sea-shore with him. She was no swimmer. Her endless delight was to
explore, to discover small treasures. For her the world was still a
great wonder-box which hid innumerable sweet toys for surprises in all
its crevices. She had bathed in many rock-pools’ tepid baths, trying
first one, then another. She had lain on the sand where the cold arms
of the ocean lifted her and smothered her impetuously, like an awful
lover.
“The sea is a great deal like Siegmund,” she said, as she rose panting,
trying to dash her nostrils free from water. It was true; the sea as it
flung over her filled her with the same uncontrollable terror as did
Siegmund when he sometimes grew silent and strange in a tide of
passion.
She wandered back to her rock-pools; they were bright and docile; they
did not fling her about in a game of terror. She bent over watching the
anemone’s fleshy petals shrink from the touch of her shadow, and she
laughed to think they should be so needlessly fearful. The flowing tide
trickled noiselessly among the rocks, widening and deepening
insidiously her little pools. Helena retreated towards a large cave
round the bend. There the water gurgled under the bladder-wrack of the
large stones; the air was cool and clammy. She pursued her way into the
gloom, bending, though there was no need, shivering at the coarse feel
of the seaweed beneath her naked feet. The water came rustling up
beneath the fucus as she crept along on the big stones; it returned
with a quiet gurgle which made her shudder, though even that was not
disagreeable. It needed, for all that, more courage than was easy to
summon before she could step off her stone into the black pool that
confronted her. It was festooned thick with weeds that slid under her
feet like snakes. She scrambled hastily upwards towards the outlet.
Turning, the ragged arch was before heir, brighter than the brightest
window. It was easy to believe the light-fairies stood outside in a
throng, excited with fine fear, throwing handfuls of light into the
dragon’s hole.
“How surprised they will be to see me!” said Helena, scrambling
forward, laughing.
She stood still in the archway, astounded. The sea was blazing with
white fire, and glowing with azure as coals glow red with heat below
the flames. The sea was transfused with white burning, while over it
hung the blue sky in a glory, like the blue smoke of the fire of God.
Helena stood still and worshipped. It was a moment of astonishment,
when she stood breathless and blinded, involuntarily offering herself
for a thank-offering. She felt herself confronting God at home in His
white incandescence, His fire settling on her like the Holy Spirit. Her
lips were parted in a woman’s joy of adoration.
The moment passed, and her thoughts hurried forward in confusion.
“It is good,” said Helena; “it is very good.” She looked again, and saw
the waves like a line of children racing hand in hand, the sunlight
pursuing, catching hold of them from behind, as they ran wildly till
they fell, caught, with the sunshine dancing upon them like a white
dog.
“It is really wonderful here!” said she; but the moment had gone, she
could not see again the grand burning of God among the waves. After a
while she turned away.
As she stood dabbling her bathing-dress in a pool, Siegmund came over
the beach to her.
“You are not gone, then?” he said.
“Siegmund!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with radiant eyes, as if
it could not be possible that he had joined her in this rare place. His
face was glowing with the sun’s inflaming, but Helena did not notice
that his eyes were full of misery.
“I, actually,” he said, smiling.
“I did not expect you,” she said, still looking at him in radiant
wonder. “I could easier have expected”—she hesitated, struggled, and
continued—“Eros walking by the sea. But you are like him,” she said,
looking radiantly up into Siegmund’s face. “Isn’t it beautiful this
morning?” she added.
Siegmund endured her wide, glad look for a moment, then he stooped and
kissed her. He remained moving his hand in the pool, ashamed, and full
of contradiction. He was at the bitter point of farewell; could see,
beyond the glamour around him, the ugly building of his real life.
“Isn’t the sea wonderful this morning?” asked Helena, as she wrung the
water from her costume.
“It is very fine,” he answered. He refrained from saying what his heart
said: “It is my last morning; it is not yours. It is my last morning,
and the sea is enjoying the joke, and you are full of delight.”
“Yes,” said Siegmund, “the morning is perfect.”
“It is,” assented Helena warmly. “Have you noticed the waves? They are
like a line of children chased by a white dog.”
“Ay!” said Siegmund.
“Didn’t you have a good time?” she asked, touching with her finger-tips
the nape of his neck as he stooped beside her.
“I swam to my little bay again,” he replied.
“Did you?” she exclaimed, pleased.
She sat down by the pool, in which she washed her feet free from sand,
holding them to Siegmund to dry.
“I am very hungry,” she said.
“And I,” he agreed.
“I feel quite established here,” she said gaily, something in his
position having reminded her of their departure.
He laughed.
“It seems another eternity before the three-forty-five train, doesn’t
it?” she insisted.
“I wish we might never go back,” he said.
Helena sighed.
“It would be too much for life to give. We have had something,
Siegmund,” she said.
He bowed his head, and did not answer.
“It has been something, dear,” she repeated.
He rose and took her in his arms.
“Everything,” he said, his face muffled in the shoulder of her dress.
He could smell her fresh and fine from the sea. “Everything!” he said.
She pressed her two hands on his head.
“I did well, didn’t I, Siegmund?” she asked. Helena felt the
responsibility of this holiday. She had proposed it; when he had
withdrawn, she had insisted, refusing to allow him to take back his
word, declaring that she should pay the cost. He permitted her at last.
“Wonderfully well, Helena,” he replied.
She kissed his forehead.
“You are everything,” he said.
She pressed his head on her bosom.
XVIII
Siegmund had shaved and dressed, and come down to breakfast. Mrs
Curtiss brought in the coffee. She was a fragile little woman, of
delicate, gentle manner.
“The water would be warm this morning,” she said, addressing no one in
particular.
Siegmund stood on the hearth-rug with his hands behind him, swaying
from one leg to the other. He was embarrassed always by the presence of
the amiable little woman; he could not feel at ease before strangers,
in his capacity of accepted swain of Helena.
“It was,” assented Helena. “It was as warm as new milk.”
“Ay, it would be,” said the old lady, looking in admiration upon the
experience of Siegmund and his beloved. “And did ye see the ships of
war?” she asked.
“No, they had gone,” replied Helena.
Siegmund swayed from foot to foot, rhythmically.
“You’ll be coming in to dinner today?” asked the old lady.
Helena arranged the matter.
“I think ye both look better,” Mrs. Curtiss said. She glanced at
Siegmund.
He smiled constrainedly.
“I thought ye looked so worn when you came,” she said sympathetically.
“He had been working hard,” said Helena, also glancing at him.
He bent his head, and was whistling without making any sound.
“Ay,” sympathized the little woman. “And it’s a very short time for
you. What a pity ye can’t stop for the fireworks at Cowes on Monday.
They are grand, so they say.”
Helena raised her eyebrows in polite interest. “Have you never seen
them?” she asked.
“No,” replied Mrs. Curtiss. “I’ve never been able to get; but I hope to
go yet.”
“I hope you may,” said Siegmund.
The little woman beamed on him. Having won a word from him, she was
quite satisfied.
“Well,” she said brightly, “the eggs must be done by now.”
She tripped out, to return directly.
“I’ve brought you,” she said, “some of the Island cream, and some white
currants, if ye’ll have them. You must think well of the Island, and
come back.”
“How could we help?” laughed Helena.
“We will,” smiled Siegmund.
When finally the door was closed on her, Siegmund sat down in relief.
Helena looked in amusement at him. She was perfectly self-possessed in
presence of the delightful little lady.
“This is one of the few places that has ever felt like home to me,” she
said. She lifted a tangled bunch of fine white currants.
“Ah!” exclaimed Siegmund, smiling at her.
“One of the few places where everything is friendly,” she said. “And
everybody.”
“You have made so many enemies?” he asked, with gentle irony.
“Strangers,” she replied. “I seem to make strangers of all the people I
meet.”
She laughed in amusement at this _mot_. Siegmund looked at her
intently. He was thinking of her left alone amongst strangers.
“Need we go—need we leave this place of friends?” he said, as if
ironically. He was very much afraid of tempting her.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and counted: “One, two,
three, four, five hours, thirty-five minutes. It is an age yet,” she
laughed.
Siegmund laughed too, as he accepted the particularly fine bunch of
currants she had extricated for him.
XIX
The air was warm and sweet in the little lane, remote from the sea,
which led them along their last walk. On either side the white path was
a grassy margin thickly woven with pink convolvuli. Some of the
reckless little flowers, so gay and evanescent, had climbed the trunks
of an old yew tree, and were looking up pertly at their rough host.
Helena walked along, watching the flowers, and making fancies out of
them.
“Who called them ‘fairies’ telephones’?” she said to herself. “They are
tiny children in pinafores. How gay they are! They are children
dawdling along the pavement of a morning. How fortunate they are! See
how they take a wind-thrill! See how wide they are set to the sunshine!
And when they are tired, they will curl daintily to sleep, and some
fairies in the dark will gather them away. They won’t be here in the
morning, shrivelled and dowdy … If only we could curl up and be gone,
after our day….”
She looked at Siegmund. He was walking moodily beside her.
“It is good when life holds no anti-climax,” she said.
“Ay!” he answered. Of course, he could not understand her meaning.
She strayed into the thick grass, a sturdy white figure that walked
with bent head, abstract, but happy.
“What is she thinking?” he asked himself. “She is sufficient to
herself—she doesn’t want me. She has her own private way of communing
with things, and is friends with them.”
“The dew has been very heavy,” she said, turning, and looking up at him
from under her brows, like a smiling witch.
“I see it has,” he answered. Then to himself he said: “She can’t
translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can’t
render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto
herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to
bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not
indispensable….”
The lane led up to the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on
the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low
roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was
edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white flowers
brilliant with dew.
A stout man in an alpaca jacket and panama hat was seated on the bare
lawn, his back to the sun, reading a newspaper. He tried in vain to
avoid the glare of the sun on his reading. At last he closed the paper
and looked angrily at the house—not at anything in particular.
He irritably read a few more lines, then jerked up his head in sudden
decision, glared at the open door of the house, and called:
“Amy! Amy!”
No answer was forthcoming. He flung down the paper and strode off
indoors, his mien one of wrathful resolution. His voice was heard
calling curtly from the dining-room. There was a jingle of crockery as
he bumped the table leg in sitting down.
“He is in a bad temper,” laughed Siegmund.
“Breakfast is late,” said Helena with contempt.
“Look!” said Siegmund.
