She was waiting for Siegmund, yet his hand upon the latch startled her.

She rose suddenly, in agitation. Siegmund was standing in the sunshine

at the gate. They greeted each other across the tall roses.

When Siegmund was holding her hand, he said, softly laughing:

“You have come out of the water very beautiful this morning.”

She laughed. She was not beautiful, but she felt so at that moment. She

glanced up at him, full of love and gratefulness.

“And you,” she murmured, in a still tone, as if it were almost

sacrilegiously unnecessary to say it.

Siegmund was glad. He rejoiced to be told he was beautiful. After a few

moments of listening to the bees and breathing the mignonette, he said:

“I found a little white bay, just like you—a virgin bay. I had to swim

there.”

“Oh!” she said, very interested in him, not in the fact.

“It seemed just like you. Many things seem like you,” he said.

She laughed again in her joyous fashion, and the reed-like vibration

came into her voice.

“I saw the sun through the cliffs, and the sea, and you,” she said.

He did not understand. He looked at her searchingly. She was white and

still and inscrutable. Then she looked up at him; her earnest eyes,

that would not flinch, gazed straight into him. He trembled, and things

all swept into a blur. After she had taken away her eyes he found

himself saying:

“You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like

Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.”

“I saw the sunshine in you,” repeated Helena quietly, looking at him

with her eyes heavy with meaning.

He laughed again, not understanding, but feeling she meant love.

“No, but you have altered everything,” he said.

The note of wonder, of joy, in his voice touched her almost beyond

self-control. She caught his hand and pressed it; then quickly kissed

it. He became suddenly grave.

“I feel as if it were right—you and me, Helena—so, even righteous. It

is so, isn’t it? And the sea and everything, they all seem with us. Do

you think so?”

Looking at her, he found her eyes full of tears. He bent and kissed

her, and she pressed his head to her bosom. He was very glad.

IX

The day waxed hot. A few little silver tortoises of cloud had crawled

across the desert of sky, and hidden themselves. The chalk roads were

white, quivering with heat. Helena and Siegmund walked eastward

bareheaded under the sunshine. They felt like two insects in the niche

of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here

and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like

blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson’s poems,

which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed,

thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have

been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her.

“Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,” she announced.

“Think of Wagner,” said Siegmund, lifting his face to the hot bright

heaven, and drinking the heat with his blinded face. All states seemed

meagre, save his own. He recalled people who had loved, and he pitied

them—dimly, drowsily, without pain.

They came to a place where they might gain access to the shore by a

path down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow

with ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the

bay. The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the

rocks of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered.

Helena sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot,

glistening sand till her feet were delightfully, almost intoxicatingly

scorched. Then she ran into the water to cool them. Siegmund and she

paddled in the light water, pensively watching the haste of the

ripples, like crystal beetles, running over the white outline of their

feet; looking out on the sea that rose so near to them, dwarfing them

by its far reach.

For a short time they flitted silently in the water’s edge. Then there

settled down on them a twilight of sleep, the little hush that closes

the doors and draws the blinds of the house after a festival. They

wandered out across the beach above high-water mark, where they sat

down together on the sand, leaning back against a flat brown stone,

Siegmund with the sunshine on his forehead, Helena drooping close to

him, in his shadow. Then the hours ride by unnoticed, making no sound

as they go. The sea creeps nearer, nearer, like a snake which watches

two birds asleep. It may not disturb them, but sinks back, ceasing to

look at them with its bright eyes.

Meanwhile the flowers of their passion were softly shed, as poppies

fall at noon, and the seed of beauty ripened rapidly within them.

Dreams came like a wind through, their souls, drifting off with the

seed-dust of beautiful experience which they had ripened, to fertilize

the souls of others withal. In them the sea and the sky and ships had

mingled and bred new blossoms of the torrid heat of their love. And the

seed of such blossoms was shaken as they slept, into the hand of God,

who held it in His palm preciously; then scattered it again, to produce

new splendid blooms of beauty.

A little breeze came down the cliffs. Sleep lightened the lovers of

their experience; new buds were urged in their souls as they lay in a

shadowed twilight, at the porch of death. The breeze fanned the face of

Helena; a coolness wafted on her throat. As the afternoon wore on she

revived. Quick to flag, she was easy to revive, like a white pansy

flung into water. She shivered lightly and rose.

Strange, it seemed to her, to rise from the brown stone into life

again. She felt beautifully refreshed. All around was quick as a garden

wet in the early morning of June. She took her hair and loosened it,

shook it free from sand, spread, and laughed like a fringed poppy that

opens itself to the sun. She let the wind comb through its soft fingers

the tangles of her hair. Helena loved the wind. She turned to it, and

took its kisses on her face and throat.

Siegmund lay still, looking up at her. The changes in him were deeper,

like alteration in his tissue. His new buds came slowly, and were of a

fresh type. He lay smiling at her. At last he said:

“You look now as if you belonged to the sea.”

“I do; and some day I shall go back to it,” she replied.

For to her at that moment the sea was a great lover, like Siegmund, but

more impersonal, who would receive her when Siegmund could not. She

rejoiced momentarily in the fact. Siegmund looked at her and continued

smiling. His happiness was budded firm and secure.

“Come!” said Helena, holding out her hand.

He rose somewhat reluctantly from his large, fruitful inertia.

X

Siegmund carried the boots and the shoes while they wandered over the

sand to the rocks. There was a delightful sense of risk in scrambling

with bare feet over the smooth irregular jumble of rocks. Helena

laughed suddenly from fear as she felt herself slipping. Siegmund’s

heart was leaping like a child’s with excitement as he stretched

forward, himself very insecure, to succour her. Thus they travelled

slowly. Often she called to him to come and look in the lovely little

rock-pools, dusky with blossoms of red anemones and brown anemones that

seemed nothing but shadows, and curtained with green of finest

sea-silk. Siegmund loved to poke the white pebbles, and startle the

little ghosts of crabs in a shadowy scuttle through the weed. He would

tease the expectant anemones, causing them to close suddenly over his

finger. But Helena liked to watch without touching things. Meanwhile

the sun was slanting behind the cross far away to the west, and the

light was swimming in silver and gold upon the lacquered water. At last

Siegmund looked doubtfully at two miles more of glistening, gilded

boulders. Helena was seated on a stone, dabbling her feet in a warm

pool, delicately feeling the wet sea-velvet of the weeds.

“Don’t you think we had better be mounting the cliffs?” he said.

She glanced up at him, smiling with irresponsible eyes. Then she lapped

the water with her feet, and surveyed her pink toes. She was absurdly,

childishly happy.

“Why should we?” she asked lightly.

He watched her. Her child-like indifference to consequences touched him

with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with

the delicious warm surface of life, but always he reeked of the

relentless mass of cold beneath—the mass of life which has no sympathy

with the individual, no cognizance of him.

She loved the trifles and the toys, the mystery and the magic of

things. She would not own life to be relentless. It was either

beautiful, fantastic, or weird, or inscrutable, or else mean and

vulgar, below consideration. He had to get a sense of the anemone and a

sympathetic knowledge of its experience, into his blood, before he was

satisfied. To Helena an anemone was one more fantastic pretty figure in

her kaleidoscope.

So she sat dabbling her pink feet in the water, quite unconscious of

his gravity. He waited on her, since he never could capture her.

“Come,” he said very gently. “You are only six years old today.”

She laughed as she let him take her. Then she nestled up to him,

smiling in a brilliant, child-like fashion. He kissed her with all the

father in him sadly alive.

“Now put your stockings on,” he said.

“But my feet are wet.” She laughed.

He kneeled down and dried her feet on his handkerchief while she sat

tossing his hair with her finger-tips. The sunlight grew more and more

golden.

“I envy the savages their free feet,” she said.

“There is no broken glass in the wilderness—or there used not to be,”

he replied.

As they were crossing the sands, a whole family entered by the cliff

track. They descended in single file, unequally, like the theatre; two

boys, then a little girl, the father, another girl, then the mother.

Last of all trotted the dog, warily, suspicious of the descent. The

boys emerged into the bay with a shout; the dog rushed, barking, after

them. The little one waited for her father, calling shrilly:

“Tiss can’t fall now, can she, dadda? Shall I put her down?”

“Ay, let her have a run,” said the father.

Very carefully she lowered the kitten which she had carried clasped to

her bosom. The mite was bewildered and scared. It turned round

pathetically.

“Go on, Tissie; you’re all right,” said the child. “Go on; have a run

on the sand.”

The kitten stood dubious and unhappy. Then, perceiving the dog some

distance ahead, it scampered after him, a fluffy, scurrying mite. But

the dog had already raced into the water. The kitten walked a few

steps, turning its small face this way and that, and mewing piteously.

It looked extraordinarily tiny as it stood, a fluffy handful, staring

away from the noisy water, its thin cry floating over the plash of

waves.

Helena glanced at Siegmund, and her eyes were shining with pity. He was

watching the kitten and smiling.

“Crying because things are too big, and it can’t take them in,” he

said.

“But look how frightened it is,” she said.

“So am I.” He laughed. “And if there are any gods looking on and

laughing at me, at least they won’t be kind enough to put me in their

pinafores….”

She laughed very quickly.

“But why?” she exclaimed. “Why should you want putting in a pinafore?”

“I don’t,” he laughed.

On the top of the cliff they were between two bays, with darkening blue

water on the left, and on the right gold water smoothing to the sun.

Siegmund seemed to stand waist-deep in shadow, with his face bright and

glowing. He was watching earnestly.

“I want to absorb it all,” he said.

When at last they turned away:

“Yes,” said Helena slowly; “one can recall the details, but never the

atmosphere.”

He pondered a moment.

“How strange!” he said. I can recall the atmosphere, but not the

detail. It is a moment to me, not a piece of scenery. I should say the

picture was in me, not out there.”

