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.