The Rainbow

Skrebensky sat beside her, listening to the sermon, to the

voice of law and order. "The very hairs of your head are all

numbered." He did not believe it. He believed his own things

were quite at his own disposal. You could do as you liked with

your own things, so long as you left other people's alone.

Ursula caressed him and made love to him. Nevertheless he

knew she wanted to react upon him and to destroy his being. She

was not with him, she was against him. But her making love to

him, her complete admiration of him, in open life, gratified

him.

She caught him out of himself, and they were lovers, in a

young, romantic, almost fantastic way. He gave her a little

ring. They put it in Rhine wine, in their glass, and she drank,

then he drank. They drank till the ring lay exposed at the

bottom of the glass. Then she took the simple jewel, and tied it

on a thread round her neck, where she wore it.

He asked her for a photograph when he was going away. She

went in great excitement to the photographer, with five

shillings. The result was an ugly little picture of herself with

her mouth on one side. She wondered over it and admired it.

He saw only the live face of the girl. The picture hurt him.

He kept it, he always remembered it, but he could scarcely bear

to see it. There was a hurt to his soul in the clear, fearless

face that was touched with abstraction. Its abstraction was

certainly away from him.

Then war was declared with the Boers in South Africa, and

everywhere was a fizz of excitement. He wrote that he might have

to go. And he sent her a box of sweets.

She was slightly dazed at the thought of his going to the

war, not knowing how to feel. It was a sort of romantic

situation that she knew so well in fiction she hardly understood

it in fact. Underneath a top elation was a sort of dreariness,

deep, ashy disappointment.

However, she secreted the sweets under her bed, and ate them

all herself, when she went to bed, and when she woke in the

morning. All the time she felt very guilty and ashamed, but she

simply did not want to share them.

That box of sweets remained stuck in her mind afterwards. Why

had she secreted them and eaten them every one? Why? She did not

feel guilty--she only knew she ought to feel guilty. And

she could not make up her mind. Curiously monumental that box of

sweets stood up, now it was empty. It was a crux for her. What

was she to think of it?

The idea of war altogether made her feel uneasy, uneasy. When

men began organized fighting with each other it seemed to her as

if the poles of the universe were cracking, and the whole might

go tumbling into the bottomless pit. A horrible bottomless

feeling she had. Yet of course there was the minted

superscription of romance and honour and even religion about

war. She was very confused.