 CHAPTER XIV Maggie's people, the show field, lived in the large gardener's cottage that was half a farm behind Belcoat Hall. The hall was too damp to live in, so the show fields were caretakers, gamekeepers, farmers, all in one. The father was gamekeeper and stock-reader. The eldest son was market gardener, using the big hall gardens. The second son was farmer and gardener. There was a large family, as at Casate. Ursula loved to stay at Belcoat, to be treated as a grandlady by Maggie's brothers. They were good-looking men. The eldest was twenty-six years old. He was the gardener, a man not very tall, but strong and well-made, with brown, sunny, easy eyes and a face handsomely hewn brown, with a long, fair mustache which he pulled as he talked to Ursula. The girl was excited because these men attended to her when she came near. She could make their eyes light up and quiver. She could make Anthony the eldest twist and twist his mustache. She knew she could move them almost at will with her light laughter and chatter. They loved her ideas, watched her as she talked vehemently about politics or economics. And she, while she talked, saw the golden-brown eyes of Anthony gleam like the eyes of a satyr as they watched her. He did not listen to her words, he listened to her. It excited her. He was like a fawn, pleased when she would go with him over his hot houses to look at the green and pretty plants, at the pink primulas knotting among their leaves and scenarios flaunting purple and crimson and white. She asked about everything, and he told her very exactly and minutely, in a queer pedantic way that made her want to laugh. Yet she was really interested in what he did, and he had the curious light in his face like the light in the eyes of the goat that was tethered by the farmyard gate. She went down with him into the warmish cellar where already in the darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming. He held the lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny knob end of the rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red stem, thrusting itself like a knob of flame through the soft soil. His face was turned up to her, the light glittered on his eyes and his teeth as he laughed with a faint musical neigh. He looked handsome, and she heard a new sound in her ears. The faintly musical, neighing laugh of Anthony, whose mustache twisted up and whose eyes were luminous with a cold, steady, arrogant laughing glare. There seemed a little prance of triumph in his movement. She could not rid herself of a movement of acquiescence, a touch of acceptance. Yet he was so humble, his voice was so caressing. He held his hand for her to step on when she must climb a wall. And she stepped on the living firmness of him that quivered firmly under her weight. She was aware of him as if in a mesmeric state. In her ordinary sense she had nothing to do with him, but the peculiar ease and unnoticeableness of his entering the house, the power of his cold gleaming light on her when he looked at her, was like a bewitchment. In his eyes, as in the pale gray eyes of a goat, there seemed some of that steady hard fire of moonlight which has nothing to do with the day. It made her alert, and yet her mind went out like an extinguished thing. She was all senses, all her senses were alive. Then she saw him on Sunday, dressed up in Sunday clothes, trying to impress her, and he looked ridiculous. She clung to the ridiculous effect of his stiff Sunday clothes. She was always conscious of some unfaithfulness to Maggie on Anthony's score. Poor Maggie stood apart as if betrayed. Maggie and Anthony were enemies by instinct. Ursula had to go back to her friend brimming with affection and appointiency of pity, which Maggie received with a little stiffness. Then poetry and books and learning took the place of Anthony, with his goats' movements and his cold gleaming humor. While Ursula was at bell-coat, the snow fell. In the morning a covering of snow weighed on the rhododendron bushes. Shall we go out, said Maggie? She had lost some of her leader's sureness and was now tentative, a little in reserve from her friend. They took the key of the gate and wandered into the park. It was a white world on which dark trees and tree masses stood under a sky keen with frost. The two girls went past the hall that was shuttered in silent, their footprints marking the snow on the drive. Down the park, a long way off, a man was carrying armfuls of hay across the snow. He was a small, dark figure, like an animal moving in its unawareness. Ursula and Maggie went on exploring, down to a tinkling chilly brook that had worn the snow away in little scoops, and ran dark between. They saw a robin glance its bright eyes and burst scarlet and grey into the hedge. Then some pertly-marked blue-chits scuffled. Meanwhile, the brook slid on coldly, chuckling to itself. The girls wandered across the snowy grass to where the artificial fishponds lay under thin ice. There was a big tree with a thick trunk twisted with ivy that hung almost horizontal over the ponds. Ursula climbed joyfully into this and sat amid bosses of bright ivy and dull berries. Some ivy leaves were like green spears held out and tipped with snow. The ice was seen beneath them. Maggie took out a book and sitting lower down the trunk began to read Coleridge's Christabel. Ursula half-listened. She was wildly thrilled. Then she saw Anthony coming across the snow with his confident, slightly strutting stride. His face looked brown and hard against the snow, smiling with a sort of tense confidence. Hello, she called to him. A response went over his face. His head was lifted in an answering, jerking gesture. Hello, he said. You're like a bird in there. And Ursula's laugh rang out. She answered to the peculiar, ready twang in his penetrating voice. She did not think of Anthony, yet she lived in a sort of connection with him, in his world. One evening she met him as she was coming down the lane and they walked side by side. I think it's so lovely here, she cried. Do you, he said, I'm glad you like it. There was a curious confidence in his voice. Oh, I love it. What more does one want than to live in this beautiful place and make things grow in your garden? It is like the Garden of Eden. Is it, he said, with a little laugh. Yes, well, it's not so bad. He was hesitating. The pale gleam was strong in his eyes. He was looking at her steadily, watching her as an animal might. Something leaped in her soul. She knew he was going to suggest to her that she should be as he was. Would you like to stay here with me? He asked, tentatively. She blenched with fear and with the intense sensation of proper license suggested to her. They had come to the gate. How, she asked, you aren't alone here. We could marry, he answered, in the strange, coldly gleaming insinuating tone that chilled the sunshine into moonlight. All substantial things seemed transformed. Shadows and dancing moonlight were real and all cold inhuman gleaming sensations. She realized with something like terror that she was going to accept this. She was going inevitably to accept him. His hand was reaching out to the gate before them. She stood still. His flesh was hard and brown and final. She seemed to be in the grip of some insult. I couldn't, she answered involuntarily. He gave the same brief, neighing little laugh, very sad and bitter now, and slotted back the bar of the gate. Yet he did not open. For a moment they both stood, looking at the fire of sunset that quivered among the purple twigs of the trees. She saw his brown, hard, well-hewn face gleaming with anger and humiliation and submission. He was an animal that knows that it is subdued. Her heart, flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow and with an inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she he was the cleaner? She turned away. She turned round from him and saw the east flush strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a rosy sky, above the darkening bluish snow. All this so beautiful, all this so lovely, he did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it and was one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely. They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates. The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made only a dimness in an unreal world, and like a shadow the day had gone into a faintly luminous snowy evening, while she was talking aimlessly to him to keep him at a distance, yet to keep him near her. And he walked heavily. He opened the garden gate for her quietly, and she was entering into her own pleasances, leaving him outside the gate. Then even whilst she was escaping or trying to escape this feeling of pain came Maggie the next day, saying, I wouldn't make Anthony love you, Ursula, if you don't want him. It is not nice. But Maggie, I never made him love me, cried Ursula, dismayed and suffering and feeling as if she had done something base. She liked Anthony, though. All her life at intervals she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveler. She was a traveler on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfillment of his own senses. She could not help it that she was a traveler. She knew, Anthony, that he was not one. But oh, ultimately and finally she must go on and on, seeking the goal that she knew she did draw nearer, too. She was wearing away her second and last cycle at St. Phillips. As the months went she ticked them off, first October, then November, December, January. She was careful always to subtract a month from the remainder for the summer holidays. She saw herself traveling round a circle, only an arc of which remained to complete. Then she was in the open, like a bird tossed into mid-air, a bird that had learned in some measure to fly. There was college ahead. That was her mid-air, unknown, spacious. From college and she would have broken from the confines of all the life she had known. For her father was also going to move. They were all going to leave Cassete. Brangwen had kept his carelessness about his circumstances. He knew his work in the lace designing meant little to him personally. He just earned his wage by it. He did not know what meant much to him. Living close to Anna Brangwen, his mind was always suffused through with physical heat. He moved from instinct to