The Rainbow · Chapter 13 (3/8)

As she waited at the tram-terminus she reverted swiftly to her childhood; her teasing grandfather, with his fair beard and blue eyes, and his big, monumental body; he had got drowned: her grandmother, whom Ursula would sometimes say she had loved more than anyone else in the world: the little church school, the Phillips boys; one was a soldier in the Life Guards now, one was a collier. With a passion she clung to the past.

But as she dreamed of it, she heard the tramcar grinding round a bend, rumbling dully, she saw it draw into sight, and hum nearer. It sidled round the loop at the terminus, and came to a standstill, looming above her. Some shadowy grey people stepped from the far end, the conductor was walking in the puddles, swinging round the pole.

She mounted into the wet, comfortless tram, whose floor was dark with wet, whose windows were all steamed, and she sat in suspense. It had begun, her new existence.

One other passenger mounted⁠—a sort of charwoman with a drab, wet coat. Ursula could not bear the waiting of the tram. The bell clanged, there was a lurch forward. The car moved cautiously down the wet street. She was being carried forward, into her new existence. Her heart burned with pain and suspense, as if something were cutting her living tissue.

Often, oh often the tram seemed to stop, and wet, cloaked people mounted and sat mute and grey in stiff rows opposite her, their umbrellas between their knees. The windows of the tram grew more steamy; opaque. She was shut in with these unliving, spectral people. Even yet it did not occur to her that she was one of them. The conductor came down issuing tickets. Each little ring of his clipper sent a pang of dread through her. But her ticket surely was different from the rest.

They were all going to work; she also was going to work. Her ticket was the same. She sat trying to fit in with them. But fear was at her bowels, she felt an unknown, terrible grip upon her.

At Bath Street she must dismount and change trams. She looked uphill. It seemed to lead to freedom. She remembered the many Saturday afternoons she had walked up to the shops. How free and careless she had been!

Ah, her tram was sliding gingerly downhill. She dreaded every yard of her conveyance. The car halted, she mounted hastily.

She kept turning her head as the car ran on, because she was uncertain of the street. At last, her heart a flame of suspense, trembling, she rose. The conductor rang the bell brusquely.

She was walking down a small, mean, wet street, empty of people. The school squatted low within its railed, asphalt yard, that shone black with rain. The building was grimy, and horrible, dry plants were shadowily looking through the windows.

She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place seemed to have a threatening expression, imitating the church’s architecture, for the purpose of domineering, like a gesture of vulgar authority. She saw that one pair of feet had paddled across the flagstone floor of the porch. The place was silent, deserted, like an empty prison waiting the return of tramping feet.

Ursula went forward to the teachers’ room that burrowed in a gloomy hole. She knocked timidly.

“Come in!” called a surprised man’s voice, as from a prison cell. She entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirtsleeves was rubbing a paper on a jelly-tray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow, sharp face, said “Good morning,” then turned away again, and stripped the paper off the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing transferred, before he dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap.

Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.

“Isn’t it a nasty morning,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s not much of weather.”

But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed. This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo. Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof.

“Am I early?” she asked.

The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to be sharpened to needle-points of vision.

“Twenty-five past,” he said. “You’re the second to come. I’m first this morning.”

Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing, pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the table.

“Must you do so many?” asked Ursula.

Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl thought.

“Sixty-three,” he answered.

“So many!” she said, gently. Then she remembered.

“But they’re not all for your class, are they?” she added.

“Why aren’t they?” he replied, a fierceness in his voice.

Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were addressing a machine.

“It is too many,” she said sympathetically.

“You’ll get about the same,” he said.

That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature.

The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about twenty-eight appeared.

“Oh, Ursula!” the newcomer exclaimed. “You are here early! My word, I’ll warrant you don’t keep it up. That’s Mr. Williamson’s peg. This is yours. Standard Five teacher always has this. Aren’t you going to take your hat off?”

Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula’s waterproof from the peg on which it was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had already snatched the pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed them through her coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat, dun-coloured hair.

“Isn’t it a beastly morning,” she exclaimed, “beastly! And if there’s one thing I hate above another it’s a wet Monday morning;⁠—pack of kids trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding ’em⁠—”

She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying it round her waist.

“You’ve brought an apron, haven’t you?” she said jerkily, glancing at Ursula. “Oh⁠—you’ll want one. You’ve no idea what a sight you’ll look before half-past four, what with chalk and ink and kids’ dirty feet.⁠—Well, I can send a boy down to mamma’s for one.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Ursula.

“Oh, yes⁠—I can send easily,” cried Miss Harby.

Ursula’s heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored him. Ursula felt the callous crude rudeness between the two teachers.

The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were already clattering in the porch.

“Jim Richards,” called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A boy came sheepishly forward.

“Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?” said Miss Harby, in a commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait for an answer. “Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my school pinas, for Miss Brangwen⁠—shall you?”

The boy muttered a sheepish “Yes, miss,” and was moving away.

“Hey,” called Miss Harby. “Come here⁠—now what are you going for? What shall you say to mamma?”

“A school pina⁠—” muttered the boy.

“ ‘Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her another school pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she’s come without one.’ ”

“Yes, miss,” muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving off. Miss Harby caught him back, holding him by the shoulder.

“What are you going to say?”

“Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss Brangwin,” muttered the boy very sheepishly.

“Miss Brangwen!” laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away. “Here, you’d better have my umbrella⁠—wait a minute.”

The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby’s umbrella, and set off.

“Don’t take long over it,” called Miss Harby, after him. Then she turned to Ursula, and said brightly:

“Oh, he’s a caution, that lad⁠—but not bad, you know.”

“No,” Ursula agreed, weakly.

