Against all this, the Brangwens stood at bay. If any one, it
was the mother who was caught by, or who was most careless of
the vulgar clamour. She would have nothing extra-human. She
never really subscribed, all her life, to Brangwen's mystical
passion.
But Ursula was with her father. As she became adolescent,
thirteen, fourteen, she set more and more against her mother's
practical indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous,
almost wicked in her mother's attitude. What did Anna Brangwen,
in these years, care for God or Jesus or Angels? She was the
immediate life of to-day. Children were still being born to her,
she was throng with all the little activities of her family. And
almost instinctively she resented her husband's slavish service
to the Church, his dark, subject hankering to worship an unseen
God. What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young
family that needed fettling for? Let him attend to the immediate
concerns of his life, not go projecting himself towards the
ultimate.
But Ursula was all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt
against babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another
world, He was not of this world. He did not thrust His hands
under her face and, pointing to His wounds, say: "Look, Ursula Brangwen, I got these for your sake. Now do as
you're told."
To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the
distance, like a white moon at sunset, a crescent moon beckoning
as it follows the sun, out of our ken. Sometimes dark clouds
standing very far off, pricking up into a clear yellow band of
sunset, of a winter evening, reminded her of Calvary, sometimes
the full moon rising blood-red upon the hill terrified her with
the knowledge that Christ was now dead, hanging heavy and dead
upon the Cross.
On Sundays, this visionary world came to pass. She heard the
long hush, she knew the marriage of dark and light was taking
place. In church, the Voice sounded, re-echoing not from this
world, as if the Church itself were a shell that still spoke the
language of creation.
"The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were
fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose.
"And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with
Man, for that he also is flesh; yet his days shall be an hundred
and twenty years.
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after
that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children unto them, the same became mighty men
which were of old, men of renown."
Over this Ursula was stirred as by a call from far off. In
those days, would not the Sons of God have found her fair, would
she not have been taken to wife by one of the Sons of God? It
was a dream that frightened her, for she could not understand
it.