instinct, groping, always groping on. When it was suggested to him that he might apply for one of the posts as handwork instructor posts about to be created by the Nottingham Education Committee, it was as if a space had been given to him into which he could remove from his hot, dusky enclosure. He sent in his application confidently, expectantly. He had a sort of belief in his supernatural fate. The inevitable weariness of his daily work had stiffened some of his muscles and made a slight deadness in his ruddy, alert face. Now he might escape. He was full of the new possibilities, and his wife was acquiescent. She was willing now to have a change. She too was tired of Cassete. The house was too small for the growing children, and since she was nearly forty years old she began to come awake from her sleep of motherhood. Her energy moved more outwards. The din of growing lives roused her from her apathy. She too must have her hand in making life. She was quite ready to move, taking all her brood. It would be better now if she transplanted them, for she had born her last child. It would be growing up. So that in her easy, unused fashion she talked plans and arrangements with her husband, indifferent really as to the method of the change. Since a change was coming, even if it did not come in this way it would come in another. The house was full of ferment. Ursula was wild with excitement. At last her father was going to be something socially. So long he had been a social cipher without form or standing. Now he was going to be art and handwork instructed for the county of Nottingham. That was really a status. It was a position. He would be a specialist in his way, and he was an uncommon man. Ursula felt they were all getting a foothold at last. He was coming to his own. Who else that she knew could turn out from his own fingers the beautiful things her father could produce. She felt he was certain of this new job. They would move. They would leave this cottage at Cassete which had grown too small for them. They would leave Cassete where the children had all been born and where they were always kept to the same measure. For the people who had known them as children, along with the other village boys and girls, would never, could never understand that they should grow up different. They had held Ertler Brangwen one of themselves and had given her her place in her native village as in a family, and the bond was strong. But now when she was growing to something beyond what Cassete would allow or understand the bond between her and her old associates was becoming a bondage. Hello, Ursula. How are you going on? They said when they met her, and it demanded of her in the old voice the old response, and something in her must respond and belong to people who knew her, but something else denied bitterly. What was true of her ten years ago was not true now, and something else which she was and must be they could neither see nor allow. They felt it there, nevertheless, something beyond them, and they were injured. They said she was proud and conceited that she was too big for her shoes nowadays. They said she needn't pretend because they knew what she was. They had known her since she was born. They quoted this and that about her, and she was ashamed because she did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet one kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it. So Casate hampered her, and she wanted to go away to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away to be free to stand straight up to her own height. So that when she knew that her father had the new post and that the family would move, she felt like skipping on the face of the earth and making psalms of joy. The old bound shell of Casate was to be cast off, and she was to dance away into the blue air. She wanted to dance and sing. She made dreams of the new place she would live in, where stately cultured people of high feeling would be friends with her, and she would live with the noble in the land, moving to a large freedom of feeling. She dreamed of a rich, proud, simple girlfriend who had never known Mr. Harvey and his like, nor ever had a note in her voice of bondage, contempt, and fear as Maggie had. And she gave herself to all that she loved in Casate passionately, because she was going away now. She wandered about to her favorite spot. There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening, and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods, an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the gray-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding. The drooping still little flowers were without heat. Ursula picked some lovingly in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight. The snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night, and she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk to the intimate little flowers and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground. She sat down on the felled tree and remained a while remote. Getting home she left the purplish dark of the trees for the open lane where the puddles shone long and jewel-like in the rut. The land about her was darkened, and the sky a jewel overhead. Oh, how amazing it was to her! It was almost too much. She wanted to run and sing and cry out for very wildness and poignancy, but she could not run and sing and cry out in such a way as to cry out the deep things in her heart, although she was still and almost sad with loneliness. At Easter she went again to Maggie's home for a few days. She was, however, shy and fugitive. She saw, Anthony, how suggestive he was to look on and how his eyes had a sort of supplicating light that was rather beautiful. She looked at him and she looked again for him to become real to her, but it was her own self that was occupied elsewhere. She seemed to have some other being. When she turned to spring in the opening buds there was a large pear-tree by a wall, and it was full, thronged with tiny gray-green buds, myriads. She stood before it, arrested with delight, and a realization went deep into her heart. There was so great a host in a ray behind the cloud of pale, dim green, so much to come forth, so much sunshine to pour down. So the weeks passed on, trans-like and pregnant. The pear-tree at Cassitay burst into bloom against the cottage end, like a wave burst into foam. Then gradually the blue bells came, blue as water, standing thin in the level places under the trees and bushes, flowing in more and more till there was a flood of azure, and pale green leaves burning, and tiny birds with fiery little song and flight. Then swiftly the flood sank and was gone, and it was summer. There was to be no going to the seaside for a holiday. The holiday was the removal from Cassitay. They were going to live near Willey Green, which place was most central for Brangwyn. It was an old quiet village on the edge of the thronged colliery district, so that it served in its quaintness of odd old cottages lingering in their sunny gardens as a sort of bower or plasance to the sprawling colliery townlet of Beldover, a pleasant walk round for the colliers on Sunday morning before the public houses opened. In Willey Green stood the grammar school where Brangwyn was occupied for two days during the week and where experiments and education were being carried on. Ursula wanted to live in Willey Green on the remote side, towards Southwell and Sherwood Forest. There it was so lovely and romantic, but out into the world met out into the world. Little Brangwyn must become modern. He bought, with his wife's money, a fairly large house in the new redbrick part of Beldover. It was a villa built by the widow of the late colliery manager and stood in a quiet, new little side street near the large church. Ursula was rather sad. Instead of having arrived at distinction, they had come to a new redbrick suburbia in a grimy small town. Mrs. Brangwyn was happy. The rooms were splendidly large, a splendid dining room, drawing room and kitchen, besides a very pleasant study downstairs. Everything was admirably appointed. The widow had settled herself in lavishly. She was a native of Beldover and had intended to reign almost queen. Her bathroom was white and silver, her stairs were of oak, her chimney-pieces were massive and oaken with bulging columnar supports. Good and substantial was the keynote, but Ursula resented the stout inflated prosperity implied everywhere. She made her father promise to chisel down the bulging oak and chimney-pieces, chisel them flat. That sort of important paunch was very distasteful to her. Her father was himself long and loosely built. What had he to do with so much good and substantial importance? They bought a fair amount also of the widow's furniture. It was in common good taste, the great Wilton carpet, the large round table, the Chesterfield covered with glossy chints and roses and birds. It was all really very sunny and nice, with large windows and a view right across the shallow valley. After all, they would be, as one of their acquaintances said, among the elite of Beldover. They would represent culture. And as there was no one of higher social importance than the managers, the colliery managers, and the chemists, they would shine with their delirobia of beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their reproductions from Botticelli. Nay, the large photographs of the primavera and the Aphrodite in the Nativity in the dining room, the ordinary reception room, would make dumb the mouth of Beldover. And after all, it is better to be princess in Beldover than a vulgar nobody in the country. It was great preparation made for the removal of the whole Branguin family, ten in all. The house in Beldover was prepared. The house in Casate was dismantled. Come the end of the school term, the removal would begin. Ursula left school at the end of July, when the summer holiday commenced. The morning outside was bright and sunny, and the freedom got inside the school room this last day. It was as if the walls of the school were going to melt away. Already they seemed shadowy and unreal. It was breaking up morning. Soon scholars and teachers would be outside, each going his own way. The irons were struck off, the sentence was expired, the prison was a momentary shadow halting about them. The children were carrying away books