An elderly lady in black and white striped linen, a young lady in
holland, both carrying some wild flowers, hastened towards the garden
gate. Their faces were turned anxiously to the house. They were hot
with hurrying, and had no breath for words. The girl pressed forward,
opened the gate for the lady in striped linen, who hastened over the
lawn. Then the daughter followed, and vanished also under the shady
veranda.
There was a quick sound of women’s low, apologetic voices, overridden
by the resentful abuse of the man.
The lovers moved out of hearing.
“Imagine that breakfast-table!” said Siegmund.
“I feel,” said Helena, with a keen twang of contempt in her voice, “as
if a fussy cock and hens had just scuffled across my path.”
“There are many such roosts,” said Siegmund pertinently.
Helena’s cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him
winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the
next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of
humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had
fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of
self-esteem tortured him to the end.
Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some
time she had confused Siegmund with her god. Yesterday she had cried to
her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side
of his tortured self-respect.
“At least,” he said, in mortification of himself—“at least, someone
must recognize a strain of God in me—and who does? I don’t believe in
it myself.”
And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized
passion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a
brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore,
and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the
shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he
would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do?
“You know, Domine,” said Helena—it was his old nickname she used—“you
look quite stern today.”
“I feel anything but stern,” he laughed. “Weaker than usual, in fact.”
“Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly
gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you—you seem so
grave.”
He laughed.
“And shall I not be brave?” he said. “Can’t you smell _Fumum et opes
strepitumque Romae_?” He turned quickly to Helena. “I wonder if that’s
right,” he said. “It’s years since I did a line of Latin, and I thought
it had all gone.”
“In the first place, what does it mean?” said Helena calmly, “for I can
only half translate. I have thrown overboard all my scrap-books of such
stuff.”
“Why,” said Siegmund, rather abashed, “only ‘the row and the smoke of
Rome’. But it is remarkable, Helena”—here the peculiar look of interest
came on his face again—“it is really remarkable that I should have said
that.”
“Yes, you look surprised,” smiled she.
“But it must be twenty”—he counted—“twenty-two or three years since I
learned that, and I forgot it—goodness knows how long ago. Like a
drowning man, I have these memories before….” He broke off, smiling
mockingly, to tease her.
“Before you go back to London,” said she, in a matter-of-fact, almost
ironical tone. She was inscrutable. This morning she could not bear to
let any deep emotion come uppermost. She wanted rest. “No,” she said,
with calm distinctness, a few moments after, when they were climbing
the rise to the cliff’s edge. “I can’t say that I smell the smoke of
London. The mist-curtain is thick yet. There it is”—she pointed to the
heavy, purple-grey haze that hung like arras on a wall, between the
sloping sky and the sea. She thought of yesterday morning’s
mist-curtain, thick and blazing gold, so heavy that no wind could sway
its fringe.
They lay down in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird’s-foot
trefoil of the cliff’s edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm
drooped over everything.
“Six hours,” thought Helena, “and we shall have passed the
mist-curtain. Already it is thinning. I could break it open with waving
my hand. I will not wave my hand.”
She was exhausted by the suffering of the last night, so she refused to
allow any emotion to move her this morning, till she was strong.
Siegmund was also exhausted; but his thoughts laboured like ants, in
spite of himself, striving towards a conclusion.
Helena had rejected him. In his heart he felt that in this love affair
also he had been a failure. No matter how he contradicted himself, and
said it was absurd to imagine he was a failure as Helena’s lover, yet
he felt a physical sensation of defeat, a kind of knot in his breast
which neither reason, nor dialectics, nor circumstance, not even
Helena, could untie. He had failed as lover to Helena.
It was not surprising his marriage with Beatrice should prove
disastrous. Rushing into wedlock as he had done, at the ripe age of
seventeen, he had known nothing of his woman, nor she of him. When his
mind and soul set to develop, as Beatrice could not sympathize with his
interests, he naturally inclined away from her, so that now, after
twenty years, he was almost a stranger to her. That was not very
surprising.
But why should he have failed with Helena?
The bees droned fitfully over the scented grass, aimlessly swinging in
the heat. Siegmund watched one gold and amber fellow lazily let go a
white clover-head, and boom in a careless curve out to sea, humming
softer and softer as he reeled along in the giddy space.
“The little fool!” said Siegmund, watching the black dot swallowed into
the light.
No ship sailed the curving sea. The light danced in a whirl upon the
ripples. Everything else watched with heavy eyes of heat enhancement
the wild spinning of the lights.
“Even if I were free,” he continued to think, “we should only grow
apart, Helena and I. She would leave me. This time I should be the
laggard. She is young and vigorous; I am beginning to set.
“Is that why I have failed? I ought to have had her in love
sufficiently to keep her these few days. I am not quick. I do not
follow her or understand her swiftly enough. And I am always timid of
compulsion. I cannot compel anybody to follow me.
“So we are here. I am out of my depth. Like the bee, I was mad with the
sight of so much joy, such a blue space, and now I shall find no
footing to alight on. I have flown out into life beyond my strength to
get back. When can I set my feet on when this is gone?”
The sun grew stronger. Slower and more slowly went the hawks of
Siegmund’s mind, after the quarry of conclusion. He lay bare-headed,
looking out to sea. The sun was burning deeper into his face and head.
“I feel as if it were burning into me,” thought Siegmund abstractedly.
“It is certainly consuming some part of me. Perhaps it is making me
ill.” Meanwhile, perversely, he gave his face and his hot black hair to
the sun.
Helena lay in what shadow he afforded. The heat put out all her
thought-activity. Presently she said:
“This heat is terrible, Siegmund. Shall we go down to the water?”
They climbed giddily down the cliff path. Already they were somewhat
sun-intoxicated. Siegmund chose the hot sand, where no shade was, on
which to lie.
“Shall we not go under the rocks?” said Helena.
“Look!” he said, “the sun is beating on the cliffs. It is hotter, more
suffocating, there.”
So they lay down in the glare, Helena watching the foam retreat slowly
with a cool splash; Siegmund thinking. The naked body of heat was
dreadful.
“My arms, Siegmund,” said she. “They feel as if they were dipped in
fire.”
Siegmund took them, without a word, and hid them under his coat.
“Are you sure it is not bad for you—your head, Siegmund? Are you sure?”
He laughed stupidly.
“That is all right,” he said. He knew that the sun was burning through
him, and doing him harm, but he wanted the intoxication.
As he looked wistfully far away over the sea at Helena’s mist-curtain,
he said:
“I _think_ we should be able to keep together if”—he faltered—“if only
I could have you a little longer. I have never had you …”
Some sound of failure, some tone telling her it was too late, some ring
of despair in his quietness, made Helena cling to him wildly, with a
savage little cry as if she were wounded. She clung to him, almost
beside herself. She could not lose him, she could not spare him. She
would not let him go. Helena was, for the moment, frantic.
He held her safely, saying nothing until she was calmer, when, with his
lips on her cheek, he murmured:
“I should be able, shouldn’t I, Helena?”
“You are always able!” she cried. “It is I who play with you at
hiding.”
“I have really had you so little,” he said.
“Can’t you forget it, Siegmund?” she cried. “Can’t you forget it? It
was only a shadow, Siegmund. It was a lie, it was nothing real. Can’t
you forget it, dear?”
“You can’t do without me?” he asked.
“If I lose you I am lost,” answered she with swift decision. She had no
knowledge of weeping, yet her tears were wet on his face. He held her
safely; her arms were hidden under his coat.
“I will have no mercy on those shadows the next time they come between
us,” said Helena to herself. “They may go back to hell.”
She still clung to him, craving so to have him that he could not be
reft away.
Siegmund felt very peaceful. He lay with his arms about her, listening
to the backward-creeping tide. All his thoughts, like bees, were flown
out to sea and lost.
“If I had her more, I should understand her through and through. If we
were side by side we should grow together. If we could stay here, I
should get stronger and more upright.”
This was the poor heron of quarry the hawks of his mind had struck.
Another hour fell like a foxglove bell from the stalk. There were only
two red blossoms left. Then the stem would have set to seed. Helena
leaned her head upon the breast of Siegmund, her arms clasping, under
his coat, his body, which swelled and sank gently, with the quiet of
great power.
“If,” thought she, “the whole clock of the world could stand still now,
and leave us thus, me with the lift and fall of the strong body of
Siegmund in my arms….”
But the clock ticked on in the heat, the seconds marked off by the
falling of the waves, repeated so lightly, and in such fragile rhythm,
that it made silence sweet.
“If now,” prayed Siegmund, “death would wipe the sweat from me, and it
were dark….”
But the waves softly marked the minutes, retreating farther, leaving
the bare rocks to bleach and the weed to shrivel.
Gradually, like the shadow on a dial, the knowledge that it was time to
rise and go crept upon them. Although they remained silent, each knew
that the other felt the same weight of responsibility, the
shadow-finger of the sundial travelling over them. The alternative was,
not to return, to let the finger travel and be gone. But then … Helena
knew she must not let the time cross her; she must rise before it was
too late, and travel before the coming finger. Siegmund hoped she would
not get up. He lay in suspense, waiting.
At last she sat up abruptly.
“It is time, Siegmund,” she said.
He did not answer, he did not look at her, but lay as she had left him.
She wiped her face with her handkerchief, waiting. Then she bent over
him. He did not look at her. She saw his forehead was swollen and
inflamed with the sun. Very gently she wiped from it the glistening
sweat. He closed his eyes, and she wiped his cheeks and his mouth.
Still he did not look at her. She bent very close to him, feeling her
heart crushed with grief for him.
“We must go, Siegmund,” she whispered.
“All right,” he said, but still he did not move.
She stood up beside him, shook herself, and tried to get a breath of
air. She was dazzled blind by the sunshine.
Siegmund lay in the bright light, with his eyes closed, never moving.
His face was inflamed, but fixed like a mask.
Helena waited, until the terror of the passing of the hour was too
strong for her. She lifted his hand, which lay swollen with heat on the
sand, and she tried gently to draw him.
“We shall be too late,” she said in distress.
He sighed and sat up, looking out over the water.
Helena could not bear to see him look so vacant and expressionless. She
put her arm round his neck, and pressed his head against her skirt.
Siegmund knew he was making it unbearable for her. Pulling himself
together, he bent his head from the sea, and said:
“Why, what time is it?”
He took out his watch, holding it in his hand. Helena still held his
left hand, and had one arm round his neck.
“I can’t see the figures,” he said. “Everything is dimmed, as if it
were coming dark.”
“Yes,” replied Helena, in that reedy, painful tone of hers. “My eyes
were the same. It is the strong sunlight.”
