‘Your gran’mother’s in her bed. Wipe your shoes well if you’re goin’ up, and don’t go burstin’ in on her like a skyrocket. My word, but that’s a fine posy! Did you do it all by yourself, an’ all?’
Tilly stealthily ushered her into the bedroom. The child entered with a strange, dragging hesitation characteristic of her when she was moved. Her grandmother was sitting up in bed, wearing a little grey woollen jacket.
The child hesitated in silence near the bed, clutching the nosegay in front of her. Her childish eyes were shining. The grandmother’s grey eyes shone with a similar light.
‘How pretty!’ she said. ‘How pretty you have made them! What a darling little bunch.’
Ursula, glowing, thrust them into her grandmother’s hand, saying, ‘I made them you.’
‘That is how the peasants tied them at home,’ said the grandmother, pushing the pinks with her fingers, and smelling them. ‘Just such tight little bunches! And they make wreaths for their hair—they weave the stalks. Then they go round with wreaths in their hair, and wearing their best aprons.’
Ursula immediately imagined herself in this story-land.
‘Did you used to have a wreath in your hair, grandmother?’
‘When I was a little girl, I had golden hair, something like Katie’s. Then I used to have a wreath of little blue flowers, oh, so blue, that come when the snow is gone. Andrey, the coachman, used to bring me the very first.’
They talked, and then Tilly brought the tea-tray, set for two. Ursula had a special green and gold cup kept for herself at the Marsh. There was thin bread and butter, and cress for tea. It was all special and wonderful. She ate very daintily, with little fastidious bites.
‘Why do you have two wedding-rings, grandmother? Must you?’ asked the child, noticing her grandmother’s ivory coloured hand with blue veins, above the tray.
‘If I had two husbands, child.’
Ursula pondered a moment.
‘Then you must wear both rings together?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which was my grandfather’s ring?’
The woman hesitated.
‘This grandfather whom you knew? This was his ring, the red one. The yellow one was your other grandfather’s whom you never knew.’
Ursula looked interestedly at the two rings on the proferred finger.
‘Where did he buy it you?’ she asked.
‘This one? In Warsaw, I think.’
‘You didn’t know my own grandfather then?’
‘Not this grandfather.’
Ursula pondered this fascinating intelligence.
‘Did he have white whiskers, as well?’
‘No, his beard was dark. You have his brows I think.’
Ursula ceased and became self-conscious. She at once identified herself with her Polish grandfather.
‘And did he have brown eyes?’
‘Yes, dark eyes. He was a clever man, as quick as a lion. He was never still.’
Lydia still resented Lensky. When she thought of him, she was always younger than he, she was always twenty, or twenty-five, and under his domination. He incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a person herself, as if she were just his aide-de-camp, or part of his baggage, or one among his surgical appliances. She still resented it. And he was always only thirty: he had died when he was thirty-four. She did not feel sorry for him. He was older than she. Yet she still ached in the thought of those days.
‘Did you like my first grandfather best?’ asked Ursula.
‘I liked them both,’ said the grandmother.
And, thinking, she became again Lensky’s girl-bride. He was of good family, of better family even than her own, for she was half German. She was a young girl in a house of insecure fortune. And he, an intellectual, a clever surgeon and physician, had loved her. How she had looked up to him! She remembered her first transports when he talked to her, the important young man with the severe black beard. He had seemed so wonderful, such an authority. After her own lax household, his gravity and confident, hard authority seemed almost God-like to her. For she had never known it in her life, all her surroundings had been loose, lax, disordered, a welter.
‘Miss Lydia, will you marry me?’ he had said to her in German, in his grave, yet tremulous voice. She had been afraid of his dark eyes upon her. They did not see her, they were fixed upon her. And he was hard, confident. She thrilled with the excitement of it, and accepted. During the courtship, his kisses were a wonder to her. She always thought about them, and wondered over them. She never wanted to kiss him back. In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the kisses she had received.