Without troubling to understand—she was inclined to think it

verbiage—she made a small sound of assent.

“That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don’t care so much,

because I have it with me,” he concluded.

XI

They decided to find their way through the lanes to Alum Bay, and then,

keeping the cross in sight, to return over the downs, with the

moon-path broad on the water before them. For the moon was rising late.

Twilight, however, rose more rapidly than they had anticipated. The

lane twisted among meadows and wild lands and copses—a wilful little

lane, quite incomprehensible. So they lost their distant landmark, the

white cross.

Darkness filtered through the daylight. When at last they came to a

signpost, it was almost too dark to read it. The fingers seemed to

withdraw into the dusk the more they looked.

“We must go to the left,” said Helena.

To the left rose the downs, smooth and grey near at hand, but higher

black with gorse, like a giant lying asleep with a bearskin over his

shoulders.

Several pale chalk-tracks ran side by side through the turf. Climbing,

they came to a disused chalk-pit, which they circumvented. Having

passed a lonely farmhouse, they mounted the side of the open down,

where was a sense of space and freedom.

“We can steer by the night,” said Siegmund, as they trod upwards

pathlessly. Helena did not mind whither they steered. All places in

that large fair night were home and welcome to her. They drew nearer to

the shaggy cloak of furze.

“There will be a path through it,” said Siegmund.

But when they arrived there was no path. They were confronted by a

tall, impenetrable growth of gorse, taller than Siegmund.

“Stay here,” said he, “while I look for a way through. I am afraid you

will be tired.”

She stood alone by the walls of gorse. The lights that had flickered

into being during the dusk grew stronger, so that a little farmhouse

down the hill glowed with great importance on the night, while the

far-off in visible sea became like a roadway, large and mysterious, its

specks of light moving slowly, and its bigger lamps stationed out amid

the darkness. Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the

west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate

everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant.

The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to

bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure

the condition of intense waiting.

He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming.

“No good,” he said, “no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.”

“Then we will sit down awhile,” said she calmly.

“‘Here on this mole-hill,’” he quoted mockingly.

They sat down in a small gap in the gorse, where the turf was very

soft, and where the darkness seemed deeper. The night was all

fragrance, cool odour of darkness, keen, savoury scent of the downs,

touched with honeysuckle and gorse and bracken scent.

Helena turned to him, leaning her hand on his thigh.

“What day is it, Siegmund?” she asked, in a joyous, wondering tone. He

laughed, understanding, and kissed her.

“But really,” she insisted, “I would not have believed the labels could

have fallen off everything like this.”

He laughed again. She still leaned towards him, her weight on her hand,

stopping the flow in the artery down his thigh.

“The days used to walk in procession like seven marionettes, each in

order and costume, going endlessly round.” She laughed, amused at the

idea.

“It is very strange,” she continued, “to have the days and nights

smeared into one piece, as if the clock-hand only went round once in a

lifetime.”

“That is how it is,” he admitted, touched by her eloquence. “You have

torn the labels off things, and they all are so different. This

morning! It does seem absurd to talk about this morning. Why should I

be parcelled up into mornings and evenings and nights? _I_ am not made

up of sections of time. Now, nights and days go racing over us like

cloud-shadows and sunshine over the sea, and all the time we take no

notice.”

She put her arms round his neck. He was reminded by a sudden pain in

his leg how much her hand had been pressing on him. He held his breath

from pain. She was kissing him softly over the eyes. They lay cheek to

cheek, looking at the stars. He felt a peculiar tingling sense of joy,

a keenness of perception, a fine, delicate tingling as of music.

“You know,” he said, repeating himself, “it is true. You seem to have

knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are

all in a symphony. They go moving on and on. You are the motive in

everything.”

Helena lay beside him, half upon him, sad with bliss.

“You must write a symphony of this—of us,” she said, prompted by a

disciple’s vanity.

“Some time,” he answered. “Later, when I have time.”

“Later,” she murmured—“later than what?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “This is so bright we can’t see beyond.” He

turned his face to hers and through the darkness smiled into her eyes

that were so close to his. Then he kissed her long and lovingly. He

lay, with her head on his shoulder looking through her hair at the

stars.

“I wonder how it is you have such a fine natural perfume,” he said,

always in the same abstract, inquiring tone of happiness.

“Haven’t all women?” she replied, and the peculiar penetrating twang of

a brass reed was again in her voice.

“I don’t know,” he said, quite untouched. “But you are scented like

nuts, new kernels of hazel-nuts, and a touch of opium….” He remained

abstractedly breathing her with his open mouth, quite absorbed in her.

“You are so strange,” she murmured tenderly, hardly able to control her

voice to speak.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “I can see the stars moving through your

hair. No, keep still, _you_ can’t see them.” Helena lay obediently very

still. “I thought I could watch them travelling, crawling like gold

flies on the ceiling,” he continued in a slow sing-song. “But now you

make your hair tremble, and the stars rush about.” Then, as a new

thought struck him: “Have you noticed that you can’t recognize the

constellations lying back like this. I can’t see one. Where is the

north, even?”

She laughed at the idea of his questioning her concerning these things.

She refused to learn the names of the stars or of the constellations,

as of the wayside plants. “Why should I want to label them?” she would

say. “I prefer to look at them, not to hide them under a name.” So she

laughed when he asked her to find Vega or Arcturus.

“How full the sky is!” Siegmund dreamed on—“like a crowded street. Down

here it is vastly lonely in comparison. We’ve found a place far quieter

and more private than the stars, Helena. Isn’t it fine to be up here,

with the sky for nearest neighbour?”

“I did well to ask you to come?” she inquired wistfully. He turned to

her.

“As wise as God for the minute,” he replied softly. “I think a few

furtive angels brought us here—smuggled us in.”

“And you are glad?” she asked. He laughed.

“_Carpe diem_,” he said. “We have plucked a beauty, my dear. With this

rose in my coat I dare go to hell or anywhere.”

“Why hell, Siegmund?” she asked in displeasure.

“I suppose it is the _postero_. In everything else I’m a failure,

Helena. But,” he laughed, “this day of ours is a rose not many men have

plucked.”

She kissed him passionately, beginning to cry in a quick, noiseless

fashion.

“What does it matter, Helena?” he murmured. “What does it matter? We

are here yet.”

The quiet tone of Siegmund moved her with a vivid passion of grief. She

felt she should lose him. Clasping him very closely, she burst into

uncontrollable sobbing. He did not understand, but he did not interrupt

her. He merely held her very close, while he looked through her shaking

hair at the motionless stars. He bent his head to hers, he sought her

face with his lips, heavy with pity. She grew a little quieter. He felt

his cheek all wet with her tears, and, between his cheek and hers, the

ravelled roughness of her wet hair that chafed and made his face burn.

“What is it, Helena?” he asked at last. “Why should you cry?”

She pressed her face in his breast, and said in a muffled,

unrecognizable voice:

“You won’t leave me, will you, Siegmund?”

“How could I? How should I?” he murmured soothingly. She lifted her

face suddenly and pressed on him a fierce kiss.

“How could I leave you?” he repeated, and she heard his voice waking,

the grip coming into his arms, and she was glad.

An intense silence came over everything. Helena almost expected to hear

the stars moving, everything below was so still. She had no idea what

Siegmund was thinking. He lay with his arms strong around her. Then she

heard the beating of his heart, like the muffled sound of salutes, she

thought. It gave her the same thrill of dread and excitement, mingled

with a sense of triumph. Siegmund had changed again, his mood was gone,

so that he was no longer wandering in a night of thoughts, but had

become different, incomprehensible to her. She had no idea what she

thought or felt. All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking

urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something

and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly

urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an

incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in

her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she

wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart

lifted slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was

so incomprehensible. Then again, when he raised his head and found her

mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming

flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a

soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she

decided, was supreme, transcendental.

The lights of the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow

specks of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the

black sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a

silver-greyness of stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night

and the sea. Helena found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry,

as she saw the sea, when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily

with a reflection of stars.

Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser

Ohne Regung ruht das Meer …

She was fond of what scraps of German verse she knew. With French verse

she had no sympathy; but Goethe and Heine and Uhland seemed to speak

her language.

Die Luft ist kühl, und es dunkelt,

Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein.

She liked Heine best of all:

Wie Träume der Kindheit seh’ ich es flimmern

Auf deinem wogenden Wellengebiet,

Und alte Erinnerung erzählt mir auf’s Neue

Von all dem lieben herrlichen Spielzeug,

Von all den blinkenden Weihnachtsgaben….

As she lay in Siegmund’s arms again, and he was very still, dreaming

she knew not what, fragments such as these flickered and were gone,

like the gleam of a falling star over water. The night moved on

imperceptibly across the sky. Unlike the day, it made no sound and gave

no sign, but passed unseen, unfelt, over them. Till the moon was ready

to step forth. Then the eastern sky blenched, and there was a small

gathering of clouds round the opening gates:

Aus alten Märchen winket es

Hervor mit weisser Hand,

Da singt es und da klingt es

Von einem Zauberland.

Helena sang this to herself as the moon lifted herself slowly among the

clouds. She found herself repeating them aloud in in a forgetful

singsong, as children do.

“What is it?” said Siegmund. They were both of them sunk in their own

stillness, therefore it was a moment or two before she repeated her

singsong, in a little louder tone. He did not listen to her, having

forgotten that he had asked her a question.

“Turn your head,” she told him, when she had finished the verse, “and

look at the moon.”

He pressed back his head, so that there was a gleaming pallor on his

chin and his forehead and deep black shadow over his eyes and his

nostrils. This thrilled Helena with a sense of mystery and magic.

