Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting.
But he tried water-colour painting after the manner of any other
amateur. He got his results but was not much interested. After
one or two drawings of his beloved church, which had the same
alertness as his modelling, he seemed to be incongruous with the
modern atmospheric way of painting, so that his church tower
stood up, really stood and asserted its standing, but was
ashamed of its own lack of meaning, he turned away again.
He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over
reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver
and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of
discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more
imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each
for all his womenfolk. Then he made rings and bracelets.
Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula
left school, he was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he
delighted in it, almost lusted after it.
All this time his only connection with the real outer world
was through his winter evening classes, which brought him into
contact with state education. About all the rest, he was
oblivious, and entirely indifferent--even about the war.
The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of
his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great
adherent.
Ursula watched the newspapers, vaguely, concerning the war in
South Africa. They made her miserable, and she tried to have as
little to do with them as possible. But Skrebensky was out
there. He sent her an occasional post-card. But it was as if she
were a blank wall in his direction, without windows or outgoing.
She adhered to the Skrebensky of her memory.
Her love for Winifred Inger wrenched her life as it seemed
from the roots and native soil where Skrebensky had belonged to
it, and she was aridly transplanted. He was really only a
memory. She revived his memory with strange passion, after the
departure of Winifred. He was to her almost the symbol of her
real life. It was as if, through him, in him, she might return
to her own self, which she was before she had loved Winifred,
before this deadness had come upon her, this pitiless
transplanting. But even her memories were the work of her
imagination.
She dreamed of him and her as they had been together. She
could not dream of him progressively, of what he was doing now,
of what relation he would have to her now. Only sometimes she
wept to think how cruelly she had suffered when he left
her--ah, how she had suffered! She remembered what
she had written in her diary: "If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down."