, only
bully, even while it tortured his strong, wholesome nature with shame
like a spur always galling. He was so blind and ugly and out of place.
Ursula could not bear it as he stood there. The whole situation was
wrong and ugly.
The lesson was finished, Mr. Harby went away. At the far end of the
room she heard the whistle and the thud of the cane. Her heart stood
still within her. She could not bear it, no, she could not bear it when
the boy was beaten. It made her sick. She felt that she must go out of
this school, this torture-place. And she hated the schoolmaster,
thoroughly and finally. The brute, had he no shame? He should never be
allowed to continue the atrocity of this bullying cruelty. Then Hill
came crawling back, blubbering piteously. There was something desolate
about this blubbering that nearly broke her heart. For after all, if
she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never have
happened, Hill would never have called out and been caned.
She began the arithmetic lesson. But she was distracted. The boy Hill
sat away on the back desk, huddled up, blubbering and sucking his hand.
It was a long time. She dared not go near, nor speak to him. She felt
ashamed before him. And she felt she could not forgive the boy for
being the huddled, blubbering object, all wet and snivelled, which he
was.
She went on correcting the sums. But there were too many children. She
could not get round the class. And Hill was on her conscience. At last
he had stopped crying, and sat bunched over his hands, playing quietly.
Then he looked up at her. His face was dirty with tears, his eyes had a
curious washed look, like the sky after rain, a sort of wanness. He
bore no malice. He had already forgotten, and was waiting to be
restored to the normal position.
“Go on with your work, Hill,” she said.
The children were playing over their arithmetic, and, she knew,
cheating thoroughly. She wrote another sum on the blackboard. She could
not get round the class. She went again to the front to watch. Some
were ready. Some were not. What was she to do?
At last it was time for recreation. She gave the order to cease
working, and in some way or other got her class out of the room. Then
she faced the disorderly litter of blotted, uncorrected books, of
broken rulers and chewed pens. And her heart sank in sickness. The
misery was getting deeper.
The trouble went on and on, day after day. She had always piles of
books to mark, myriads of errors to correct, a heart-wearying task that
she loathed. And the work got worse and worse. When she tried to
flatter herself that the composition grew more alive, more interesting,
she had to see that the handwriting grew more and more slovenly, the
books more filthy and disgraceful. She tried what she could, but it was
of no use. But she was not going to take it seriously. Why should she?
Why should she say to herself, that it mattered, if she failed to teach
a class to write perfectly neatly? Why should she take the blame unto
herself?
Pay day came, and she received four pounds two shillings and one penny.
She was very proud that day. She had never had so much money before.
And she had earned it all herself. She sat on the top of the tram-car
fingering the gold and fearing she might lose it. She felt so
established and strong, because of it. And when she got home she said
to her mother:
“It is pay day to-day, mother.”
“Ay,” said her mother, coolly.
Then Ursula put down fifty shillings on the table.
“That is my board,” she said.
“Ay,” said her mother, letting it lie.
Ursula was hurt. Yet she had paid her scot. She was free. She paid for
what she had. There remained moreover thirty-two shillings of her own.
She would not spend any, she who was naturally a spendthrift, because
she could not bear to damage her fine gold.
She had a standing ground now apart from her parents. She was something
else besides the mere daughter of William and Anna Brangwen. She was
independent. She earned her own living. She was an important member of
the working community. She was sure that fifty shillings a month quite
paid for her keep. If her mother received fifty shillings a month for
each of the children, she would have twenty pounds a month and no
clothes to provide. Very well then.
Ursula was independent of her parents. She now adhered elsewhere. Now,
the ‘Board of Education’ was a phrase that rang significant to her, and
she felt Whitehall far beyond her as her ultimate home. In the
government, she knew which minister had supreme control over Education,
and it seemed to her that, in some way, he was connected with her, as
her father was connected with her.
She had another self, another responsibility. She was no longer Ursula
Brangwen, daughter of William Brangwen. She was also Standard Five
teacher in St. Philip’s School. And it was a case now of being Standard
Five teacher, and nothing else. For she could not escape.
Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks passed on,
there was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There was only a girl of
that name obsessed by the fact that she could not manage her class of
children. At week-ends there came days of passionate reaction, when she
went mad with the taste of liberty, when merely to be free in the
morning, to sit down at her embroidery and stitch the coloured silks
was a passion of delight. For the prison house was always awaiting her!
This was only a respite, as her chained heart knew well. So that she
seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end, and wrung the last drop
of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel frenzy.
She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her. She did
not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how horrible she found
it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday night came, and she felt the
Monday morning at hand, she was strung up tight with dreadful
anticipation, because the strain and the torture was near again.
She did not believe that she could ever teach that great, brutish
class, in that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if she failed, she
must in some way go under. She must admit that the man’s world was too
strong for her, she could not take her place in it; she must go down
before Mr. Harby. And all her life henceforth, she must go on, never
having freed herself of the man’s world, never having achieved the
freedom of the great world of responsible work. Maggie had taken her
place there, she had even stood level with Mr. Harby and got free of
him: and her soul was always wandering in far-off valleys and glades of
poetry. Maggie was free. Yet there was something like subjection in
Maggie’s very freedom. Mr. Harby, the man, disliked the reserved woman,
Maggie. Mr. Harby, the schoolmaster, respected his teacher, Miss
Schofield.