“‘_Die grossen Blumen schmachten_,’” she said to herself, curiously

awake and joyous. “The big flowers open with black petals and silvery

ones, Siegmund. You are the big flowers, Siegmund; yours is the

bridegroom face, Siegmund, like a black and glistening flesh-petalled

flower, Siegmund, and it blooms in the _Zauberland_, Siegmund—this is

the magic land.”

Between the phrases of this whispered ecstasy she kissed him swiftly on

the throat, in the shadow, and on his faintly gleaming cheeks. He lay

still, his heart beating heavily; he was almost afraid of the strange

ecstasy she concentrated on him. Meanwhile she whispered over him

sharp, breathless phrases in German and English, touching him with her

mouth and her cheeks and her forehead.

“‘_Und Liebesweisen tönen_’-not tonight, Siegmund. They are all

still-gorse and the stars and the sea and the trees, are all kissing,

Siegmund. The sea has its mouth on the earth, and the gorse and the

trees press together, and they all look up at the moon, they put up

their faces in a kiss, my darling. But they haven’t you-and it all

centres in you, my dear, all the wonder-love is in you, more than in

them all Siegmund—Siegmund!”

He felt the tears falling on him as he lay with heart beating in slow

heavy drops under the ecstasy of her love. Then she sank down and lay

prone on him, spent, clinging to him, lifted up and down by the

beautiful strong motion of his breathing. Rocked thus on his strength,

she swooned lightly into unconsciousness.

When she came to herself she sighed deeply. She woke to the exquisite

heaving of his life beneath her.

“I have been beyond life. I have been a little way into death!” she

said to her soul, with wide-eyed delight. She lay dazed, wondering upon

it. That she should come back into a marvellous, peaceful happiness

astonished her.

Suddenly she became aware that she must be slowly weighing down the

life of Siegmund. There was a long space between the lift of one breath

and the next. Her heart melted with sorrowful pity. Resting herself on

her hands, she kissed him—a long, anguished kiss, as if she would fuse

her soul into his for ever. Then she rose, sighing, sighing again

deeply. She put up her hands to her head and looked at the moon. “No

more,” said her heart, almost as if it sighed too-“no more!”

She looked down at Siegmund. He was drawing in great heavy breaths. He

lay still on his back, gazing up at her, and she stood motionless at

his side, looking down at him. He felt stunned, half-conscious. Yet as

he lay helplessly looking up at her some other consciousness inside him

murmured; “Hawwa—Eve—Mother!” She stood compassionate over him. Without

touching him she seemed to be yearning over him like a mother. Her

compassion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little Helena.

This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her

compassion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a

personification of the great motherhood of women.

“I am her child, too,” he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in

sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when

he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and

gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.

“Come,” she said gently, when she knew he was restored. “Shall we go?”

He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength.

XII

Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The

hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into

shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some

distance, very great, it seemed.

“I can’t get hold of them,” he said distractedly to himself. He felt

detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things;

as if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and

unsupported, somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He

wanted to lie down again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of

supporting and controlling his body. If he could lie down again

perfectly still he need not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter

of his body, and then he would not feel thus sick and outside himself.

But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the

moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly,

joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.

Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked

with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.

This pity for her drew him nearer to life.

He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the

hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in

his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not

notice it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.

“What is it?” he asked himself in wonder.

His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke

verbally to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost

insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought

from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir

of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.

They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so

uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he

stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot

securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became conscious

of it.

“Good Lord!” he said to himself. “I wonder what it is.”

He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his

body—his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing

wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself

into another detached phrase. “There is nothing the matter with me,” he

said.

Then he continued vaguely wondering, recalling the sensation of

wretched sickness which sometimes follows drunkenness, thinking of the

times when he had fallen ill.

“But I am not like that,” he said, “because I don’t feel tremulous. I

am sure my hand is steady.”

Helena stood still to consider the road. He held out his hand before

him. It was motionless as a dead flower on this silent night.

“Yes, I think this is the right way,” said Helena, and they set off

again, as if gaily.

“It certainly feels rather deathly,” said Siegmund to himself. He

remembered distinctly, when he was a child and had diphtheria, he had

stretched himself in the horrible sickness, which he felt was—and here

he chose the French word—“_l’agonie_”. But his mother had seen and had

cried aloud, which suddenly caused him to struggle with all his soul to

spare her her suffering.

“Certainly it is like that,” he said. “Certainly it is rather deathly.

I wonder how it is.”

Then he reviewed the last hour.

“I believe we are lost!” Helena interrupted him.

“Lost! What matter!” he answered indifferently, and Helena pressed him

tighter, hearer to her in a kind of triumph. “But did we not come this

way?” he added.

“No. See”—her voice was reeded with restrained emotion—“we have

certainly not been along this bare path which dips up and down.”

“Well, then, we must merely keep due eastward, towards the moon pretty

well, as much as we can,” said Siegmund, looking forward over the down,

where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of

clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer. As he looked at

the moon he felt a sense of companionship. Helena, not understanding,

left him so much alone; the moon was nearer.

Siegmund continued to review the last hours. He had been so wondrously

happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately

beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had

been wandering in another—a glamorous, primordial world.

“I suppose,” he said to himself, “I have lived too intensely, I seem to

have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now

they’ve gone my house is weak.”

So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He

reviewed his hour of passion with Helena.

“Surely,” he told himself, “I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt

my cup. My soul seems to leak out—I am half here, half gone away.

That’s why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.”

Then he came to the hour of Helena’s strange ecstasy over him. That,

somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness

concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid

wine was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which

had been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing

vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling has brain, sweeping away

his sickness, soothing him.

“I suppose,” he said to himself for the last time, “I suppose living

too intensely kills you, more or less.”

Then Siegmund forgot. He opened his eyes and saw the night about him.

The moon had escaped from the cloud-pack, and was radiant behind a fine

veil which glistened to her rays, and which was broidered with a

lustrous halo, very large indeed, the largest halo Siegmund had ever

seen. When the little lane turned full towards the moon, it seemed as

if Siegmund and Helena would walk through a large Moorish arch of

horse-shoe shape, the enormous white halo opening in front of them.

They walked on, keeping their faces to the moon, smiling with wonder

and a little rapture, until once mote the little lane curved wilfully,

and they were walking north. Helena observed three cottages crouching

under the hill and under trees to cover themselves from the magic of

the moonlight.

“We certainly did not come this way before,” she said triumphantly. The

idea of being lost delighted her.

Siegmund looked round at the grey hills smeared over with a low, dim

glisten of moon-mist. He could not yet fully realize that he was

walking along a lane in the Isle of Wight. His surroundings seemed to

belong to some state beyond ordinary experience—some place in romance,

perhaps, or among the hills where Brünhild lay sleeping in her large

bright halo of fire. How could it be that he and Helena were two

children of London wandering to find their lodging in Freshwater? He

sighed, and looked again over the hills where the moonlight was

condensing in mist ethereal, frail, and yet substantial, reminding him

of the way the manna must have condensed out of the white moonlit mists

of Arabian deserts.

“We may be on the road to Newport,” said Helena presently, “and the

distance is ten miles.”

She laughed, not caring in the least whither they wandered, exulting in

this wonderful excursion! She and Siegmund alone in a glistening

wilderness of night at the back of habited days and nights! Siegmund

looked at her. He by no means shared her exultation, though he

sympathized with it. He walked on alone in his deep seriousness, of

which she was not aware. Yet when he noticed her abandon, he drew her

nearer, and his heart softened with protecting tenderness towards her,

and grew heavy with responsibility.

The fields breathed off a scent as if they were come to life with the

night, and were talking with fragrant eagerness. The farms huddled

together in sleep, and pulled the dark shadow over them to hide from

the supernatural white night; the cottages were locked and darkened.

Helena walked on in triumph through this wondrous hinterland of night,

actively searching for the spirits, watching the cottages they

approached, listening, looking for the dreams of those sleeping inside,

in the darkened rooms. She imagined she could see the frail dream-faces

at the windows; she fancied they stole out timidly into the gardens,

and went running away among the rabbits on the gleamy hill-side. Helena

laughed to herself, pleased with her fancy of wayward little dreams

playing with weak hands and feet among the large, solemn-sleeping

cattle. This was the first time, she told herself, that she had ever

been out among the grey-frocked dreams and white-armed fairies. She

imagined herself lying asleep in her room, while her own dreams slid

out down the moonbeams. She imagined Siegmund sleeping in his room,

while his dreams, dark-eyed, their blue eyes very dark and yearning at

night-time, came wandering over the grey grass seeking her dreams.

So she wove her fancies as she walked, until for very weariness she was

fain to remember that it was a long way—a long way. Siegmund’s arm was

about her to support her; she rested herself upon it. They crossed a

stile and recognized, on the right of the path, the graveyard of the

Catholic chapel. The moon, which the days were paring smaller with

envious keen knife, shone upon the white stones in the burial-ground.

The carved Christ upon His cross hung against a silver-grey sky. Helena

looked up wearily, bowing to the tragedy. Siegmund also looked, and

bowed his head.

“Thirty years of earnest love; three years’ life like a passionate

ecstasy-and it was finished. He was very great and very wonderful. I am

very insignificant, and shall go out ignobly. But we are the same;

love, the brief ecstasy, and the end. But mine is one rose, and His all

the white beauty in the world.”

Siegmund felt his heart very heavy, sad, and at fault, in presence of

the Christ. Yet he derived comfort from the knowledge that life was

treating him in the same manner as it had treated the Master, though

his compared small and despicable with the Christ-tragedy. Siegmund

stepped softly into the shadow of the pine copse.

“Let me get under cover,” he thought. “Let me hide in it; it is good,

the sudden intense darkness. I am small and futile: my small, futile

tragedy!”

