“Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.”
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys: the unlovely uncombed Wherrys, who were the “poor” to her? She did not.
She walked this Monday morning on the verge of misery. For she did want to do what was right. And she didn’t want to do what the gospels said. She didn’t want to be poor—really poor. The thought was a horror to her: to live like the Wherrys, so ugly, to be at the mercy of everybody.
“Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.”
One could not do it in real life. How dreary and hopeless it made her!
Nor could one turn the other cheek. Theresa slapped Ursula on the face. Ursula, in a mood of Christian humility, silently presented the other side of her face. Which Theresa, in exasperation at the challenge, also hit. Whereupon Ursula, with boiling heart, went meekly away.
But anger, and deep, writhing shame tortured her, so she was not easy till she had again quarrelled with Theresa and had almost shaken her sister’s head off.
“That’ll teach you,” she said, grimly.
And she went away, unchristian but clean.
There was something unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity. Ursula suddenly revolted to the other extreme.
“I hate the Wherrys, and I wish they were dead. Why does my father leave us in the lurch like this, making us be poor and insignificant? Why is he not more? If we had a father as he ought to be, he would be Earl William Brangwen, and I should be the Lady Ursula. What right have I to be poor? crawling along the lane like vermin? If I had my rights I should be seated on horseback in a green riding-habit, and my groom would be behind me. And I should stop at the gates of the cottages, and enquire of the cottage woman who came out with a child in her arms, how did her husband, who had hurt his foot. And I would pat the flaxen head of the child, stooping from my horse, and I would give her a shilling from my purse, and order nourishing food to be sent from the hall to the cottage.”
So she rode in her pride. And sometimes, she dashed into flames to rescue a forgotten child; or she dived into the canal locks and supported a boy who was seized with cramp; or she swept up a toddling infant from the feet of a runaway horse: always imaginatively, of course.
But in the end there returned the poignant yearning from the Sunday world. As she went down in the morning from Cossethay and saw Ilkeston smoking blue and tender upon its hill, then her heart surged with far-off words:
“Oh, Jerusalem—Jerusalem—how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not—”
The passion rose in her for Christ, for the gathering under the wings of security and warmth. But how did it apply to the weekday world? What could it mean, but that Christ should clasp her to His breast, as a mother clasps her child? And oh, for Christ, for Him who could hold her to His breast and lose her there. Oh, for the breast of man, where she should have refuge and bliss for ever! All her senses quivered with passionate yearning.
Vaguely she knew that Christ meant something else: that in the vision-world He spoke of Jerusalem, something that did not exist in the everyday world. It was not houses and factories He would hold in His bosom: nor householders nor factory-workers nor poor people: but something that had no part in the weekday world, nor seen nor touched with weekday hands and eyes.
Yet she must have it in weekday terms—she must. For all her life was a weekday life, now, this was the whole. So He must gather her body to His breast, that was strong with a broad bone, and which sounded with the beating of the heart, and which was warm with the life of which she partook, the life of the running blood.
So she craved for the breast of the Son of Man, to lie there. And she was ashamed in her soul, ashamed. For whereas Christ spoke for the Vision to answer, she answered from the weekday fact. It was a betrayal, a transference of meaning, from the vision world, to the matter-of-fact world. So she was ashamed of her religious ecstasy, and dreaded lest anyone should see it.
Early in the year, when the lambs came, and shelters were built of straw, and on her uncle’s farm the men sat at night with a lantern and a dog, then again there swept over her this passionate confusion between the vision world and the weekday world. Again she felt Jesus in the countryside. Ah, He would lift up the lambs in His arms! Ah, and she was the lamb. Again, in the morning, going down the lane, she heard the ewe call, and the lambs came running, shaking and twinkling with new-born bliss. And she saw them stooping, nuzzling, groping to the udder, to find the teats, whilst the mother turned her head gravely and sniffed her own. And they were sucking, vibrating with bliss on their little, long legs, their throats stretched up, their new bodies quivering to the stream of blood-warm, loving milk.
Oh and the bliss, the bliss! She could scarcely tear herself away to go to school. The little noses nuzzling at the udder, the little bodies so glad and sure, the little black legs crooked, the mother standing still, yielding herself to their quivering attraction—then the mother walked calmly away.
Jesus—the vision world—the everyday world—all mixed inextricably in a confusion of pain and bliss. It was almost agony, the confusion, the inextricability. Jesus, the vision, speaking to her, who was non-visionary! And she would take His words of the spirit and make them to pander to her own carnality.
This was a shame to her. The confusing of the spirit world with the material world, in her own soul, degraded her. She answered the call of the spirit in terms of immediate, everyday desire.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to Him really, and lay her head on His breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a child!
All the time she walked in a confused heat of religious yearning. She wanted Jesus to love her deliciously, to take her sensuous offering, to give her sensuous response. For weeks she went in a muse of enjoyment.
