Feeling too much upset to go home, she rode a little farther
into the town, and got down from the tram at a small tea-shop.
There, in the dark little place behind the shop, she drank her
tea and ate bread-and-butter. She did not taste anything. The
taking of tea was just a mechanical action, to cover over her
existence. There she sat in the dark, obscure little place,
without knowing. Only unconsciously she nursed the back of her
hand, which was bruised.
When finally she took her way home, it was sunset red across
the west. She did not know why she was going home. There was
nothing for her there. She had, true, only to pretend to be
normal. There was nobody she could speak to, nowhere to go for
escape. But she must keep on, under this red sunset, alone,
knowing the horror in humanity, that would destroy her, and with
which she was at war. Yet it had to be so.
In the morning again she must go to school. She got up and
went without murmuring even to herself. She was in the hands of
some bigger, stronger, coarser will.
School was fairly quiet. But she could feel the class
watching her, ready to spring on her. Her instinct was aware of
the class instinct to catch her if she were weak. But she kept
cold and was guarded.
Williams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning
there was a knock at the door: someone wanted the headmaster.
Mr. Harby went out, heavily, angrily, nervously. He was afraid
of irate parents. After a moment in the passage, he came again
into school.
"Sturgess," he called to one of his larger boys. "Stand in
front of the class and write down the name of anyone who speaks.
Will you come this way, Miss Brangwen."
He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.
Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with
a whitish skin, not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple
hat.
"I called about Vernon," said the woman, speaking in a
refined accent. There was about the woman altogether an
appearance of refinement and of cleanliness, curiously
contradicted by her half beggar's deportment, and a sense of her
being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad inside. She
was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man's wife, but a
creature separate from society. By her dress she was not
poor.
Ursula knew at once that she was Williams' mother, and that
he was Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and
well-dressed, in a sailor suit. And he had this same peculiar,
half transparent unwholesomeness, rather like a corpse.
"I wasn't able to send him to school to-day," continued the
woman, with a false grace of manner. "He came home last night
so ill--he was violently sick--I thought I
should have to send for the doctor.--You know he has a weak
heart."