Helena shrank in the darkness. It was almost terrible to her, and the

silence was like a deep pit. She shrank to Siegmund. He drew her

closer, leaning over her as they walked, trying to assure her. His

heart was heavy, and heavy with a tenderness approaching grief, for his

small, brave Helena.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” he whispered to her.

“Quite, quite sure,” she whispered confidently in reply. And presently

they came out into the hazy moonlight, and began stumbling down the

steep hill. They were both very tired, both found it difficult to go

with ease or surety this sudden way down. Soon they were creeping

cautiously across the pasture and the poultry farm. Helena’s heart was

beating, as she imagined what a merry noise there would be should they

wake all the fowls. She dreaded any commotion, any questioning, this

night, so she stole carefully along till they issued on the high-road

not far from home.

XIII

In the morning, after bathing, Siegmund leaned upon the seawall in a

kind of reverie. It was late, towards nine o’clock, yet he lounged,

dreamily looking out on the turquoise blue water, and the white haze of

morning, and the small, fair shadows of ships slowly realizing before

him. In the bay were two battleships, uncouth monsters, lying as naïve

and curious as sea-lions strayed afar.

Siegmund was gazing oversea in a half-stupid way, when he heard a voice

beside him say:

“Where have they come from; do you know, sir?”

He turned, saw a fair, slender man of some thirty-five years standing

beside him and smiling faintly at the battleships.

“The men-of-war? There are a good many at Spithead,” said Siegmund.

The other glanced negligently into his face.

“They look rather incongruous, don’t you think? We left the sea empty

and shining, and when we come again, behold, these objects keeping

their eye on us!”

Siegmund laughed.

“You are not an Anarchist, I hope?” he said jestingly.

“A Nihilist, perhaps,” laughed the other. “But I am quite fond of the

Czar, if pity is akin to love. No; but you can’t turn round without

finding some policeman or other at your elbow—look at them, abominable

ironmongery!—ready to put his hand on your shoulder.”

The speaker’s grey-blue eyes, always laughing with mockery, glanced

from the battleships and lit on the dark blue eyes of Siegmund. The

latter felt his heart lift in a convulsive movement. This stranger ran

so quickly to a perturbing intimacy.

“I suppose we are in the hands of—God,” something moved Siegmund to

say. The stranger contracted his eyes slightly as he gazed deep at the

speaker.

“Ah!” he drawled curiously. Then his eyes wandered over the wet hair,

the white brow, and the bare throat of Siegmund, after which they

returned again to the eyes of his interlocutor. “Does the Czar sail

this way?” he asked at last.

“I do not know,” replied Siegmund, who, troubled by the other’s

penetrating gaze, had not expected so trivial a question.

“I suppose the newspaper will tell us?” said the man.

Sure to,” said Siegmund.

“You haven’t seen it this morning?”

“Not since Saturday.”

The swift blue eyes of the man dilated. He looked curiously at

Siegmund.

“You are not alone on your holiday?”

“No.” Siegmund did not like this—he gazed over the sea in displeasure.

“I live here—at least for the present—name, Hampson—”

“Why, weren’t you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years

back?” asked Siegmund.

They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been

fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused

himself for having addressed Siegmund:

“I saw you with your nose flattened against the window,” he said, “and

as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be

re-acquainted.”

Siegmund looked at the man in astonishment.

“I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It’s a pity to

try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don’t you think?”

“Stare beyond it, you mean?” asked Siegmund.

“Exactly!” replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. “I call a

day like this ‘the blue room’. It’s the least draughty apartment in all

the confoundedly draughty House of Life.”

Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express

something in his own soul.

“I mean,” the man explained, “that after all, the great mass of life

that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the

blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can’t

stop it, once we’ve begun to leak.”

“What do you mean by ‘leak’?” asked Siegmund.

“Goodness knows—I talk through my hat. But once you’ve got a bit tired

of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the

dark—as you were doing.”

“But, to use your metaphor, I’m not tired of the House—if you mean

Life,” said Siegmund.

“Praise God! I’ve met a poet who’s not afraid of having his pocket

picked—or his soul, or his brain!” said the stranger, throwing his head

back in a brilliant smile, his eyes dilated.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Siegmund, very quietly, with a

strong fear and a fascination opposing each other in his heart.

“You’re not tired of the House, but of your own particular room-say,

suite of rooms—”

“Tomorrow I am turned out of this ‘blue room’,” said Siegmund with a

wry smile. The other looked at him seriously.

“Dear Lord!” exclaimed Hampson; then: “Do you remember Flaubert’s

saint, who laid naked against a leper? I could _not_ do it.”

“Nor I,” shuddered Siegmund.

“But you’ve got to-or something near it!”

Siegmund looked at the other with frightened, horrified eyes.

“What of yourself?” he said, resentfully.

“I’ve funked-ran away from my leper, and now am eating my heart out,

and staring from the window at the dark.”

“But can’t you _do_ something?” said Siegmund.

The other man laughed with amusement, throwing his head back and

showing his teeth.

“I won’t ask you what _your_ intentions are,” he said, with delicate

irony in his tone. “You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five

hundred a year by hard work; but it’s no good. If you have acquired a

liking for intensity in life, you can’t do without it. I mean vivid

soul experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and

physical excitement.”

Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.

“Well, and what then?” he said.

“What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other

craving. You become a _concentré_, you feed your normal flame with

oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are

always semi-transparent.”

Siegmund laughed.

“At least, I am quite opaque,” he said.

The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.

“Not altogether,” said Hampson. “And you, I should think, are one whose

flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.”

Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.

“You haven’t much reserve. You’re like a tree that’ll flower till it

kills itself,” the man continued. “You’ll run till you drop, and then

you won’t get up again. You’ve no dispassionate intellect to control

you and economize.”

“You’re telling me very plainly what I am and am not,” said Siegmund,

laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it.

“Oh, it’s only what I think,” replied Hampson. “We’re a good deal

alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn’t;

but women have always done as they liked with me.”

“That’s hardly so in my case,” said Siegmund.

Hampson eyed him critically.

“Say one woman; it’s enough,” he replied.

Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.

“The best sort of women—the most interesting—are the worst for us,”

Hampson resumed. “By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and

animal in us. Then they are supersensitive—refined a bit beyond

humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their

instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth;

and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or

warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great

potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source

of life. In us her force becomes evident.

“She can’t live without us, but she destroys us. These deep,

interesting women don’t want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit

they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading

to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man

in us—that is, us altogether.”

“You’re a bit downright are you not?” asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He

did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such

statements were arbitrary.

“That’s according to my intensity,” laughed Hampson. “I can open the

blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and

see—God knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am

perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!”

“Don’t you think it’s wrong to get like it?” asked Siegmund.

“Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the

end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them;

and the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible.”

Siegmund pondered a little….

“You make me feel—as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,”

he said slowly.

The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands

lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins.

“I can scarcely believe they are me,” he said. “If they rose up and

refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren’t they beautiful?”

He looked, with a faint smile, at Siegmund.

Siegmund glanced from the stranger’s to his own hands, which lay curved

on the sea-wall as if asleep. They were small for a man of his stature,

but, lying warm in the sun, they looked particularly secure in life.

Instinctively, with a wave of self-love, he closed his fists over his

thumbs.

“I wonder,” said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, “that she

can’t see it; I wonder she doesn’t cherish you. You are full and

beautiful enough in the flesh—why will she help to destroy you, when

she loved you to such extremity?”

Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man,

with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly.

“Fools—the fools, these women!” he said. “Either they smash their own

crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands.

Look at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick

with compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold

up by itself. I am very sorry.”

All at once he stopped. The bitter despair in his tone was the voice of

a heavy feeling of which Siegmund had been vaguely aware for some

weeks. Siegmund felt a sense of doom. He laughed, trying to shake it

off.

“I wish I didn’t go on like this,” said Hampson piteously. “I wish I

could be normal. How hot it is already! You should wear a hat. It is

really hot.” He pulled open his flannel shirt.

“I like the heat,” said Siegmund.

“So do I.”

Directly, the young man dashed the long hair on his forehead into some

sort of order, bowed, and smiling in his gay fashion, walked leisurely

to the village.

Siegmund stood awhile as if stunned. It seemed to him only a painful

dream. Sighing deeply to relieve himself of the pain, he set off to

find Helena.

XIV

In the garden of tall rose trees and nasturtiums Helena was again

waiting. It was past nine o’clock, so she was growing impatient. To

herself, however, she professed a great interest in a little book of

verses she had bought in St Martin’s Lane for twopence.

A late, harsh blackbird smote him with her wings,

As through the glade, dim in the dark, she flew….

So she read. She made a curious, pleased sound, and remarked to herself

that she thought these verses very fine. But she watched the road for

Siegmund.

And now she takes the scissors on her thumb …

Oh then, no more unto my lattice come.

“H’m!” she said, “I really don’t know whether I like that or not.”

Therefore she read the piece again before she looked down the road.

“He really is very late. It is absurd to think he may have got drowned;

but if he were washing about at the bottom of the sea, his hair loose

on the water!”

Her heart stood still as she imagined this.

“But what nonsense! I like these verses _very_ much. I will read them

as I walk along the side path, where I shall hear the bees, and catch

the flutter of a butterfly among the words. That will be a very fitting

way to read this poet.”

So she strolled to the gate, glancing up now and again. There, sure

enough, was Siegmund coming, the towel hanging over his shoulder, his

throat bare, and his face bright. She stood in the mottled shade.

“I have kept you waiting,” said Siegmund.

“Well, I was reading, you see.”

She would not admit her impatience.

“I have been talking,” he said.

“Talking!” she exclaimed in slight displeasure. “Have you found an

acquaintance even here?”

“A fellow who was quite close friends in Savoy days; he made me feel

queer-sort of _Doppelgänger_, he was.”

