Skrebensky sat beside her, listening to the sermon, to the
voice of law and order. "The very hairs of your head are all
numbered." He did not believe it. He believed his own things
were quite at his own disposal. You could do as you liked with
your own things, so long as you left other people's alone.
Ursula caressed him and made love to him. Nevertheless he
knew she wanted to react upon him and to destroy his being. She
was not with him, she was against him. But her making love to
him, her complete admiration of him, in open life, gratified
him.
She caught him out of himself, and they were lovers, in a
young, romantic, almost fantastic way. He gave her a little
ring. They put it in Rhine wine, in their glass, and she drank,
then he drank. They drank till the ring lay exposed at the
bottom of the glass. Then she took the simple jewel, and tied it
on a thread round her neck, where she wore it.
He asked her for a photograph when he was going away. She
went in great excitement to the photographer, with five
shillings. The result was an ugly little picture of herself with
her mouth on one side. She wondered over it and admired it.
He saw only the live face of the girl. The picture hurt him.
He kept it, he always remembered it, but he could scarcely bear
to see it. There was a hurt to his soul in the clear, fearless
face that was touched with abstraction. Its abstraction was
certainly away from him.
Then war was declared with the Boers in South Africa, and
everywhere was a fizz of excitement. He wrote that he might have
to go. And he sent her a box of sweets.
She was slightly dazed at the thought of his going to the
war, not knowing how to feel. It was a sort of romantic
situation that she knew so well in fiction she hardly understood
it in fact. Underneath a top elation was a sort of dreariness,
deep, ashy disappointment.
However, she secreted the sweets under her bed, and ate them
all herself, when she went to bed, and when she woke in the
morning. All the time she felt very guilty and ashamed, but she
simply did not want to share them.
That box of sweets remained stuck in her mind afterwards. Why
had she secreted them and eaten them every one? Why? She did not
feel guilty--she only knew she ought to feel guilty. And
she could not make up her mind. Curiously monumental that box of
sweets stood up, now it was empty. It was a crux for her. What
was she to think of it?
The idea of war altogether made her feel uneasy, uneasy. When
men began organized fighting with each other it seemed to her as
if the poles of the universe were cracking, and the whole might
go tumbling into the bottomless pit. A horrible bottomless
feeling she had. Yet of course there was the minted
superscription of romance and honour and even religion about
war. She was very confused.