“I can’t,” he repeated, and he was rather surprised—“I can’t see the
time. Can you?”
She stooped down and looked.
“It is half past one,” she said.
Siegmund hated her voice as she spoke. There was still sufficient time
to catch the train. He stood up, moved inside his clothing, saying: “I
feel almost stunned by the heat. I can hardly see, and all my feeling
in my body is dulled.”
“Yes,” answered Helena, “I am afraid it will do you harm.”
“At any rate,” he smiled as if sleepily, “I have had enough. If it’s
too much—what _is_ too much?”
They went unevenly over the sand, their eyes sun-dimmed.
“We are going back—we are going back!” the heart of Helena seemed to
run hot, beating these words.
They climbed the cliff path toilsomely. Standing at the top, on the
edge of the grass, they looked down the cliffs at the beach and over
the sea. The strand was wide, forsaken by the sea, forlorn with rocks
bleaching in the sun, and sand and seaweed breathing off their painful
scent upon the heat. The sea crept smaller, farther away; the sky stood
still. Siegmund and Helena looked hopelessly out on their beautiful,
incandescent world. They looked hopelessly at each other, Siegmund’s
mood was gentle and forbearing. He smiled faintly at Helena, then
turned, and, lifting his hand to his mouth in a kiss for the beauty he
had enjoyed, “_Addio_!” he said.
He turned away, and, looking from Helena landwards, he said, smiling
peculiarly:
“It reminds me of Traviata—an ‘_Addio_’ at every verse-end.”
She smiled with her mouth in acknowledgement of his facetious irony; it
jarred on her. He was pricked again by her supercilious reserve.
“_Addi-i-i-i-o, Addi-i-i-o_!” he whistled between his teeth, hissing
out the Italian’s passion-notes in a way that made Helena clench her
fists.
“I suppose,” she said, swallowing, and recovering her voice to check
this discord—“I suppose we shall have a fairly easy journey—Thursday.”
“I don’t know,” said Siegmund.
“There will not be very many people,” she insisted.
“I think,” he said, in a very quiet voice, “you’d better let me go by
the South-Western from Portsmouth while you go on by the Brighton.”
“But why?” she exclaimed in astonishment.
“I don’t want to sit looking at you all the way,” he said.
“But why should you?” she exclaimed.
He laughed.
“Indeed, no!” she said. “We shall go together.”
“Very well,” he answered.
They walked on in silence towards the village. As they drew near the
little post office, he said:
“I suppose I may as well wire them that I shall be home tonight.”
“You haven’t sent them any word?” she asked.
He laughed. They came to the open door of the little shop. He stood
still, not entering. Helena wondered what he was thinking.
“Shall I?” he asked, meaning, should he wire to Beatrice. His manner
was rather peculiar.
“Well, I should think so,” faltered Helena, turning away to look at the
postcards in the window. Siegmund entered the shop. It was dark and
cumbered with views, cheap china ornaments, and toys. He asked for a
telegraph form.
“My God!” he said to himself bitterly as he took the pencil. He could
not sign the abbreviated name his wife used towards him. He scribbled
his surname, as he would have done to a stranger. As he watched the
amiable, stout woman counting up his words carefully, pointing with her
finger, he felt sick with irony.
“That’s right,” she said, picking up the sixpence and taking the form
to the instrument. “What beautiful weather!” she continued. “It will be
making you sorry to leave us.”
“There goes my warrant,” thought Siegmund, watching the flimsy bit of
paper under the post-mistress’s heavy hand.
“Yes—it is too bad, isn’t it,” he replied, bowing and laughing to the
woman.
“It is, sir,” she answered pleasantly. “Good morning.”
He came out of the shop still smiling, and when Helena turned from the
postcards to look at him, the lines of laughter remained over his face
like a mask. She glanced at his eyes for a sign; his facial expression
told her nothing; his eyes were just as inscrutable, which made her
falter with dismay.
“What is he thinking of?” she asked herself. Her thoughts flashed back.
“And why did he ask me so peculiarly whether he should wire them at
home?”
“Well,” said Siegmund, “are there any postcards?”
“None that I care to take,” she replied. “Perhaps you would like one of
these?”
She pointed to some faded-looking cards which proved to be imaginary
views of Alum Bay done in variegated sand. Siegmund smiled.
“I wonder if they dribbled the sand on with a fine glass tube,” he
said.
“Or a brush,” said Helena.
“She does not understand,” said Siegmund to himself. “And whatever I do
I must not tell her. I should have thought she would understand.”
As he walked home beside her there mingled with his other feelings
resentment against her. Almost he hated her.
XX
At first they had a carriage to themselves. They sat opposite each
other with averted faces, looking out of the windows and watching the
houses, the downs dead asleep in the sun, the embankments of the
railway with exhausted hot flowers go slowly past out of their reach.
They felt as if they were being dragged away like criminals. Unable to
speak or think, they stared out of the windows, Helena struggling in
vain to keep back her tears, Siegmund labouring to breathe normally.
At Yarmouth the door was snatched open, and there was a confusion of
shouting and running; a swarm of humanity, clamouring, attached itself
at the carriage doorway, which was immediately blocked by a stout man
who heaved a leather bag in front of him as he cried in German that
here was room for all. Faces innumerable—hot, blue-eyed faces—strained
to look over his shoulders at the shocked girl and the amazed Siegmund.
There entered eight Germans into the second-class compartment, five men
and three ladies. When at last the luggage was stowed away they sank
into the seats. The last man on either side to be seated lowered
himself carefully, like a wedge, between his two neighbours. Siegmund
watched the stout man, the one who had led the charge, settling himself
between his large lady and the small Helena. The latter crushed herself
against the side of the carriage. The German’s hips came down tight
against her. She strove to lessen herself against the window, to escape
the pressure of his flesh, whose heat was transmitted to her. The man
squeezed in the opposite direction.
“I am afraid I press you,” he said, smiling in his gentle, chivalric
German fashion. Helena glanced swiftly at him. She liked his grey eyes,
she liked the agreeable intonation, and the pleasant sound of his
words.
“Oh no,” she answered. “You do not crush me.”
Almost before she had finished the words she turned away to the window.
The man seemed to hesitate a moment, as if recovering himself from a
slight rebuff, before he could address his lady with the good-humoured
remark in German: “Well, and have we not managed it very nicely, eh?”
The whole party began to talk in German with great animation. They told
each other of the quaint ways of this or the other; they joked loudly
over “Billy”—this being a nickname discovered for the German
Emperor—and what he would be saying of the Czar’s trip; they questioned
each other, and answered each other concerning the places they were
going to see, with great interest, displaying admirable knowledge. They
were pleased with everything; they extolled things English.
Helena’s stout neighbour, who, it seemed, was from Dresden, began to
tell anecdotes. He was a _raconteur_ of the naïve type: he talked with
face, hands, with his whole body. Now and again he would give little
spurts in his seat. After one of these he must have become aware of
Helena—who felt as if she were enveloped by a soft stove—struggling to
escape his compression. He stopped short, lifted his hat, and smiling
beseechingly, said in his persuasive way:
“I am sorry. I am sorry. I compress you!” He glanced round in
perplexity, seeking some escape or remedy. Finding none, he turned to
her again, after having squeezed hard against his lady to free Helena,
and said:
“Forgive me, I am sorry.”
“You are forgiven,” replied Helena, suddenly smiling into his face with
her rare winsomeness. The whole party, attentive, relaxed into a smile
at this. The good humour was complete.
“Thank you,” said the German gratefully.
Helena turned away. The talk began again like the popping of corn; the
_raconteur_ resumed his anecdote. Everybody was waiting to laugh.
Helena rapidly wearied of trying to follow the tale. Siegmund had made
no attempt. He had watched, with the others, the German’s apologies,
and the sight of his lover’s face had moved him more than he could
tell.
She had a peculiar, childish wistfulness at times, and with this an
intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should
never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement
between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown
race that never can tell its own story. This feeling always moved
Siegmund’s pity to its deepest, leaving him poignantly helpless. This
same foreignness, revealed in other ways, sometimes made him hate her.
It was as if she would sacrifice him rather than renounce her foreign
birth. There was something in her he could never understand, so that
never, never could he say he was master of her as she was of him the
mistress.
As she smiled and turned away from the German, mute, uncomplaining,
like a child wise in sorrow beyond its years, Siegmund’s resentment
against her suddenly took fire, and blazed him with sheer pain of pity.
She was very small. Her quiet ways, and sometimes her impetuous
clinging made her seem small; for she was very strong. But Siegmund saw
her now, small, quiet, uncomplaining, living for him who sat and looked
at her. But what would become of her when he had left her, when she was
alone, little foreigner as she was, in this world, which apologizes
when it has done the hurt, too blind to see beforehand? Helena would be
left behind; death was no way for her. She could not escape thus with
him from this house of strangers which she called “life”. She had to go
on alone, like a foreigner who cannot learn the strange language.
“What will she do?” Siegmund asked himself, “when her loneliness comes
upon her like a horror, and she has no one to go to. She will come to
the memory of me for a while, and that will take her over till her
strength is established. But what then?”
Siegmund could find no answer. He tried to imagine her life. It would
go on, after his death, just in the same way, for a while, and then? He
had not the faintest knowledge of how she would develop. What would she
do when she was thirty-eight, and as old as himself? He could not
conceive. Yet she would not die, of that he was certain.
Siegmund suddenly realized that he knew nothing of her life, her real
inner life. She was a book written in characters unintelligible to him
and to everybody. He was tortured with the problem of her till it
became acute, and he felt as if his heart would burst inside him. As a
boy he had experienced the same sort of feeling after wrestling for an
hour with a problem in Euclid, for he was capable of great
concentration.
He felt Helena looking at him. Turning, he found her steady, unswerving
eyes fixed on him, so that he shrank confused from them. She smiled: by
an instinctive movement she made him know that she wanted him to hold
her hand. He leaned forward and put his hand over hers. She had
peculiar hands, small, with a strange, delightful silkiness. Often they
were cool or cold; generally they lay unmoved within his clasp, but
then they were instinct with life, not inert. Sometimes he would feel a
peculiar jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held
her hand. Occasionally it was almost painful, and felt as if a little
virtue were passing out of his blood. But that he dismissed as
nonsense.
