Jerusalem the Golden Read Online Free PDF

fitted her for such recognitions: she was not bred to it. And when she reflected, as she frequently did, upon what she had been bred to, she was profoundly puzzled by her own origins. Her birth, as far as she could see, had been accidental; no careful well-intended deity could have selected for her her own home. But she did not like to admit the accidental, for if her birth was the effect of chance, so then was her escape; the same arbitrary law that had produced her might well have blinded her at the most crucial moments of her life, and left her forever desiring, forever missing, never achieving, an eternal misfit. She had seen people like this. She had no confidence that time would bring with it inevitable growth: she grew by will and by strain. As a child, she was always deeply affected by the story of the sower who sowed his seeds, and some fell by the wayside, and some on stony ground and some fell among the thorns, and some fell upon good ground and bore fruit. This story was a favourite of the headmistress of her primary school, so she heard it often at Morning Prayers, and long before she could see it as a parable, she already felt shock before its injustice. The random scattering of seeds, and, how much worse, of human souls, appalled her. As she grew older, she looked upon herself, tragically, defiantly, with all the hopelessness of fourteen years, as a plant trying to root itself upon the solid rock, without water, without earth, without shade: and then, when a little older yet, when conscious of some growth, she had to concede that she must have fallen happily upon some small dry sandy fissure, where a few grains of sand, a few drops of moisture, had been enough to support her trembling and tenacious life. Because she would live, she would survive.
    It always amazed her to see that other people could live so comfortably upon such barren territory. Northam was to her the very image of unfertile ground, and yet other people lived there and stayed there when they had money in the bank and legs to walk away on. She hated her home town with such violence that when she returned each vacation from University, she would shake and tremble with an ashamed and feverish fear. She hated it, and she was afraid of it, because she doubted her power to escape; even after two years in London, she still thought that her brain might go or that her nerve might snap, and that she would be compelled to return, feebly, defeated, to her mother’s house. She was so constantly braced, her will so stiff from desire, that she could not sleep at nights; she feared that if she fell asleep she might lose her determination and her faith, might wake up alone in her narrow bed, in the small back bedroom, overlooking the small square garden, backing onto the next small square garden, where for so many years she had lain and dreamed her subversive dreams. She was frightened of this: and also she was frightened of her mother.
    Her father was dead. He was killed on a pedestrian crossing when Clara was sixteen. Those who took an interest in Clara might have seen in his death the loss of an ally, because outwardly at least he appeared to be more intelligent than his wife; at least he did not scorn in public, as she did, all efforts of the mind, and all the aims of education. But in fact he had never been particularly sympathetic towards Clara, and paid but a feeble and superficial attention to her progress. He did not like children; he did not much like anything. He took slightly more interest in his two sons, Arthur and Alan, but not through any natural preference for them; it was simply that with them he knew better what questions should be asked. His work, which he pursued at the Town Hall, was never mentioned in the house, and as far as Clara could gather it was mathematical, highly respectable, and highly dull. When people asked Mrs Maugham where her daughter got her brains from, she would sniff and shrug her shoulders and say, as though