Then she found that the way to escape was easy. One departed
from the whole circumstance. One went away to the Grammar
School, and left the little school, the meagre teachers, the
Phillipses whom she had tried to love but who had made her fail,
and whom she could not forgive. She had an instinctive fear of
petty people, as a deer is afraid of dogs. Because she was
blind, she could not calculate nor estimate people. She must
think that everybody was just like herself.
She measured by the standard of her own people: her father
and mother, her grandmother, her uncles. Her beloved father, so
utterly simple in his demeanour, yet with his strong, dark soul
fixed like a root in unexpressed depths that fascinated and
terrified her: her mother, so strangely free of all money and
convention and fear, entirely indifferent to the world, standing
by herself, without connection: her grandmother, who had come
from so far and was centred in so wide an horizon: people must
come up to these standards before they could be Ursula's
people.
So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow
boundary of Cossethay, where only limited people lived. Outside,
was all vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she
would love.
Going to school by train, she must leave home at a quarter to
eight in the morning, and she did not arrive again till
half-past five at evening. Of this she was glad, for the house
was small and overful. It was a storm of movement, whence there
had been no escape. She hated so much being in charge.
The house was a storm of movement. The children were healthy
and turbulent, the mother only wanted their animal well-being.
To Ursula, as she grew a little older, it became a nightmare.
When she saw, later, a Rubens picture with storms of naked
babies, and found this was called "Fecundity", she shuddered,
and the world became abhorrent to her. She knew as a child what
it was to live amidst storms of babies, in the heat and swelter
of fecundity. And as a child, she was against her mother,
passionately against her mother, she craved for some
spirituality and stateliness.
In bad weather, home was a bedlam. Children dashed in and out
of the rain, to the puddles under the dismal yew trees, across
the wet flagstones of the kitchen, whilst the cleaning-woman
grumbled and scolded; children were swarming on the sofa,
children were kicking the piano in the parlour, to make it sound
like a beehive, children were rolling on the hearthrug, legs in
air, pulling a book in two between them, children, fiendish,
ubiquitous, were stealing upstairs to find out where our Ursula
was, whispering at bedroom doors, hanging on the latch, calling
mysteriously, "Ursula! Ursula!" to the girl who had locked
herself in to read. And it was hopeless. The locked door excited
their sense of mystery, she had to open to dispel the lure.
These children hung on to her with round-eyed excited
questions.