The Germans were still rattling away, perspiring freely, wiping their
faces with their handkerchiefs as they laughed, moving inside their
clothing, which was sticking to their sides. Siegmund had not noticed
them for some time, he was so much absorbed. But Helena, though she
sympathized with her fellow-passengers, was tormented almost beyond
endurance by the noise, the heat of her neighbour’s body, the
atmosphere of the crowded carriage, and her own emotion. The only thing
that could relieve her was the hand of Siegmund soothing her in its
hold.
She looked at him with the same steadiness which made her eyes feel
heavy upon him, and made him shrink. She wanted his strength of nerve
to support her, and he submitted at once, his one aim being to give her
out of himself whatever she wanted.
XXI
The tall white yachts in a throng were lounging off the roads of Ryde.
It was near the regatta time, so these proud creatures had flown
loftily together, and now flitted hither and thither among themselves,
like a concourse of tall women, footing the waves with superb touch. To
Siegmund they were very beautiful, but removed from him, as dancers
crossing the window-lights are removed from the man who looks up from
the street. He saw the Solent and the world of glamour flying gay as
snow outside, where inside was only Siegmund, tired, dispirited,
without any joy.
He and Helena had climbed among coils of rope on to the prow of their
steamer, so they could catch a little spray of speed on their faces to
stimulate them. The sea was very bright and crowded. White sails leaned
slightly and filed along the roads; two yachts with sails of amber
floated, it seemed, without motion, amid the eclipsed blue of the day;
small boats with red and yellow flags fluttered quickly, trailing the
sea with colour; a pleasure steamer coming from Cowes swung her soft
stout way among the fleeting ships; high in the background were
men-of-war, a long line, each one threading tiny triangles of flags
through a sky dim with distance.
“It is all very glad,” said Siegmund to himself, “but it seems to be
fanciful.”
He was out of it. Already he felt detached from life. He belonged to
his destination. It is always so: we have no share in the beauty that
lies between us and our goal.
Helena watched with poignant sorrow all the agitation of colour on the
blue afternoon.
“We must leave it; we must pass out of it,” she lamented, over and over
again. Each new charm she caught eagerly.
“I like the steady purpose of that brown-sailed tramp,” she said to
herself, watching a laden coaster making for Portsmouth.
They were still among the small shipping of Ryde. Siegmund and Helena,
as they looked out, became aware of a small motor-launch heading across
their course towards a yacht whose tall masts were drawn clean on the
sky. The eager launch, its nose up as if to breathe, was racing over
the swell like a coursing dog. A lady, in white, and a lad with dark
head and white jersey were leaning in the bows; a gentleman was bending
over some machinery in the middle of the boat, while the sailor in the
low stern was also stooping forward attending to something. The steamer
was sweeping onwards, huge above the water; the dog of a boat was
coursing straight across her track. The lady saw the danger first.
Stretching forward, she seized the arm of the lad and held him firm,
making no sound, but watching the forward menace of the looming
steamer.
“Look!” cried Helena, catching hold of Siegmund. He was already
watching. Suddenly the steamer bell clanged. The gentleman looked up,
with startled, sunburned face; then he leaped to the stern. The launch
veered. It and the steamer closed together like a pair of scissors. The
lady, still holding the boy, looked up with an expressionless face at
the high sweeping chisel of the steamer’s bows; the husband stood
rigid, staring ahead. No sound was to be heard save the rustling of
water under the bows. The scissors closed, the launch skelped forward
like a dog from in front of the traffic. It escaped by a yard or two.
Then, like a dog, it seemed to look round. The gentleman in the stern
glanced back quickly. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with dark
eyes. His face was as if carven out of oak, set and grey-brown. Then he
looked to the steering of his boat. No one had uttered a sound. From
the tiny boat coursing low on the water, not a sound, only tense
waiting. The launch raced out of danger towards the yacht. The
gentleman, with a brief gesture, put his man in charge again, whilst he
himself went forward to the lady. He was a handsome man, very proud in
his movements; and she, in her bearing, was prouder still. She received
him almost with indifference.
Helena turned to Siegmund. He took both her hands and pressed them,
whilst she looked at him with eyes blind with emotion. She was white to
the lips, and heaving like the buoy in the wake of the steamer. The
noise of life had suddenly been hushed, and each heart had heard for a
moment the noiselessness of death. How everyone was white and gasping!
They strove, on every hand, to fill the day with noise and the colour
of life again.
“By Jove, that was a near thing!”
“Ah, that has made me feel bad!” said a woman.
“A French yacht,” said somebody.
Helena was waiting for the voice of Siegmund. But he did not know what
to say. Confused, he repeated:
“That was a close shave.”
Helena clung to him, searching his face. She felt his difference from
herself. There was something in his experience that made him different,
quiet, with a peculiar expression as if he were pained.
“Ah, dear Lord!” he was saying to himself. “How bright and whole the
day is for them! If God had suddenly put His hand over the sun, and
swallowed us up in a shadow, they could not have been more startled.
That man, with his fine, white-flannelled limbs and his dark head, has
no suspicion of the shadow that supports it all. Between the blueness
of the sea and the sky he passes easy as a gull, close to the fine
white seamew of his mate, amid red flowers of flags, and soft birds of
ships, and slow-moving monsters of steamboats.
“For me the day is transparent and shrivelling. I can see the darkness
through its petals. But for him it is a fresh bell-flower, in which he
fumbles with delights like a bee.
“For me, quivering in the interspaces of the atmosphere, is the
darkness the same that fills in my soul. I can see death urging itself
into life, the shadow supporting the substance. For my life is burning
an invisible flame. The glare of the light of myself, as I burn on the
fuel of death, is not enough to hide from me the source and the issue.
For what is a life but a flame that bursts off the surface of darkness,
and tapers into the darkness again? But the death that issues differs
from the death that was the source. At least, I shall enrich death with
a potent shadow, if I do not enrich life.”
“Wasn’t that woman fine!” said Helena.
“So perfectly still,” he answered.
“The child realized nothing,” she said.
Siegmund laughed, then leaned forward impulsively to her.
“I am always so sorry,” he said, “that the human race is urged
inevitably into a deeper and deeper realization of life.”
She looked at him, wondering what provoked such a remark.
“I guess,” she said slowly, after a while, “that the man, the sailor,
will have a bad time. He was abominably careless.”
“He was careful of something else just then,” said Siegmund, who hated
to hear her speak in cold condemnation. “He was attending to the
machinery or something.”
“That was scarcely his first business,” said she, rather sarcastic.
Siegmund looked at her. She seemed very hard in judgement—very blind.
Sometimes his soul surged against her in hatred.
“Do you think the man _wanted_ to drown the boat?” he asked.
“He nearly succeeded,” she replied.
There was antagonism between them. Siegmund recognized in Helena the
world sitting in judgement, and he hated it. “But, after all,” he
thought, I suppose it is the only way to get along, to judge the event
and not the person. I have a disease of sympathy, a vice of
exoneration.”
Nevertheless, he did not love Helena as a judge. He thought rather of
the woman in the boat. She was evidently one who watched the sources of
life, saw it great and impersonal.
“Would the woman cry, or hug and kiss the boy when she got on board?”
he asked.
“I rather think not. Why?” she replied.
“I hope she didn’t,” he said.
Helena sat watching the water spurt back from the bows. She was very
much in love with Siegmund. He was suggestive; he stimulated her. But
to her mind he had not her own dark eyes of hesitation; he was swift
and proud as the wind. She never realized his helplessness.
Siegmund was gathering strength from the thought of that other woman’s
courage. If she had so much restraint as not to cry out, or alarm the
boy, if she had so much grace not to complain to her husband, surely he
himself might refrain from revealing his own fear of Helena, and from
lamenting his hard fate.
They sailed on past the chequered round towers. The sea opened, and
they looked out to eastward into the sea-space. Siegmund wanted to
flee. He yearned to escape down the open ways before him. Yet he knew
he would be carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up.
The shore came round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand.
The shore swept round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There
the old _Victory_, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested,
saved for a trophy.
“It is a dreadful thing,” thought Siegmund, “to remain as a trophy when
there is nothing more to do.” He watched the landing-stages swooping
nearer. There were the trains drawn up in readiness. At the other end
of the train was London.
He could scarcely bear to have Helena before him for another two hours.
The suspense of that protracted farewell, while he sat opposite her in
the beating train, would cost too much. He longed to be released from
her.
They had got their luggage, and were standing at the foot of the
ladder, in the heat of the engines and the smell of hot oil, waiting
for the crowd to pass on, so that they might ascend and step off the
ship on to the mainland.
“Won’t you let me go by the South-Western, and you by the Brighton?”
asked Siegmund, hesitating, repeating the morning’s question.
Helena looked at him, knitting her brows with misgiving and perplexity.
“No,” she replied. “Let us go together.”
Siegmund followed her up the iron ladder to the quay.
There was no great crowd on the train. They easily found a second-class
compartment without occupants. He swung the luggage on the rack and sat
down, facing Helena.
“Now,” said he to himself, “I wish I were alone.”
He wanted to think and prepare himself.
Helena, who was thinking actively, leaned forward to him to say:
“Shall I not go down to Cornwall?”
By her soothing willingness to do anything for him, Siegmund knew that
she was dogging him closely. He could not bear to have his anxiety
protracted.
“But you have promised Louisa, have you not?” he replied.
“Oh, well!” she said, in the peculiar slighting tone she had when she
wished to convey the unimportance of affairs not touching him.
“Then you must go,” he said.
“But,” she began, with harsh petulance, “I do not want to go down to
Cornwall with _Louisa and Olive_”—she accentuated the two names—“after
_this_,” she added.
“Then Louisa will have no holiday—and you have promised,” he said
gravely.
Helena looked at him. She saw he had decided that she should go.
“Is my promise so _very_ important?” she asked. She glanced angrily at
the three ladies who were hesitating in the doorway. Nevertheless, the
ladies entered, and seated themselves at the opposite end of the
carriage. Siegmund did not know whether he were displeased or relieved
by their intrusion. If they had stayed out, he might have held Helena
in his arms for still another hour. As it was, she could not harass him
with words. He tried not to look at her, but to think.
The train at last moved out of the station. As it passed through
Portsmouth, Siegmund remembered his coming down, on the Sunday. It
seemed an indefinite age ago. He was thankful that he sat on the side
of the carriage opposite from the one he had occupied five days before.
The afternoon of the flawless sky was ripening into evening. The
chimneys and the sides of the houses of Portsmouth took on that radiant
appearance which transfigures the end of day in town. A rich bloom of
light appears on the surfaces of brick and stone.
“It will go on,” thought Siegmund, “being gay of an evening, for ever.
And I shall miss it all!”