For the present, however, Ursula only envied and admired Maggie. She
herself had still to get where Maggie had got. She had still to make
her footing. She had taken up a position on Mr. Harby’s ground, and she
must keep it. For he was now beginning a regular attack on her, to
drive her away out of his school. She could not keep order. Her class
was a turbulent crowd, and the weak spot in the school’s work.
Therefore she must go, and someone more useful must come in her place,
someone who could keep discipline.
The headmaster had worked himself into an obsession of fury against
her. He only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got worse as the
weeks went on, she was absolutely no good. His system, which was his
very life in school, the outcome of his bodily movement, was attacked
and threatened at the point where Ursula was included. She was the
danger that threatened his body with a blow, a fall. And blindly,
thoroughly, moving from strong instinct of opposition, he set to work
to expel her.
When he punished one of her children as he had punished the boy Hill,
for an offence against _himself,_ he made the punishment extra heavy
with the significance that the extra stroke came in because of the weak
teacher who allowed all these things to be. When he punished for an
offence against her, he punished lightly, as if offences against her
were not significant. Which all the children knew, and they behaved
accordingly.
Every now and again Mr. Harby would swoop down to examine exercise
books. For a whole hour, he would be going round the class, taking book
after book, comparing page after page, whilst Ursula stood aside for
all the remarks and fault-finding to be pointed at her through the
scholars. It was true, since she had come, the composition books had
grown more and more untidy, disorderly, filthy. Mr. Harby pointed to
the pages done before her regime, and to those done after, and fell
into a passion of rage. Many children he sent out to the front with
their books. And after he had thoroughly gone through the silent and
quivering class he caned the worst offenders well, in front of the
others, thundering in real passion of anger and chagrin.
“Such a condition in a class, I can’t believe it! It is simply
disgraceful! I can’t think how you have been let to get like it! Every
Monday morning I shall come down and examine these books. So don’t
think that because there is nobody paying any attention to you, that
you are free to unlearn everything you ever learned, and go back till
you are not fit for Standard Three. I shall examine all books every
Monday——”
Then in a rage, he went away with his cane, leaving Ursula to confront
a pale, quivering class, whose childish faces were shut in blank
resentment, fear, and bitterness, whose souls were full of anger and
contempt for her rather than of the master, whose eyes looked at her
with the cold, inhuman accusation of children. And she could hardly
make mechanical words to speak to them. When she gave an order they
obeyed with an insolent off-handedness, as if to say: “As for you, do
you think we would obey _you,_ but for the master?” She sent the
blubbering, caned boys to their seats, knowing that they too jeered at
her and her authority, holding her weakness responsible for what
punishment had overtaken them. And she knew the whole position, so that
even her horror of physical beating and suffering sank to a deeper
pain, and became a moral judgment upon her, worse than any hurt.
She must, during the next week, watch over her books, and punish any
fault. Her soul decided it coldly. Her personal desire was dead for
that day at least. She must have nothing more of herself in school. She
was to be Standard Five teacher only. That was her duty. In school, she
was nothing but Standard Five teacher. Ursula Brangwen must be
excluded.
So that, pale, shut, at last distant and impersonal, she saw no longer
the child, how his eyes danced, or how he had a queer little soul that
could not be bothered with shaping handwriting so long as he dashed
down what he thought. She saw no children, only the task that was to be
done. And keeping her eyes there, on the task, and not on the child,
she was impersonal enough to punish where she could otherwise only have
sympathized, understood, and condoned, to approve where she would have
been merely uninterested before. But her interest had no place any
more.
It was agony to the impulsive, bright girl of seventeen to become
distant and official, having no personal relationship with the
children. For a few days, after the agony of the Monday, she succeeded,
and had some success with her class. But it was a state not natural to
her, and she began to relax.
Then came another infliction. There were not enough pens to go round
the class. She sent to Mr. Harby for more. He came in person.
“Not enough pens, Miss Brangwen?” he said, with the smile and calm of
exceeding rage against her.
“No, we are six short,” she said, quaking.
“Oh, how is that?” he said, menacingly. Then, looking over the class,
he asked:
“How many are there here to-day?”
“Fifty-two,” said Ursula, but he did not take any notice, counting for
himself.
“Fifty-two,” he said. “And how many pens are there, Staples?”
Ursula was now silent. He would not heed her if she answered, since he
had addressed the monitor.
“That’s a very curious thing,” said Mr. Harby, looking over the silent
class with a slight grin of fury. All the childish faces looked up at
him blank and exposed.
“A few days ago there were sixty pens for this class—now there are
forty-eight. What is forty-eight from sixty, Williams?” There was a
sinister suspense in the question. A thin, ferret-faced boy in a sailor
suit started up exaggeratedly.
“Please, sir!” he said. Then a slow, sly grin came over his face. He
did not know. There was a tense silence. The boy dropped his head. Then
he looked up again, a little cunning triumph in his eyes. “Twelve,” he
said.
