Skrebensky saw the man rather than the woman. She saw only
the slender, unchangeable youth waiting there inscrutable, like
her fate. He was beyond her, with his loose, slightly horsey
appearance, that made him seem very manly and foreign. Yet his
face was smooth and soft and impressionable. She shook hands
with him, and her voice was like the rousing of a bird startled
by the dawn.
"Isn't it nice," she cried, "to have a wedding?"
There were bits of coloured confetti lodged on her dark
hair.
Again the confusion came over him, as if he were losing
himself and becoming all vague, undefined, inchoate. Yet he
wanted to be hard, manly, horsey. And he followed her.
There was a light tea, and the guests scattered. The real
feast was for the evening. Ursula walked out with Skrebensky
through the stackyard to the fields, and up the embankment to
the canal-side.
The new corn-stacks were big and golden as they went by, an
army of white geese marched aside in braggart protest. Ursula
was light as a white ball of down. Skrebensky drifted beside
her, indefinite, his old from loosened, and another self, grey,
vague, drifting out as from a bud. They talked lightly, of
nothing.
The blue way of the canal wound softly between the autumn
hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left
was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway and the
town which rose on its hill, the church tower topping all. The
round white dot of the clock on the tower was distinct in the
evening light.
That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the
grim, alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the
evening, mellow over the green water-meadows and the winding
alder trees beside the river, and the pale stretches of stubble
beyond. There the evening glowed softly, and even a pee-wit was
flapping in solitude and peace.
Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the
canal between. The berries on the hedges were crimson and bright
red, above the leaves. The glow of evening and the wheeling of
the solitary pee-wit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet
the shuffling noise of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the
town opposite, and they two walked the blue strip of water-way,
the ribbon of sky between.
He was looking, Ursula thought, very beautiful, because of a
flush of sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how
he had learned to shoe horses and select cattle fit for
killing.
"Do you like to be a soldier?" she asked.
"I am not exactly a soldier," he replied.
"But you only do things for wars," she said.
"Yes."
"Would you like to go to war?"
"I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would
want to go."