Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always
busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of
motherhood. She seemed to exist in her own violent fruitfulness,
and it was as if the sun shone tropically on her. Her colour was
bright, her eyes full of a fecund gloom, her brown hair tumbled
loosely over her ears. She had a look of richness. No
responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her. The outside,
public life was less than nothing to her, really.
Whereas when, at twenty-six, he found himself father of four
children, with a wife who lived intrinsically like the ruddiest
lilies of the field, he let the weight of responsibility press
on him and drag him. It was then that his child Ursula strove to
be with him. She was with him, even as a baby of four, when he
was irritable and shouted and made the household unhappy. She
suffered from his shouting, but somehow it was not really him.
She wanted it to be over, she wanted to resume her normal
connection with him. When he was disagreeable, the child echoed
to the crying of some need in him, and she responded blindly.
Her heart followed him as if he had some tie with her, and some
love which he could not deliver. Her heart followed him
persistently, in its love.
But there was the dim, childish sense of her own smallness
and inadequacy, a fatal sense of worthlessness. She could not do
anything, she was not enough. She could not be important to him.
This knowledge deadened her from the first.
Still she set towards him like a quivering needle. All her
life was directed by her awareness of him, her wakefulness to
his being. And she was against her mother.
Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up.
But for him, she might have gone on like the other children,
Gudrun and Theresa and Catherine, one with the flowers and
insects and playthings, having no existence apart from the
concrete object of her attention. But her father came too near
to her. The clasp of his hands and the power of his breast woke
her up almost in pain from the transient unconsciousness of
childhood. Wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awake before she knew
how to see. She was wakened too soon. Too soon the call had come
to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close
to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into
wakefulness by the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping
her to his body for love and for fulfilment, asking as a magnet
must always ask. From her the response had struggled dimly,
vaguely into being.
The children were dressed roughly for the country. When she
was little, Ursula pattered about in little wooden clogs, a blue
overall over her thick red dress, a red shawl crossed on her
breast and tied behind again. So she ran with her father to the
garden.