“I would advise you to attend,” said the headmaster dangerously. The
boy sat down.
“Forty-eight from sixty is twelve: so there are twelve pens to account
for. Have you looked for them, Staples?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then look again.”
The scene dragged on. Two pens were found: ten were missing. Then the
storm burst.
“Am I to have you thieving, besides your dirt and bad work and bad
behaviour?” the headmaster began. “Not content with being the
worst-behaved and dirtiest class in the school, you are thieves into
the bargain, are you? It is a very funny thing! Pens don’t melt into
the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What
has become of them then? They must be somewhere. What has become of
them? For they must be found, and found by Standard Five. They were
lost by Standard Five, and they must be found.”
Ursula stood and listened, her heart hard and cold. She was so much
upset, that she felt almost mad. Something in her tempted her to turn
on the headmaster and tell him to stop, about the miserable pens. But
she did not. She could not.
After every session, morning and evening, she had the pens counted.
Still they were missing. And pencils and india-rubbers disappeared. She
kept the class staying behind, till the things were found. But as soon
as Mr. Harby had gone out of the room, the boys began to jump about and
shout, and at last they bolted in a body from the school.
This was drawing near a crisis. She could not tell Mr. Harby because,
while he would punish the class, he would make her the cause of the
punishment, and her class would pay her back with disobedience and
derision. Already there was a deadly hostility grown up between her and
the children. After keeping in the class, at evening, to finish some
work, she would find boys dodging behind her, calling after her:
“Brangwen, Brangwen—Proud-acre.”
When she went into Ilkeston of a Saturday morning with Gudrun, she
heard again the voices yelling after her:
“Brangwen, Brangwen.”
She pretended to take no notice, but she coloured with shame at being
held up to derision in the public street. She, Ursula Brangwen of
Cossethay, could not escape from the Standard Five teacher which she
was. In vain she went out to buy ribbon for her hat. They called after
her, the boys she tried to teach.
And one evening, as she went from the edge of the town into the
country, stones came flying at her. Then the passion of shame and anger
surpassed her. She walked on unheeding, beside herself. Because of the
darkness she could not see who were those that threw. But she did not
want to know.
Only in her soul a change took place. Never more, and never more would
she give herself as individual to her class. Never would she, Ursula
Brangwen, the girl she was, the person she was, come into contact with
those boys. She would be Standard Five teacher, as far away personally
from her class as if she had never set foot in St. Philip’s school. She
would just obliterate them all, and keep herself apart, take them as
scholars only.
So her face grew more and more shut, and over her flayed, exposed soul
of a young girl who had gone open and warm to give herself to the
children, there set a hard, insentient thing, that worked mechanically
according to a system imposed.
It seemed she scarcely saw her class the next day. She could only feel
her will, and what she would have of this class which she must grasp
into subjection. It was no good, any more, to appeal, to play upon the
better feelings of the class. Her swift-working soul realized this.
She, as teacher, must bring them all as scholars, into subjection. And
this she was going to do. All else she would forsake. She had become
hard and impersonal, almost avengeful on herself as well as on them,
since the stone throwing. She did not want to be a person, to be
herself any more, after such humiliation. She would assert herself for
mastery, be only teacher. She was set now. She was going to fight and
subdue.
She knew by now her enemies in the class. The one she hated most was
Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed.
He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But
he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive
to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate.
Once he had thrown an ink-well at her, in one of his mad little rages.
Twice he had run home out of class. He was a well-known character.
And he grinned up his sleeve at this girl-teacher, sometimes hanging
round her to fawn on her. But this made her dislike him more. He had a
kind of leech-like power.
From one of the children she took a supple cane, and this she
determined to use when real occasion came. One morning, at composition,
she said to the boy Williams:
“Why have you made this blot?”
“Please, miss, it fell off my pen,” he whined out, in the mocking voice
that he was so clever in using. The boys near snorted with laughter.
For Williams was an actor, he could tickle the feelings of his hearers
subtly. Particularly he could tickle the children with him into
ridiculing his teacher, or indeed, any authority of which he was not
afraid. He had that peculiar gaol instinct.
“Then you must stay in and finish another page of composition,” said
the teacher.
This was against her usual sense of justice, and the boy resented it
derisively. At twelve o’clock she caught him slinking out.
“Williams, sit down,” she said.
And there she sat, and there he sat, alone, opposite to her, on the
back desk, looking up at her with his furtive eyes every minute.
“Please, miss, I’ve got to go an errand,” he called out insolently.
“Bring me your book,” said Ursula.
The boy came out, flapping his book along the desks. He had not written
a line.
“Go back and do the writing you have to do,” said Ursula. And she sat
at her desk, trying to correct books. She was trembling and upset. And
for an hour the miserable boy writhed and grinned in his seat. At the
end of that time he had done five lines.
“As it is so late now,” said Ursula, “you will finish the rest this
evening.”
The boy kicked his way insolently down the passage.
The afternoon came again. Williams was there, glancing at her, and her
heart beat thick, for she knew it was a fight between them. She watched
him.