She had never quite recovered from her prostration of the first days, or nights, of marriage. He had taken her to Vienna, and she was utterly alone with him, utterly alone in another world, everything, everything foreign, even he foreign to her. Then came the real marriage, passion came to her, and she became his slave, he was her lord, her lord. She was the girl-bride, the slave, she kissed his feet, she had thought it an honour to touch his body, to unfasten his boots. For two years, she had gone on as his slave, crouching at his feet, embracing his knees.
Children had come, he had followed his ideas. She was there for him, just to keep him in condition. She was to him one of the baser or material conditions necessary for his welfare in prosecuting his ideas, of nationalism, of liberty, of science.
But gradually, at twenty-three, twenty-four, she began to realise that she too might consider these ideas. By his acceptance of her self-subordination, he exhausted the feeling in her. There were those of his associates who would discuss the ideas with her, though he did not wish to do so himself. She adventured into the minds of other men. His, then, was not the only male mind! She did not exist, then, just as his attribute! She began to perceive the attention of other men. An excitement came over her. She remembered now the men who had paid her court, when she was married, in Warsaw.
Then the rebellion broke out, and she was inspired too. She would go as a nurse at her husband’s side. He worked like a lion, he wore his life out. And she followed him helplessly. But she disbelieved in him. He was so separate, he ignored so much. He counted too much on himself. His work, his ideas,—did nothing else matter?
Then the children were dead, and for her, everything became remote. He became remote. She saw him, she saw him go white when he heard the news, then frown, as if he thought, ‘Why have they died now, when I have no time to grieve?’
‘He has no time to grieve,’ she had said, in her remote, awful soul. ‘He has no time. It is so important, what he does! He is then so self-important, this half-frenzied man! Nothing matters, but this work of rebellion! He has not time to grieve, nor to think of his children! He had not time even to beget them, really.’
She had let him go on alone. But, in the chaos, she had worked by his side again. And out of the chaos, she had fled with him to London.
He was a broken, cold man. He had no affection for her, nor for anyone. He had failed in his work, so everything had failed. He stiffened, and died.
She could not subscribe. He had failed, everything had failed, yet behind the failure was the unyielding passion of life. The individual effort might fail, but not the human joy. She belonged to the human joy.
He died and went his way, but not before there was another child. And this little Ursula was his grandchild. She was glad of it. For she still honoured him, though he had been mistaken.
She, Lydia Brangwen, was sorry for him now. He was dead—he had scarcely lived. He had never known her. He had lain with her, but he had never known her. He had never received what she could give him. He had gone away from her empty. So, he had never lived. So, he had died and passed away. Yet there had been strength and power in him.
She could scarcely forgive him that he had never lived. If it were not for Anna, and for this little Ursula, who had his brows, there would be no more left of him than of a broken vessel thrown away, and just r
emembered.
Tom Brangwen had served her. He had come to her, and taken from her. He had died and gone his way into death. But he had made himself immortal in his knowledge with her. So she had her place here, in life, and in immortality. For he had taken his knowledge of her into death, so that she had her place in death. ‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’*
She loved both her husbands. To one she had been a naked little girl-bride, running to serve him. The other she loved out of fulfilment, because he was good and had given her being, because he had served her honourably, and become her man, one with her.
She was established in this stretch of life, she had come to herself. During her first marriage, she had not existed, except through him, he was the substance and she the shadow running at his feet. She was very glad she had come to her own self. She was grateful to Brangwen. She reached out to him in gratitude, into death.
In her heart she felt a vague tenderness and pity for her first husband, who had been her lord. He was so wrong when he died. She could not bear it, that he had never lived, never really become himself. And he had been her lord! Strange, it all had been! Why had he been her lord? He seemed now so far off, so without bearing on her.
‘Which did you, grandmother?’
‘What?’
‘Like best.’