But as soon as the train moved into the gloom of the Town station, he
began again:
“Beatrice will be proud, and silent as steel when I get home. She will
say nothing, thank God—nor shall I. That will expedite matters: there
will be no interruptions….
“But we cannot continue together after this. Why should I discuss
reasons for and against? We cannot. She goes to a cottage in the
country. Already I have spoken of it to her. I allow her all I can of
my money, and on the rest I manage for myself in lodgings in London.
Very good.
“But when I am comparatively free I cannot live alone. I shall want
Helena; I shall remember the children. If I have the one, I shall be
damned by the thought of the other. This bruise on my mind will never
get better. Helena says she would never come to me; but she would, out
of pity for me. I know she would.
“But then, what then? Beatrice and the children in the country, and me
not looking after the children. Beatrice is thriftless. She would be in
endless difficulty. It would be a degradation to me. She would keep a
red sore inflamed against me; I should be a shameful thing in her
mouth. Besides, there would go all her strength. She would not make any
efforts. ‘He has brought it on us,’ she would say; ‘let him see what
the result is.’ And things would go from bad to worse with them. It
would be a gangrene of shame.
“And Helena—I should have nothing but mortification. When she was
asleep I could not look at her. She is such a strange, incongruous
creature. But I should be responsible for her. She believes in me as if
I had the power of God. What should I think of myself?”
Siegmund leaned with his head against the window, watching the country
whirl past, but seeing nothing. He thought imaginatively, and his
imagination destroyed him. He pictured Beatrice in the country. He
sketched the morning—breakfast haphazard at a late hour; the elder
children rushing off without food, miserable and untidy, the youngest
bewildered under her swift, indifferent preparations for school. He
thought of Beatrice in the evening, worried and irritable, her bills
unpaid, the work undone, declaiming lamentably against the cruelty of
her husband, who had abandoned her to such a burden of care while he
took his pleasure elsewhere.
This line exhausted or intolerable, Siegmund switched off to the
consideration of his own life in town. He would go to America; the
agreement was signed with the theatre manager. But America would be
only a brief shutting of the eyes and closing of the mouth. He would
wait for the home-coming to Helena, and she would wait for him. It was
inevitable; then would begin—what? He would never have enough money to
keep Helena, even if he managed to keep himself. Their meetings would
then be occasional and clandestine. Ah, it was intolerable!
“If I were rich,” said Siegmund, “all would be plain. I would give each
of my children enough, and Beatrice, and we would go away; but I am
nearly forty; I have no genius; I shall never be rich,” Round and round
went his thoughts like oxen over a threshing floor, treading out the
grain. Gradually the chaff flew away; gradually the corn of conviction
gathered small and hard upon the floor.
As he sat thinking, Helena leaned across to him and laid her hand on
his knee.
“If I have made things more difficult,” she said, her voice harsh with
pain, “you will forgive me.”
He started. This was one of the cruel cuts of pain that love gives,
filling the eyes with blood. Siegmund stiffened himself; slowly he
smiled, as he looked at her childish, plaintive lips, and her large
eyes haunted with pain.
“Forgive you?” he repeated. “Forgive you for five days of perfect
happiness; the only real happiness I have ever known!”
Helena tightened her fingers on his knee. She felt herself stinging
with painful joy; but one of the ladies was looking her curiously. She
leaned back in her place, and turned to watch at the shocks of corn
strike swiftly, in long rows, across her vision.
Siegmund, also quivering, turned his face to the window, where the
rotation of the wide sea-flat helped the movement of his thought.
Helena had interrupted him. She had bewildered his thoughts from their
hawking, so that they struck here and there, wildly, among small,
pitiful prey that was useless, conclusions which only hindered the
bringing home of the final convictions.
“What will she do?” cried Siegmund, “What will she do when I am gone?
What will become of her? Already she has no aim in life; then she will
have no object. Is it any good my going if I leave her behind? What an
inextricable knot this is! But what will she do?”
It was a question she had aroused before, a question which he could
never answer; indeed, it was not for him to answer.
They wound through the pass of the South Downs. As Siegmund, looking
backward, saw the northern slope of the downs swooping smoothly, in a
great, broad bosom of sward, down to the body of the land, he warmed
with sudden love for the earth; there the great downs were, naked like
a breast, leaning kindly to him. The earth is always kind; it loves us,
and would foster us like a nurse. The downs were big and tender and
simple. Siegmund looked at the farm, folded in a hollow, and he
wondered what fortunate folk were there, nourished and quiet, hearing
the vague roar of the train that was carrying him home.
Up towards Arundel the cornfields of red wheat were heavy with gold. It
was evening, when the green of the trees went out, leaving dark shapes
proud upon the sky; but the red wheat was forged in the sunset, hot and
magnificent. Siegmund almost gloated as he smelled the ripe corn, and
opened his eyes to its powerful radiation. For a moment he forgot
everything, amid the forging of red fields of gold in the smithy of the
sunset. Like sparks, poppies blew along the railway-banks, a crimson
train. Siegmund waited, through the meadows, for the next wheat-field.
It came like the lifting of yellow-hot metal out of the gloom of
darkened grass-lands.
Helena was reassured by the glamour of evening over ripe Sussex. She
breathed the land now and then, while she watched the sky. The sunset
was stately. The blue-eyed day, with great limbs, having fought its
victory and won, now mounted triumphant on its pyre, and with white
arms uplifted took the flames, which leaped like blood about its feet.
The day died nobly, so she thought.
One gold cloud, as an encouragement tossed to her, followed the train.
“Surely that cloud is for us,” said she, as she watched it anxiously.
Dark trees brushed between it and her, while she waited in suspense. It
came, unswerving, from behind the trees.
“I am sure it is for us,” she repeated. A gladness came into her eyes.
Still the cloud followed the train. She leaned forward to Siegmund and
pointed out the cloud to him. She was very eager to give him a little
of her faith.
“It has come with us quite a long way. Doesn’t it seem to you to be
travelling with us? It is the golden hand; it is the good omen.”
She then proceeded to tell him the legend from “Aylwin”.
Siegmund listened, and smiled. The sunset was handsome on his face.
Helena was almost happy.
“I am right,” said he to himself. I am right in my conclusions, and
Helena will manage by herself afterwards. I am right; there is the hand
to confirm it.”
The heavy train settled down to an easy, unbroken stroke, swinging like
a greyhound over the level northwards. All the time Siegmund was
mechanically thinking the well-known movement from the Valkyrie Ride,
his whole self beating to the rhythm. It seemed to him there was a
certain grandeur in this flight, but it hurt him with its heavy
insistence of catastrophe. He was afraid; he had to summon his courage
to sit quiet. For a time he was reassured; he believed he was going on
towards the right end. He hunted through the country and the sky,
asking of everything, “Am I right? Am I right?” He did not mind what
happened to him, so long as he felt it was right. What he meant by
“right” he did not trouble to think, but the question remained. For a
time he had been reassured; then a dullness came over him, when his
thoughts were stupid, and he merely submitted to the rhythm of the
train, which stamped him deeper and deeper with a brand of catastrophe.
The sun had gone down. Over the west was a gush of brightness as the
fountain of light bubbled lower. The stars, like specks of froth from
the foaming of the day, clung to the blue ceiling. Like spiders they
hung overhead, while the hosts of the gold atmosphere poured out of the
hive by the western low door. Soon the hive was empty, a hollow dome of
purple, with here and there on the floor a bright brushing of wings—a
village; then, overhead, the luminous star-spider began to run.
“Ah, well!” thought Siegmund—he was tired—“if one bee dies in a swarm,
what is it, so long as the hive is all right? Apart from the gold
light, and the hum and the colour of day, what was I? Nothing! Apart
from these rushings out of the hive, along with swarm, into the dark
meadows of night, gathering God knows what, I was a pebble. Well, the
day will swarm in golden again, with colour on the wings of every bee,
and humming in each activity. The gold and the colour and sweet smell
and the sound of life, they exist, even if there is no bee; it only
happens we see the iridescence on the wings of a bee. It exists whether
or not, bee or no bee. Since the iridescence and the humming of life
_are_ always, and since it was they who made me, then I am not lost. At
least, I do not care. If the spark goes out, the essence of the fire is
there in the darkness. What does it matter? Besides, I _have_ burned
bright; I have laid up a fine cell of honey somewhere—I wonder where?
We can never point to it; but it _is_ so—what does it matter, then!”
They had entered the north downs, and were running through Dorking
towards Leatherhead. Box Hill stood dark in the dusky sweetness of the
night. Helena remembered that here she and Siegmund had come for their
first walk together. She would like to come again. Presently she saw
the quick stilettos of stars on the small, baffled river; they ran
between high embankments. Siegmund recollected that these were covered
with roses of Sharon—the large golden St John’s wort of finest silk. He
looked, and could just distinguish the full-blown, delicate flowers,
ignored by the stars. At last he had something to say to Helena:
“Do you remember,” he asked, “the roses of Sharon all along here?”
“I do,” replied Helena, glad he spoke so brightly. “Weren’t they
pretty?”
After a few moments of watching the bank, she said:
“Do you know, I have never gathered one? I think I should like to; I
should like to feel them, and they should have an orangy smell.”
He smiled, without answering.
She glanced up at him, smiling brightly.
“But shall we come down here in the morning, and find some?” she asked.
She put the question timidly. “Would you care to?” she added.
Siegmund darkened and frowned. Here was the pain revived again.
“No,” he said gently; “I think we had better not.” Almost for the first
time he did not make apologetic explanation.
Helena turned to the window, and remained, looking out at the spinning
of the lights of the towns without speaking, until they were near
Sutton. Then she rose and pinned on her hat, gathering her gloves and
her basket. She was, in spite of herself, slightly angry. Being quite
ready to leave the train, she sat down to wait for the station.
Siegmund was aware that she was displeased, and again, for the first
time, he said to himself, “Ah, well, it must be so.”
She looked at him. He was sad, therefore she softened instantly.
“At least,” she said doubtfully, “I shall see you at the station.”
“At Waterloo?” he asked.
“No, at Wimbledon,” she replied, in her metallic tone.
“But—” he began.
“It will be the best way for us,” she interrupted, in the calm tone of
conviction. “Much better than crossing London from Victoria to
Waterloo.”
“Very well,” he replied.
He looked up a train for her in his little time-table.
“You will get in Wimbledon 10.5—leave 10.40—leave Waterloo 11.30,” he
said.
“Very good,” she answered.