During the geography lesson, as she was pointing to the map with her
cane, the boy continually ducked his whitish head under the desk, and
attracted the attention of other boys.
“Williams,” she said, gathering her courage, for it was critical now to
speak to him, “what are you doing?”
He lifted his face, the sore-rimmed eyes half smiling. There was
something intrinsically indecent about him. Ursula shrank away.
“Nothing,” he replied, feeling a triumph.
“What are you doing?” she repeated, her heart-beat suffocating her.
“Nothing,” replied the boy, insolently, aggrieved, comic.
“If I speak to you again, you must go down to Mr. Harby,” she said.
But this boy was a match even for Mr. Harby. He was so persistent, so
cringing, and flexible, he howled so when he was hurt, that the master
hated more the teacher who sent him than he hated the boy himself. For
of the boy he was sick of the sight. Which Williams knew. He grinned
visibly.
Ursula turned to the map again, to go on with the geography lesson. But
there was a little ferment in the class. Williams’ spirit infected them
all. She heard a scuffle, and then she trembled inwardly. If they all
turned on her this time, she was beaten.
“Please, miss——” called a voice in distress.
She turned round. One of the boys she liked was ruefully holding out a
torn celluloid collar. She heard the complaint, feeling futile.
“Go in front, Wright,” she said.
She was trembling in every fibre. A big, sullen boy, not bad but very
difficult, slouched out to the front. She went on with the lesson,
aware that Williams was making faces at Wright, and that Wright was
grinning behind her. She was afraid. She turned to the map again. And
she was afraid.
“Please, miss, Williams——” came a sharp cry, and a boy on the back row
was standing up, with drawn, pained brows, half a mocking grin on his
pain, half real resentment against Williams—“Please, miss, he’s nipped
me,”—and he rubbed his leg ruefully.
“Come in front, Williams,” she said.
The rat-like boy sat with his pale smile and did not move.
“Come in front,” she repeated, definite now.
“I shan’t,” he cried, snarling, rat-like, grinning. Something went
click in Ursula’s soul. Her face and eyes set, she went through the
class straight. The boy cowered before her glowering, fixed eyes. But
she advanced on him, seized him by the arm, and dragged him from his
seat. He clung to the form. It was the battle between him and her. Her
instinct had suddenly become calm and quick. She jerked him from his
grip, and dragged him, struggling and kicking, to the front. He kicked
her several times, and clung to the forms as he passed, but she went
on. The class was on its feet in excitement. She saw it, and made no
move.
She knew if she let go the boy he would dash to the door. Already he
had run home once out of her class. So she snatched her cane from the
desk, and brought it down on him. He was writhing and kicking. She saw
his face beneath her, white, with eyes like the eyes of a fish, stony,
yet full of hate and horrible fear. And she loathed him, the hideous
writhing thing that was nearly too much for her. In horror lest he
should overcome her, and yet at the heart quite calm, she brought down
the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making inarticulate
noises, and lunging vicious kicks at her. With one hand she managed to
hold him, and now and then the cane came down on him. He writhed, like
a mad thing. But the pain of the strokes cut through his writhing,
vicious, coward’s courage, bit deeper, till at last, with a long
whimper that became a yell, he went limp. She let him go, and he rushed
at her, his teeth and eyes glinting. There was a second of agonized
terror in her heart: he was a beast thing. Then she caught him, and the
cane came down on him. A few times, madly, in a frenzy, he lunged and
writhed, to kick her. But again the cane broke him, he sank with a
howling yell on the floor, and like a beaten beast lay there yelling.
Mr. Harby had rushed up towards the end of this performance.
“What’s the matter?” he roared.
Ursula felt as if something were going to break in her.
“I’ve thrashed him,” she said, her breast heaving, forcing out the
words on the last breath. The headmaster stood choked with rage,
helpless. She looked at the writhing, howling figure on the floor.
“Get up,” she said. The thing writhed away from her. She took a step
forward. She had realized the presence of the headmaster for one
second, and then she was oblivious of it again.
“Get up,” she said. And with a little dart the boy was on his feet. His
yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had been in a frenzy.
“Go and stand by the radiator,” she said.
As if mechanically, blubbering, he went.
The headmaster stood robbed of movement or speech. His face was yellow,
his hands twitched convulsively. But Ursula stood stiff not far from
him. Nothing could touch her now: she was beyond Mr. Harby. She was as
if violated to death.
The headmaster muttered something, turned, and went down the room,
whence, from the far end, he was heard roaring in a mad rage at his own
class.
The boy blubbered wildly by the radiator. Ursula looked at the class.
There were fifty pale, still faces watching her, a hundred round eyes
fixed on her in an attentive, expressionless stare.
“Give out the history readers,” she said to the monitors.
There was dead silence. As she stood there, she could hear again the
ticking of the clock, and the chock of piles of books taken out of the
low cupboard. Then came the faint flap of books on the desks. The
children passed in silence, their hands working in unison. They were no
longer a pack, but each one separated into a silent, closed thing.
“Take page 125, and read that chapter,” said Ursula.