in inkwell and rolling up maps. All their faces were bright with gladness and goodwill. There was a bustle of cleaning and clearing away all marks of this last term of imprisonment. They were all breaking free. Visually eagerly Ursula made up her totals of attendance and spent the register. With pride she wrote down the thousands. To so many thousands of children had she given another session's lessons. It looked tremendous. The excited hours passed slowly in suspense. Then at last it was over. For the last time she stood before her children whilst they said their prayers and sang a hymn. Then it was over. Good-bye, children, she said. I shall not forget you, and you must not forget me. No, miss, cried the children in chorus with shining faces. She stood smiling on them, moved as they filed out. Then she gave her monitors their term six pence's and they two departed. Cubbers were locked, blackboards washed, inkwells and dusters removed. The place stood bare and vacated. She had triumphed over it. It was a shell now. She had fought a good fight here and it had not been all together unenjoyable. She owed some gratitude even to this hard vacant place that stood like a memorial or a trophy. So much of her life had been fought for and won and lost here. Something of this school would always belong to her, something of her to it. She acknowledged it and now came the leave-taking. In the teacher's room the teachers were chatting and loitering, talking excitedly of where they were going. To the Isle of Man, to Lendudno, to Yarmuth they were eager and attached to each other like comrades leaving a ship. Then it was Mr. Harvey's turn to make a speech to Ursula. He looked handsome, with his silver-gray temples and black brows and his imperturbable male solidity. Well, he said, we must say good-bye to Miss Brangwin and wish her all good fortune for the future. I suppose we shall see her again sometime and hear how she is getting on. Oh, yes, said Ursula, stammering, blushing, laughing. Oh, yes, I shall come and see you. Then she realized that this sounded too personal and she felt foolish. Miss Schofield suggested these two books, he said, putting a couple of volumes on the table. I hope you will like them. Ursula, feeling very shy, picked up the books. There was a volume of Swinburne's poetry and a volume of Meredith. Oh, I shall love them, she said. Thank you very much. Thank you all so much. She stuttered to an end and, very red, turned to the leaves of the books eagerly, pretending to be taking the first pleasure, but really seeing nothing. Mr. Harvey's eyes were twinkling. He alone was at his ease, master of the situation. It was pleasing to him to make Ursula the gift and for once extend good feeling to his teachers. As a rule, it was so difficult. Each one was so strained in resentment under his rule. Yes, he said, we hoped you would like the choice. He looked with his peculiar challenging smile for a moment, then returned to his cupboards. Ursula felt very confused. She hugged her books, loving them, and she felt that she loved all the teachers and Mr. Harvey. It was very confusing. At last she was out. She cast one hasty glance over the school building, squatting on the asphalt yard in the hot, glistening sun, one look down the well-known road and turned her back on it all, something strained in her heart. She was going away. Well, good luck, said the last of the teachers as she shook hands at the end of the road. We'll expect you back some day. He spoke in irony. She laughed and broke away. She was free. As she sat on the top of the tram in the sunlight, she looked round her with tremendous delight. She had left something which had meant much to her. She would not go to school anymore and do the familiar things. Queer! There was a little pang amid her exaltation, of fear, not of regret. Yet how she exalted this morning. She was tremulous with pride and joy. She loved the two books. They were tokens to her, representing the fruit and trophies of her two years which, thank God, were over. To Ursula Brangwen with best wishes for her future, and in warm memory of the time she spent in St. Philip's school, was written in the headmaster's neat, scrupulous handwriting. She could see the careful hand holding the pen, the thick fingers with tufts of black hair on the back of each one. He had signed. All the teachers had signed. She liked having all their signatures. She felt she loved them all. They were her fellow workers. She carried away from the school a pride she could never lose. She had her place as comrade and sharer in the work of the school. Her fellow teachers had signed to her as one of them. And she was one of all workers. She had put in her tiny brick to the fabric man was building. She had qualified herself as co-builder. Even the day for the home removal came. Ursula rose early to pack up the remaining goods. The carts arrived, lent by her uncle at the marsh in the lull between hay and corn harvest. The goods roped in the cart. Ursula mounted her bicycle and sped away to belled of her. The house was hers. She entered its clean scrubbed silence. The dining room had been covered with a thick rushed matting, hard and of the beautiful, luminous, clean color of sun-dried reeds. The walls were pale gray. The doors were darker gray. Ursula admired it very much as the sun came through the large windows, streaming in. She flung open doors and windows to the sunshine. Flowers were bright and shining round the small lawn, which stood above the road, looking over the raw field opposite, which would later be built upon. No one came. So she wandered down the garden at the back of the wall. The eight bells of the church rang the hour. She could hear the many sounds of the town about her. At last the cart was seen coming round the corner. Familiar furniture piled undignified on top. Tom, her brother, and Teresa, marching on foot beside the mass, proud of having walked 10 miles or more from the tram terminus. Ursula poured out beer, and the men drank thirstily by the door. A second cart was coming. Her father appeared on his motor bicycle. There was the staggering transport of furniture up the steps to the little lawn where it was deposited, all pal-mal in the sunshine, very queer and discomforting. Brangwen was a pleasant man to work with, cheerful and easy. Ursula loved deciding him where the heavy things should stand. She watched anxiously to struggle up the steps and through the doorways. Then the big things were in. The carts set off again. Ursula and her father worked away, carrying in all the light things that remained upon the lawn and putting them in place. Dinner time came. They ate bread and cheese in the kitchen. Well, we're getting on, said Brangwen cheerfully. Two more loads arrived. The afternoon passed away in a struggle with the furniture upstairs. Towards five o'clock appeared the last loads, consisting also of Mrs. Brangwen and the younger children, driven by Uncle Fred in the trap. Goodwin had walked with Margaret from the station. The whole family had come. There, said Brangwen, as his wife got down from the cart, now we're all here. A. said his wife pleasantly. And the very brevity, the silence of intimacy between the two made a home in the hearts of the children, who clustered round feeling strange in the new place. Everything was at sixes and sevens, but a fire was made in the kitchen, the hearth-rug put down, the kettle set on the hob, and Mrs. Brangwen began towards sunset to prepare the first meal. Ursula and Goodwin were slaving in the bedrooms. Candles were rushing about. Then from the kitchen came the smell of ham and eggs and coffee, and in the gaslight the scrambled meal began. The family seemed to huddle together like a little camp in a strange place. Ursula felt a load of responsibility upon her, caring for the half-little ones. The smallest kept near the mother. It was dark, and the children went sleepy but excited to bed. It was a long time before the sound of voices died out. There was a tremendous sense of adventure. In the morning everybody was awake soon after dawn. The children crying, When I wakened up I didn't know where I was. There were the strange sounds of the town and the repeated chiming of the big church bells, so much harsher and more insistent than the little bells of Casate. They looked through the windows past the other new red houses to the wooded hill across the valley. They had all a delightful sense of space and liberation, space and light and air, but gradually all set to work. They were a careless, untidy family, yet when once they set about to get the house in order the thing went with felicity and quickness. By evening the place was roughly established. They would not have a servant to live in the house, only a woman who could go home at night, and they would not even have the woman yet. They wanted to do as they liked in their own home, with no stranger in the midst. Chapter 15 Part 1 of the Rainbow This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Chapter 15 The Bitterness of Ecstasy Part 1 A storm of industry raged on in the house. Ursula did not go to college till October, so with a distinct feeling of responsibility, as if she must express herself in this house, she labored arranging, rearranging, selecting, contriving. She could use her father's ordinary tools, both for woodwork and metalwork, so she hammered and tinkered. Her mother was quite content to have the thing done. Brangwen was interested. He had a ready belief in his daughter. He himself was at work putting up his work shed in the garden. At last she had finished for the time being. The drawing room was big and empty. It had the good Wilton carpet of which the family was so proud, and the large couch and large chairs covered with shiny chintz, and the piano, a little sculpture and plaster that Brangwen had done, and not very much more. It was too large and empty feeling for the family to occupy very much, yet they liked to know it was there, large and empty. The home was the dining room. There, the hard, rushed floor covering made the ground light, reflecting light upon the bottom of their hearts. In the window-bay was a broad, sunny seat. The table was so solid one could not jostle it, and the chairs so strong one could knock them over without hurting them. The familiar organ that Brangwen had made stood on one