His real mistress was the machine, and the real mistress of
Winifred was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the
impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in
the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the
clog and degradation of human feeling. There, in the monstrous
mechanism that held all matter, living or dead, in its service,
did she achieve her consummation and her perfect unison, her
immortality.
Hatred sprang up in Ursula's heart. If she could she would
smash the machine. Her soul's action should be the smashing of
the great machine. If she could destroy the colliery, and make
all the men of Wiggiston out of work, she would do it. Let them
starve and grub in the earth for roots, rather than serve such a
Moloch as this.
She hated her Uncle Tom, she hated Winifred Inger. They went
down to the summer-house for tea. It was a pleasant place among
a few trees, at the end of a tiny garden, on the edge of a
field. Her Uncle Tom and Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to
cheapen her. She was miserable and desolate. But she would never
give way.
Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was
over between them. She saw gross, ugly movements in her
mistress, she saw a clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that
reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle
Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking.
Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand
was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had
something marshy about him--the succulent moistness and
turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh,
where life and decaying are one.
He was repellent to her, who was so dry and fine in her fire.
Her very bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her.
It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two
weeks at Wiggiston, and she hated it. All was grey, dry ash,
cold and dead and ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get
rid of Winifred. The girl's hatred and her sense of
repulsiveness in her mistress and in her uncle seemed to throw
the other two together. They drew together as if against
her.
In hardness and bitterness of soul, Ursula knew that Winifred
was become her uncle's lover. She was glad. She had loved them
both. Now she wanted to be rid of them both. Their marshy,
bitter-sweet corruption came sick and unwholesome in her
nostrils. Anything, to get out of the foetid air. She would
leave them both for ever, leave for ever their strange, soft,
half-corrupt element. Anything to get away.
One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula's bed, and
put her arms round the girl, holding her to herself in spite of
unwillingness, and said, "Dear, my dear--shall I marry Mr. Brangwen--shall
I?"