And all the time she knew underneath that she was playing false, accepting the passion of Jesus for her own physical satisfaction. But she was in such a daze, such a tangle. How could she get free?
She hated herself, she wanted to trample on herself, destroy herself. How could one become free? She hated religion, because it lent itself to her confusion. She abused everything. She wanted to become hard, indifferent, brutally callous to everything but just the immediate need, the immediate satisfaction. To have a yearning towards Jesus, only that she might use Him to pander to her own soft sensation, use Him as a means of re-acting upon herself, maddened her in the end. There was then no Jesus, no sentimentality. With all the bitter hatred of helplessness she hated sentimentality.
At this period came the young Skrebensky. She was nearly sixteen years old, a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent, yet lapsing into unreserved expansiveness now and then, when she seemed to give her whole soul, but when in fact she only made another counterfeit of her soul for outward presentation. She was sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always affecting a callous indifference to screen herself.
She was at this time a nuisance on the face of the earth, with her spasmodic passion and her slumberous torment. She seemed to go with all her soul in her hands, yearning, to the other person. Yet all the while, deep at the bottom of her was a childish antagonism of distrust. She thought she loved everybody and believed in everybody. But because she could not love herself nor believe in herself, she mistrusted everybody with the mistrust of a serpent or a captured bird. Her starts of revulsion and hatred were more inevitable than her impulses to love.
So she wrestled through her dark days of confusion, soulless, uncreated, unformed.
One evening, as she
was studying in the parlour, her head buried in her hands, she heard new voices in the kitchen speaking. At once, from its apathy, her excitable spirit started and strained to listen. It seemed to crouch, to lurk under cover, tense, glaring forth unwilling to be seen.
There were two strange men’s voices, one soft and candid, veiled with soft candour, the other veiled with easy mobility, running quickly. Ursula sat quite tense, shocked out of her studies, lost. She listened all the time to the sound of the voices, scarcely heeding the words.
The first speaker was her Uncle Tom. She knew the naïve candour covering the girding and savage misery of his soul. Who was the other speaker? Whose voice ran on so easy, yet with an inflamed pulse? It seemed to hasten and urge her forward, that other voice.
“I remember you,” the young man’s voice was saying. “I remember you from the first time I saw you, because of your dark eyes and fair face.”
Mrs Brangwen laughed, shy and pleased.
“You were a curly-headed little lad,” she said.
“Was I? Yes, I know. They were very proud of my curls.”
And a laugh ran to silence.
“You were a very well-mannered lad, I remember,” said her father.
“Oh! did I ask you to stay the night? I always used to ask people to stay the night. I believe it was rather trying for my mother.”
There was a general laugh. Ursula rose. She had to go.
At the click of the latch everybody looked round. The girl hung in the doorway, seized with a moment’s fierce confusion. She was going to be good-looking. Now she had an attractive gawkiness, as she hung a moment, not knowing how to carry her shoulders. Her dark hair was tied behind, her yellow-brown eyes shone without direction. Behind her, in the parlour, was the soft light of a lamp upon open books.
A superficial readiness took her to her Uncle Tom, who kissed her, greeting her with warmth, making a show of intimate possession of her, and at the same time leaving evident his own complete detachment.
But she wanted to turn to the stranger. He was standing back a little, waiting. He was a young man with very clear greyish eyes that waited until they were called upon, before they took expression.
Something in his self-possessed waiting moved her, and she broke into a confused, rather beautiful laugh as she gave him her hand, catching her breath like an excited child. His hand closed over hers very close, very near, he bowed, and his eyes were watching her with some attention. She felt proud—her spirit leapt to life.
“You don’t know Mr Skrebensky, Ursula,” came her Uncle Tom’s intimate voice. She lifted her face with an impulsive flash to the stranger, as if to declare a knowledge, laughing her palpitating, excited laugh.
His eyes became confused with roused lights, his detached attention changed to a readiness for her. He was a young man of twenty-one, with a slender figure and soft brown hair brushed up in the German fashion straight from his brow.
“Are you staying long?” she asked.
“I’ve got a month’s leave,” he said, glancing at Tom Brangwen. “But I’ve various places I must go to—put in some time here and there.”
He brought her a strong sense of the outer world. It was as if she were set on a hill and could feel vaguely the whole world lying spread before her.
“What have you a month’s leave from?” she asked.
“I’m in the Engineers—in the Army.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, glad.
“We’re taking you away from your studies,” said her Uncle Tom.
“Oh no,” she replied quickly.
Skrebensky laughed, young and inflammable.
“She won’t wait to be taken away,” said her father. But that seemed clumsy. She wished he would leave her to say her own things.
“Don’t you like study?” asked Skrebensky, turning to her, putting the question from his own case.
“I like some things,” said Ursula. “I like Latin and French—and grammar.”
