The Rainbow

Neither could she succeed. That was her horror. As the weeks

passed on, there was no Ursula Brangwen, free and jolly. There

was only a girl of that name obsessed by the fact that she could

not manage her class of children. At week-ends there came days

of passionate reaction, when she went mad with the taste of

liberty, when merely to be free in the morning, to sit down at

her embroidery and stitch the coloured silks was a passion of

delight. For the prison house was always awaiting her! This was

only a respite, as her chained heart knew well. So that she

seized hold of the swift hours of the week-end, and wrung the

last drop of sweetness out of them, in a little, cruel

frenzy.

She did not tell anybody how this state was a torture to her.

She did not confide, either to Gudrun or to her parents, how

horrible she found it to be a school-teacher. But when Sunday

night came, and she felt the Monday morning at hand, she was

strung up tight with dreadful anticipation, because the strain

and the torture was near again.

She did not believe that she could ever teach that great,

brutish class, in that brutal school: ever, ever. And yet, if

she failed, she must in some way go under. She must admit that

the man's world was too strong for her, she could not take her

place in it; she must go down before Mr. Harby. And all her life

henceforth, she must go on, never having freed herself of the

man's world, never having achieved the freedom of the great

world of responsible work. Maggie had taken her place there, she

had even stood level with Mr. Harby and got free of him: and her

soul was always wandering in far-off valleys and glades of

poetry. Maggie was free. Yet there was something like subjection

in Maggie's very freedom. Mr. Harby, the man, disliked the

reserved woman, Maggie. Mr. Harby, the schoolmaster, respected

his teacher, Miss Schofield.

For the present, however, Ursula only envied and admired

Maggie. She herself had still to get where Maggie had got. She

had still to make her footing. She had taken up a position on

Mr. Harby's ground, and she must keep it. For he was now

beginning a regular attack on her, to drive her away out of his

school. She could not keep order. Her class was a turbulent

crowd, and the weak spot in the school's work. Therefore she

must go, and someone more useful must come in her place, someone

who could keep discipline.

The headmaster had worked himself into an obsession of fury

against her. He only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got

worse as the weeks went on, she was absolutely no good. His

system, which was his very life in school, the outcome of his

bodily movement, was attacked and threatened at the point where

Ursula was included. She was the danger that threatened his body

with a blow, a fall. And blindly, thoroughly, moving from strong

instinct of opposition, he set to work to expel her.