side, looking peculiarly small. The sideboard was comfortably reduced to normal proportions. This was the family living room. Ursula had a bedroom to herself. It was really a servant's bedroom, small and plain. Its window looked over the back garden at other back gardens, some of them old and very nice, some of them littered with packing cases. Then at the backs of the houses whose fronts were the shops in High Street, or the gentile homes of the under manager or the chief cashier facing the chapel. She had six weeks still before going to college. In this time she nervously read over some Latin and some botany and fitfully worked at some mathematics. She was going into college as a teacher for her training. But having already taken her matriculation examination, she was entered for a university course. At the end of a year she would sit for the intermediate arts, then two years after for her BA. So her case was not that of the ordinary school teacher. She would be working among the private students who came only for pure education, not for mere professional training. She would be of the elect. For the next three years she would be more or less dependent on her parents again. Her training was free. All college fees were paid by the government. She had more over a few pounds grant every year. This would just pay for her train fares and her clothing. Her parents would only have to feed her. She did not want to cost them much. They would not be well off. Her father would earn only two hundred a year and a good deal of her mother's capital was spent in buying the house. Still there was enough to get along with. Goodwin was attending the art school at Nottingham. She was working particularly at sculpture. She had a gift for this. She loved making little models and clay of children or of animals. Already some of these had appeared in the students' exhibition in the castle. And Goodwin was a distinguished person. She was chafing at the art school and wanted to go to London, but there was not enough money. Neither would her parents let her go so far. Teresa had left the high school. She was a great strapping bold hussy, indifferent to all higher claims. She would stay at home. The others were at school except the youngest. When terms started they would all be transferred to the grammar school at Willie Green. Ursula was excited at making acquaintances in Beldover. The excitement soon passed. She had tea at the clergyman's, at the chemists, at the other chemists, at the doctors, at the under managers. Then she knew practically everybody. She could not take people very seriously, though at the time she wanted to. She wandered the country, on foot and on her bicycle, finding it very beautiful in the forest direction between Mansfield and Southwell and Workshop. But she was here only skirmishing for amusement. Her real exploration would begin in college. Term began. She went into town each day by train. The cloistered quiet of the college began to close around her. She was not at first disappointed. The big college built of stone standing in the quiet street with a rim of grass and lime trees also peaceful. She felt it remote, a magic land. Its architecture was foolish, she knew from her father. Still, it was different from that of all other buildings. Its rather pretty plaything gothic form was almost the style in the dirty industrial town. She liked the hall with its big stone chimney piece and its gothic arches supporting the balcony above. To be sure the arches were ugly, the chimney piece of cardboard-like carved stone with its arboreal decoration looked silly just opposite the bicycle stand and the radiator, whilst a great notice board with its fluttering papers seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall. Nevertheless, amorphous as it might be, there was in it a reminiscence of the wondrous cloisteral origin of education. Her soul flew straight back to the medieval times when the monks of God held the learning of men and imparted it within the shadow of religion. In this spirit she entered college. The harshness and vulgarity of the lobbies and cloak rooms hurt her at first. Why was it not all beautiful? But she could not openly admit her criticism. She was on holy ground. She wanted all the students to have a high pure spirit. She wanted them to say only the real, genuine things. She wanted their faces to be still and luminous as the nuns and the monks' faces. Alas, the girls chattered and giggled and were nervous. They were dressed up and frizzed. The men looked mean and clownish. Still, it was lovely to pass along the corridor with one's books in one's hands, to push the swinging glass panel door and enter the big room where the first lecture would be given. The windows were large and lofty. The myriad brown students' desks stood waiting. The great blackboard was smooth behind the rostrum. Ursula sat behind her window, rather far back. Looking down, she saw the lime trees turning yellow, the tradesman's boy passing silent down the still autumn-sunny street. There was the world, remote, remote. Here within the great whispering seashell it whispered all the while with reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence. She listened. She scribbled her notes with joy, almost with ecstasy, never for a moment criticizing what she heard. The lecturer was a mouthpiece, a priest. As she stood black-gowned on the rostrum, some strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they became a lecture. At first she preserved herself from criticism. She would not consider the professors as men, ordinary men, who ate bacon and pulled on their boots before coming to college. They were the black-gowned priests of knowledge, serving forever in a remote, hushed temple. They were the initiated, and the beginning and the end of the mystery was in their keeping. Curious joy she had of the lectures, it was a joy to hear the theory of education. There was such freedom and pleasure in ranging over the very stuff of knowledge and seeing how it moved and lived and had its being. How happy Racine made her. She did not know why, but as the big lines of the drama unfolded themselves, so steady, so measured, she felt a thrill as of being in the realm of the reality. Of Latin she was doing Livy and Horus, the curious, intimate, gossiping tone of the Latin class suited Horus, yet she never cared for him, nor even Livy. There was an entire lack of sternness in the gossipy classroom. She tried hard to keep her old grasp of the Roman spirit, but gradually the Latin became mere gossip stuff and artificiality to her, a question of manners and verbosities. Her terror was the mathematics class. The lecturer went so fast her heart beat excitedly, she seemed to be straining every nerve, and she struggled hard during private study to get the stuff into control. Then came the lovely peaceful afternoons in the Botany Laboratory. There were few students, how she loved to sit on her high stool before the bench, with her pith and her razor and her material carefully mounting her slides, carefully bringing her microscope into focus, then turning with joy to record her observation, drawing joyfully in her book, if the slide were good. She soon made a college friend, a girl who had lived in Florence, a girl who wore a wonderful purple or figured scarf draped over a plain dark dress. She was Dorothy Russell, daughter of a South country advocate. Dorothy lived with a maiden aunt in Nottingham, and spent her spare moments slaving for the women's social and political union. She was quiet and intense, with an ivory face and dark hair looped plain over her ears. Ursula was very fond of her, but afraid of her. She seemed so old and so relentless towards herself. Yet she was only twenty-two. Ursula always felt her to be a creature of fate, like Cassandra. The two girls had a close, stern friendship. Dorothy worked at all things with the same passion, never sparing herself. She came closest to Ursula during the botany hours, for she could not draw. Ursula made beautiful and wonderful drawings of the sections under the microscope, and Dorothy always came to learn the manner of the drawing. So the first year went by in magnificent seclusion and activity of learning. It was strenuous as a battle, her college life, yet remote as peace. She came to Nottingham in the morning with Goodwin. The two sisters were distinguished wherever they went, slim, strong girls, eager and extremely sensitive. Goodwin was the more beautiful of the two, with her sleepy, half-language girlishness that looked so soft and yet was balanced and inalterable underneath. She wore soft, easy clothing and hats which fell by themselves into a careless grace. Ursula was much more carefully dressed, but she was self-conscious, always falling into depths of admiration of somebody else and modeling herself upon this other, and so producing a hopeless incongruity. When she dressed for practical purposes, she always looked well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat and skirt and a small hat of black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding sensitive receptivity. At the end of the first year, Ursula got through her intermediate arts examination, and there came a lull in her eager activities. She slackened off. She relaxed altogether, worn nervous and inflammable by the excitement of the preparation for the examination, and by the sort of exaltation which carried her through the crisis itself, she now fell into a quivering passivity, her will all loosened. The family went to Scarborough for a month. Goodwin and the father were busy at the handicraft holiday school there. Ursula was left a good deal with the children, but when she could she went off by herself. She stood and looked out over the shining sea. It was very beautiful to her. The tears rose hot in her heart. Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly into her a passionate, unborn yearning. There are so many dawns that have not yet risen. It seemed as if from over the edge of the sea all the unrisened dawns were appealing to her. All her unborn soul was crying for the unrisened dawns. As she sat looking out at the tender sea with its lovely, swift glimmer, the sob rose in her breast till she caught her lip suddenly under her teeth, and the tears were forcing themselves from her. And in her very sob she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry. It was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried. She glanced apprehensively round, hoping no one would see her in this state. Then came a time when the sea was rough. She watched the water traveling into the coast. She watched a big wave running unnoticed to burst in a shock of foam against a rock, enveloping all in a great white beauty to pour away again, leaving the rock emerged black and teeming. Oh, and if when the wave burst into whiteness it were only set free. Sometimes she loitered along the harbor, looking at the sea-brown sailors who, in their close blue jerseys, lounged on the harbor wall and laughed at her with impudent communicative eyes. There was established a little relation between her and them. She never would speak to them or know any more of them. Yet as she walked by and they leaned on the sea wall, there was something between her and them, something keen and delightful and painful. She liked best the young one whose fair, salty hair tumbled over his blue eyes. He was so new and fresh and salt and not of this world. From Scarborough she went to her uncle Tom's. Winifred had a small baby born at the end of the summer. She had become strange and alien to Ursula. There was an unmentionable reserve between the two women. William Branglund was an attentive father, a very domestic husband, but there was something spurious about his domesticity. Ursula did not like him any more. Something ugly, blatant in his nature, had come out now, making him shift everything over to a sentimental basis. A materialistic unbeliever, he carried it all off by becoming full of human feeling, a warm, attentive host, a generous husband, a model citizen, and he was clever enough to rouse admiration everywhere and to take in his wife sufficiently. She did not love him. She was glad to live in a state of complacent self-deception with him. She worked according to him. Ursula was relieved to go home. She had still two peaceful years before her. Her future was settled for two years. She returned to college to prepare for her final examination. But during this year the glamour began to depart from college. The professors were not priests initiated into the deep mysteries of life and knowledge. After all, they were only middlemen handling wares they had become so accustomed to that they were oblivious of them. What was Latin? So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop where one bought curios and learned the market value of curios? Dull curios, too, on the whole. She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by Chinese and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops. Antiques. The very word made her soul fall flat and dead. The life went out of her studies. Why? She did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious. Spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naivety of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little sideshow to the factories of the town. Gradually, the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a little apprentice shop where one was further equipped for making money. The college itself was a little slovenly laboratory for the factory. A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same darkness and bitter gloom from which she was never safe now. The realization of the permanent substratum of ugliness under everything. As she came to the college in the afternoon, the lawns were frothed with daisies, the lime trees hung tender and sunlit and green, and oh, the deep white froth of the daisies was anguished to see. For inside, inside the college, she knew she must enter the sham workshop. All the while it was a sham store, a sham warehouse, with a single motive of material gain and no productivity. It pretended to exist by the religious virtue of knowledge, but the religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunky to the god of material success. A sort of inertia came over her. Slowly from habit she went on with her studies, but it was almost hopeless. She could scarcely attend to anything. At the Anglo-Saxon lecture in the afternoon she sat looking down out of the window, hearing no word of Beowulf or of anything else. Down below in the street the sunny gray pavement went beside the palisade. A woman in a pink frock with a scarlet sunshade crossed the road, a little white dog running like a fleck of light about her. The woman with the scarlet sunshade came over the road, a lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her. Ursula watched spellbound. The woman with the scarlet sunshade and the flickering terrier was gone, and wither. Wither! In what world of reality was the woman in the pink dress walking? To what warehouse of dead unreality was she herself confined? What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon when one only learned it in order to answer examination questions in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the intercommercial shrine, yet what else was there? Was life all this and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things to encumber material life. Finally she threw over French, she would take honors in botany. This was the one study that lived for her. She had entered into the lives of the plants. She was fascinated by the strange laws of the vegetable world. She had here a glimpse of something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human world. College was barren, cheap, a temple converted to the most vulgar petty commerce. Did she not go on to hear the echo of learning pulsing back to the source of the mystery? The source of mystery and barrenly the professors and their gowns offered commercial commodity that could be turned to good account in the examination room. Ready made stuff too and not really worth the money it was intended to fetch, which they all knew. All the time in the college now, save when she was laboring in her botany laboratory, for there the mystery still glimmered. She felt she was degrading herself in a kind of trade of sham Jew-jaws. Angry and stiff she went through her last term. She would rather be out again earning her own living. Even Brinsley Street and Mr. Harvey seemed real in comparison. Her violent hatred of the Elkston School was nothing compared with the sterile degradation of college, but she was not going back to Brinsley Street either. She would take her BA and become a mistress in some grammar school for a time. The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead, and then upon approach always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead, always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven, and then from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous squalid activity. No matter. Every hilltop was a little different. Every valley was somehow new. Cassatté and her childhood with her father, the marsh and the little church school near the marsh, and her grandmother and her uncles, the high school at Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky, Anton Skrebensky and the dance in the moonlight between the fires. And the time she could not think of without being blasted, Winifred Inger and the months before becoming a schoolteacher. Then the horrors of Brinsley Street lapsing into comparative peacefulness, Maggie and Maggie's brother whose influence she could still feel in her veins when she conjured him up. Then college and Dorothy Russell, who was now in France. Then the next move into the world again. Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different, yet she was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion, of falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action. Not which she was positively was dark and unrevealed. It could not come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area lit up by man's completest consciousness. She thought was all the world. That here all was disclosed forever. Yet all the time within the darkness she had been aware of points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts gleaming, penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged in a great heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and the factories ground out their machine produce, and the plants and the animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc lamp, wherein the moths and children played in the security of blinding light. Not even knowing there was any darkness because they stayed in the light. But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of range. She saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the vanity of the campfire and the sleepers. She felt the strange foolish vanity of the camp, which said, Beyond our light and our order there is nothing. Turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of illuminating consciousness, which comprised sun and stars and the Creator and the system of righteousness, ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about with half revealed shapes lurking on the edge. Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness. For if he did, he was jeered to death by the others who cried, Fool! Antisocial! Nave! Why would you disturb us with bogies? There is no darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge. We comprise and comprehend the innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool! And nave! How dare you belittle us with the darkness? Nevertheless, the darkness wheeled round about with gray shadow, shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow shapes of the angels whom the light fenced out as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of darkness. And some, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyena and the wolf. And some, having given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the eyes of the wolf and the hyena, that it was the flash of the sort of angels flashing at the door to come in, that the angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied, like the flash of fangs. It was a little while before Easter, in her last year of college, when Ursula was twenty-two years old, that she heard again from Skrebensky. He had written to her once or twice from South Africa, during the first months of his service out there in the war, and since had sent her a postcard every now and then at ever longer intervals. He had become a first lieutenant and had stayed out in Africa. She had not heard of him now for more than two years. Often her thoughts returned to him. He seemed like the gleaming dawn, yellow, radiant, of a long grey ashy day. The memory of him was like the thought of the first radiant hours of morning, and here was the blank grey ashyness of later daytime. Ah, if he had only remained true to her, she might have known the sunshine without all this toil and hurt and degradation of a spoiled day. He would have been her angel. He held the keys of the sunshine. Still he held them. He could open to her the gates of succeeding freedom and delight. Nay, if he had remained true to her, he would have been the doorway to her, into the boundless sky of happiness and plunging inexhaustible freedom, which was the paradise of her soul. Ah, the great range he would have opened to her, the illimitable, endless space for self-realization and delight forever. The one thing she believed in was in the love she had held for him. It remained shining and complete, a thing to hark back to, and she said to herself, when present things seemed a failure, Ah, I was fond of him, as if with him the leading flower of her life had died. Now she heard from him again. The chief effect was pain. The pleasure, the spontaneous joy, was not there any longer. But her will rejoiced, her will had fixed itself to him, and the old excitement of her dreams stirred and woke up. She was come, the man with the wondrous lips that could send the kiss wavering to the very end of all space. Was he come back to her? She did not believe. My dear Ursula, I am back in England again for a few months before going out again, this time to India. I wonder if you still keep the memory of our times together. I have still got the little photograph of you. You must be changed since then, for it is about six years ago. I am fully six years older. I have lived through another life since I knew you at Kasate. I wonder if you would care to see me. I shall come up to Derby next week, and I would call in Nottingham, and we might have tea together. Will you let me know? I shall look for your answer, Anton Skrebensky. Ursula had taken this letter from the rack in the hall at college, and torn it open as she crossed to the women's room. The world seemed to dissolve away from around her. She stood alone in clear air. Where could she go to be alone? She fled away upstairs and threw the private way to the reference library. Seizing a book, she sat down and pondered the letter. Her heart beat, her limbs trembled. As in a dream, she heard one gong sound in the college, then strangely another. The first lecture had gone by. Hurriedly she took one of her notebooks and began to write. Dear Anton, yes I still have the ring. I should be very glad to see you again. You can come here to college for me, or I will meet you somewhere in the town. Will you let me know? Your sincere friend. Trembling, she asked the librarian, who was her friend, if he would give her an envelope. She sealed and addressed her letter and went out, bare-headed, to post it. When it was dropped into the pillar box, the world became a very still, pale place, without confines. She wandered back to college, to her pale dream, like a first wand light of dawn. Skrebensky came one afternoon the following week. Day after day, she had hurried swiftly to the letter rack on her arrival at college in the morning and during the intervals between lectures. Several times, swiftly with secretive fingers, she had plucked his letter down from its public prominence and fled across the hall, holding it fast and hidden. She read her letters in the Botany Laboratory, where her corner was always reserved to her. Several letters, and then he was coming. It was Friday afternoon, he appointed. She worked over her microscope with feverish activity, able to give only half her attention, yet working closely and rapidly. She had on her slide some special stuff come up from London that day, and the professor was fussy and excited about it. At the same time, as she focused the light on her field and saw the plant animal lying shadowy in a boundless light, she was fretting over a conversation she had had a few days ago with Dr. Frank Stone, who was a woman doctor of physics in the college. No, really, Dr. Frank Stone had said, I don't see why we should attribute some special mystery to life, do you? We don't understand it, as we understand electricity even, but that doesn't warrant our saying it is something special, something different and kind and distinct from everything else in the universe. Do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don't see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life and life alone. The conversation had ended on a note of uncertainty, indefinite, wistful, but the purpose, what was the purpose? Electricity had no soul, light and heat had no soul, was she herself an impersonal force or conjunction of forces like one of these? She looked still at the unicellular shadow that lay within the field of light under her microscope. It was alive, she saw it move. She saw the bright mist of its ciliary activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus as it slid across the plane of light. What then was its will? If it was a conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held these forces unified and for what purpose were they unified? For what purpose were the incalculable physical and chemical activities nodalized in this shadowy moving speck under her microscope? What was the will which nodalized them and created the one thing she saw? What was its intention, to be itself? Was its purpose just mechanical and limited to itself? It intended to be itself, but what self? Only in her mind the world gleamed strangely with an intense light like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme gleaming triumph of infinity. End of chapter 15 part one. Chapter 15 part two of the Rainbow. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence. Chapter 15 part two. Ursula sat abstracted over her microscope in suspense. Her soul was busy, infinitely busy, in the new world. In the new world Skrebensky was waiting for her. He would be waiting for her. She could not go yet because her soul was engaged. Soon she would go. A stillness, like passing away, took hold of her. Far off down the corridors, she heard the gong booming five o'clock. She must go, yet she sat still. The other students were pushing back their stools and putting their microscopes away. Everything broke into turmoil. She saw through the window students going down the steps with books under their arms, talking, all talking. A great craving to depart came upon her. She wanted also to be gone. She was in dread of the material world and in dread of her own transfiguration. She wanted to run to meet Skrebensky, the new life, the reality. Very rapidly, she wiped her slides and put them back, cleared her place at the bench, active, active, active. She wanted to run to meet Skrebensky, hasten, hasten. She did not know what she was to meet, but it would be a new beginning. She must hurry. She flitted down the corridor on swift feet, her razor and notebooks and pencil in one hand, her pinafore over her arm. Her face was lifted intense with eagerness. He might not be there. Issuing from the corridor, she saw him at once. She knew him at once. Yet he was so strange. He stood with the curious, self-effacing diffidence which so frightened her and well-bred young men whom she knew. He stood as if he wished to be unseen. He was very well dressed. She would not admit to herself the chill like a sunshine of frost that came over her. This was he, the key, the nucleus to the new world. He saw her coming swiftly across the hall, a slim girl in a white flannel blouse and dark skirt with some of the abstraction and gleam of the unknown upon her, and he started excited. He was very nervous. Other students were loitering about the hall. She laughed with a blind, dazzled face as she gave him her hand. He too could not perceive her. In a moment she was gone to get her outdoor things. Then again, as when she had been at school, they walked out into the town to tea and they went to the same tea shop. She knew a great difference in him. The kinship was there, the old kinship, but he had belonged to a different world from hers. It was as if they had cried a state of truce between him and her and in this truce they had met. She knew vaguely in the first minute that there were enemies come together in a truce. Every movement and word of his was alien to her being. Yet still she loved the fine texture of his face, of his skin. He was rather browner, physically stronger. He was a man now. She thought his manliness made the strangeness in him. When he was only a youth, fluid, he was nearer to her. She thought a man must inevitably set into the strange separateness, cold otherness of being. He talked but not to her. She tried to speak to him but she could not reach him. He seemed so balanced and sure. He made such a confident presence. He was a great rider, so there was about him some of a horseman's sureness and habitual definiteness of decision. Also some of the horseman's animal darkness. Yet his soul was only the more wavering vague. He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. She knew nothing of it. She could only feel the dark, heavy fixity of his animal desire. This dumb desire on his part had brought him to her. She was puzzled, hurt by some hopeless fixity in him that terrified her with a cold feeling of despair. What did he want? His desires were so underground. Why did he not admit himself? What did he want? He wanted something that should be nameless. She shrank in fear. Yet she flashed with excitement. In his dark subterranean male soul he was kneeling before her, darkly exposing himself. She quivered. The dark flame ran over her. He was waiting at her feet. He was helpless at her mercy. She could take or reject. If she rejected him, something would die in him. For him it was life or death. And yet almost be kept so dark the consciousness must admit nothing. How long, she said, are you staying in England? I am not sure, but not later than July, I believe. Then they were both silent. He was here in England for six months. They had a space of six months between them. He waited, the same iron rigidity as if the world were made of steel possessed her again. It was no use turning with flesh and blood to this arrangement of forged metal. Quickly her imagination adjusted itself to the situation. Have you an appointment in India, she asked? Yes, I have just the six months leave. Will you like being out there? I think so. There's a good deal of social life and plenty going on, hunting, polo, and always a good horse and plenty of work, any amount of work. He was always sidetracking, always sidetracking his own soul. She could see him so well out there in India, one of the governing class, superimposed upon an old civilization, lord and master of a clumsier civilization than his own. It was his choice. He would become again an aristocrat, invested with authority and responsibility, having a great helpless populace beneath him. One of the ruling class his whole being would be given over to the fulfilling and the executing of the better idea of the state. And in India, there would be real work to do. The country did need the civilization which he himself represented. It did need his roads and bridges and the enlightenment of which he was part. He would go to India, but that was not her road. Yet she loved him, the body of him, whatever his decisions might be. He seemed to want something of her. He was waiting for her to decide of him. It had been decided in her long ago when he had kissed her first. He was her lover, though good and evil should cease. Her will never relaxed, though her heart and soul must be imprisoned and silenced. He waited upon her and she accepted him for he had come back to her. A glow came into his face, into his fine smooth skin, his eyes gold gray glowed intimately to her. He burned up. He caught fire and became splendid, royal, something like a tiger. She caught his brilliant burnished glamour. Her heart and her soul were shut away fast down below, hidden. She was free of them. She was to have her satisfaction. She became proud and erect like a flower, putting itself forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people made her proud. It was like deference to her and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was Nomir Ursula Brangwen. She was woman. She was the whole of woman in the human order, all containing universal. How should she be limited to individuality? She was exhilarated. She did not want to go away from him. She had her placed by him who should take her away. They came out of the cafe. Is there anything you would like to do? He said. Is there anything we can do? It was a dark windy night in March. There is nothing to do. She said. Which was the answer he wanted? Let us walk then. Where shall we walk? He asked. Shall we go to the river? She suggested timidly. In a moment they were on the tram going down to Trent Bridge. She was so glad. The thought of walking in the dark, far-reaching water meadows beside the full river transported her. Dark water flowing in silence through the big restless night made her feel wild. They crossed the bridge, descended, and went away from the lights. In an instant, in the darkness, he took her hand and they went in silence with subtle feet treading the darkness. The town fumed away on their left. There were strange lights and sounds. The wind rushed against the trees and under the bridge. They walked close together, powerful in unison. He drew her very close, held her with a subtle, stealthy, powerful passion as if they had a secret agreement which held good in the profound darkness. The profound darkness was their universe. It is like it was before, she said. Yet it was not in the least as it was before. Nevertheless, his heart was perfectly in accord with her. They thought one thought. I knew I should come back, he said at length. She quivered. Did you always love me? She asked. The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him for a moment. The darkness traveled massively along. I had to come back to you, he said, as if hypnotized. You were always at the back of everything. She was silent with triumph, like fate. I loved you, she said, always. The dark flame leaped up in him. He must give her himself. He must give her the very foundations of himself. He drew her very close and they went on in silence. She started violently hearing voices. They were near a style across the dark meadows. It's only lovers, he said to her softly. She looked to see the dark figures against the fence, wondering that the darkness was inhabited. Only lovers will walk here tonight, he said. Then in a low vibrating voice, he told her about Africa, the strange darkness, the strange blood fear. I am not afraid of the darkness in England, he said. It is soft and natural to me. It is my medium, especially when you are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror, not fear of anything, just fear. One breathes it like the smell of blood. The blacks know it, they worship it. Really, the darkness. One almost likes it, the fear, something sensual. She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness. He talked to her all the while in low tones about Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her. The negro with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, feckin' darkness that possessed his own blood. He was strangely secret. The whole world must be abolished. He maddened her with his soft, cajoling, vibrating tones. He wanted her to answer, to understand. A turgid, teeming night, heavy with fecundity, in which every molecule of matter grew big with increase, secretly urgent with feckin' desire, seemed to come to pass. She quivered, taut and vibrating, almost pained. And gradually he ceased telling her of Africa. There came a silence, whilst they walked the darkness beside the massive river. Her limbs were rich and tense. She felt they must be vibrating with a low, profound vibration. She could scarcely walk. The deep vibration of the darkness could only be felt, not heard. Suddenly as they walked, she turned to him and held him fast, as if she were turned to steel. Do you love me? She cried in anguish. Yes, he said, in a curious, lapping voice, unlike himself. Yes, I love you. He seemed like the living darkness upon her. She was in the embrace of the strong darkness. He held her enclosed, soft, unutterably soft, and with the unrelaxing softness of fate, the relentless softness of fecundity. She quivered and quivered like a tense thing that has struck, but he held her all the time, soft, unending, like darkness closed upon her, omnipresent as the night. He kissed her and she quivered as if she were being destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel vibrated and broke in her soul. The light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all dark, willless, having only the receptive will. He kissed her with his soft, enveloping kisses, and she responded to them completely. Her mind, her soul, gone out. Darkness, cleaving to darkness, she hung close to him, pressed herself into soft flow of his kiss, pressed herself down, down to the source and core of his kiss. Herself, covered and enveloped in the warm, feckened flow of his kiss that traveled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last fiber of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she clung at the core of him with her lips holding open the very bottom most source of him. So they stood in the utter dark kiss that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned in the unutterable satisfaction. They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream. Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a drows, and out of the drows a small light of consciousness woke up. Ursula became aware of the night around her, the water lapping and running full just near, the trees roaring and softening in dusts of wind. She kept near to him in contact with him, but she became ever more and more herself, and she knew she must go to catch her train, but she did not want to draw away from contact with him. At length they roused and set out, no longer they existed in the unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the twinkle of lights across the river, the big flare of the town in front and on their right. But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked untouched by the light, darkness supreme and arrogant. The stupid lights Ursula said to herself in her dark sensual arrogance, the stupid artificial exaggerated town fuming its light. It does not exist really, it rests upon the unlimited darkness like a gleam of colored oil on dark water, but what is it? Nothing, just nothing. In the tram, in the train she felt the same. The lights, the civic uniform was a trick played. The people as they moved or sat were only dummies exposed. She could see beneath their pale wooden pretense of composure and civic purposefulness the dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper ships in their motion, but in reality each one was a dark blind eager wave urging blindly forward, dark with the same homogeneous desire. And all their talk and all their behavior was sham. They were dressed up creatures. She was reminded of the invisible man who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his clothes. During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the same dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be jibing at the civic pretense of all the human life about her. What are you, you pale citizens? Her face seemed to say gleaming. You subdued beast in sheep's clothing. You primeval darkness falsified to a social mechanism. She went about in the sensual subconsciousness all the time mocking at the ready-made artificial daylight of the rest. They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing, she said to herself, looking and mocking contempt at the stiffened neutralized men. They think it better to be clerks or professors than to be the dark, fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness. What do you think you are? Her soul asked of the professor as she said opposite him in class. What do you think you are as you sit there in your gown and your spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffing creature with eyes peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires. That is what you are, though nobody would believe it, and you would be the very last to allow it. Her soul mocked