_Chapter 5_
They found the fire burning brightly in their room. The only other
person in the pretty, stiffly-furnished cottage was their landlady, a
charming old lady, who let this sitting-room more for the change, for
the sake of having visitors, than for gain.
Helena introduced Siegmund as 'My friend'. The old lady smiled upon him.
He was big, and good-looking, and embarrassed. She had had a son years
back.... And the two were lovers. She hoped they would come to her house
for their honeymoon.
Siegmund sat in his great horse-hair chair by the fire, while Helena
attended to the lamp. Glancing at him over the glowing globe, she found
him watching her with a small, peculiar smile of irony, and anger, and
bewilderment. He was not quite himself. Her hand trembled so, she could
scarcely adjust the wicks.
Helena left the room to change her dress.
'I shall be back before Mrs Curtiss brings in the tray. There is the
Nietzsche I brought--'
He did not answer as he watched her go. Left alone, he sat with his arms
along his knees, perfectly still. His heart beat heavily, and all his
being felt sullen, watchful, aloof, like a balked animal. Thoughts came
up in his brain like bubbles--random, hissing out aimlessly. Once, in
the startling inflammability of his blood, his veins ran hot, and
he smiled.
When Helena entered the room his eyes sought hers swiftly, as sparks
lighting on the tinder. But her eyes were only moist with tenderness.
His look instantly changed. She wondered at his being so silent,
so strange.
Coming to him in her unhesitating, womanly way--she was only twenty-six
to his thirty-eight--she stood before him, holding both his hands and
looking down on him with almost gloomy tenderness. She wore a white
dress that showed her throat gathering like a fountain-jet of solid foam
to balance her head. He could see the full white arms passing clear
through the dripping spume of lace, towards the rise of her breasts. But
her eyes bent down upon him with such gloom of tenderness that he dared
not reveal the passion burning in him. He could not look at her. He
strove almost pitifully to be with her sad, tender, but he could not put
out his fire. She held both his hands firm, pressing them in appeal for
her dream love. He glanced at her wistfully, then turned away. She
waited for him. She wanted his caresses and tenderness. He would not
look at her.
'You would like supper now, dear?' she asked, looking where the dark
hair ended, and his neck ran smooth, under his collar, to the strong
setting of his shoulders.
'Just as you will,' he replied.
Still she waited, and still he would not look at her. Something troubled
him, she thought. He was foreign to her.
'I will spread the cloth, then,' she said, in deep tones of resignation.
She pressed his hands closely, and let them drop. He took no notice,
but, still with his arms on his knees, he stared into the fire.
In the golden glow of lamplight she set small bowls of white and
lavender sweet-peas, and mignonette, upon the round table. He watched
her moving, saw the stir of her white, sloping shoulders under the lace,
and the hollow of her shoulders firm as marble, and the slight rise and
fall of her loins as she walked. He felt as if his breast were scalded.
It was a physical pain to him.
Supper was very quiet. Helena was sad and gentle; he had a peculiar,
enigmatic look in his eyes, between suffering and mockery and love. He
was quite intractable; he would not soften to her, but remained there
aloof. He was tired, and the look of weariness and suffering was evident
to her through his strangeness. In her heart she wept.
At last she tinkled the bell for supper to be cleared. Meanwhile,
restlessly, she played fragments of Wagner on the piano.
'Will you want anything else?' asked the smiling old landlady.
'Nothing at all, thanks,' said Helena, with decision.
'Oh! then I think I will go to bed when I've washed the dishes. You will
put the lamp out, dear?'
'I am well used to a lamp,' smiled Helena. 'We use them always at home.'
She had had a day before Siegmund's coming, in which to win Mrs Curtiss'
heart, and she had been successful. The old lady took the tray.
'Good-night, dear--good-night, sir. I will leave you. You will not be
long, dear?'
'No, we shall not be long. Mr MacNair is very evidently tired out.'
'Yes--yes. It is very tiring, London.'
When the door was closed, Helena stood a moment undecided, looking at
Siegmund. He was lying in his arm-chair in a dispirited way, and looking
in the fire. As she gazed at him with troubled eyes, he happened to
glance to her, with the same dark, curiously searching,
disappointed eyes.
'Shall I read to you?' she asked bitterly.
'If you will,' he replied.
He sounded so indifferent, she could scarcely refrain from crying. She
went and stood in front of him, looking down on him heavily.
'What is it, dear?' she said.
'You,' he replied, smiling with a little grimace.
'Why me?'
He smiled at her ironically, then closed his eyes. She slid into his
arms with a little moan. He took her on his knee, where she curled up
like a heavy white cat. She let him caress her with his mouth, and did
not move, but lay there curled up and quiet and luxuriously warm.