The brakes were grinding. They waited in a burning suspense for the
train to stop.
“If only she will soon go!” thought Siegmund. It was an intolerable
minute. She rose; everything was a red blur. She stood before him,
pressing his hand; then he rose to give her the bag. As he leaned upon
the window-frame and she stood below on the platform, looking up at
him, he could scarcely breathe. “How long will it be?” he said to
himself, looking at the open carriage doors. He hated intensely the
lady who could not get a porter to remove her luggage; he could have
killed her; he could have killed the dilatory guard. At last the doors
slammed and the whistle went. The train started imperceptibly into
motion.
“Now I lose her,” said Siegmund.
She looked up at him; her face was white and dismal.
“Good-bye, then!” she said, and she turned away.
Siegmund went back to his seat. He was relieved, but he trembled with
sickness. We are all glad when intense moments are done with; but why
did she fling round in that manner, stopping the keen note short; what
would she do?
XXII
Siegmund went up to Victoria. He was in no hurry to get down to
Wimbledon. London was warm and exhausted after the hot day, but this
peculiar lukewarmness was not unpleasant to him. He chose to walk from
Victoria to Waterloo.
The streets were like polished gun-metal glistened over with gold. The
taxi-cabs, the wild cats of the town, swept over the gleaming floor
swiftly, soon lessening in the distance, as if scornful of the other
clumsy-footed traffic. He heard the merry click-clock of the swinging
hansoms, then the excited whirring of the motor-buses as they charged
full-tilt heavily down the road, their hearts, as it seemed, beating
with trepidation; they drew up with a sigh of relief by the kerb, and
stood there panting—great, nervous, clumsy things. Siegmund was always
amused by the headlong, floundering career of the buses. He was pleased
with this scampering of the traffic; anything for distraction. He was
glad Helena was not with him, for the streets would have irritated her
with their coarse noise. She would stand for a long time to watch the
rabbits pop and hobble along on the common at night; but the tearing
along of the taxis and the charge of a great motor-bus was painful to
her. “Discords,” she said, “after the trees and sea.” She liked the
glistening of the streets; it seemed a fine alloy of gold laid down for
pavement, such pavement as drew near to the pure gold streets of
Heaven; but this noise could not be endured near any wonderland.
Siegmund did not mind it; it drummed out his own thoughts. He watched
the gleaming magic of the road, raced over with shadows, project itself
far before him into the night. He watched the people. Soldiers, belted
with scarlet, went jauntily on in front. There was a peculiar charm in
their movement. There was a soft vividness of life in their carriage;
it reminded Siegmund of the soft swaying and lapping of a poised
candle-flame. The women went blithely alongside. Occasionally, in
passing, one glanced at him; then, in spite of himself, he smiled; he
knew not why. The women glanced at him with approval, for he was ruddy;
besides, he had that carelessness and abstraction of despair. The eyes
of the women said, “You are comely, you are lovable,” and Siegmund
smiled.
When the street opened, at Westminster, he noticed the city sky, a
lovely deep purple, and the lamps in the square steaming out a vapour
of grey-gold light.
“It is a wonderful night,” he said to himself. “There are not two such
in a year.”
He went forward to the Embankment, with a feeling of elation in his
heart. This purple and gold-grey world, with the fluttering
flame-warmth of soldiers and the quick brightness of women, like lights
that clip sharply in a draught, was a revelation to him.
As he leaned upon the Embankment parapet the wonder did not fade, but
rather increased. The trams, one after another, floated loftily over
the bridge. They went like great burning bees in an endless file into a
hive, past those which were drifting dreamily out, while below, on the
black, distorted water, golden serpents flashed and twisted to and fro.
“Ah!” said Siegmund to himself; “it is far too wonderful for me. Here,
as well as by the sea, the night is gorgeous and uncouth. Whatever
happens, the world is wonderful.”
So he went on amid all the vast miracle of movement in the city night,
the swirling of water to the sea, the gradual sweep of the stars, the
floating of many lofty, luminous cars through the bridged darkness,
like an army of angels filing past on one of God’s campaigns, the
purring haste of the taxis, the slightly dancing shadows of people.
Siegmund went on slowly, like a slow bullet winging into the heart of
life. He did not lose this sense of wonder, not in the train, nor as he
walked home in the moonless dark.
When he closed the door behind him and hung up his hat he frowned. He
did not think definitely of anything, but his frown meant to him: “Now
for the beginning of Hell!”
He went towards the dining-room, where the light was, and the uneasy
murmur. The clock, with its deprecating, suave chime, was striking ten,
Siegmund opened the door of the room. Beatrice was sewing, and did not
raise her head. Frank, a tall, thin lad of eighteen, was bent over a
book. He did not look up. Vera had her fingers thrust in among her
hair, and continued to read the magazine that lay on the table before
her. Siegmund looked at them all. They gave no sign to show they were
aware of his entry; there was only that unnatural tenseness of people
who cover their agitation. He glanced round to see where he should go.
His wicker arm-chair remained by the fireplace; his slippers were
standing under the sideboard, as he had left them. Siegmund sat down in
the creaking chair; he began to feel sick and tired.
“I suppose the children are in bed,” he said.
His wife sewed on as if she had not heard him; his daughter noisily
turned over a leaf and continued to read, as if she were pleasantly
interested and had known no interruption. Siegmund waited, with his
slipper dangling from his hand, looking from one to another.
“They’ve been gone two hours,” said Frank at last, still without
raising his eyes from his book. His tone was contemptuous, his voice
was jarring, not yet having developed a man’s fullness.
Siegmund put on his slipper, and began to unlace the other boot. The
slurring of the lace through the holes and the snacking of the tag
seemed unnecessarily loud. It annoyed his wife. She took a breath to
speak, then refrained, feeling suddenly her daughter’s scornful
restraint upon her. Siegmund rested his arms upon his knees, and sat
leaning forward, looking into the barren fireplace, which was littered
with paper, and orange-peel, and a banana-skin.
“Do you want any supper?” asked Beatrice, and the sudden harshness of
her voice startled him into looking at her.
She had her face averted, refusing to see him. Siegmund’s heart went
down with weariness and despair at the sight of her.
“Aren’t _you_ having any?” he asked.
The table was not laid. Beatrice’s work-basket, a little wicker
fruit-skep, overflowed scissors, and pins, and scraps of holland, and
reels of cotton on the green serge cloth. Vera leaned both her elbows
on the table.
Instead of replying to him, Beatrice went to the sideboard. She took
out a table-cloth, pushing her sewing litter aside, and spread the
cloth over one end of the table. Vera gave her magazine a little knock
with her hand.
“Have you read this tale of a French convent school in here, Mother?”
she asked.
“In where?”
In this month’s _Nash’s_.”
“No,” replied Beatrice. “What time have I for reading, much less for
anything else?”
“You should think more of yourself, and a little less of other people,
then,” said Vera, with a sneer at the “other people”. She rose. “Let me
do this. You sit down; you are tired, Mother,” she said.
Her mother, without replying, went out to the kitchen. Vera followed
her. Frank, left alone with his father, moved uneasily, and bent his
thin shoulders lower over his book. Siegmund remained with his arms on
his knees, looking into the grate. From the kitchen came the chinking
of crockery, and soon the smell of coffee. All the time Vera was heard
chatting with affected brightness to her mother, addressing her in fond
tones, using all her wits to recall bright little incidents to retail
to her. Beatrice answered rarely, and then with utmost brevity.
Presently Vera came in with the tray. She put down a cup of coffee, a
plate with boiled ham, pink and thin, such as is bought from a grocer,
and some bread-and-butter. Then she sat down, noisily turning over the
leaves of her magazine. Frank glanced at the table; it was laid solely
for his father. He looked at the bread and the meat, but restrained
himself, and went on reading, or pretended to do so. Beatrice came in
with the small cruet; it was conspicuously bright.
Everything was correct: knife and fork, spoon, cruet, all perfectly
clean, the crockery fine, the bread and butter thin—in fact, it was
just as it would have been for a perfect stranger. This scrupulous
neatness, in a household so slovenly and easy-going, where it was an
established tradition that something should be forgotten or wrong,
impressed Siegmund. Beatrice put the serving knife and fork by the
little dish of ham, saw that all was proper, then went and sat down.
Her face showed no emotion; it was calm and proud. She began to sew.
“What do you say, Mother?” said Vera, as if resuming a conversation.
“Shall it be Hampton Court or Richmond on Sunday?”
“I say, as I said before,” replied Beatrice: “I cannot afford to go
out.”
“But you must begin, my dear, and Sunday shall see the beginning.
_Dîtes donc_!”
“There are other things to think of,” said Beatrice.
“Now, _maman, nous avons changé tout cela_! We are going out—a jolly
little razzle!” Vera, who was rather handsome, lifted up her face and
smiled at her mother gaily.
“I am afraid there will be no _razzle_”—Beatrice accented the word,
smiling slightly—“for me. You are slangy, Vera.”
“_Un doux argot, ma mère_. You look tired.”
Beatrice glanced at the clock.
“I will go to bed when I have cleared the table,” she said.
Siegmund winced. He was still sitting with his head bent down, looking
in the grate. Vera went on to say something more. Presently Frank
looked up at the table, and remarked in his grating voice:
“There’s your supper, Father.”
The women stopped and looked round at this. Siegmund bent his head
lower. Vera resumed her talk. It died out, and there was silence.
Siegmund was hungry.
“Oh, good Lord, good Lord! bread of humiliation tonight!” he said to
himself before he could muster courage to rise and go to the table. He
seemed to be shrinking inwards. The women glanced swiftly at him and
away from him as his chair creaked and he got up. Frank was watching
from under his eyebrows.
Siegmund went through the ordeal of eating and drinking in presence of
his family. If he had not been hungry, he could not have done it,
despite the fact that he was content to receive humiliation this night.
He swallowed the coffee with effort. When he had finished he sat
irresolute for some time; then he arose and went to the door.
“Good night!” he said.
Nobody made any reply. Frank merely stirred in his chair. Siegmund shut
the door and went.
There was absolute silence in the room till they heard him turn on the
tap in the bathroom; then Beatrice began to breathe spasmodically,
catching her breath as if she would sob. But she restrained herself.
The faces of the two children set hard with hate.
“He is not worth the flicking of your little finger, Mother,” said
Vera.
Beatrice moved about with pitiful, groping hands, collecting her sewing
and her cottons.
“At any rate, he’s come back red enough,” said Frank, in his grating
tone of contempt. “He’s like boiled salmon.”