There was a click of many books opened. The children found the page,
and bent their heads obediently to read. And they read, mechanically.
Ursula, who was trembling violently, went and sat in her high chair.
The blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice of Mr. Brunt,
the roar of Mr. Harby, came muffled through the glass partition. And
now and then a pair of eyes rose from the reading-book, rested on her a
moment, watchful, as if calculating impersonally, then sank again.
She sat still without moving, her eyes watching the class, unseeing.
She was quite still, and weak. She felt that she could not raise her
hand from the desk. If she sat there for ever, she felt she could not
move again, nor utter a command. It was a quarter-past four. She almost
dreaded the closing of the school, when she would be alone.
The class began to recover its ease, the tension relaxed. Williams was
still crying. Mr. Brunt was giving orders for the closing of the
lesson. Ursula got down.
“Take your place, Williams,” she said.
He dragged his feet across the room, wiping his face on his sleeve. As
he sat down, he glanced at her furtively, his eyes still redder. Now he
looked like some beaten rat.
At last the children were gone. Mr. Harby trod by heavily, without
looking her way, or speaking. Mr. Brunt hesitated as she was locking
her cupboard.
“If you settle Clarke and Letts in the same way, Miss Brangwen, you’ll
be all right,” he said, his blue eyes glancing down in a strange
fellowship, his long nose pointing at her.
“Shall I?” she laughed nervously. She did not want anybody to talk to
her.
As she went along the street, clattering on the granite pavement, she
was aware of boys dodging behind her. Something struck her hand that
was carrying her bag, bruising her. As it rolled away she saw that it
was a potato. Her hand was hurt, but she gave no sign. Soon she would
take the tram.
She was afraid, and strange. It was to her quite strange and ugly, like
some dream where she was degraded. She would have died rather than
admit it to anybody. She could not look at her swollen hand. Something
had broken in her; she had passed a crisis. Williams was beaten, but at
a cost.
Feeling too much upset to go home, she rode a little farther into the
town, and got down from the tram at a small tea-shop. There, in the
dark little place behind the shop, she drank her tea and ate
bread-and-butter. She did not taste anything. The taking of tea was
just a mechanical action, to cover over her existence. There she sat in
the dark, obscure little place, without knowing. Only unconsciously she
nursed the back of her hand, which was bruised.
When finally she took her way home, it was sunset red across the west.
She did not know why she was going home. There was nothing for her
there. She had, true, only to pretend to be normal. There was nobody
she could speak to, nowhere to go for escape. But she must keep on,
under this red sunset, alone, knowing the horror in humanity, that
would destroy her, and with which she was at war. Yet it had to be so.
In the morning again she must go to school. She got up and went without
murmuring even to herself. She was in the hands of some bigger,
stronger, coarser will.
School was fairly quiet. But she could feel the class watching her,
ready to spring on her. Her instinct was aware of the class instinct to
catch her if she were weak. But she kept cold and was guarded.
Williams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning there was
a knock at the door: someone wanted the headmaster. Mr. Harby went out,
heavily, angrily, nervously. He was afraid of irate parents. After a
moment in the passage, he came again into school.
“Sturgess,” he called to one of his larger boys. “Stand in front of the
class and write down the name of anyone who speaks. Will you come this
way, Miss Brangwen.”
He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.
Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with a whitish
skin, not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple hat.
“I called about Vernon,” said the woman, speaking in a refined accent.
There was about the woman altogether an appearance of refinement and of
cleanliness, curiously contradicted by her half beggar’s deportment,
and a sense of her being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad
inside. She was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man’s wife, but
a creature separate from society. By her dress she was not poor.
Ursula knew at once that she was Williams’ mother, and that he was
Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and well-dressed, in a
sailor suit. And he had this same peculiar, half transparent
unwholesomeness, rather like a corpse.
“I wasn’t able to send him to school to-day,” continued the woman, with
a false grace of manner. “He came home last night _so_ ill—he was
violently sick—I thought I should have to send for the doctor.—You know
he has a weak heart.”
The woman looked at Ursula with her pale, dead eyes.
“No,” replied the girl, “I did not know.”
She stood still with repulsion and uncertainty. Mr. Harby, large and
male, with his overhanging moustache, stood by with a slight, ugly
smile at the corner of his eyes. The woman went on insidiously, not
quite human:
“Oh, yes, he has had heart disease ever since he was a child. That is
why he isn’t very regular at school. And it is very bad to beat him. He
was awfully ill this morning—I shall call on the doctor as I go back.”
“Who is staying with him now, then?” put in the deep voice of the
schoolmaster, cunningly.
“Oh, I left him with a woman who comes in to help me—and who
understands him. But I shall call in the doctor on my way home.”
Ursula stood still. She felt vague threats in all this. But the woman
was so utterly strange to her, that she did not understand.
“He told me he had been beaten,” continued the woman, “and when I
undressed him to put him to bed, his body was covered with marks—I
could show them to any doctor.”
Mr. Harby looked at Ursula to answer. She began to understand. The
woman was threatening to take out a charge of assault on her son
against her. Perhaps she wanted money.
