pg28948 [184]
"If you'd asked about it, a place could have been got for you in Ilkeston. But you had to play Miss High-an'-mighty, and go your own way," said her father.
"I've no doubt you'd rather go right away," said her mother, very caustic. "And I've no doubt you'd find other people didn't put up with you for very long either. You've too much opinion of yourself for your good."
Between the girl and her mother was a feeling of pure hatred. There came a stubborn silence. Ursula knew she must break it.
"Well, they've written to me, and I s'll have to go," she said.
"Where will you get the money from?" asked her father.
"Uncle Tom will give it me," she said.
Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant.
Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was abstracted, he seemed to be abstracting himself, to make a pure statement.
"Well, you're not going all that distance away," he said. "I'll ask Mr. Burt about a place here. I'm not going to have you by yourself at the other side of London."
"But I've got to go to Kingston," said Ursula. "They've sent for me."
"They'll do without you," he said.
There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of tears.
"Well," she said, low and tense, "you can put me off this, but I'm going to have a place. I'm not going to stop at home."
"Nobody wants you to stop at home," he suddenly shouted, going livid with rage.
She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She went singing into the parlour.
C'est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenêtre qu'est-ce qui le lue renda——"
During the next days Ursula went about bright and hard, singing to herself, making love to the children, but her soul hard and cold with regard to her parents. Nothing more was said. The hardness and brightness lasted for four days. Then it began to break up. So at evening she said to her father:
"Have you spoken about a place for me?"
"I spoke to Mr. Burt."
"What did he say?"
"There's a committee meeting to-morrow. He'll tell me on Friday."
So she waited till Friday. Kingston-on-Thames had been an exciting dream. Here she could feel the hard, raw reality. So she knew that this would come to pass. Because nothing was ever fulfilled, she found, except in the hard limited reality. She did not want to be a teacher in Ilkeston, because she knew Ilkeston, and hated it. But she wanted to be free, so she must take her freedom where she could.
On Friday her father said there was a place vacant in Brinsley Street school. This could most probably be secured for her, at once, without the trouble of application.
Her heart halted. Brinsley Street was a school in a poor quarter, and she had had a taste of the common children of Ilkeston. They had shouted after her and thrown stones. Still, as a teacher, she would be in authority. And it was all unknown. She was excited. The very forest of dry, sterile brick had some fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly ugly, it would purge her of some of her floating sentimentality.
She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love her. She would be so personal. Teachers were always so hard and impersonal. There was no vivid relationship. She would make everything personal and vivid, she would give herself, she would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her children, she would make them so happy, and they would prefer her to any teacher on the face of the earth.
At Christmas she would choose such fascinating Christmas cards for them, and she would give them such a happy party in one of the class-rooms.
The headmaster, Mr. Harby, was a short, thick-set, rather common man, she thought. But she would hold before him the light of grace and refinement, he would have her in such high esteem before long. She would be the gleaming sun of the school, the children would blossom like little weeds,