Instead of consoling her, this made her harder, more ruthless. She was now up against her own fate. It was for her to choose between being Mrs. Skrebensky, even Baroness Skrebensky, wife of a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, the Sappers, as he called them, living with the European population in India—or being Ursula Brangwen, spinster, schoolmistress. She was qualified by her Intermediate Arts examination. She would probably even now get a post quite easily as assistant in one of the higher grade schools, or even in Willey Green School. Which was she to do?
She hated most of all entering the bondage of teaching once more. Very heartily she detested it. Yet at the thought of marriage and living with Skrebensky amid the European population in India, her soul was locked and would not budge. She had very little feeling about it: only there was a deadlock.
Skrebensky waited, she waited, everybody waited for the decision. When Anton talked to her, and seemed insidiously to suggest himself as a husband to her, she knew how utterly locked out he was. On the other hand, when she saw Dorothy, and discussed the matter, she felt she would marry him promptly, at once, as a sharp disavowal of adherence with Dorothy’s views.
The situation was almost ridiculous.
“But do you love him?” asked Dorothy.
“It isn’t a question of loving him,” said Ursula. “I love him well enough—certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I haven’t. What is it to me?”
And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt.
Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid.
“Then what do you care about?” she asked, exasperated.
“I don’t know,” said Ursula. “But something impersonal. Love—love—love—what does it mean—what does it amount to? So much personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”
“It isn’t supposed to lead anywhere, is it?” said Dorothy, satirically. “I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.”
“Then what does it matter to me?” cried Ursula. “As an end in itself, I could love a hundred men, one after the other. Why should I end with a Skrebensky? Why should I not go on, and love all the types I fancy, one after another, if love is an end in itself? There are plenty of men who aren’t Anton, whom I could love—whom I would like to love.”
“Then you don’t love him,” said Dorothy.
“I tell you I do;—quite as much, and perhaps more than I should love any of the others. Only there are plenty of things that aren’t in Anton that I would love in the other men.”
“What, for instance?”
“It doesn’t matter. But a sort of strong understanding, in some men, and then a dignity, a directness, something unquestioned that there is in working men, and then a jolly, reckless passionateness that you see—a man who could really let go—”
Dorothy could feel that Ursula was already hankering after something else, something that this man did not give her.
“The question is, what do you want,” propounded Dorothy. “Is it just other men?”
Ursula was silenced. This was her own dread. Was she just promiscuous?
“Because if it is,” continued Dorothy, “you’d better marry Anton. The other can only end badly.”
So out of fear of herself Ursula was to marry Skrebensky.
He was very busy now, preparing to go to India. He must visit relatives and contract business. He was almost sure of Ursula now. She seemed to have given in. And he seemed to become again an important, self-assured man.
It was the first week in August, and he was one of a large party in a bungalow on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a tennis, golf, motorcar, motorboat party, given by his great-aunt, a lady of social pretensions. Ursula was invited to spend the week with the party.
She went rather reluctantly. Her marriage was more or less fixed for the twenty-eighth of the month. They were to sail for India on September the fifth. One thing she knew, in her subconsciousness, and that was, she would never sail for India.
She and Anton, being important guests on account of the coming marriage, had rooms in the large bungalow. It was a big place, with a great central hall, two smaller writing-rooms, and then two corridors from which opened eight or nine bedrooms. Skrebensky was put on one corridor, Ursula on the other. They felt very lost, in the crowd.
Being lovers, however, they were allowed to be out alone together as much as they liked. Yet she felt very strange, in this crowd of strange people, uneasy, as if she had no privacy. She was not used to these homogeneous crowds. She was afraid.
She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard, easy, shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little. She felt she was not pronounced enough. It was a kind of hold-your-own unconventional atmosphere.
She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. Even before Skrebensky she felt unimportant, almost inferior. He could take his part very well with the rest.
He and she went out into the night. There was a moon behind clouds, shedding a diffused light, gleaming now and again in bits of smoky mother-of-pearl. So they walked together on the wet, ribbed sands near the sea, hearing the run of the long, heavy waves, that made a ghostly whiteness and a whisper.
He was sure of himself. As she walked, the soft silk of her dress—she wore a blue shantung,