Helena glanced up swiftly and curiously.

“In what way?” she said.

“He talked all the skeletons in the cupboard-such piffle it seems, now!

The sea is like a harebell, and there are two battleships lying in the

bay. You can hear the voices of the men on deck distinctly. Well, have

you made the plans for today?”

They went into the house to breakfast. She watched him helping himself

to the scarlet and green salad.

“Mrs Curtiss,” she said, in rather reedy tone, “has been very motherly

to me this morning; oh, very motherly!”

Siegmund, who was in a warm, gay mood, shrank up.

“What, has she been saying something about last night?” he asked.

“She was very much concerned for me-was afraid something dreadful had

happened,” continued Helena, in the same keen, sarcastic tone, which

showed she was trying to rid herself of her own mortification.

“Because we weren’t in till about eleven?” said Siegmund, also with

sarcasm.

“I mustn’t do it again. Oh no, I mustn’t do it again, really.”

“For fear of alarming the old lady?” he asked.

“‘You know, dear, it troubles _me_ a good deal … but if I were your

_mother_, I don’t know _how_ I should feel,’” she quoted.

“When one engages rooms one doesn’t usually stipulate for a stepmother

to nourish one’s conscience,” said Siegmund. They laughed, making jest

of the affair; but they were both too thin-skinned. Siegmund writhed

within himself with mortification, while Helena talked as if her teeth

were on edge.

“I don’t _mind_ in the least,” she said. “The poor old woman has her

opinions, and I mine.”

Siegmund brooded a little.

“I know I’m a moral coward,” he said bitterly.

“Nonsense” she replied. Then, with a little heat: “But you _do_

continue to try so hard to justify yourself, as if _you_ felt you

needed justification.”

He laughed bitterly.

“I tell you—a little thing like this—it remains tied tight round

something inside me, reminding me for hours—well, what everybody else’s

opinion of me is.”

Helena laughed rather plaintively.

“I thought you were so sure we were right,” she said.

He winced again.

“In myself I am. But in the eyes of the world—”

“If you feel so in yourself, is not that enough?” she said brutally.

He hung his head, and slowly turned his serviette-ring.

“What is myself?” he asked.

“Nothing very definite,” she said, with a bitter laugh.

They were silent. After a while she rose, went lovingly over to him,

and put her arms round his neck.

“This is our last clear day, dear,” she said.

A wave of love came over him, sweeping away all the rest. He took her

in his arms….

“It will be hot today,” said Helena, as they prepared to go out.

“I felt the sun steaming in my hair as I came up,” he replied.

“I shall wear a hat—you had better do so too.”

“No,” he said. “I told you I wanted a sun-soaking; now I think I shall

get one.”

She did not urge or compel him. In these matters he was old enough to

choose for himself.

This morning they were rather silent. Each felt the tarnish on their

remaining day.

“I think, dear,” she said, “we ought to find the little path that

escaped us last night.”

“We were lucky to miss it,” he answered. “You don’t get a walk like

that twice in a lifetime, in spite of the old ladies.”

She glanced up at him with a winsome smile, glad to hear his words.

They set off, Siegmund bare-headed. He was dressed in flannels and a

loose canvas shirt, but he looked what he was—a Londoner on holiday. He

had the appearance, the diffident bearing, and the well-cut clothes of

a gentleman. He had a slight stoop, a strong-shouldered stoop, and as

he walked he looked unseeing in front of him.

Helena belonged to the unclassed. She was not ladylike, nor smart, nor

assertive. One could not tell whether she were of independent means or

a worker. One thing was obvious about her: she was evidently educated.

Rather short, of strong figure, she was much more noticeably a

_concentrée_ than was Siegmund. Unless definitely looking at something

she always seemed coiled within herself.

She wore a white voile dress made with the waist just below her

breasts, and the skirt dropping straight and clinging. On her head was

a large, simple hat of burnt straw.

Through the open-worked sleeves of her dress she could feel the sun

bite vigorously.

“I wish you had put on a hat, Siegmund,” she said.

“Why?” he laughed. “My hair is like a hood,” He ruffled it back with

his hand. The sunlight glistened on his forehead.

On the higher paths a fresh breeze was energetically chasing the

butterflies and driving the few small clouds disconsolate out of the

sky. The lovers stood for some time watching the people of the farm in

the down below dip their sheep on this sunny morning. There was a

ragged noise of bleating from the flock penned in a corner of the yard.

Two red-armed men seized a sheep, hauled it to a large bath that stood

in the middle of the yard, and there held it, more or less in the bath,

whilst a third man baled a dirty yellow liquid over its body. The white

legs of the sheep twinkled as it butted this way and that to escape the

yellow douche, the blue-shirted men ducked and struggled. There was a

faint splashing and shouting to be heard even from a distance. The

farmer’s wife and children stood by ready to rush in with assistance if

necessary.

Helena laughed with pleasure.

“That is really a very quaint and primitive proceeding,” she said. “It

is cruder than Theocritus.”

“In an instant it makes me wish I were a farmer,” he laughed. “I think

every man has a passion for farming at the bottom of his blood. It

would be fine to be plain-minded, to see no farther than the end of

one’s nose, and to own cattle and land.”

“Would it?” asked Helena sceptically.

“If I had a red face, and went to sleep as soon as I sat comfortable, I

should love it,”he said.

“It amuses me to hear you long to be stupid,” she replied.

“To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the

desideratum.”

“Is it?” she asked ironically.

“I would give anything to be like that,” he said.

“That is, not to be yourself,” she said pointedly.

He laughed without much heartiness.

“Don’t they seem a long way off?” he said, staring at the bucolic

scene. “They are farther than Theocritus—down there is farther than

Sicily, and more than twenty centuries from us. I wish it weren’t.”

“Why do you?” she cried, with curious impatience.

He laughed.

Crossing the down, scattered with dark bushes, they came directly

opposite the path through the furze.

“There it is!” she cried, “How could we miss it?”

“Ascribe it to the fairies,” he replied, whistling the bird music out

of _Siegfried_, then pieces of _Tristan_. They talked very little.

She was tired. When they arrived at a green, naked hollow near the

cliff’s edge, she said:

“This shall be our house today.”

“Welcome home!” said Siegmund.

He flung himself down on the high, breezy slope of the dip, looking out

to sea. Helena sat beside him. It was absolutely still, and the wind

was slackening more and more. Though they listened attentively, they

could hear only an indistinct breathing sound, quite small, from the

water below: no clapping nor hoarse conversation of waves. Siegmund lay

with his hands beneath his head, looking over the sparkling sea. To put

her page in the shadow, Helena propped her book against him and began

to read.

Presently the breeze, and Siegmund, dropped asleep. The sun was pouring

with dreadful persistence. It beat and beat on Helena, gradually

drawing her from her book in a confusion of thought. She closed her

eyes wearily, longing for shade. Vaguely she felt a sympathy with Adam

in “Adam Cast Forth”. Her mind traced again the tumultuous, obscure

strugglings of the two, forth from Eden through the primitive

wildernesses, and she felt sorrowful. Thinking of Adam blackened with

struggle, she looked down at Siegmund. The sun was beating him upon the

face and upon his glistening brow. His two hands, which lay out on the

grass, were full of blood, the veins of his wrists purple and swollen

with heat. Yet he slept on, breathing with a slight, panting motion.

Helena felt deeply moved. She wanted to kiss him as he lay helpless,

abandoned to the charge of the earth and the sky. She wanted to kiss

him, and shed a few tears. She did neither, but instead, moved her

position so that she shaded his head. Cautiously putting her hand on

his hair, she found it warm, quite hot, as when you put your hand under

a sitting hen, and feel the hot-feathered bosom.

“It will make him ill,” she whispered to herself, and she bent over to

smell the hot hair. She noticed where the sun was scalding his

forehead. She felt very pitiful and helpless when she saw his brow

becoming inflamed with the sun-scalding.

Turning weariedly away, she sought relief in the landscape. But the sea

was glittering unbearably, like a scaled dragon wreathing. The houses

of Freshwater slept, as cattle sleep motionless in the hollow valley.

Green Farringford on the slope, was drawn over with a shadow of heat

and sleep. In the bay below the hill the sea was hot and restless.

Helena was sick with sunshine and the restless glitter of water.

“‘And there shall be no more sea,’” she quoted to herself, she knew not

wherefrom.

“No more sea, no more anything,” she thought dazedly, as she sat in the

midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the

lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this

tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag

seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the old

activities, the old manner of living.

“It is impossible,” she said; “it is impossible! What shall I be when I

come out of this? I shall not come out, except as metal to be cast in

another shape. No more the same Siegmund, no more the same life. What

will become of us—what will happen?”

She was roused from these semi-delirious speculations in the sun

furnace by Siegmund’s waking. He opened his eyes, took a deep breath,

and looked smiling at Helena.

“It is worth while to sleep,” said he, “for the sake of waking like

this. I was dreaming of huge ice-crystals.”

She smiled at him. He seemed unconscious of fate, happy and strong. She

smiled upon him almost in condescension.

“I should like to realize your dream,” she said. “This is terrible!”

They went to the cliff’s edge, to receive the cool up-flow of air from

the water. She drank the travelling freshness eagerly with her face,

and put forward her sunburnt arms to be refreshed.

“It is really a very fine sun,” said Siegmund lightly. “I feel as if I

were almost satisfied with heat.”

Helena felt the chagrin of one whose wretchedness must go unperceived,

while she affects a light interest in another’s pleasure. This time,

when Siegmund “failed to follow her”, as she put it, she felt she must

follow him.

“You are having your satisfaction complete this journey,” she said,

smiling; “even a sufficiency of me.”

“Ay!” said Siegmund drowsily. “I think I am. I think this is about

perfect, don’t you?”

She laughed.

