The Rainbow

"Pens down."

The children put down their pens and looked up.

"Fold arms."

They pushed back their books and folded arms.

Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate

herself.

"What is your composition about?" asked the

headmaster. Every hand shot up. "The ----" stuttered

some voice in its eagerness to answer.

"I wouldn't advise you to call out," said Mr. Harby. He would

have a pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable

menace that always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes

twinkling under his bushy black eyebrows, watching the class.

There was something fascinating in him, as he stood, and again

she wanted to scream. She was all jarred, she did not know what

she felt.

"Well, Alice?" he said.

"The rabbit," piped a girl's voice.

"A very easy subject for Standard Five."

Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed

before the class. And she was tormented by the contradictoriness

of everything. Mr. Harby stood so strong, and so male, with his

black brows and clear forehead, the heavy jaw, the big,

overhanging moustache: such a man, with strength and male power,

and a certain blind, native beauty. She might have liked him as

a man. And here he stood in some other capacity, bullying over

such a trifle as a boy's speaking out without permission. Yet he

was not a little, fussy man. He seemed to have some cruel,

stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too small and

petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would

fulfil, because he had to earn his living. He had no finer

control over himself, only this blind, dogged, wholesale will.

He would keep the job going, since he must. And this job was to

make the children spell the word "caution" correctly, and put a

capital letter after a full-stop. So at this he hammered with

his suppressed hatred, always suppressing himself, till he was

beside himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he stood, short and

handsome and powerful, teaching her class. It seemed such a

miserable thing for him to be doing. He had a decent, powerful,

rude soul. What did he care about the composition on "The

Rabbit"? Yet his will kept him there before the class, threshing

the trivial subject. It was habit with him now, to be so little

and vulgar, out of place. She saw the shamefulness of his

position, felt the fettered wickedness in him which would blaze

out into evil rage in the long run, so that he was like a

persistent, strong creature tethered. It was really intolerable.

The jarring was torture to her. She looked over the silent,

attentive class that seemed to have crystallized into order and

rigid, neutral form. This he had it in his power to do, to

crystallize the children into hard, mute fragments, fixed under

his will: his brute will, which fixed them by sheer force.