The Rainbow

"But I've got to go to Kingston," said Ursula.

"They've sent for me."

"They'll do without you," he said.

There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of

tears.

"Well," she said, low and tense, "you can put me off this,

but I'm going to have a place. I'm not going to

stop at home."

"Nobody wants you to stop at home," he suddenly shouted,

going livid with rage.

She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its

own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest

of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She

went singing into the parlour.

C'est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,

Qui cri par la fenetre qu'est-ce qui le lue renda----"

During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard,

singing to herself, making love to the children, but her soul

hard and cold with regard to her parents. Nothing more was said.

The hardness and brightness lasted for four days. Then it began

to break up. So at evening she said to her father: "Have you spoken about a place for me?"

"I spoke to Mr. Burt."

"What did he say?"

"There's a committee meeting to-morrow. He'll tell me on

Friday."

So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an

exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So

she knew that this would come to pass. Because nothing was ever

fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited reality. She

did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew

Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must

take her freedom where she could.

On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in

Brinsley Street school. This could most probably be secured for

her, at once, without the trouble of application.

Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor

quarter, and she had had a taste of the common children of

Ilkeston. They had shouted after her and thrown stones. Still,

as a teacher, she would be in authority. And it was all unknown.

She was excited. The very forest of dry, sterile brick had some

fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly

ugly, it would purge her of some of her floating

sentimentality.

She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love

her. She would be so personal. Teachers were always so

hard and impersonal. There was no vivid relationship. She would

make everything personal and vivid, she would give herself, she

would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her

children, she would make them so happy, and they would prefer

her to any teacher on the face of the earth.