“I want nothing more and nothing different,” he continued; “and that’s

the extreme of a decent time, I should think.”

“The extreme of a decent time!” she repeated.

But he drawled on lazily:

“I’ve only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I’ve got

all the cheese—which is you, my dear.”

“I certainly feel eaten up,” she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him

lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy’s, his whole being

careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she

felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a

sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy,

his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his

buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or

spoil one minute of his consummate hour.

From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the

path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them.

Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid’s chair,

wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man,

was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his

pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted

body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken

eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half

obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he

should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the

torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide—“the life

tide,” she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her

own distress. She was fretted to her soul.

“Come!” she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the

completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.

“We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow—so

quiet,” she said to herself.

They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her

own state, after her own fashion.

“The Mist Spirit,” she said to herself. “The Mist Spirit draws a

curtain round us—it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a

thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the

curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of

the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I

want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.”

As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said:

“Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next

year, and stay for a whole month?”

“If there be any next year,” said she.

Siegmund did not reply.

She wondered if he had really spoken in sincerity, or if he, too, were

mocking fate. They walked slowly through the broiling sun towards their

lodging.

“There will be an end to this,” said Helena, communing with herself.

“And when we come out of the mist-curtain, what will it be? No

matter—let come what will. All along Fate has been resolving, from the

very beginning, resolving obvious discords, gradually, by unfamiliar

progression; and out of original combinations weaving wondrous

harmonies with our lives. Really, the working out has been wondrous, is

wondrous now. The Master-Fate is too great an artist to suffer an

anti-climax. I am sure the Master-Musician is too great an artist to

allow a bathetic anti-climax.”

XV

The afternoon of the blazing day passed drowsily. Lying close together

on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like

perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised

with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams

without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more

clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading

of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little

waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But

each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with

copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun

was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed,

spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was

merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her

in the traces, like overthrown charioteers. So the hours passed.

After tea they went eastwards on the downs. Siegmund was animated, so

that Helena caught his mood. It was very rare that they spoke of the

time preceding their acquaintance, Helena knew little or nothing of

Siegmund’s life up to the age of thirty, whilst he had never learned

anything concerning her childhood. Somehow she did not encourage him to

self-discovery. Today, however, the painful need of lovers for

self-revelation took hold on him.

“It is awfully funny,” he said. “I was _so_ gone on Beatrice when I

married her. She had only just come back from Egypt. Her father was an

army officer, a very handsome man, and, I believe, a bit of a rake.

Beatrice is really well connected, you know. But old FitzHerbert ran

through all his money, and through everything else. He was too hot for

the rest of the family, so they dropped him altogether.

“He came to live at Peckham when I was sixteen. I had just left school,

and was to go into father’s business. Mrs FitzHerbert left cards, and

very soon we were acquainted. Beatrice had been a good time in a French

convent school. She had only knocked about with the army a little

while, but it had brought her out. I remember I thought she was miles

above me—which she was. She wasn’t bad-looking, either, and you know

men all like her. I bet she’d marry again, in spite of the children.

“At first I fluttered round her. I remember I’d got a little, silky

moustache. They all said I looked older than sixteen. At that time I

was mad on the violin, and she played rather well. Then FitzHerbert

went off abroad somewhere, so Beatrice and her mother half lived at our

house. The mother was an invalid.

“I remember I nearly stood on my head one day. The conservatory opened

off the smoking-room, so when I came in the room, I heard my two

sisters and Beatrice talking about good-looking men.

“‘I consider Bertram will make a handsome man,’ said my younger sister.

“‘He’s got beautiful eyes,’ said my other sister.

“‘And a real darling nose and chin!’ cried Beatrice. ‘If only he was

more _solide_! He is like a windmill, all limbs.’

“‘He will fill out. Remember, he’s not quite seventeen,’ said my elder

sister.

“‘Ah, he is _doux_—he is _câlin_,’ said Beatrice.

“‘I think he is rather _too_ spoony for his age,’ said my elder sister.

“‘But he’s a fine boy for all that. See how thick his knees are,’ my

younger sister chimed in.

“‘Ah, _si, si_!’ cried Beatrice.

“I made a row against the door, then walked across.

“‘Hello, is somebody in here?’ I said, as I pushed into the little

conservatory.

“I looked straight at Beatrice, and she at me. We seemed to have formed

an alliance in that look: she was the other half of my consciousness, I

of hers. Ha! Ha! there were a lot of white narcissus, and little white

hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, in the conservatory. I can see them now,

great white stars, and tangles of little ones, among a bank of green;

and I can recall the keen, fresh scent on the warm air; and the look of

Beatrice … her great dark eyes.

“It’s funny, but Beatrice is as dead—ay, far more dead—than Dante’s.

And I am not that young fool, not a bit.

“I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour.

Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always

jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen,

earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when

we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it

awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know.

“There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.”

Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit.

They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before

Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea

that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and

wonderful a thing in a man’s life as birth, or adolescence, or death,

was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of

disillusion.

“Come to think of it,” Siegmund continued, “I have always shirked.

Whenever I’ve been in a tight corner I’ve gone to Pater.”

“I think,” she said, “marriage has been a tight corner you couldn’t get

out of to go to anybody.”

“Yet I’m here,” he answered simply.

The blood suffused her face and neck.

“And some men would have made a better job of it. When it’s come to

sticking out against Beatrice, and sailing the domestic ship in spite

of her, I’ve always funked. I tell you I’m something of a moral

coward.”

He had her so much on edge she was inclined to answer, “So be it.”

Instead, she ran back over her own history: it consisted of petty

discords in contemptible surroundings, then of her dreams and fancies,

finally—Siegmund.

“In my life,” she said, with the fine, grating discord in her tones, “I

might say _always_, the real life has seemed just outside—brownies

running and fairies peeping—just beyond the common, ugly place where I

am. I seem to have been hedged in by vulgar circumstances, able to

glimpse outside now and then, and see the reality.”

“You are so hard to get at,” said Siegmund. “And so scornful of

familiar things.”

She smiled, knowing he did not understand. The heat had jaded her, so

that physically she was full of discord, of dreariness that set her

teeth on edge. Body and soul, she was out of tune.

A warm, noiseless twilight was gathering over the downs and rising

darkly from the sea. Fate, with wide wings, was hovering just over her.

Fate, ashen grey and black, like a carrion crow, had her in its shadow.

Yet Siegmund took no notice. He did not understand. He walked beside

her whistling to himself, which only distressed her the more.

They were alone on the smooth hills to the east. Helena looked at the

day melting out of the sky, leaving the permanent structure of the

night. It was her turn to suffer the sickening detachment which comes

after moments of intense living.

The rosiness died out of the sunset as embers fade into thick ash. In

herself, too, the ruddy glow sank and went out. The earth was a cold

dead heap, coloured drearily, the sky was dark with flocculent grey

ash, and she herself an upright mass of soft ash.

She shuddered slightly with horror. The whole face of things was to her

livid and ghastly. Being a moralist rather than an artist, coming of

fervent Wesleyan stock, she began to scourge herself. She had done

wrong again. Looking back, no one had she touched without hurting. She

had a destructive force; anyone she embraced she injured. Faint voices

echoed back from her conscience. The shadows were full of complaint

against her. It was all true, she was a harmful force, dragging Fate to

petty, mean conclusions.

Life and hope were ash in her mouth. She shuddered with discord.

Despair grated between her teeth. This dreariness was worse than any

her dreary, lonely life had known. She felt she could bear it no

longer.

Siegmund was there. Surely he could help? He would rekindle her. But he

was straying ahead, carelessly whistling the Spring Song from _Die

Walküre_. She looked at him, and again shuddered with horror. Was that

really Siegmund, that stooping, thick-shouldered, indifferent man? Was

that the Siegmund who had seemed to radiate joy into his surroundings,

the Siegmund whose coming had always changed the whole weather of her

soul? Was that the Siegmund whose touch was keen with bliss for her,

whose face was a panorama of passing God? She looked at him again. His

radiance was gone, his aura had ceased. She saw him a stooping man,

past the buoyancy of youth, walking and whistling rather stupidly—in

short, something of the “clothed animal on end”, like the rest of men.

She suffered an agony of disillusion. Was this the real Siegmund, and

her own only a projection of her soul? She took her breath sharply. Was

he the real clay, and that other, her beloved, only the breathing of

her soul upon this. There was an awful blank before her.

“Siegmund!” she said in despair.

He turned sharply at the sound of her voice. Seeing her face pale and

distorted in the twilight, he was filled with dismay. She mutely lifted

her arms to him, watching him in despair. Swiftly he took her in his

arms, and asked in a troubled voice:

“What is it, dear? Is something wrong?”

His voice was nothing to her—it was stupid. She felt his arms round

her, felt her face pressed against the cloth of his coat, against the

beating of his heart. What was all this? This was not comfort or love.

He was not understanding or helping, only chaining her, hurting. She

did not want his brute embrace—she was most utterly alone, gripped so

in his arms. If he could not save her from herself, he must leave her

free to pant her heart out in free air. The secret thud, thud of his

heart, the very self of that animal in him she feared and hated,

repulsed her. She struggled to escape.

“What is it? Won’t you tell me what is the matter?” he pleaded.

She began to sob, dry wild sobs, feeling as if she would go mad. He

tried to look at her face, for which she hated him. And all the time he

held her fast, all the time she was imprisoned in the embrace of this

brute, blind creature, whose heart confessed itself in thud, thud,

thud.

“Have you heard anything against us? Have I done anything? Have I said

anything? Tell me—at any rate tell me, Helena.”

Her sobbing was like the chattering of dry leaves. She grew frantic to

be free. Stifled in that prison any longer, she would choke and go mad.