“I caned him,” she said. “He was so much trouble.”
“I’m sorry if he was troublesome,” said the woman, “but he must have
been shamefully beaten. I could show the marks to any doctor. I’m sure
it isn’t allowed, if it was known.”
“I caned him while he kept kicking me,” said Ursula, getting angry
because she was half excusing herself, Mr. Harby standing there with
the twinkle at the side of his eyes, enjoying the dilemma of the two
women.
“I’m sure I’m sorry if he behaved badly,” said the woman. “But I can’t
think he deserved beating as he has been. I can’t send him to school,
and really can’t afford to pay the doctor.—Is it allowed for the
teachers to beat the children like that, Mr. Harby?”
The headmaster refused to answer. Ursula loathed herself, and loathed
Mr. Harby with his twinkling cunning and malice on the occasion. The
other miserable woman watched her chance.
“It is an expense to me, and I have a great struggle to keep my boy
decent.”
Ursula still would not answer. She looked out at the asphalt yard,
where a dirty rag of paper was blowing.
“And it isn’t allowed to beat a child like that, I am sure, especially
when he is delicate.”
Ursula stared with a set face on the yard, as if she did not hear. She
loathed all this, and had ceased to feel or to exist.
“Though I know he is troublesome sometimes—but I think it was too much.
His body is covered with marks.”
Mr. Harby stood sturdy and unmoved, waiting now to have done, with the
twinkling, tiny wrinkles of an ironical smile at the corners of his
eyes. He felt himself master of the situation.
“And he was violently sick. I couldn’t possibly send him to school
to-day. He couldn’t keep his head up.”
Yet she had no answer.
“You will understand, sir, why he is absent,” she said, turning to Mr.
Harby.
“Oh, yes,” he said, rough and off-hand. Ursula detested him for his
male triumph. And she loathed the woman. She loathed everything.
“You will try to have it remembered, sir, that he has a weak heart. He
is so sick after these things.”
“Yes,” said the headmaster, “I’ll see about it.”
“I know he is troublesome,” the woman only addressed herself to the
male now—“but if you could have him punished without beating—he is
really delicate.”
Ursula was beginning to feel upset. Harby stood in rather superb
mastery, the woman cringing to him to tickle him as one tickles trout.
“I had come to explain why he was away this morning, sir. You will
understand.”
She held out her hand. Harby took it and let it go, surprised and
angry.
“Good morning,” she said, and she gave her gloved, seedy hand to
Ursula. She was not ill-looking, and had a curious insinuating way,
very distasteful yet effective.
“Good morning, Mr. Harby, and thank you.”
The figure in the grey costume and the purple hat was going across the
school yard with a curious lingering walk. Ursula felt a strange pity
for her, and revulsion from her. She shuddered. She went into the
school again.
The next morning Williams turned up, looking paler than ever, very neat
and nicely dressed in his sailor blouse. He glanced at Ursula with a
half-smile: cunning, subdued, ready to do as she told him. There was
something about him that made her shiver. She loathed the idea of
having laid hands on him. His elder brother was standing outside the
gate at playtime, a youth of about fifteen, tall and thin and pale. He
raised his hat, almost like a gentleman. But there was something
subdued, insidious about him too.
“Who is it?” said Ursula.
“It’s the big Williams,” said Violet Harby roughly. “_She_ was here
yesterday, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“It’s no good her coming—her character’s not good enough for her to
make any trouble.”
Ursula shrank from the brutality and the scandal. But it had some
vague, horrid fascination. How sordid everything seemed! She felt sorry
for the queer woman with the lingering walk, and those queer, insidious
boys. The Williams in her class was wrong somewhere. How nasty it was
altogether.
So the battle went on till her heart was sick. She had several more
boys to subjugate before she could establish herself. And Mr. Harby
hated her almost as if she were a man. She knew now that nothing but a
thrashing would settle some of the big louts who wanted to play cat and
mouse with her. Mr. Harby would not give them the thrashing if he could
help it. For he hated the teacher, the stuck-up, insolent high-school
miss with her independence.
“Now, Wright, what have you done this time?” he would say genially to
the boy who was sent to him from Standard Five for punishment. And he
left the lad standing, lounging, wasting his time.
So that Ursula would appeal no more to the headmaster, but, when she
was driven wild, she seized her cane, and slashed the boy who was
insolent to her, over head and ears and hands. And at length they were
afraid of her, she had them in order.
But she had paid a great price out of her own soul, to do this. It
seemed as if a great flame had gone through her and burnt her sensitive
tissue. She who shrank from the thought of physical suffering in any
form, had been forced to fight and beat with a cane and rouse all her
instincts to hurt. And afterwards she had been forced to endure the
sound of their blubbering and desolation, when she had broken them to
order.
Oh, and sometimes she felt as if she would go mad. What did it matter,
what did it matter if their books were dirty and they did not obey? She
would rather, in reality, that they disobeyed the whole rules of the
school, than that they should be beaten, broken, reduced to this
crying, hopeless state. She would rather bear all their insults and
insolences a thousand times than reduce herself and them to this.
