Gudrun was attending the Art School at Nottingham. She was working particularly at sculpture. She had a gift for this. She loved making little models in clay, of children or of animals. Already some of these had appeared in the Students’ Exhibition in the Castle, and Gudrun was a distinguished person. She was chafing at the Art School and wanted to go to London. But there was not enough money. Neither would her parents let her go so far.
Theresa had left the High School. She was a great strapping, bold hussy, indifferent to all higher claims. She would stay at home. The others were at school, except the youngest. When term started, they would all be transferred to the Grammar School at Willey Green.
Ursula was excited at making acquaintances in Beldover. The excitement soon passed. She had tea at the clergyman’s, at the chemist’s, at the other chemist’s, at the doctor’s, at the under-manager’s—then she knew practically everybody. She could not take people very seriously, though at the time she wanted to.
She wandered the country, on foot and on her bicycle, finding it very beautiful in the forest direction, between Mansfield and Southwell and Worksop. But she was here only skirmishing for amusement. Her real exploration would begin in college.
Term began. She went into town each day by train. The cloistered quiet of the college began to close around her.
She was not at first disappointed. The big college built of stone, standing in the quiet street, with a rim of grass and lime trees all so peaceful: she felt it remote, a magic land. Its architecture was foolish, she knew from her father. Still, it was different from that of all other buildings. Its rather pretty, plaything, Gothic form was almost a style, in the dirty industrial town.
She liked the hall, with its big stone chimneypiece and its Gothic arches supporting the balcony above. To be sure the arches were ugly, the chimneypiece of cardboard-like carved stone, with its armorial decoration, looked silly just opposite the bicycle stand and the radiator, whilst the great notice-board with its fluttering papers seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall. Nevertheless, amorphous as it might be, there was in it a reminiscence of the wondrous, cloistral origin of education. Her soul flew straight back to the medieval times, when the monks of God held the learning of men and imparted it within the shadow of religion. In this spirit she entered college.
The harshness and vulgarity of the lobbies and cloakrooms hurt her at first. Why was it not all beautiful? But she could not openly admit her criticism. She was on holy ground.
She wanted all the students to have a high, pure spirit, she wanted them to say only the real, genuine things, she wanted their faces to be still and luminous as the nuns’ and the monks’ faces.
Alas, the girls chattered and giggled and were nervous, they were dressed up and frizzed, the men looked mean and clownish.
Still, it was lovely to pass along the corridor with one’s books in one’s hands, to push the swinging, glass-panelled door, and enter the big room where the first lecture would be given. The windows were large and lofty, the myriad brown students’ desks stood waiting, the great blackboard was smooth behind the rostrum.
Ursula sat beside her window, rather far back. Looking down, she saw the lime trees turning yellow, the tradesman’s boy passing silent down the still, autumn-sunny street. There was the world, remote, remote.
Here, within the great, whispering seashell, that whispered all the while with reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence.
She listened, she scribbled her notes with joy, almost with ecstasy, never for a moment criticizing what she heard. The lecturer was a mouthpiece, a priest. As he stood, black-gowned, on the rostrum, some strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they became a lecture.
At first, she preserved herself from criticism. She would not consider the professors as men, ordinary men who ate bacon, and pulled on their boots before coming to college. They were the black-gowned priests of knowledge, serving forever in a remote, hushed temple. They were the initiated, and the beginning and the end of the mystery was in their keeping.
Curious joy she had of the lectures. It was a joy to hear the theory of education, there was such freedom and pleasure in ranging over the very stuff of knowledge, and seeing how it moved and lived and had its being. How happy Racine made her! She did not know why. But as the big lines of the drama unfolded themselves, so steady, so measured, she felt a thrill as of being in the realm of the reality. Of Latin, she was doing Livy and Horace. The curious, intimate, gossiping tone of the Latin class suited Horace. Yet she never cared for him, nor even Livy. There was an entire lack of sternness in the gossipy classroom. She tried hard to keep her old grasp of the Roman spirit. But gradually the Latin became mere gossip-stuff and artificiality to her, a question of manners and verbosities.
Her terror was the mathematics class. The lecturer went so fast, her heart beat excitedly, she seemed to be straining every nerve. And she struggled hard,