at all this pretense. Herself, she kept on pretending. She dressed herself and made herself fine. She attended her lectures and scribbled her notes, but all in a mood of superficial mocking facility. She understood well enough their two and two make four tricks. She was as clever as they were. But care? Did she care about their monkey tricks of knowledge or learning or civic deportment? She did not care in the least. There was Skrebensky. There was her dark, vital self. Outside the college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the edge of the night he was attentive. Did he care? She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in the night. She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood. She had the glimmering core of fecundity. She had her mate, her complement, her sharer and fruition. So she had all, everything. Skrebensky was staying in Nottingham all the time. He too was free. He knew no one in this town. He had no civic self to maintain. He was free. Their trams and markets and theaters and public meetings were a shaken kaleidoscope to him. He watched as a lion or a tiger may lie with narrowed eyes watching the people pass before its cage, the kaleidoscopic unreality of people, or a leopard-like blinking, watching the incomprehensible feats of the keepers. He despised it all. It was all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good political speakers, their good earnest women, all the time he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance. He watched the citizen, a pillar of society, a model, saw the stiff goat's legs, which have become almost stiffened to wood in the desire to make them puppet in their action. He saw the trousers formed to the puppet action, man's legs, but man's legs become rigid and deformed, ugly, mechanical. He was curiously happy being alone now. The glimmering grin was on his face. He had no longer any necessity to take part in the performing tricks of the rest. He had discovered the clue to himself. He had escaped from the show, like a wild beast escaped straight back into its jungle. Taking a room in a quiet hotel, he hired a horse and rode out into the country, staying sometimes for the night in some village and returning the next day. He felt rich and abundant in himself. Everything he did was a voluptuous pleasure to him, either to ride on horseback or to walk or to lie in the sun or to drink in a public house. He had no use for people nor for words. He had an amused pleasure in everything, a great sense of voluptuous richness in himself and of the fecundity of the universal night he inhabited. The puppet shapes of people, their wood mechanical voices, he was remote from them. For there were always his meetings with Ursula. Very often she did not go to college in the afternoon but walked with him instead. Or he took a motor car or a dog cart and they drove into the country, leaving the car and going away by themselves into the woods. He had not taken her yet. With subtle instinctive economy, they went to the end of each kiss, each embrace, each pleasure and intimate contact, knowing subconsciously that the last was coming. It was to be their final entry into the source of creation. She took him home and he stayed a weekend at Belldover with her family. She loved having him in the house. Strange how he seemed to come into the atmosphere of her family with his laughing insidious grace. They all loved him. He was kin to them. His railery, his warm voluptuous mocking presence was meat and joy to the brand-win household. For this house was always quivering with darkness. They put off their puppet form when they came home to lie in drows in the sun. There was a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the undercurrent of darkness among them all. Yet here at home Ursula resented it. It became distasteful to her. And she knew that if they understood the real relationship between her and Skrebensky, her parents, her father in particular, would go mad with rage. So subtly she seemed to be like any other girl who was more or less courted by a man. And she was like any other girl. But in her the antagonism to the social imposition was for the time complete and final. She waited every moment of the day for his next kiss. She admitted it to herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously she waited. He waited, but until the time came more unconsciously. When the time came that he should kiss her again, a prevention was an annihilation to him. He felt his flesh go gray. He was heavy with a corpse-like intonition. He did not exist if the time passed unfulfilled. He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses and there was the silence between them. They stood as at the edge of a cliff with a great darkness beneath. Coming out of the lane along the darkness with the dark space spreading down to the wind and the twinkling lights of the station below, the far-off, windy chuff of a shunting train, the tiny clink-clink-clink of the wagons blown between the wind, the light of Beldover edge twinkling upon the blackness of the hill opposite, the glow of the furnaces along the railway to the right, their steps began to falter. They would soon come out of the darkness into the lights. It was like turning back. It was unfulfillment. Two quivering, unwilling creatures, they lingered on the edge of the darkness, peering out at the lights and the machine glimmer beyond. They could not turn back to the world. They could not. So lingering along they came to a great oak tree by the path. In all its budding mass it roared to the wind and its trunk vibrated in every fiber, powerful, indomitable. We will sit down, he said. And in the roaring circle under the tree that was almost invisible, yet whose powerful presence received them, they lay a moment looking at the twinkling lights on the darkness opposite, saw the sweeping brand of a train past the edge of their darkened field. Then he turned and kissed her and she waited for him. The pain to her was the pain she wanted. The agony was the agony she wanted. She was caught up and tangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man, what was he, a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality. When she rose she felt strangely free, strong. She was not ashamed, why should she be? He was walking beside her, the man who had been with her. She had taken him, they had been together. Whether they had gone, she did not know. But it was as if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal changeless place into which they had leapt together. Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the footbridge over the railway and met the train passengers, she felt herself belonging to another world. She walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them. When she went into the lighted dining room at home, she was impervious to the lights and the eyes of her parents. Her everyday self was just the same. She merely had another stronger self that knew the darkness. This curious separate strength that existed in darkness and pride of night never forsook her. She had never been more herself. It could not occur to her that anybody, not even the young man of the world, Skrebensky, should have anything at all to do with her permanent self. As for her temporal social self, she let it look after itself. Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky, not the young man of the world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong, she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense. She existed supremely. She continued at college in her ordinary routine, merely as a cover to her dark powerful under life. The fact of herself and with her Skrebensky was so powerful that she took rest in the other. She went to college in the morning and attended her classes, flowering and remote. She had lunch with him in his hotel. Every evening she spent with him, either in town, at his rooms, or in the country. She made the excuse at home of evening study for her degree, but she paid not the slightest attention to her study. There were both absolute and happy and calm. The fact of their own consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they were free. The only thing they wanted as the days went by was more time to themselves. They wanted the time to be absolutely their own. The Easter vacation was approaching. They agreed to go right away. It would not matter if they did not come back. They were indifferent to the actual facts. I suppose we ought to get married, he said, rather wistfully. It was so magnificently free and in a deeper world as it was. To make public their connection would be to put it in range with all the things which nullified him and from which he was, for the moment, entirely dissociated. If he married, he would have to assume his social self, and the thought of assuming his social self made him at once diffident and abstract. If she were his social wife, if she were part of that complication of dead reality, then what had his underlife to do with her? One social wife was almost a material symbol, whereas now she was something more vivid to him than anything in conventional life could be. She gave the complete lie to all conventional life. He and she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living lie to the dead whole which contained them. He watched her pensive, puzzled face. I don't think I want to marry you, she said, her brow clouded. It peaked him rather. Why not? he asked. Let's think about it afterwards, shall we? She said. He was crossed, yet he loved her violently. You've got a muse, though, not a face, he said. Have I? she cried. Her face lighting up like a pure flame. She thought she had escaped, yet he returned. He was not satisfied. Why? he asked. Why don't you want to marry me? I don't want to be with other people, she said. I want to be like this. I'll tell you if ever I want to marry you. All right, he said. He would rather the thing was left indefinite and that she took the responsibility. They talked of the Easter vacation. She thought only of complete enjoyment. They went to an hotel in Piccadilly. She was supposed to be his wife. They bought a wedding ring for a shilling from a shop in a poor quarter. They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence was like a possession upon them. End of chapter 15, part two.