Bitterly she repented having got beside herself, and having tackled the
boy she had beaten.
Yet it had to be so. She did not want to do it. Yet she had to. Oh,
why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must
brutalize herself to live? Why had she become a school-teacher, why,
why?
The children had forced her to the beatings. No, she did not pity them.
She had come to them full of kindness and love, and they would have
torn her to pieces. They chose Mr. Harby. Well then, they must know her
as well as Mr. Harby, they must first be subjugate to her. For she was
not going to be made nought, no, neither by them, nor by Mr. Harby, nor
by all the system around her. She was not going to be put down,
prevented from standing free. It was not to be said of her, she could
not take her place and carry out her task. She would fight and hold her
place in this state also, in the world of work and man’s convention.
She was isolated now from the life of her childhood, a foreigner in a
new life, of work and mechanical consideration. She and Maggie, in
their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant,
discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in
the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her
the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far
transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the
vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form
and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman
meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something,
she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she
were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere
that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.
In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel
move towards freeing herself. But having more freedom she only became
more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She
wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she
wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she
wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she
could put no name to.
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and
surpass. And one never knew where one was going. It was a blind fight.
She had suffered bitterly in this school of St. Philip’s. She was like
a young filly that has been broken in to the shafts, and has lost its
freedom. And now she was suffering bitterly from the agony of the
shafts. The agony, the galling, the ignominy of her breaking in. This
wore into her soul. But she would never submit. To shafts like these
she would never submit for long. But she would know them. She would
serve them that she might destroy them.
She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage
meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of
pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two
girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an
endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy,
finding, discovering.
But Ursula never told about Winifred Inger. That was a sort of secret
side-show to her life, never to be opened. She did not even think of
it. It was the closed door she had not the strength to open.
Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began gradually to have
a new life of her own again. She was going to college in eighteen
months’ time. Then she would take her degree, and she would—ah, she
would perhaps be a big woman, and lead a movement. Who knows?—At any
rate she would go to college in eighteen months’ time. All that
mattered now was work, work.
And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St. Philip’s
School, which was always destroying her, but which she could now
manage, without spoiling all her life. She would submit to it for a
time, since the time had a definite limit.
The class-teaching itself at last became almost mechanical. It was a
strain on her, an exhausting wearying strain, always unnatural. But
there was a certain amount of pleasure in the sheer oblivion of
teaching, so much work to do, so many children to see after, so much to
be done, that one’s self was forgotten. When the work had become like
habit to her, and her individual soul was left out, had its growth
elsewhere, then she could be almost happy.
Her real, individual self drew together and became more coherent during
these two years of teaching, during the struggle against the odds of
class teaching. It was always a prison to her, the school. But it was a
prison where her wild, chaotic soul became hard and independent. When
she was well enough and not tired, then she did not hate the teaching.
She enjoyed getting into the swing of work of a morning, putting forth
all her strength, making the thing go. It was for her a strenuous form
of exercise. And her soul was left to rest, it had the time of torpor
in which to gather itself together in strength again. But the teaching
hours were too long, the tasks too heavy, and the disciplinary
condition of the school too unnatural for her. She was worn very thin
and quivering.
She came to school in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers wet, the
little, rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The larks quivered their
song up into the new sunshine, and the country was so glad. It was a
violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the town.
So that she stood before her class unwilling to give herself up to the
activity of teaching, to turn her energy, that longed for the country
and for joy of early summer, into the dominating of fifty children and
the transferring to them some morsels of arithmetic. There was a little
absentness about her. She could not force herself into forgetfulness. A
jar of buttercups and fool’s-parsley in the window-bottom kept her away
in the meadows, where in the lush grass the moon-daisies were
half-submerged, and a spray of pink ragged robin. Yet before her were
faces of fifty children. They were almost like big daisies in a dimness
of the grass.
A brightness was on her face, a little unreality in her teaching. She
could not quite see her children. She was struggling between two
worlds, her own world of young summer and flowers, and this other world
of work. And the glimmer of her own sunlight was between her and her
class.
Then the morning passed with a strange far-awayness and quietness.
Dinner-time came, when she and Maggie ate joyously, with all the
windows open. And then they went out into St. Philip’s churchyard,
where was a shadowy corner under red hawthorn trees. And there they
talked and read Shelley or Browning or some work about “Woman and
Labour”.
And when she went back to school, Ursula lived still in the shadowy
corner of the graveyard, where pink-red petals lay scattered from the
hawthorn tree, like myriad tiny shells on a beach, and a church bell
sometimes rang sonorously, and sometimes a bird called out, whilst
Maggie’s voice went on low and sweet.
These days she was happy in her soul: oh, she was so happy, that she
wished she could take her joy and scatter it in armfuls broadcast. She
made her children happy, too, with a little tingling of delight. But to
her, the children were not a school class this afternoon. They were
flowers, birds, little bright animals, children, anything. They only
were not Standard Five. She felt no responsibility for them. It was for
once a game, this teaching. And if they got their sums wrong, what
matter? And she would take a pleasant bit of reading. And instead of
history with dates, she would tell a lovely tale. And for grammar, they
could have a bit of written analysis that was not difficult, because
they had done it before:
“She shall be sportive as a fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs.”
