The Rainbow

"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.