Chapter 2 Ursula's limitation

And your father?

Gudrun gave Ursula an almost resentful look as though she had been brought to heel.

She responded coldly, "I haven't thought about him: I've refrained."

Ursula hesitated before answering, "Yes," signaling that the exchange had ended. The sisters felt as though they had gazed over the edge and were met by a void, a scary gap.

For a while, they labored in silence; Gudrun's cheek was flushed with suppressed emotion. She was angry that it had been summoned.

She suggested in an overly casual tone, "Shall we go out and look at that wedding?"

Ursula exclaimed, "Yes!" too excitedly, setting down her needlework and leaping up as if to flee from something, revealing the stress of the circumstance and getting on Gudrun's nerves with a friction of disapproval.

Ursula was aware of the surroundings as she made her way upstairs in the house and in her own home. She despised the filthy, overly familiar place! She was terrified by the intensity of her feelings toward the house, the neighborhood, the overall climate, and the state of this antiquated life. She was alarmed by how she felt.

The two girls were soon moving quickly down Beldover's main street, a broad avenue with some businesses and residences but no signs of poverty. Gudrun withdrew brutally from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex. However, she continued on, moving forward across the entire vile range of pettiness and the lengthy, amorphous, grimy roadway. She went through a period of agony while being open to every stare. It was odd that she had decided to return and see how this formless, barren ugliness affected her personally. Why did she want to commit herself to this abominable agony by these ugly, useless people and this desecrated landscape? Why does she still want to submit herself to this torture? She was laboring in the sand like a bug. She felt repulsed by everything.

They made a left turn off the main road and passed by a smoky common garden where cabbage stumps stood brazenly. Nobody considered feeling humiliated. Nobody felt ashamed of anything.

Gudrun remarked, "It's like a country in the underworld. The colliers shovel it up and bring it with them above ground. It's amazing, Ursula, it's truly amazing-it's a great, different world. Everything is ghostly, and the people are all ghouls.

Everything in the real world is a horrifying imitation; it is all filthy and disgusting. It makes you feel crazy, Ursula.

The sisters were moving across a filthy, pitch-black field on a dark route. A vast landscape could be seen on the left, including a valley with collieries and adjacent hills with cornfields and woods, all of which were darkened by distance and appeared to be seen through a crape veil. Stable columns of white and black smoke appeared in the darkness, casting a spell. Long rows of houses in straight lines along the brow of the hill began to approach in close proximity, curving up the hillside. They had fragile red brick exteriors and dark slate roofs. The sisters were walking on a dark path that had been worn down by frequent colliers and was separated from the field by iron railings; the stile that went back into the road had been polished by the passing miners' moleskins. The two females were currently moving between some rows of modest homes. Children yelled insults while women stood at the end of their block conversing with their arms folded over their coarse aprons and gazing after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unceasing gaze of Australian aborigines.

Gudrun walked out in a stupor. What was her own world outside if this were human life, if these were human beings living in a whole universe? She was conscious of her grass-green stockings, her big velour hat in the same color, and her full, plush coat, which was a bright blue. Her heart was in her throat, and she had the unsettling sensation that she was treading on air. She felt as if she may fall to the ground at any moment. She felt uneasy.

She clung on Ursula, who had become accustomed to this violation of a hostile, uncreated universe via repeated use. Her heart, however, was sobbing continuously as if she were going through a trying situation: "I want to go back, I want to leave, I want to not know it, I want to not know that this exists." But she has to move ahead.

Ursula sensed her anguish.

You detest this, right? she questioned.

It baffles me, Gudrun mumbled.

You won't remain for very long, Ursula retorted.

Gudrun followed suit while struggling for freedom.

They moved out from the colliery area, around the hill's curve, onto the purer land on the other side, and in the direction of Willey Green. Still, a hazy blackness lingered over the farms and forested hills, appearing to shine in the darkness. It was a chilly spring day with brief periods of brightness. In Willey Green's cottage gardens, currant bushes were beginning to turn leafy, and tiny white flowers were appearing on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls. Yellow celandines also emerged from the bottoms of the hedges.

Turning, they moved down the highroad that passed through high banks in the direction of the church. A small group of eager individuals were waiting to see the wedding there on the road's lowest bend, low under the trees. The district's top mine owner, Thomas Crich, was having his daughter married to a naval officer.

Let's go back, Gudrun remarked, veering off. "All of those people are there."

She then hung hesitantly in the street.

They're OK, Ursula remarked, so disregard them. They are all aware of me and are irrelevant.

Gudrun questioned, "But must we go through them?"

Really, they're fine, replied Ursula as she moved forward. The two sisters then approached the throng of anxious, wary commoners jointly. The more shiftless type of colliers' wives made up the majority of the group. They had eerie, watching expressions.

The two sisters kept their bodies rigid and moved swiftly in the direction of the gate. The women gave them a small amount of room, as though reluctantly giving them the upper hand. The girls walked silently up the steps and through the stone gate while a police officer counted their steps and estimated their speed.

A voice behind Gudrun said, "What price the stockings!" The girl was suddenly overcome by a tremendous, homicidal rage. She wanted them all destroyed and removed from the planet so that it was left empty for her. She detested moving forward in their line of sight as she walked up the graveyard path and along the crimson carpet.

She abruptly declared, "I won't go into the church," with such conviction that Ursula was forced to stop, turn around, and take a short side route that went to the little private gate of the Grammar School, whose grounds were next to the church's.

Ursula took a brief rest on the low stone wall beneath the laurel bushes just inside the school's shrubbery gate, outside the churchyard. Behind her, the calmly rising enormous red structure of the school with its wide windows could be seen. The old church's light roofs and tower were visible over the shrubbery in front of her. The vegetation had veiled the sisters.

Gudrun took a seat motionless. Her face was turned away, her mouth tightly closed. She was profoundly remorseful that she had ever returned. Ursula turned red as she stared at her, thinking how stunningly lovely she was. However, she imposed a limitation on Ursula's character in the form of fatigue. Ursula desired solitude in order to escape Gudrun's presence's confinement and constriction.