His coat chafed her face; as she struggled she could see the strong

working of his throat. She fought against him; she struggled in panic

to be free.

“Let me go!” she cried. “Let me go! Let me go!” He held her in

bewilderment and terror. She thrust her hands in his chest and pushed

him apart. Her face, blind to him, was very much distorted by her

suffering. She thrust him furiously away with great strength.

His heart stood still with wonder. She broke from him and dropped down,

sobbing wildly, in the shelter of the tumuli. She was bunched in a

small, shaken heap. Siegmund could not bear it. He went on one knee

beside her, trying to take her hand in his, and pleading:

“Only tell me, Helena, what it is. Tell me what it is. At least tell

me, Helena; tell me what it is. Oh, but this is dreadful!”

She had turned convulsively from him. She shook herself, as if beside

herself, and at last covered her ears with her hands, to shut out this

unreasoning pleading of his voice.

Seeing her like this, Siegmund at last gave in. Quite still, he knelt

on one knee beside her, staring at the late twilight. The intense

silence was crackling with the sound of Helena’s dry, hissing sobs. He

remained silenced, stunned by the unnatural conflict. After waiting a

while, he put his hand on her. She winced convulsively away.

Then he rose, saying in his heart, “It is enough,” He went behind the

small hill, and looked at the night. It was all exposed. He wanted to

hide, to cover himself from the openness, and there was not even a bush

under which he could find cover.

He lay down flat on the ground, pressing his face into the wiry turf,

trying to hide. Quite stunned, with a death taking place in his soul,

he lay still, pressed against the earth. He held his breath for a long

time before letting it go, then again he held it. He could scarcely

bear, even by breathing, to betray himself. His consciousness was dark.

Helena had sobbed and struggled the life animation back into herself.

At length, weary but comfortable, she lay still to rest. Almost she

could have gone to sleep. But she grew chilly, and a ground insect

tickled her face. Was somebody coming?

It was dark when she rose. Siegmund was not in sight. She tidied

herself, and rather frightened, went to look for him. She saw him like

a thick shadow on the earth. Now she was heavy with tears good to shed.

She stood in silent sorrow, looking at him.

Suddenly she became aware of someone passing and looking curiously at

them.

“Dear!” she said softly, stooping and touching his hair. He began to

struggle with himself to respond. At that minute he would rather have

died than face anyone. His soul was too much uncovered.

“Dear, someone is looking,” she pleaded.

He drew himself up from cover. But he kept his face averted. They

walked on.

“Forgive me, dear,” she said softly.

“Nay, it’s not you,” he answered, and she was silenced. They walked on

till the night seemed private. She turned to him, and “Siegmund!” she

said, in a voice of great sorrow and pleading.

He took her in his arms, but did not kiss her, though she lifted her

face. He put his mouth against her throat, below the ear, as she

offered it, and stood looking out through the ravel of her hair, dazed,

dreamy.

The sea was smoking with darkness under half-luminous heavens. The

stars, one after another, were catching alight. Siegmund perceived

first one, and then another dimmer one, flicker out in the darkness

over the sea. He stood perfectly still, watching them. Gradually he

remembered how, in the cathedral, the tapers of the choir-stalls would

tremble and set steadily to burn, opening the darkness point after

point with yellow drops of flame, as the acolyte touched them, one by

one, delicately with his rod. The night was religious, then, with its

proper order of worship. Day and night had their ritual, and passed in

uncouth worship.

Siegmund found himself in an abbey. He looked up the nave of the night,

where the sky came down on the sea-like arches, and he watched the

stars catch fire. At least it was all sacred, whatever the God might

be. Helena herself, the bitter bread, was stuff of the ceremony, which

he touched with his lips as part of the service.

He had Helena in his arms, which was sweet company, but in spirit he

was quite alone. She would have drawn him back to her, and on her

woman’s breast have hidden him from Fate, and saved him from searching

the unknown. But this night he did not want comfort. If he were “an

infant crying in the night”, it was crying that a woman could not

still. He was abroad seeking courage and faith for his own soul. He, in

loneliness, must search the night for faith.

“My fate is finely wrought out,” he thought to himself. “Even damnation

may be finely imagined for me in the night. I have come so far. Now I

must get clarity and courage to follow out the theme. I don’t want to

botch and bungle even damnation.”

But he needed to know what was right, what was the proper sequence of

his acts. Staring at the darkness, he seemed to feel his course, though

he could not see it. He bowed in obedience. The stars seemed to swing

softly in token of submission.

XVI

Feeling him abstract, withdrawn from her, Helena experienced the dread

of losing him. She was in his arms, but his spirit ignored her. That

was insufferable to her pride. Yet she dared not disturb him—she was

afraid. Bitterly she repented her of the giving way to her revulsion a

little space before. Why had she not smothered it and pretended? Why

had she, a woman, betrayed herself so flagrantly? Now perhaps she had

lost him for good. She was consumed with uneasiness.

At last she drew back from him, held him her mouth to kiss. As he

gently, sadly kissed her she pressed him to her bosom. She must get him

back, whatever else she lost. She put her hand tenderly on his brow.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked.

“I?” he replied. “I really don’t know. I suppose I was hardly thinking

anything.”

She waited a while, clinging to him, then, finding some difficulty in

speech, she asked:

“Was I very cruel, dear?”

It was so unusual to hear her grieved and filled with humility that he

drew her close into him.

“It was pretty bad, I suppose,” he replied. “But I should think neither

of us could help it.”

She gave a little sob, pressed her face into his chest, wishing she had

helped it. Then, with Madonna love, she clasped his head upon her

shoulder, covering her hands over his hair. Twice she kissed him softly

in the nape of the neck, with fond, reassuring kisses. All the while,

delicately, she fondled and soothed him, till he was child to her

Madonna.

They remained standing with his head on her shoulder for some time,

till at last he raised himself to lay his lips on hers in a long kiss

of healing and renewal—long, pale kisses of after-suffering.

Someone was coming along the path. Helena let him go, shook herself

free, turned sharply aside, and said:

“Shall we go down to the water?”

“If you like,” he replied, putting out his hand to her. They went thus

with clasped hands down the cliff path to the beach.

There they sat in the shadow of the uprising island, facing the

restless water. Around them the sand and shingle were grey; there

stretched a long pale line of surf, beyond which the sea was black and

smeared with star-reflections. The deep, velvety sky shone with

lustrous stars.

As yet the moon was not risen. Helena proposed that they should lie on

a tuft of sand in a black cleft of the cliff to await its coming. They

lay close together without speaking. Each was looking at a low, large

star which hung straight in front of them, dripping its brilliance in a

thin streamlet of light along the sea almost to their feet. It was a

star-path fine and clear, trembling in its brilliance, but certain upon

the water. Helena watched it with delight. As Siegmund looked at the

star, it seemed to him a lantern hung at the gate to light someone

home. He imagined himself following the thread of the star-track. What

was behind the gate?

They heard the wash of a steamer crossing the bay. The water seemed

populous in the night-time, with dark, uncanny comings and goings.

Siegmund was considering.

“What _was_ the matter with you?” he asked.

She leaned over him, took his head in her lap, holding his face between

her two hands as she answered in a low, grave voice, very wise and old

in experience:

“Why, you see, dear, you won’t understand. But there was such a greyish

darkness, and through it—the crying of lives I have touched….”

His heart suddenly shrank and sank down. She acknowledged then that she

also had helped to injure Beatrice and his children. He coiled with

shame.

“….A crying of lives against me, and I couldn’t silence them, nor

escape out of the darkness. I wanted you—I saw you in front, whistling

the Spring Song, but I couldn’t find you—it was not you—I couldn’t find

you.”

She kissed his eyes and his brows.

“No, I don’t see it,” he said. “You would always be you. I could think

of hating you, but you’d still be yourself.”

She made a moaning, loving sound. Full of passionate pity, she moved

her mouth on his face, as a woman does on her child that has hurt

itself.

“Sometimes,” she murmured, in a low, grieved confession, “you lose me.”

He gave a brief laugh.

“I lose you!” he repeated. “You mean I lose my attraction for you, or

my hold over you, and then you—?”

He did not finish. She made the same grievous murmuring noise over him.

“It shall not be any more,” she said.

“All right,” he replied, “since you decide it.”

She clasped him round the chest and fondled him, distracted with pity.

“You mustn’t be bitter,” she murmured.

“Four days is enough,” he said. “In a fortnight I should be intolerable

to you. I am not masterful.”

“It is not so, Siegmund,” she said sharply.

“I give way always,” he repeated. “And then—tonight!”

“Tonight, tonight!” she cried in wrath. “Tonight I have been a fool!”

“And I?” he asked.

“You—what of you?” she cried. Then she became sad. “I have little

perverse feelings,” she lamented.

“And I can’t bear to compel anything, for fear of hurting it. So I’m

always pushed this way and that, like a fool.”

“You don’t know how you hurt me, talking so,” she said.

He kissed her. After a moment he said:

“You are not like other folk. ‘_Ihr Lascheks seid ein anderes

Geschlecht_.’ I thought of you when we read it.”

“Would you rather have me more like the rest, or more unlike, Siegmund?

Which is it?”

“Neither,” he said. “You are _you_.”

They were quiet for a space. The only movement in the night was the

faint gambolling of starlight on the water. The last person had passed

in black silhouette between them and the sea.

He was thinking bitterly. She seemed to goad him deeper and deeper into

life. He had a sense of despair, a preference of death. The German she

read with him—she loved its loose and violent romance—came back to his

mind: “_Der Tod geht einem zur Seite, fast sichtbarlich, und jagt einem

immer tiefer ins Leben._”

Well, the next place he would be hunted to, like a hare run down, was

home. It seemed impossible the morrow would take him back to Beatrice.

“This time tomorrow night,” he said.

“Siegmund!” she implored.