He watched her, and all his being seemed attentive to her, then he shook his head.
“I don’t,” he said. “They say all the brains of the army are in the Engineers. I think that’s why I joined them—to get the credit of other people’s brains.”
He said this quizzically and with chagrin. And she became alert to him. It interested her. Whether he had brains or not, he was interesting. His directness attracted her, his independent motion. She was aware of the movement of his life over against her.
“I don’t think brains matter,” she said.
“What does matter then?” came her Uncle Tom’s intimate, caressing, half-jeering voice.
She turned to him.
“It matters whether people have courage or not,” she said.
“Courage for what?” asked her uncle.
“For everything.”
Tom Brangwen gave a sharp little laugh. The mother and father sat silent, with listening faces. Skrebensky waited. She was speaking for him.
“Everything’s nothing,” laughed her uncle.
She disliked him at that moment.
“She doesn’t practise what she preaches,” said her father, stirring in his chair and crossing one leg over the other. “She has courage for mighty little.”
But she would not answer. Skrebensky sat still, waiting. His face was irregular, almost ugly, flattish, with a rather thick nose. But his eyes were pellucid, strangely clear, his brown hair was soft and thick as silk, he had a slight moustache. His skin was fine, his figure slight, beautiful. Beside him, her Uncle Tom looked full-blown, her father seemed uncouth. Yet he reminded her of her father, only he was finer, and he seemed to be shining. And his face was almost ugly.
He seemed simply acquiescent in the fact of his own being, as if he were beyond any change or question. He was himself. There was a sense of fatality about him that fascinated her. He made no effort to prove himself to other people. Let it be accepted for what it was, his own being. In its isolation it made no excuse or explanation for itself.
So he seemed perfectly, even fatally established, he did not ask to be rendered before he could exist, before he could have relationship with another person.
This attracted Ursula very much. She was so used to unsure people who took on a new being with every new influence. Her Uncle Tom was always more or less what the other person would have him. In consequence, one never knew the real Uncle Tom, only a fluid, unsatisfactory flux with a more or less consistent appearance.
But let Skrebensky do what he would, betray himself entirely, he betrayed himself always upon his own responsibility. He permitted no question about himself. He was irrevocable in his isolation.
So Ursula thought him wonderful, he was so finely constituted, and so distinct, self-contained, self-supporting. This, she said to herself, was a gentleman, he had a nature like fate, the nature of an aristocrat.
She laid hold of him at once for her dreams. Here was one such as those Sons of God who saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. He was no son of Adam. Adam was servile. Had not Adam been driven cringing out of his native place, had not the human race been a beggar ever since, seeking its own being? But Anton Skrebensky could not beg. He was in possession of himself, of that, and no more. Other people could not really give him anything nor take anything from him. His soul stood alone.
She knew that her mother and father acknowledged him. The house was changed. There had been a visit paid to the house. Once three angels stood in Abraham’s doorway, and greeted him, and stayed and ate with him, leaving his household enriched for ever when they went.
The next day she went down to the Marsh according to invitation. The two men were not come home. Then, looking through the window, she saw the dog-cart drive up, and Skrebensky leapt down. She saw him draw himself together, jump, laugh to her uncle, who was driving, then come towards her to the house. He was so
spontaneous and revealed in his movements. He was isolated within his own clear, fine atmosphere, and as still as if fated.
His resting in his own fate gave him an appearance of indolence, almost of languor: he made no exuberant movement. When he sat down, he seemed to go loose, languid.
“We are a little late,” he said.
“Where have you been?”
“We went to Derby to see a friend of my father’s.”
“Who?”
It was an adventure to her to put direct questions and get plain answers. She knew she might do it with this man.
“Why, he is a clergyman too—he is my guardian—one of them.”
Ursula knew that Skrebensky was an orphan.
“Where is really your home now?” she asked.
“My home?—I wonder. I am very fond of my colonel—Colonel Hepburn: then there are my aunts: but my real home, I suppose, is the army.”
“Do you like being on your own?”
His clear, greenish-grey eyes rested on her a moment, and, as he considered, he did not see her.
“I suppose so,” he said. “You see my father—well, he was never acclimatised here. He wanted—I don’t know what he wanted—but it was a strain. And my mother—I always knew she was too good to me. I could feel her being too good to me—my mother! Then I went away to school so early. And I must say, the outside world was always more naturally a home to me than the vicarage—I don’t know why.”
“Do you feel like a bird blown out of its own latitude?” she asked, using a phrase she had met.
“No, no. I find everything very much as I like it.”
He seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world, a sense of distances and large masses of humanity. It drew her as a scent draws a bee from afar. But also it hurt her.
It was summer, and she wore cotton frocks. The third time he saw her she had on a dress with fine blue-and-white stripes, with a white collar, and a large white hat. It suited her golden, warm complexion.
The Rainbow (100th Anniversary ed.) Page 34