‘I liked them both. I married the first when I was quite a girl. Then I loved your grandfather when I was a woman. There is a difference.’
They were silent for a time.
‘Did you cry when my first grandfather died?’ the child asked.
Lydia Brangwen rocked herself on the bed, thinking aloud.
‘When we came to England, he hardly ever spoke, he was too much concerned to take any notice of anybody. He grew thinner and thinner, till his cheeks were hollow and his mouth stuck out. He wasn’t handsome any more. I knew he couldn’t bear being beaten, I thought everything was lost in the world. Only I had your mother a baby, it was no use my dying.
‘He looked at me with his black eyes, almost as if he hated me, when he was ill, and said, “It only wanted this. It only wanted that I should leave you and a young child to starve in this London.” I told him we should not starve. But I was young, and foolish, and frightened, which he knew.
‘He was bitter, and he never gave way. He lay beating his brains, to see what he could do. “I don’t know what you will do,” he said. “I am no good, I am a failure from beginning to end. I cannot even provide for my wife and child!”’
‘But you see, it was not for him to provide for us. My life went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.
‘I ought to have known, I ought to have been able to say to him: “Don’t be so bitter, don’t die because this has failed. You are not the beginning and the end.” But I was too young, he had never let me become myself, I thought he was truly the beginning and the end.* So I let him take all upon himself. Yet all did not depend on him. Life must go on, and I must marry your grandfather, and have your Uncle Tom, and your Uncle Fred. We cannot take so much upon ourselves.’
The child’s heart beat fast as she listened to these things. She could not understand, but she seemed to feel far-off things. It gave her a deep, joyous thrill, to know she hailed from far off, from Poland, and that dark-bearded impressive man. Strange, her antecedents were, and she felt fate on either side of her terrible.
Almost every day, Ursula saw her grandmother, and every time, they talked together. Till the grandmother’s sayings and stories, told in the complete hush of the Marsh bedroom, accumulated with mystic significance, and became a sort of Bible to the child.
And Ursula asked her deepest childish questions of her grandmother.
‘Will somebody love me, grandmother?’
‘Many people love you, child. We all love you.’
‘But when I am grown up, will somebody love me?’
‘Yes, some man will love you, child, because it’s your nature. And I hope it will be somebody who will love you for what you are, and not for what he wants of you. But we have a right to what we want.’
Ursula was frightened, hearing these things. Her heart sank, she felt she had no ground under her feet. She clung to her grandmother. Here was peace and security. Here, from her grandmother’s peaceful room, the door opened on to the greater space, the past, which was so big, that all it contained seemed tiny; loves and births and deaths, tiny units and features within a vast horizon. That was a great relief, to know the tiny importance of the individual, within the great past.
CHAPTER X
THE WIDENING CIRCLE
IT was very burdensome to Ursula, that she was the eldest of the family. By the time she was eleven, she had to take to school Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine. The boy, William, always called Billy, so that he should not be confused with his father, was a lovable, rather delicate child of three, so he stayed at home as yet. There was another baby girl, called Cassandra.
The children went for a time to the little church school just near the Marsh. It was the only place within reach, and being so small, Mrs Brangwen felt safe in sending her children there, though the village boys did nickname Ursula ‘Urtler,’ and Gudrun ‘Good-runner,’ and Theresa ‘Tea-pot.’
Gudrun and Ursula were co-mates. The second child, with her long, sleepy body and her endless chain of fancies, would have nothing to do with realities. She was not for them, she was for her own fancies. Ursula was the one for realities. So Gudrun left all such to her elder sister, and trusted in her implicitly, indifferently. Ursula had a great tenderness for her co-mate sister.
It was no good trying to make Gudrun responsible. She floated along like a fish in the sea, perfect within the medium of her own difference and being. Other existence did not trouble her. Only she believed in Ursula, and trusted to Ursula.
The eldest child was very much fretted by her responsibility for the other young ones. Especially Theresa, a sturdy, bold-eyed thing, had a faculty for warfare.