Beatrice did not answer anything. Frank rose, and stood with his back
to the grate, in his father’s characteristic attitude.
“He _would_ come slinking back in a funk!” he said, with a young man’s
sneer.
Stretching forward, he put a piece of ham between two pieces of bread,
and began to eat the sandwich in large bites. Vera came to the table at
this, and began to make herself a more dainty sandwich. Frank watched
her with jealous eyes.
“There is a little more ham, if you’d like it,” said Beatrice to him.
“I kept you some.”
“All right, Ma,” he replied. Fetch it in.”
Beatrice went out to the kitchen.
“And bring the bread and butter, too, will you?” called Vera after her.
“The damned coward! Ain’t he a rotten funker?” said Frank, _sotto
voce_, while his mother was out of the room.
Vera did not reply, but she seemed tacitly to agree.
They petted their mother, while she waited on them. At length Frank
yawned. He fidgeted a moment or two, then he went over to his mother,
and, putting his hand on her arm—the feel of his mother’s round arm
under the black silk sleeve made his tears rise—he said, more gratingly
than ever:
“Ne’er mind, Ma; we’ll be all right to you.” Then he bent and kissed
her. “Good night, Mother,” he said awkwardly, and he went out of the
room.
Beatrice was crying.
XXIII
“I shall never re-establish myself,” said Siegmund as he closed behind
him the dining-room door and went upstairs in the dark. “I am a family
criminal. Beatrice might come round, but the children’s insolent
judgement is too much. And I am like a dog that creeps round the house
from which it escaped with joy. I have nowhere else to go. Why did I
come back? But I am sleepy. I will not bother tonight.”
He went into the bathroom and washed himself. Everything he did gave
him a grateful sense of pleasure, notwithstanding the misery of his
position. He dipped his arms deeper into the cold water, that he might
feel the delight of it a little farther. His neck he swilled time after
time, and it seemed to him he laughed with pleasure as the water caught
him and fell away. The towel reminded him how sore were his forehead
and his neck, blistered both to a state of rawness by the sun. He
touched them very cautiously to dry them, wincing, and smiling at his
own childish touch-and-shrink.
Though his bedroom was very dark, he did not light the gas. Instead, he
stepped out into the small balcony. His shirt was open at the neck and
wrists. He pulled it farther apart, baring his chest to the deliciously
soft night. He stood looking out at the darkness for some time. The
night was as yet moonless, but luminous with a certain atmosphere of
light. The stars were small. Near at hand, large shapes of trees rose
up. Farther, lamps like little mushroom groups shone amid an
undergrowth of darkness. There was a vague hoarse noise filling the
sky, like the whispering in a shell, and this breathing of the summer
night occasionally swelled into a restless sigh as a train roared
across the distance.
“What a big night!” thought Siegmund. “The night gathers everything
into a oneness. I wonder what is in it.”
He leaned forward over the balcony, trying to catch something out of
the night. He felt his soul like tendrils stretched out anxiously to
grasp a hold. What could he hold to in this great, hoarse breathing
night? A star fell. It seemed to burst into sight just across his eyes
with a yellow flash. He looked up, unable to make up his mind whether
he had seen it or not. There was no gap in the sky.
“It is a good sign—a shooting star,” he said to himself. “It is a good
sign for me. I know I am right. That was my sign.”
Having assured himself, he stepped indoors, unpacked his bag, and was
soon in bed.
“This is a good bed,” he said. “And the sheets are very fresh.”
He lay for a little while with his head bending forwards, looking from
his pillow out at the stars, then he went to sleep.
At half past six in the morning he suddenly opened his eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, and almost without interruption answered:
“Well, I’ve got to go through it.”
His sleep had shaped him perfect premonition, which, like a dream, he
forgot when he awoke. Only this naïve question and answer betrayed what
had taken place in his sleep. Immediately he awoke this subordinate
knowledge vanished.
Another fine day was striding in triumphant. The first thing Siegmund
did was to salute the morning, because of its brightness. The second
thing was to call to mind the aspect of that bay in the Isle of Wight.
“What would it just be like now?” said he to himself. He had to give
his heart some justification for the peculiar pain left in it from his
sleep activity, so he began poignantly to long for the place which had
been his during the last mornings. He pictured the garden with roses
and nasturtiums; he remembered the sunny way down the shore, and all
the expanse of sea hung softly between the tall white cliffs.
“It is impossible it is gone!” he cried to himself. “It can’t be gone.
I looked forward to it as if it never would come. It can’t be gone now.
Helena is not lost to me, surely.” Then he began a long pining for the
departed beauty of his life. He turned the jewel of memory, and facet
by facet it wounded him with its brilliant loveliness. This pain,
though it was keen, was half pleasure.
Presently he heard his wife stirring. She opened the door of the room
next to his, and he heard her:
“Frank, it’s a quarter to eight. You _will_ be late.”
“All right, Mother. Why didn’t you call me sooner?” grumbled the lad.
“I didn’t wake myself. I didn’t go to sleep till morning, and then I
slept.”
She went downstairs. Siegmund listened for his son to get out of bed.
The minutes passed.
“The young donkey, why doesn’t he get out?” said Siegmund angrily to
himself. He turned over, pressing himself upon the bed in anger and
humiliation, because now he had no authority to call to his son and
keep him to his duty. Siegmund waited, writhing with anger, shame, and
anxiety. When the suave, velvety “Pan-n-n! pan-n-n-n!” of the clock was
heard striking, Frank stepped with a thud on to the floor. He could be
heard dressing in clumsy haste. Beatrice called from the bottom of the
stairs:
“Do you want any hot water?”
“You know there isn’t time for me to shave now,” answered her son,
lifting his voice to a kind of broken falsetto.
The scent of the cooking of bacon filled the house. Siegmund heard his
second daughter, Marjory, aged nine, talking to Vera, who occupied the
same room with her. The child was evidently questioning, and the elder
girl answered briefly. There was a lull in the household noises, broken
suddenly by Marjory, shouting from the top of the stairs:
“Mam!” She wailed. “Mam!” Still Beatrice did not hear her. “Mam!
Mamma!” Beatrice was in the scullery. “Mamma-a!” The child was getting
impatient. She lifted her voice and shouted: “Mam? Mamma!” Still no
answer. “Mam-mee-e!” she squealed.
Siegmund could hardly contain himself.
“Why don’t you go down and ask?” Vera called crossly from the bedroom.
And at the same moment Beatrice answered, also crossly: “What do you
want?”
“Where’s my stockings?” cried the child at the top of her voice.
“Why do you ask me? Are they down here?” replied her mother. “What are
you shouting for?”
The child plodded downstairs. Directly she returned, and as she passed
into Vera’s room, she grumbled: “And now they’re not mended.”
Siegmund heard a sound that made his heart beat. It was the crackling
of the sides of the crib, as Gwen, his little girl of five, climbed
out. She was silent for a space. He imagined her sitting on the white
rug and pulling on her stockings. Then there came the quick little thud
of her feet as she went downstairs.
“Mam,” Siegmund heard her say as she went down the hall, “has dad
come?”
The answer and the child’s further talk were lost in the distance of
the kitchen. The small, anxious question, and the quick thudding of
Gwen’s feet, made Siegmund lie still with torture. He wanted to hear no
more. He lay shrinking within himself. It seemed that his soul was
sensitive to madness. He felt that he could not, come what might, get
up and meet them all.
The front door banged, and he heard Frank’s hasty call: “Good-bye!”
Evidently the lad was in an ill-humour. Siegmund listened for the sound
of the train; it seemed an age; the boy would catch it. Then the water
from the wash-hand bowl in the bathroom ran loudly out. That, he
suggested, was Vera, who was evidently not going up to town. At the
thought of this, Siegmund almost hated her. He listened for her to go
downstairs. It was nine o’clock.
The footsteps of Beatrice came upstairs. She put something down in the
bathroom—his hot water. Siegmund listened intently for her to come to
his door. Would she speak? She approached hurriedly, knocked, and
waited. Siegmund, startled, for the moment, could not answer. She
knocked loudly.
“All right,” said he.
Then she went downstairs.
He lay probing and torturing himself for another half-hour, till Vera’s
voice said coldly, beneath his window outside:
“You should clear away, then. We don’t want the breakfast things on the
table for a week.”
Siegmund’s heart set hard. He rose, with a shut mouth, and went across
to the bathroom. There he started. The quaint figure of Gwen stood at
the bowl, her back was towards him; she was sponging her face gingerly.
Her hair, all blowsed from the pillow, was tied in a stiff little
pigtail, standing out from her slender, childish neck. Her arms were
bare to the shoulder. She wore a bodiced petticoat of pink flannelette,
which hardly reached her knees. Siegmund felt slightly amused to see
her stout little calves planted so firmly close together. She carefully
sponged her cheeks, her pursed-up mouth, and her neck, soaping her
hair, but not her ears. Then, very deliberately, she squeezed out the
sponge and proceeded to wipe away the soap.
For some reason or other she glanced round. Her startled eyes met his.
She, too, had beautiful dark blue eyes. She stood, with the sponge at
her neck, looking full at him. Siegmund felt himself shrinking. The
child’s look was steady, calm, inscrutable.
“Hello!” said her father. “Are you here!”
The child, without altering her expression in the slightest, turned her
back on him, and continued wiping her neck. She dropped the sponge in
the water and took the towel from off the side of the bath. Then she
turned to look again at Siegmund, who stood in his pyjamas before her,
his mouth shut hard, but his eyes shrinking and tender. She seemed to
be trying to discover something in him.
“Have you washed your ears?” he said gaily.
She paid no heed to this, except that he noticed her face now wore a
slight constrained smile as she looked at him. She was shy. Still she
continued to regard him curiously.
“There is some chocolate on my dressing-table,” he said.
“Where have you been to?” she asked suddenly.
“To the seaside,” he answered, smiling.
“To Brighton?” she asked. Her tone was still condemning.
“Much farther than that,” he replied.
“To Worthing?” she asked.
“Farther—in a steamer,” he replied.
“But who did you go with?” asked the child.
“Why, I went all by myself,” he answered.
“Twuly?” she asked.
“Weally and twuly,” he answered, laughing.
“Couldn’t you take me?” she asked.
“I will next time,” he replied.
The child still looked at him, unsatisfied.
“But what did you go for?” she asked, goading him suspiciously.
“To see the sea and the ships and the fighting ships with cannons—”
“You _might_ have taken me,” said the child reproachfully.
“Yes, I ought to have done, oughtn’t I?” he said, as if regretful.
