"He was bitter, and he never gave way. He lay beating his
brains, to see what he could do. 'I don't know what you will
do,' he said. 'I am no good, I am a failure from beginning to
end. I cannot even provide for my wife and child!' "But you see, it was not for him to provide for us. My life
went on, though his stopped, and I married your grandfather.
"I ought to have known, I ought to have been able to say to
him: 'Don't be so bitter, don't die because this has failed. You
are not the beginning and the end.' But I was too young, he had
never let me become myself, I thought he was truly the beginning
and the end. So I let him take all upon himself. Yet all did not
depend on him. Life must go on, and I must marry your
grandfather, and have your Uncle Tom, and your Uncle Fred. We
cannot take so much upon ourselves."
The child's heart beat fast as she listened to these things.
She could not understand, but she seemed to feel far-off things.
It gave her a deep, joyous thrill, to know she hailed from far
off, from Poland, and that dark-bearded impressive man. Strange,
her antecedents were, and she felt fate on either side of her
terrible.
Almost every day, Ursula saw her grandmother, and every time,
they talked together. Till the grandmother's sayings and
stories, told in the complete hush of the Marsh bedroom,
accumulated with mystic significance, and became a sort of Bible
to the child.
And Ursula asked her deepest childish questions of her
grandmother.
"Will somebody love me, grandmother?"
"Many people love you, child. We all love you."
"But when I am grown up, will somebody love me?"
"Yes, some man will love you, child, because it's your
nature. And I hope it will be somebody who will love you for
what you are, and not for what he wants of you. But we have a
right to what we want."
Ursula was frightened, hearing these things. Her heart sank,
she felt she had no ground under her feet. She clung to her
grandmother. Here was peace and security. Here, from her
grandmother's peaceful room, the door opened on to the greater
space, the past, which was so big, that all it contained seemed
tiny, loves and births and deaths, tiny units and features
within a vast horizon. That was a great relief, to know the tiny
importance of the individual, within the great past.