‘Our Ursula, Billy Pillins has lugged my hair.’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I said nothing.’
Then the Brangwen girls were in for a feud with the Pillinses, or Phillipses.
‘You won’t pull my hair again, Billy Pillins,’ said Theresa, walking with her sisters, and looking superbly at the freckled, red-haired boy.
‘Why shan’t I?’ retorted Billy Pillins.
‘You won’t because you dursn’t,’ said the tiresome Theresa.
‘You come here then, Tea-pot, an’ see if I dursna.’
Up marched Tea-pot, and immediately Billy Pillins lugged her black, snaky locks. In a rage she flew at him. Immediately in rushed Ursula and Gudrun, and little Katie, in clashed the other Phillipses, Clem and Walter, and Eddie Anthony. Then there was a fray. The Brangwen girls were well-grown and stronger than many boys. But for pinafores and long hair, they would have carried easy victories. They went home, however, with hair lugged and pinafores torn. It was a joy to the Phillips boys to rip the pinafores of the Brangwen girls.
Then there was an outcry. Mrs Brangwen would not have it, no she would not. All her innate dignity and standoffishness rose up. Then there was the vicar lecturing the school. ‘It was a sad thing that the boys of Cossethay could not behave more like gentlemen to the girls of Cossethay. Indeed, what kind of boy was it that should set upon a girl, and kick her, and beat her, and tear her pinafore? That boy deserved severe castigation, and the name of coward, for no boy who was not a coward—etc., etc.’
Meanwhile much hang-dog fury in the Pillinses’ hearts, much virtue in the Brangwen girls’, particularly in Theresa’s. And the feud continued, with periods of extraordinary amity, when Ursula was Clem Phillips’s sweetheart, and Gudrun was Walter’s, and Theresa was Billy’s, and even the tiny Katie had to be Eddie Ant’ny’s sweetheart. There was the closest union. At every possible moment the little gang of Brangwens and Phillipses flew together. Yet neither Ursula nor Gudrun could have any real i
ntimacy with the Phillips boys. It was a sort of fiction to them, this alliance and this dubbing of sweethearts.
Again Mrs Brangwen rose up.
‘Ursula, I will not have you raking* the roads with lads, so I tell you. Now stop it, and the rest will stop it.’
How Ursula hated always to represent the little Brangwen club. She could never be herself, no, she was always Ursula-Gudrun-Theresa-Catherine—and later even Billy was added on to her. Moreover, she did not want the Phillipses either. She was out of taste with them.
However, the Brangwen-Pillins coalition readily broke down, owing to the unfair superiority of the Brangwens. The Brangwens were rich. They had free access to the Marsh Farm. The school teachers were almost respectful to the girls, the vicar spoke to them on equal terms. The Brangwen girls presumed, they tossed their heads.
‘You’re not ivrybody, Urtler Brangwin, ugly-mug,’ said Clem Phillips, his face going very red.
‘I’m better than you, for all that,’ retorted Urtler.
‘You think you are—wi’ a face like that—Ugly Mug,—Urtler Brangwin,’ he began to jeer, trying to set all the others in cry against her. Then there was hostility again. How she hated their jeering. She became cold against the Phillipses. Ursula was very proud in her family. The Brangwen girls had all a curious blind dignity, even a kind of nobility in their bearing. By some result of breed and upbringing, they seemed to rush along their own lives without caring that they existed to other people. Never from the start did it occur to Ursula that other people might hold a low opinion of her. She thought that whosoever knew her, knew she was enough and accepted her as such. She thought it was a world of people like herself. She suffered bitterly if she were forced to have a low opinion of any person, and she never forgave that person.
This was maddening to many little people. All their lives, the Brangwens were meeting folk who tried to pull them down to make them seem little. Curiously, the mother was aware of what would happen, and was always ready to give her children the advantage of the move.
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