Then the morning passed with a strange far-awayness and
quietness. Dinner-time came, when she and Maggie ate joyously,
with all the windows open. And then they went out into St.
Philip's churchyard, where was a shadowy corner under red
hawthorn trees. And there they talked and read Shelley or
Browning or some work about "Woman and Labour".
And when she went back to school, Ursula lived still in the
shadowy corner of the graveyard, where pink-red petals lay
scattered from the hawthorn tree, like myriad tiny shells on a
beach, and a church bell sometimes rang sonorously, and
sometimes a bird called out, whilst Maggie's voice went on low
and sweet.
These days she was happy in her soul: oh, she was so happy,
that she wished she could take her joy and scatter it in armfuls
broadcast. She made her children happy, too, with a little
tingling of delight. But to her, the children were not a school
class this afternoon. They were flowers, birds, little bright
animals, children, anything. They only were not Standard Five.
She felt no responsibility for them. It was for once a game,
this teaching. And if they got their sums wrong, what matter?
And she would take a pleasant bit of reading. And instead of
history with dates, she would tell a lovely tale. And for
grammar, they could have a bit of written analysis that was not
difficult, because they had done it before: "She shall be sportive as a fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs."
She wrote that from memory, because it pleased her.
So the golden afternoon passed away and she went home happy.
She had finished her day of school, and was free to plunge into
the glowing evening of Cossethay. And she loved walking home.
But it had not been school. It had been playing at school
beneath red hawthorn blossom.
She could not go on like this. The quarterly examination was
coming, and her class was not ready. It irritated her that she
must drag herself away from her happy self, and exert herself
with all her strength to force, to compel this heavy class of
children to work hard at arithmetic. They did not want to work,
she did not want to compel them. And yet, some second conscience
gnawed at her, telling her the work was not properly done. It
irritated her almost to madness, and she let loose all the
irritation in the class. Then followed a day of battle and hate
and violence, when she went home raw, feeling the golden evening
taken away from her, herself incarcerated in some dark, heavy
place, and chained there with a consciousness of having done
badly at work.
What good was it that it was summer, that right till evening,
when the corncrakes called, the larks would mount up into the
light, to sing once more before nightfall. What good was it all,
when she was out of tune, when she must only remember the burden
and shame of school that day.