Lady Ursula the Incomparable

Introduction

“Lady Ursula the Incomparable” stands out among Louis Golding’s other short stories because it covers a different topic than many of her other, more famous writings, which typically focus on Anglo-Judaism. Instead of analyzing the relationships between Jews and gentiles, this story depicts a different aspect of society by portraying the main character, Lady Ursula, as an admired socialite, and then showing how her status changes after she becomes a mother.

Lady Ursula’s story encompasses themes ranging from societal roles to psychological madness and questions of identity. Its story is straightforward, but Golding shows its merit in the complicated messages he is really trying to portray, and the social norms he challenges. For example, by portraying Lady Ursula's fall from her elite social status, is Golding commenting on the dangers of becoming a cruel and self-serving social ladder-climber, or contesting the idea that motherhood necessarily excludes desirability? What connection do the roles of mother and the modern self-sufficient woman have, and are they mutually exclusive? One interesting facet of the story is Ursula’s relationship with her child and how her identity seems to merge with and become swallowed up in his. This could be seen as portraying motherhood as a burden that robs one of her identity—or, alternatively, it could be seen as a criticism of Ursula and her resistance to selflessly fulfilling her motherly duty as tradition dictates, she should.

Published in Voices in Poetry and Prose in 1919, this story was perhaps an atypical piece to be printed, as the magazine consisted mostly of poetry. However, Golding was a regular contributor to the magazine, which printed other short stories of Golding’s as well as a few excerpts from his books. “Lady Ursula the Incomparable” may seem slightly controversial for the unassuming journal, but in questioning traditional societal and familial roles, it expresses modernist ideals of challenging established rules and boundaries. Although it doesn’t go quite as far as other modernist stories might have, the story also begins to approach the more psychological leanings that modernism adopted by depicting Ursula’s encroaching madness in her feelings toward her baby. Themes of identity discovery and overturning traditional roles inform the way in which “Lady Ursula the Incomparable” contributed to the modernist era.

 

Transcription

Ah Lady Ursula! There was in no capital so exquisite a being as Lady Ursula! How shall we speak of her with a calm voice and eyes that do not shine with her brightness as Eastern windows with morning?

Not that you could not hate Lady Ursula, but if you loved her, you loved her too well!

Slim, straight, sweet, swift, cold! These were the lines of Lady Ursula from the dispassionate shattering poise of her head to the curve of her instep towards her firm white foot. Do I need to describe her body? If you were a stranger and knew not the name of Ursula (and you must be a stranger from an outward land not to have heard echoes from the silver peal of her name), you might enter the room where Ursula sat silent and hardly look towards her a second time; only a stranger current you dared not define would make a crescent riot in the streets of your blood, only a music not of sound would beat upon the drums of your head. But when she arose and spoke the air would flutter as with wings. You would see then that at the heart of her violet eyes burned a point of diamond flame. You would see that the movements of her hands were subtle as a wind and not less cool. You would see in the lift of her breasts the pride of many kings.

Her body was almost a thing of translucent alabaster through which glowed fire. Shall I say that her soul shone through her curtains of frail fair flesh as a lamp shines in a sanctuary? This I dare not say. There was less of a souls warmth in Lady Ursula than in a high mountain that looks only towards cold rivers and colder skies. What then was this flame that shone so whitely and so steady? The world used this word only—“Personality!” they said. “Radiant creature!” a dazzled man might say. “God! What a personality she has!” a sick voice would reply.

Of this Lady Ursula was not unconscious. The word was never on her lips, if it was never absent for long from the lips of all who had come her way. It was something more than the fused essence of her physical and intellectual qualities that received this name. For if she was lovely, there were lovelier women. If she was witty, then so was all the world. C’était le métier à chacun.^[1] French for “It’s the job for everyone.” But when she moved, all others were still; when she spoke, the words of men and women faltered on their lips.

So far from being unconscious of this sword-like instant personality to which London bowed the head, Ursula played with it as with an exquisite jewel. It was a ball of crystal she held in ivory fingers, letting sun and moon strike through it with lances of light. It was a peal of bells in the tower of her presence, with which she played audacious bewildering melodies. It was a robe spangled with green opals which she drew round her shoulders as she swung, irresistible. It was a bowstring which twanged deadly messages.

She was cruel. How else could she have resisted for a long fatal hour the call of her sister who lay dying of a sudden illness, refused her presence, forsooth, because she had seen no such tint of saffron in a sunset before? When Joan, her maid, came one evening to dress Lady Ursula for dinner, having heard that day that her lover was dead in a frontier war, “Go!” said Ursula with faint horror; for how could Ursula endure again in her service a creature whose eyes had puffed with plebeian tears? She had demanded imperiously the destruction at Larmoor Towers of a dog whose warm mouth had smirched her gown. And if the dog lingered in her memory at all, he lingered more than Johnny Travers and young Lord John de Warenne, who had shot themselves in despair of a gracious word.

But the more desolation her personality achieved from Biarritz to Mayfair, the more unassailably was she the queen of her epoch. Poets foreswore poetry for her. The millions of the financial tyrants of three continents were scattered before her feet. There were whispers connecting her name with the name of a personage at St. James’s. From all these she turned away with a sweet light laugh which entered flamelike into the marrow, and the more tantalisingly she flashed her crystal ball, until she became a centre of lightnings.

Hence the world’s surprise when the world learned one morning that Ursula the Incomparable was married to George Aubrey. He had money, it was true, and was handsomer than many men. Yet the reason for her choice remained secret even to Aubrey, for none was more dazzled than himself to find Ursula was Ursula Aubrey. I can only hazard the suggestion that Aubrey, having hovered moth-like round Ursula since years ago when he had met a twelve-year sorceress at Capri, had succeeded in surrounding her, little that he perceived it, with a net of inevitability; a fibre that even she could not break, consisting of his quiet subdued unfailing attentions, of the deathless hungry loyalty in his eyes, of the very tissue of his voice. Perhaps she had found him the simplest solution to that problem which presented before her a prince, a man moneyed beyond dreams, the loveliest poet of his time.

I must hasten my tale of Ursula. I must repeat the celebrated words which she uttered vaguely from the mists of the chloroformed sleep of her accouchement.^[2] French for “delivery”; the process of giving birth. “I hope,” she said, “I hope the child made its appearance with decorum!”

Now came the transformation in Ursula. When she arose from her bed she became aware uneasily that not all of her had risen, aware with misgiving, terror. She stooped towards her sleeping boy, pressed her lips against his own minute lips, and withdrew swiftly, feeling that some intangible thing was passing through her and away from her into the body of the child, passing from her to leave a shell, a hulk. She gazed down towards the shut eyes; a great wave of love filled her, but she knew that the water was crested with a bitter foam. What had come to abrase the perfect surface of her crystal? Was she Ursula, the self-sufficient, the more than crowned queen? What usurper had entered her country? The boy opened and closed his little fist. The robes she had gathered round her shoulders once, something had bedraggled them. The peals of bells she rang in the old proud days, something had rifted their mellowness.

“Not the old Ursula!” the world said. She did not hear the blunt words, but they burned none the less like irons into the flesh of her pride. “A little ripe almost, eh?” they said. “Hush, tell it not, positively middle-aged!” “Babies are all very well in their limited way,” someone said, “but they might have spared us our Ursula!”

Sometimes at night Ursula called to the nurse for her child, and clasped him to her bosom in a transport of fierce love, fierce hate. Ursula, whose emotions had been like a winter morning! “Darling!” she cried. “Devil!” a voice muttered in her ear darkly.

The queenship was slipping from her. Lady Mary de Sainville came like a comet into the Mayfair skies. “Poor Ursula!” they were whispering. “The de Sainville rather displays Ursula a little passée, don’t you think?” Ursula knew more certainly than the disparagements, the withering of her wreaths, than if the world had shouted to the roof the whispers which dubiously surrounded her.

“You!” she muttered, “you!” to the sleeping child nestling in her warmth.

The day came when Lady Mary de Sainville sate worshipped openly on the throne of Ursula. As she sate, men and women were spellbound at her feet. When Ursula entered the Blue and Orange Room of Lady Mary’s triumph, not a person was aware of her entrance, not a man rose. Only by a slight lifting of her eyelids did Lady Mary betray the sense of her complete victory.

That night a storm raged in Ursula’s blood. “You! You! You!” she hissed into her child’s ear. “Who wanted you, you upstart, you thief!” White hatred seared like an arrow of lightning to the mid point of her heart. She crushed her hand down over the nostrils and mouth of her boy. “You have not beaten me yet, Lady Mary de Sainville!” her tortured soul shrilled inwardly. Her heart shook with laughter, then was still suddenly. Against her arm, the little body was heaving, shuddering. She heard a slight crying, a choking.

She tore her hand away. “Lovely, lovely one! O my baby, my baby!” she moaned. “O my lovely, I’m mad! Listen, baby, are you well? Tell me quick, are you well?”

The boy opened his eyes next morning with the sun and smiled and chuckled into the haggard face of Lady Ursula.

She faded wholly from Mayfair. Even her name became thin, a memory, in the resounding music of the name of Lady Mary de Sainville.

Lady Ursula entered the body of her child and did not depart. She had hardly no separate existence. She became a woman among other women, devoted, usual. Yet she could not eliminate from the far depths of her consciousness a hideous nightmare—the mother’s hand over the breathing of the child, the heaving of the tiny breast. When the boy died, with an hour’s warning or less, her first thought was the hand, the choking throat. “It is fulfilled!”^[3]A Biblical allusion; the last words spoken by Jesus Christ are translated as “It is finished!” or “It is fulfilled!” an echo rolled within her, hollowly, prolonged.

For a month she moved like a sleep-walker, her eyes void of sight. Her hands twitched as she passed from room to room, then hung limply. Then like thunder one day a loud mirth volleyed within her. “Lady Mary de Sainville,” the thunder pealed, “we shall see, we shall see!”

When Lady Ursula returned to Mayfair, she blazed like the equatorial sun. She was a song more captivating than the sailors of Ulysses heard. She was like a mountain superb with snow. For Lady Mary de Sainville, who regarded where she went? Is not Ursula with us? Life, Life and for ever Life to Ursula the Queen! Where she danced she was the consummation of movement. Where she was still, movement was banal. Ursula the Queen! Homage to Ursula!

And there came a night when a low crying entered her sleep, a crying, a choking. And her arm moved emptily along the pillow and she said, “Lovely, lovely, listen! Are you there?” But the night was dark and the lovely thing had no place in the night or in the day, or in any night or day. All those black hours, Ursula’s eyes, wide, tearless, gazed into the blank gloom.

Ah Lady Ursula! Frail, down-at-heels Ursula! Somewhere at the fringe of a Psychic and Theosophistic and Pseudo-Oriental Society she trails, with the hollow cheeks and the questing eyes. But through all her table-rappings her tottering intellect catches no baby voice, no crowing, no tiny laughter. Sometimes at night there is a choking, a heaving beside her in the bed. Her eyes strain upward, wide, tearless, till dawn fills them indifferently. Lady Ursula . . .!