“Why not?” he laughed.

“Don’t, dear,” she pleaded.

“All right, I won’t.”

Some large steamer crossing the mouth of the bay made the water dash a

little as it broke in accentuated waves. A warm puff of air wandered in

on them now and again.

“You won’t be tired when you go back?” Helena asked.

“Tired!” he echoed.

“You know how you were when you came,” she reminded him, in tones full

of pity. He laughed.

“Oh, that is gone,” he said.

With a slow, mechanical rhythm she stroked his cheek.

“And will you be sad?” she said, hesitating.

“Sad!” he repeated.

“But will you be able to fake the old life up, happier, when you go

back?”

“The old life will take me up, I suppose,” he said.

There was a pause.

“I think, dear,” she said, “I have done wrong.”

“Good Lord—you have not!” he replied sharply, pressing back his head to

look at her, for the first time.

“I shall have to send you back to Beatrice and the babies—tomorrow—as

you are now….”

“‘Take no thought for the morrow.’ Be quiet, Helena!” he exclaimed as

the reality bit him. He sat up suddenly.

“Why?” she asked, afraid.

“Why!” he repeated. He remained sitting, leaning forward on the sand,

staring intently at Helena. She looked back in fear at him. The moment

terrified her, and she lost courage.

With a fluttered motion she put her hand on his, which was pressed hard

on the sand as he leaned forward. At once he relaxed his intensity,

laughed, then became tender.

Helena yielded herself like a forlorn child to his arms, and there lay,

half crying, while he smoothed her brow with his fingers, and grains of

sand fell from his palm on her cheek. She shook with dry, withered

sobs, as a child does when it snatches itself away from the lancet of

the doctor and hides in the mother’s bosom, refusing to be touched.

But she knew the morrow was coming, whether or not, and she cowered

down on his breast. She was wild with fear of the parting and the

subsequent days. They must drink, after tomorrow, separate cups. She

was filled with vague terror of what it would be. The sense of the

oneness and unity of their fates was gone.

Siegmund also was cowed by the threat of separation. He had more

definite knowledge of the next move than had Helena. His heart was

certain of calamity, which would overtake him directly. He shrank away.

Wildly he beat about to find a means of escape from the next day and

its consequences. He did not want to go. Anything rather than go back.

In the midst of their passion of fear the moon rose. Siegmund started

to see the rim appear ruddily beyond the sea. His struggling suddenly

ceased, and he watched, spellbound, the oval horn of fiery gold come

up, resolve itself. Some golden liquor dripped and spilled upon the far

waves, where it shook in ruddy splashes. The gold-red cup rose higher,

looming before him very large, yet still not all discovered. By degrees

the horn of gold detached itself from the darkness at back of the

waves. It was immense and terrible. When would the tip be placed upon

the table of the sea?

It stood at last, whole and calm, before him; then the night took up

this drinking-cup of fiery gold, lifting it with majestic movement

overhead, letting stream forth the wonderful unwasted liquor of gold

over the sea—a libation.

Siegmund looked at the shaking flood of gold and paling gold spread

wider as the night upraised the blanching crystal, poured out farther

and farther the immense libation from the whitening cup, till at last

the moon looked frail and empty.

And there, exhaustless in the night, the white light shook on the floor

of the sea. He wondered how it would be gathered up. “I gather it up

into myself,” he said. And the stars and the cliffs and a few trees

were watching, too. “If I have spilled my life,” he thought, “the

unfamiliar eyes of the land and sky will gather it up again.”

Turning to Helena, he found her face white and shining as the empty

moon.

XVII

Towards morning, Siegmund went to sleep. For four hours, until seven

o’clock, the womb of sleep received him and nourished him again.

“But it is finest of all to wake,” he said, as the bright sunshine of

the window, and the lumining green sunshine coming through the lifted

hands of the leaves, challenged him into the open.

The morning was exceedingly fair, and it looked at him so gently that

his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium

glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of

the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful,

offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the

brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. Everything looked at him

with the same eyes of tenderness, offering him, timidly, a little love.

“They are all extraordinarily sweet,” said Siegmund to the full-mouthed

scabious and the awkward, downcast ragwort. Three or four butterflies

fluttered up and down in agitated little leaps, around him.

Instinctively Siegmund put his hand forward to touch them.

“The careless little beggars!” he said.

When he came to the cliff tops there was the morning, very bravely

dressed, rustling forward with a silken sound and much silken shining

to meet him. The battleships had gone; the sea was blue with a _panier_

of diamonds; the sky was full with a misty tenderness like love.

Siegmund had never recognized before the affection that existed between

him and everything. We do not realize how tremendously dear and

indispensable to us are the hosts of common things, till we must leave

them, and we break our hearts.

“We have been very happy together,” everything seemed to say.

Siegmund looked up into the eyes of the morning with a laugh.

“It is very lovely,” he said, “whatever happens.”

So he went down to the beach; his dark blue eyes, darker from last

night’s experience, smiled always with the pride of love. He undressed

by his usual altar-stone.

“How closely familiar everything is,” he thought. “It seems almost as

if the curves of this stone were rounded to fit in my soul.”

He touched the smooth white slope of the stone gently with discovering

fingers, in the same way as he touched the cheek of Helena, or of his

own babies. He found great pleasure in this feeling of intimacy with

things. A very soft wind, shy as a girl, put his arms round him, and

seemed to lay its cheek against his chest. He placed his hands beneath

his arms, where the wind was caressing him, and his eyes opened with

wondering pleasure.

“They find no fault with me,” he said. “I suppose they are as fallible

as I, and so don’t judge,” he added, as he waded thigh-deep into the

water, thrusting it to hear the mock-angry remonstrance.

“Once more,” he said, and he took the sea in his arms. He swam very

quietly. The water buoyed him up, holding him closely clasped. He swam

towards the white rocks of the headlands; they rose before him like

beautiful buttressed gates, so glistening that he half expected to see

fantail pigeons puffing like white irises in the niches, and white

peacocks with dark green feet stepping down the terraces, trailing a

sheen of silver.

“Helena is right,” he said to himself as he swam, scarcely swimming,

but moving upon the bosom of the tide; “she is right, it is all

enchanted. I have got into her magic at last. Let us see what it is

like.”

He determined to visit again his little bay. He swam carefully round

the terraces, whose pale shadows through the swift-spinning emerald

facets of the water seemed merest fancy. Siegmund touched them with his

foot; they were hard, cold, dangerous. He swam carefully. As he made

for the archway, the shadows of the headland chilled the water. There

under water, clamouring in a throng at the base of the submerged walls,

were sea-women with dark locks, and young sea-girls, with soft hair,

vividly green, striving to climb up out of the darkness into the

morning, their hair swirling in abandon. Siegmund was half afraid of

their frantic efforts.

But the tide carried him swiftly through the high gate into the porch.

There was exultance in this sweeping entry. The skin-white,

full-fleshed walls of the archway were dappled with green lights that

danced in and out among themselves. Siegmund was carried along in an

invisible chariot, beneath the jewel-stained walls. The tide swerved,

threw him as he swam against the inward-curving white rock; his elbow

met the rock, and he was sick with pain. He held his breath, trying to

get back the joy and magic. He could not believe that the lovely,

smooth side of the rock, fair as his own side with its ripple of

muscles, could have hurt him thus. He let the water carry him till he

might climb out on to the shingle. There he sat upon a warm boulder,

and twisted to look at his arm. The skin was grazed, not very badly,

merely a ragged scarlet patch no bigger than a carnation petal. The

bruise, however, was painful, especially when, a minute or two later,

he bent his arm.

“No,” said he pitiably to himself, “it is impossible it should have

hurt me. I suppose I was careless.”

Nevertheless, the aspect of the morning changed. He sat on the boulder

looking out on the sea. The azure sky and the sea laughed on, holding a

bright conversation one with another. The two headlands of the tiny bay

gossiped across the street of water. All the boulders and pebbles of

the sea-shore played together.

“Surely,” said Siegmund, “they take no notice of me; they do not care a

jot or a tittle for me. I am a fool to think myself one with them.”

He contrasted this with the kindness of the morning as he had stood on

the cliffs.

“I was mistaken,” he said. “It was an illusion.”

He looked wistfully out again. Like neighbours leaning from opposite

windows of an overhanging street, the headlands were occupied one with

another. White rocks strayed out to sea, followed closely by other

white rocks. Everything was busy, interested, occupied with its own

pursuit and with its own comrades. Siegmund alone was without pursuit

or comrade.

“They will all go on the same; they will be just as gay. Even Helena,

after a while, will laugh and take interest in others. What do I

matter?”

Siegmund thought of the futility of death:

We are not long for music and laughter,

Love and desire and hate;

I think we have no portion in them after

We pass the gate.

“Why should I be turned out of the game?” he asked himself, rebelling.

He frowned, and answered: “Oh, Lord!—the old argument!”

But the thought of his own expunging from the picture was very bitter.

“Like the puff from the steamer’s funnel, I should be gone.”

He looked at himself, at his limbs and his body in the pride of his

maturity. He was very beautiful to himself.

“Nothing, in the place where I am,” he said. “Gone, like a puff of

steam that melts on the sunshine.”

Again Siegmund looked at the sea. It was glittering with laughter as at

a joke.

“And I,” he said, lying down in the warm sand, “I am nothing. I do not

count; I am inconsiderable.”

He set his teeth with pain. There were no tears, there was no relief. A

convulsive gasping shook him as he lay on the sands. All the while he

was arguing with himself.

“Well,” he said, “if I am nothing dead I am nothing alive.”

But the vulgar proverb arose—“Better a live dog than a dead lion,” to

answer him. It seemed an ignominy to be dead. It meant, to be

overlooked, even by the smallest creature of God’s earth. Surely that

was a great ignominy.