Gwen still looked full at him.
“You _are_ red,” she said.
He glanced quickly in the glass, and replied:
“That is the sun. Hasn’t it been hot?”
“Mm! It made my nose all peel. Vera said she would scrape me like a new
potato.” The child laughed and turned shyly away.
“Come here,” said Siegmund. “I believe you’ve got a tooth out, haven’t
you?”
He was very cautious and gentle. The child drew back. He hesitated, and
she drew away from him, unwilling.
“Come and let me look,” he repeated.
She drew farther away, and the same constrained smile appeared on her
face, shy, suspicious, condemning.
“Aren’t you going to get your chocolate?” he asked, as the child
hesitated in the doorway.
She glanced into his room, and answered:
“I’ve got to go to mam and have my hair done.”
Her awkwardness and her lack of compliance insulted him. She went
downstairs without going into his room.
Siegmund, rebuffed by the only one in the house from whom he might have
expected friendship, proceeded slowly to shave, feeling sick at heart.
He was a long time over his toilet. When he stripped himself for the
bath, it seemed to him he could smell the sea. He bent his head and
licked his shoulder. It tasted decidedly salt.
“A pity to wash it off,” he said.
As he got up dripping from the cold bath, he felt for the moment
exhilarated. He rubbed himself smooth. Glancing down at himself, he
thought: “I look young. I look as young as twenty-six.”
He turned to the mirror. There he saw himself a mature, complete man of
forty, with grave years of experience on his countenance.
“I used to think that, when I was forty,” he said to himself, “I should
find everything straight as the nose on my face, walking through my
affairs as easily as you like. Now I am no more sure of myself, have no
more confidence than a boy of twenty. What can I do? It seems to me a
man needs a mother all his life. I don’t feel much like a lord of
creation.”
Having arrived at this cynicism, Siegmund prepared to go downstairs.
His sensitiveness had passed off; his nerves had become callous. When
he was dressed he went down to the kitchen without hesitation. He was
indifferent to his wife and children. No one spoke to him as he sat to
the table. That was as he liked it; he wished for nothing to touch him.
He ate his breakfast alone, while his wife bustled about upstairs and
Vera bustled about in the dining-room. Then he retired to the solitude
of the drawing-room. As a reaction against his poetic activity, he felt
as if he were gradually becoming more stupid and blind. He remarked
nothing, not even the extravagant bowl of grasses placed where he would
not have allowed it—on his piano; nor his fiddle, laid cruelly on the
cold, polished floor near the window. He merely sat down in an
arm-chair, and felt sick.
All his unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past
few days, had vanished. He felt flaccid, while his life struggled
slowly through him. After an intoxication of passion and love, and
beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms
gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his strength, so that
now his life struggled in a clogged and broken channel.
Siegmund sat with his head between his hands, leaning upon the table.
He would have been stupidly quiescent in his feeling of loathing and
sickness had not an intense irritability in all his nerves tormented
him into consciousness.
“I suppose this is the result of the sun—a sort of sunstroke,” he said,
realizing an intolerable stiffness of his brain, a stunned condition in
his head.
“This is hideous!” he said. His arms were quivering with intense
irritation. He exerted all his will to stop them, and then the hot
irritability commenced in his belly. Siegmund fidgeted in his chair
without changing his position. He had not the energy to get up and move
about. He fidgeted like an insect pinned down.
The door opened. He felt violently startled; yet there was no movement
perceptible. Vera entered, ostensibly for an autograph-album into which
she was going to copy a drawing from the _London Opinion_, really to
see what her father was doing. He did not move a muscle. He only longed
intensely for his daughter to go out of the room, so that he could let
go. Vera went out of the drawing-room humming to herself. Apparently
she had not even glanced at her father. In reality, she had observed
him closely.
“He is sitting with his head in his hands,” she said to her mother.
Beatrice replied: “I’m glad he’s nothing else to do.”
“I should think he’s pitying himself,” said Vera.
“He’s a good one at it,” answered Beatrice.
Gwen came forward and took hold of her mother’s skirt, looking up
anxiously.
“What is he doing, Mam?” she asked.
“Nothing,” replied her mother—“nothing; only sitting in the
drawing-room.”
“But what has he _been_ doing?” persisted the anxious child.
“Nothing—nothing that I can tell _you_. He’s only spoilt all our
lives.”
The little girl stood regarding her mother In the greatest distress and
perplexity.
“But what will he do, Mam?” she asked.
“Nothing. Don’t bother. Run and play with Marjory now. Do you want a
nice plum?”
She took a yellow plum from the table. Gwen accepted it without a word.
She was too much perplexed.
“What do you say?” asked her mother.
“Thank you,” replied the child, turning away.
Siegmund sighed with relief when he was again left alone. He twisted in
his chair, and sighed again, trying to drive out the intolerable
clawing irritability from his belly.
“Ah, this is horrible!” he said.
He stiffened his muscles to quieten them.
“I’ve never been like this before. What is the matter?” he asked
himself.
But the question died out immediately. It seemed useless and sickening
to try and answer it. He began to cast about for an alleviation. If he
could only do something, or have something he wanted, it would be
better.
“What do I want?” he asked himself, and he anxiously strove to find
this out.
Everything he suggested to himself made him sicken with weariness or
distaste: the seaside, a foreign land, a fresh life that he had often
dreamed of, farming in Canada.
“I should be just the same there,” he answered himself. “Just the same
sickening feeling there that I want nothing.”
“Helena!” he suggested to himself, trembling.
But he only felt a deeper horror. The thought of her made him shrink
convulsively.
“I can’t endure this,” he said. If this is the case, I had better be
dead. To have no want, no desire—that is death, to begin with.”
He rested awhile after this. The idea of death alone seemed
entertaining. Then, “Is there really nothing I could turn to?” he asked
himself.
To him, in that state of soul, it seemed there was not.
“Helena!” he suggested again, appealingly testing himself. “Ah, no!” he
cried, drawing sharply back, as from an approaching touch upon a raw
place.
He groaned slightly as he breathed, with a horrid weight of nausea.
There was a fumbling upon the door-knob. Siegmund did not start. He
merely pulled himself together. Gwen pushed open the door, and stood
holding on to the door-knob looking at him.
“Dad, Mam says dinner’s ready,” she announced.
Siegmund did not reply. The child waited, at a loss for some moments,
before she repeated, in a hesitating tone:
“Dinner’s ready.”
“All right,” said Siegmund. “Go away.”
The little girl returned to the kitchen with tears in her eyes, very
crestfallen.
“What did he say?” asked Beatrice.
“He shouted at me,” replied the little one, breaking into tears.
Beatrice flushed. Tears came into her own eyes. She took the child in
her arms and pressed her to her, kissing her forehead.
“Did he?” she said very tenderly. “Never mind, then, dearie—never
mind.”
The tears in her mother’s voice made the child sob bitterly. Vera and
Marjory sat silent at table. The steak and mashed potatoes steamed and
grew cold.
XXIV
When Helena arrived home on the Thursday evening she found everything
repulsive. All the odours of the sordid street through which she must
pass hung about the pavement, having crept out in the heat. The house
was bare and narrow. She remembered children sometimes to have brought
her moths shut up in matchboxes. As she knocked at the door she felt
like a numbed moth which a boy is pushing off its leaf-rest into his
box.
The door was opened by her mother. She was a woman whose sunken mouth,
ruddy cheeks, and quick brown eyes gave her the appearance of a bird
which walks about pecking suddenly here and there. As Helena
reluctantly entered the mother drew herself up, and immediately
relaxed, seeming to peck forwards as she said:
“Well?”
“Well, here we are!” replied the daughter in a matter-of-fact tone.
Her mother was inclined to be affectionate, therefore she became
proportionately cold.
“So I see,” exclaimed Mrs Verden, tossing her head in a peculiar
jocular manner. “And what sort of a time have you had?”
“Oh, very good,” replied Helena, still more coolly.
“H’m!”
Mrs Verden looked keenly at her daughter. She recognized the peculiar
sulky, childish look she knew so well, therefore, making an effort, she
forbore to question.
“You look well,” she said.
Helena smiled ironically.
“And are you ready for your supper?” she asked, in the playful,
affectionate manner she had assumed.
“If the supper is ready I will have it,” replied her daughter.
“Well, it’s not ready.” The mother shut tight her sunken mouth, and
regarded her daughter with playful challenge. “Because,” she continued,
“I didn’t known when you were coming.” She gave a jerk with her arm,
like an orator who utters the incontrovertible. “But,” she added, after
a tedious dramatic pause, “I can soon have it ready. What will you
have?”
“The full list of your capacious larder,” replied Helena.
Mrs Verden looked at her again, and hesitated.
“Will you have cocoa or lemonade?” she asked, coming to the point
curtly.
“Lemonade,” said Helena.
Presently Mr Verden entered—a small, white-bearded man with a gentle
voice.
“Oh, so you are back, Nellie!” he said, in his quiet, reserved manner.
“As you see, Pater,” she answered.
“H’m!” he murmured, and he moved about at his accounts.
Neither of her parents dared to question Helena. They moved about her
on tiptoe, stealthily. Yet neither subserved her. Her father’s quiet
“H’m!” her mother’s curt question, made her draw inwards like a snail
which can never retreat far enough from condemning eyes. She made a
careless pretence of eating. She was like a child which has done wrong,
and will not be punished, but will be left with the humiliating smear
of offence upon it.
There was a quick, light palpitating of the knocker. Mrs Verden went to
the door.
“Has she come?”
And there were hasty steps along the passage. Louisa entered. She flung
herself upon Helena and kissed her.
“How long have you been in?” she asked, in a voice trembling with
affection.
“Ten minutes,” replied Helena.
“Why didn’t you send me the time of the train, so that I could come and
meet you?” Louisa reproached her.
“Why?” drawled Helena.
Louisa looked at her friend without speaking. She was deeply hurt by
this sarcasm.
As soon as possible Helena went upstairs. Louisa stayed with her that
night. On the next day they were going to Cornwall together for their
usual midsummer holiday. They were to be accompanied by a third girl—a
minor friend of Louisa, a slight acquaintance of Helena.
During the night neither of the two friends slept much. Helena made
confidences to Louisa, who brooded on these, on the romance and tragedy
which enveloped the girl she loved so dearly. Meanwhile, Helena’s
thoughts went round and round, tethered amid the five days by the sea,
pulling forwards as far as the morrow’s meeting with Siegmund, but
reaching no further.