"Ay," said the mother, "there's a good crop of stockings
lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action."
Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened
her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of
enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The
commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it
all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas, she
corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in
silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with
supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child
not to be taken seriously.
Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved
Ursula, therefore he always had a sense of shame, almost of
betrayal, when he turned on her. So he turned fiercely and
scathingly, and with a wholesale brutality that made Ursula go
white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming
deadened in her, her temper hard and cold.
Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all
these years, he began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty
years he had gone on at this office as a draughtsman, doing work
in which he had no interest, because it seemed his allotted
work. The growing up of his daughters, their developing
rejection of old forms set him also free.
He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he
pushed his way out of the earth that covered him, working always
away from the physical element in which his life was captured.
Slowly, blindly, gropingly, with what initiative was left to
him, he made his way towards individual expression and
individual form.
At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving,
almost to the point where he had left off his Adam and Eve
panel, when he was courting. But now he had knowledge and skill
without vision. He saw the puerility of his young conceptions,
he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived. He now
had a new strength in his sense of reality. He felt as if he
were real, as if he handled real things. He had worked for many
years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring
the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the
plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were
utterances of himself.
But he could not quite hitch on--always he was too busy,
too uncertain, confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling.
To his surprise he found he could do it. Modelling in clay, in
plaster, he produced beautiful reproductions, really beautiful.
Then he set-to to make a head of Ursula, in high relief, in the
Donatello manner. In his first passion, he got a beautiful
suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of concentration would
not come. With a little ash in his mouth he gave up. He
continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from
classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had
loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of
the freshness, the naive alertness of the early Italians. But it
was only reproduction.