The Rainbow

Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting.

But he tried water-colour painting after the manner of any other

amateur. He got his results but was not much interested. After

one or two drawings of his beloved church, which had the same

alertness as his modelling, he seemed to be incongruous with the

modern atmospheric way of painting, so that his church tower

stood up, really stood and asserted its standing, but was

ashamed of its own lack of meaning, he turned away again.

He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over

reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver

and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of

discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more

imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each

for all his womenfolk. Then he made rings and bracelets.

Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula

left school, he was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he

delighted in it, almost lusted after it.

All this time his only connection with the real outer world

was through his winter evening classes, which brought him into

contact with state education. About all the rest, he was

oblivious, and entirely indifferent--even about the war.

The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of

his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great

adherent.

Ursula watched the newspapers, vaguely, concerning the war in

South Africa. They made her miserable, and she tried to have as

little to do with them as possible. But Skrebensky was out

there. He sent her an occasional post-card. But it was as if she

were a blank wall in his direction, without windows or outgoing.

She adhered to the Skrebensky of her memory.

Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed

from the roots and native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to

it, and she was aridly transplanted. He was really only a

memory. She revived his memory with strange passion, after the

departure of Winifred. He was to her almost the symbol of her

real life. It was as if, through him, in him, she might return

to her own self, which she was before she had loved Winifred,

before this deadness had come upon her, this pitiless

transplanting. But even her memories were the work of her

imagination.

She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She

could not dream of him progressively, of what he was doing now,

of what relation he would have to her now. Only sometimes she

wept to think how cruelly she had suffered when he left

her--ah, how she had suffered! She remembered what

she had written in her diary: "If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down."