She wrote that from memory, because it pleased her.
So the golden afternoon passed away and she went home happy. She had
finished her day of school, and was free to plunge into the glowing
evening of Cossethay. And she loved walking home. But it had not been
school. It had been playing at school beneath red hawthorn blossom.
She could not go on like this. The quarterly examination was coming,
and her class was not ready. It irritated her that she must drag
herself away from her happy self, and exert herself with all her
strength to force, to compel this heavy class of children to work hard
at arithmetic. They did not want to work, she did not want to compel
them. And yet, some second conscience gnawed at her, telling her the
work was not properly done. It irritated her almost to madness, and she
let loose all the irritation in the class. Then followed a day of
battle and hate and violence, when she went home raw, feeling the
golden evening taken away from her, herself incarcerated in some dark,
heavy place, and chained there with a consciousness of having done
badly at work.
What good was it that it was summer, that right till evening, when the
corncrakes called, the larks would mount up into the light, to sing
once more before nightfall. What good was it all, when she was out of
tune, when she must only remember the burden and shame of school that
day.
And still, she hated school. Still she cried, she did not believe in
it. Why should the children learn, and why should she teach them? It
was all so much milling the wind. What folly was it that made life into
this, the fulfilling of some stupid, factitious duty? It was all so
made up, so unnatural. The school, the sums, the grammar, the quarterly
examinations, the registers—it was all a barren nothing!
Why should she give her allegiance to this world, and let it so
dominate her, that her own world of warm sun and growing, sap-filled
life was turned into nothing? She was not going to do it. She was not
going to be a prisoner in the dry, tyrannical man-world. She was not
going to care about it. What did it matter if her class did ever so
badly in the quarterly examination. Let it—what did it matter?
Nevertheless, when the time came, and the report on her class was bad,
she was miserable, and the joy of the summer was taken away from her,
she was shut up in gloom. She could not really escape from this world
of system and work, out into her fields where she was happy. She must
have her place in the working world, be a recognized member with full
rights there. It was more important to her than fields and sun and
poetry, at this time. But she was only the more its enemy.
It was a very difficult thing, she thought, during the long hours of
intermission in the summer holidays, to be herself, her happy self that
enjoyed so much to lie in the sun, to play and swim and be content, and
also to be a school-teacher getting results out of a class of children.
She dreamed fondly of the time when she need not be a teacher any more.
But vaguely, she knew that responsibility had taken place in her for
ever, and as yet her prime business was to work.
The autumn passed away, the winter was at hand. Ursula became more and
more an inhabitant of the world of work, and of what is called life.
She could not see her future, but a little way off, was college, and to
the thought of this she clung fixedly. She would go to college, and get
her two or three years’ training, free of cost. Already she had applied
and had her place appointed for the coming year.
So she continued to study for her degree. She would take French, Latin,
English, mathematics and botany. She went to classes in Ilkeston, she
studied at evening. For there was this world to conquer, this knowledge
to acquire, this qualification to attain. And she worked with
intensity, because of a want inside her that drove her on. Almost
everything was subordinated now to this one desire to take her place in
the world. What kind of place it was to be she did not ask herself. The
blind desire drove her on. She must take her place.
She knew she would never be much of a success as an elementary school
teacher. But neither had she failed. She hated it, but she had managed
it.
Maggie had left St. Philip’s School, and had found a more congenial
post. The two girls remained friends. They met at evening classes, they
studied and somehow encouraged a firm hope each in the other. They did
not know whither they were making, nor what they ultimately wanted. But
they knew they wanted now to learn, to know and to do.
They talked of love and marriage, and the position of woman in
marriage. Maggie said that love was the flower of life, and blossomed
unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it was found,
and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
To Ursula this was unsatisfactory. She thought she still loved Anton
Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had not been strong
enough to acknowledge her. He had denied her. How then could she love
him? How then was love so absolute? She did not believe it. She
believed that love was a way, a means, not an end in itself, as Maggie
seemed to think. And always the way of love would be found. But whither
did it lead?
“I believe there are many men in the world one might love—there is not
only one man,” said Ursula.
She was thinking of Skrebensky. Her heart was hollow with the knowledge
of Winifred Inger.
“But you must distinguish between love and passion,” said Maggie,
adding, with a touch of contempt: “Men will easily have a passion for
you, but they won’t love you.”
“Yes,” said Ursula, vehemently, the look of suffering, almost of
fanaticism, on her face. “Passion is only part of love. And it seems so
much because it can’t last. That is why passion is never happy.”
She was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in contrast
with Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable passing-away of
things. Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of life, Maggie was
always single, always withheld, so she went in a heavy brooding sadness
that was almost meat to her. In Ursula’s last winter at St. Philip’s
the friendship of the two girls came to a climax. It was during this
winter that Ursula suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie’s
fundamental sadness of enclosedness. Maggie enjoyed and suffered
Ursula’s struggles against the confines of her life. And then the two
girls began to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life
wherein Maggie must remain enclosed.