The Rainbow

Ah, it was a dull agony to her to remember what she had been

then. For it was remembering a dead self. All that was dead

after Winifred. She knew the corpse of her young, loving self,

she knew its grave. And the young living self she mourned for

had scarcely existed, it was the creature of her

imagination.

Deep within her a cold despair remained unchanging and

unchanged. No one would ever love her now--she would love

no one. The body of love was killed in her after Winifred, there

was something of the corpse in her. She would live, she would go

on, but she would have no lovers, no lover would want her any

more. She herself would want no lover. The vividest little flame

of desire was extinct in her for ever. The tiny, vivid germ that

contained the bud of her real self, her real love, was killed,

she would go on growing as a plant, she would do her best to

produce her minor flowers, but her leading flower was dead

before it was born, all her growth was the conveying of a corpse

of hope.

The miserable weeks went on, in the poky house crammed with

children. What was her life--a sordid, formless,

disintegrated nothing; Ursula Brangwen a person without worth or

importance, living in the mean village of Cossethay, within the

sordid scope of Ilkeston. Ursula Brangwen, at seventeen,

worthless and unvalued, neither wanted nor needed by anybody,

and conscious herself of her own dead value. It would not bear

thinking of.

But still her dogged pride held its own. She might be

defiled, she might be a corpse that should never be loved, she

might be a core-rotten stalk living upon the food that others

provided; yet she would give in to nobody.

Gradually she became conscious that she could not go on

living at home as she was doing, without place or meaning or

worth. The very children that went to school held her

uselessness in contempt. She must do something.

Her father said she had plenty to do to help her mother. From

her parents she would never get more than a hit in the face. She

was not a practical person. She thought of wild things, of

running away and becoming a domestic servant, of asking some man

to take her.

She wrote to the mistress of the High School for advice.

"I cannot see very clearly what you should do, Ursula," came

the reply, "unless you are willing to become an elementary

school teacher. You have matriculated, and that qualifies you to

take a post as uncertificated teacher in any school, at a salary

of about fifty pounds a year.

"I cannot tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in your

desire to do something. You will learn that mankind is a great

body of which you are one useful member, you will take your own

place at the great task which humanity is trying to fulfil. That

will give you a satisfaction and a self-respect which nothing

else could give."