The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room. Ursula glanced down the place. Its rigid, long silence was official and chilling. Halfway down was a glass partition, the doors of which were open. A clock ticked reechoing, and Miss Harby’s voice sounded double as she said:

“This is the big room⁠—Standard Five-Six-and-Seven.⁠—Here’s your place⁠—Five⁠—”

She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a small high teacher’s desk facing a squadron of long benches, two high windows in the wall opposite.

It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious, unliving light in the room changed her character. She thought it was the rainy morning. Then she looked up again, because of the horrid feeling of being shut in a rigid, inflexible air, away from all feeling of the ordinary day; and she noticed that the windows were of ribbed, suffused glass.

The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed, pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums against the pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a squadron, and dread filled her. This was a new world, a new life, with which she was threatened. But still excited, she climbed into her chair at her teacher’s desk. It was high, and her feet could not reach the ground, but must rest on the step. Lifted up there, off the ground, she was in office. How queer, how queer it all was! How different it was from the mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought of her own village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off, so lost to her.

She was here in this hard, stark reality⁠—reality. It was queer that she should call this the reality, which she had never known till today, and which now so filled her with dread and dislike, that she wished she might go away. This was the reality, and Cossethay, her beloved, beautiful, well-known Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was minor reality. This prison of a school was reality. Here, then, she would sit in state, the queen of scholars! Here she would realize her dream of being the beloved teacher bringing light and joy to her children! But the desks before her had an abstract angularity that bruised her sentiment and made her shrink. She winced, feeling she had been a fool in her anticipations. She had brought her feelings and her generosity to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And already she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of place.

She slid down, and they returned to the teacher’s room. It was queer to feel that one ought to alter one’s personality. She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

Mr. Harby was in the teachers’ room, standing before a big, open cupboard, in which Ursula could see piles of pink blotting-paper, heaps of shiny new books, boxes of chalk, and bottles of coloured inks. It looked a treasure store.

The schoolmaster was a short, sturdy man, with a fine head, and a heavy jowl. Nevertheless he was good-looking, with his shapely brows and nose, and his great, hanging moustache. He seemed absorbed in his work, and took no notice of Ursula’s entry. There was something insulting in the way he could be so actively unaware of another person, so occupied.

When he had a moment of absence, he looked up from the table and said good morning to Ursula. There was a pleasant light in his brown eyes. He seemed very manly and incontrovertible, like something she wanted to push over.

“You had a wet walk,” he said to Ursula.

“Oh, I don’t mind, I’m used to it,” she replied, with a nervous little laugh.

But already he was not listening. Her words sounded ridiculous and babbling. He was taking no notice of her.

“You will sign your name here,” he said to her, as if she were some child⁠—“and the time when you come and go.”

Ursula signed her name in the time book and stood back. No one took any further notice of her. She beat her brains for something to say, but in vain.

“I’d let them in now,” said Mr. Harby to the thin man, who was very hastily arranging his papers.

The assistant teacher made no sign of acquiescence, and went on with what he was doing. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. At the last moment Mr. Brunt slipped into his coat.

“You will go to the girls’ lobby,” said the schoolmaster to Ursula, with a fascinating, insulting geniality, purely official and domineering.

She went out and found Miss Harby, and another girl teacher, in the porch. On the asphalt yard the rain was falling. A toneless bell tang-tang-tanged drearily overhead, monotonously, insistently. It came to an end. Then Mr. Brunt was seen, bareheaded, standing at the other gate of the school yard, blowing shrill blasts on a whistle and looking down the rainy, dreary street.

Boys in gangs and streams came trotting up, running past the master and with a loud clatter of feet and voices, over the yard to the boys’ porch. Girls were running and walking through the other entrance.

In the porch where Ursula stood there was a great noise of girls, who were tearing off their coats and hats, and hanging them on the racks bristling with pegs. There was a smell of wet clothing, a tossing out of wet, draggled hair, a noise of voices and feet.

The mass of girls grew greater, the rage around the pegs grew steadier, the scholars tended to fall into little noisy gangs in the porch. Then Violet Harby clapped her hands, clapped them louder, with a shrill “Quiet, girls, quiet!”

There was a pause. The hubbub died down but did not cease.

“What did I say?” cried Miss Harby, shrilly.

There was almost complete silence. Sometimes a girl, rather late, whirled into the porch and flung off her things.

“Leaders⁠—in place,” commanded Miss Harby shrilly.

Pairs of girls in pinafores and long hair stood separate in the porch.

“Standard Four, Five, and Six⁠—fall in,” cried Miss Harby.

There was a hubbub, which gradually resolved itself into three columns of girls, two and two, standing smirking in the passage. In among the peg-racks, other teachers were putting the lower classes into ranks.

Ursula stood by her own Standard Five. They were jerking their shoulders, tossing their hair, nudging, writhing, staring, grinning, whispering and twisting.

A sharp whistle was heard, and Standard Six, the biggest girls, set off, led by Miss Harby. Ursula, with her Standard Five, followed after. She stood beside a smirking, grinning row of girls, waiting in a narrow passage. What she was herself she did not know.

Suddenly the sound of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off hollowly down the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The piano played on, a march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of the big room. Mr. Harby was seen away beyond at his desk. Mr. Brunt guarded the other door of the room. Ursula’s class pushed up. She stood near them. They glanced and smirked and shoved.

“Go on,” said Ursula.

They tittered.

“Go on,” said Ursula, for the piano continued.

The girls broke loosely into the room. Mr. Harby, who had seemed immersed in some occupation, away at his desk, lifted his head and thundered:

“Halt!”

There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just starting through the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued voice of Mr. Brunt was heard, then the booming shout of Mr. Harby, from far down the room: