The Rainbow

His real mistress was the machine, and the real mistress of

Winifred was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the

impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in

the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the

clog and degradation of human feeling. There, in the monstrous

mechanism that held all matter, living or dead, in its service,

did she achieve her consummation and her perfect unison, her

immortality.

Hatred sprang up in Ursula's heart. If she could she would

smash the machine. Her soul's action should be the smashing of

the great machine. If she could destroy the colliery, and make

all the men of Wiggiston out of work, she would do it. Let them

starve and grub in the earth for roots, rather than serve such a

Moloch as this.

She hated her Uncle Tom, she hated Winifred Inger. They went

down to the summer-house for tea. It was a pleasant place among

a few trees, at the end of a tiny garden, on the edge of a

field. Her Uncle Tom and Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to

cheapen her. She was miserable and desolate. But she would never

give way.

Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was

over between them. She saw gross, ugly movements in her

mistress, she saw a clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that

reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle

Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking.

Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand

was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had

something marshy about him--the succulent moistness and

turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh,

where life and decaying are one.

He was repellent to her, who was so dry and fine in her fire.

Her very bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her.

It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two

weeks at Wiggiston, and she hated it. All was grey, dry ash,

cold and dead and ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get

rid of Winifred. The girl's hatred and her sense of

repulsiveness in her mistress and in her uncle seemed to throw

the other two together. They drew together as if against

her.

In hardness and bitterness of soul, Ursula knew that Winifred

was become her uncle's lover. She was glad. She had loved them

both. Now she wanted to be rid of them both. Their marshy,

bitter-sweet corruption came sick and unwholesome in her

nostrils. Anything, to get out of the foetid air. She would

leave them both for ever, leave for ever their strange, soft,

half-corrupt element. Anything to get away.

One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula's bed, and

put her arms round the girl, holding her to herself in spite of

unwillingness, and said, "Dear, my dear--shall I marry Mr. Brangwen--shall

I?"