He kissed her hair, which was beautifully fragrant of itself, and time
after time drew between his lips one long, keen thread, as if he would
ravel out with his mouth her vigorous confusion of hair. His tenderness
of love was like a soft flame lapping her voluptuously.
After a while they heard the old lady go upstairs. Helena went very
still, and seemed to contract. Siegmund himself hesitated in his
love-making. All was very quiet. They could hear the faint breathing of
the sea. Presently the cat, which had been sleeping in a chair, rose and
went to the door.
'Shall I let her out?' said Siegmund.
'Do!' said Helena, slipping from his knee. 'She goes out when the nights
are fine.'
Siegmund rose to set free the tabby. Hearing the front door open, Mrs
Curtiss called from upstairs: 'Is that you, dear?'
'I have just let Kitty out,' said Siegmund.
'Ah, thank you. Good night!' They heard the old lady lock her bedroom
door.
Helena was kneeling on the hearth. Siegmund softly closed the door, then
waited a moment. His heart was beating fast.
'Shall we sit by firelight?' he asked tentatively.
'Yes--If you wish,' she replied, very slowly, as if against her will. He
carefully turned down the lamp, then blew out the light. His whole body
was burning and surging with desire.
The room was black and red with firelight. Helena shone ruddily as she
knelt, a bright, bowed figure, full in the glow. Now and then red
stripes of firelight leapt across the walls. Siegmund, his face ruddy,
advanced out of the shadows.
He sat in the chair beside her, leaning forward, his hands hanging like
two scarlet flowers listless in the fire glow, near to her, as she knelt
on the hearth, with head bowed down. One of the flowers awoke and spread
towards her. It asked for her mutely. She was fascinated, scarcely
able to move.
'Come,' he pleaded softly.
She turned, lifted her hands to him. The lace fell back, and her arms,
bare to the shoulder, shone rosily. He saw her breasts raised towards
him. Her face was bent between her arms as she looked up at him afraid.
Lit by the firelight, in her white, clinging dress, cowering between her
uplifted arms, she seemed to be offering him herself to sacrifice.
In an instant he was kneeling, and she was lying on his shoulder,
abandoned to him. There was a good deal of sorrow in his joy.
* * * * *
It was eleven o'clock when Helena at last loosened Siegmund's arms, and
rose from the armchair where she lay beside him. She was very hot,
feverish, and restless. For the last half-hour he had lain absolutely
still, with his heavy arms about her, making her hot. If she had not
seen his eyes blue and dark, she would have thought him asleep. She
tossed in restlessness on his breast.
'Am I not uneasy?' she had said, to make him speak. He had smiled
gently.
'It is wonderful to be as still as this,' he said. She had lain tranquil
with him, then, for a few moments. To her there was something sacred in
his stillness and peace. She wondered at him; he was so different from
an hour ago. How could he be the same! Now he was like the sea, blue and
hazy in the morning, musing by itself. Before, he was burning, volcanic,
as if he would destroy her.
She had given him this new soft beauty. She was the earth in which his
strange flowers grew. But she herself wondered at the flowers produced
of her. He was so strange to her, so different from herself. What next
would he ask of her, what new blossom would she rear in him then. He
seemed to grow and flower involuntarily. She merely helped to
produce him.
Helena could not keep still; her body was full of strange sensations, of
involuntary recoil from shock. She was tired, but restless. All the time
Siegmund lay with his hot arms over her, himself so incomprehensible in
his base of blue, open-eyed slumber, she grew more breathless and
unbearable to herself.
At last she lifted his arm, and drew herself out of the chair. Siegmund
looked at her from his tranquillity. She put the damp hair from her
forehead, breathed deep, almost panting. Then she glanced hauntingly at
her flushed face in the mirror. With the same restlessness, she turned
to look at the night. The cool, dark, watery sea called to her. She
pushed back the curtain.
The moon was wading deliciously through shallows of white cloud. Beyond
the trees and the few houses was the great concave of darkness, the sea,
and the moonlight. The moon was there to put a cool hand of absolution
on her brow.
'Shall we go out a moment, Siegmund?' she asked fretfully.
'Ay, if you wish to,' he answered, altogether willing. He was filled
with an easiness that would comply with her every wish.
They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at
the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the
casement of the land seductively.
'It's the finest night I have seen,' said Siegmund. Helena's eyes
suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness.
'I like the moon on the water,' she said.
'I can hardly tell the one from the other,' he replied simply. 'The sea
seems to be poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the
coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say,
are all you.'
'Yes,' she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and
she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her
now, and did not need her.
'I feel at home here,' he said; 'as if I had come home where I was
bred.'
She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him.
'We go an awful long way round, Helena,' he said, 'just to find we're
all right.' He laughed pleasantly. 'I have thought myself such an
outcast! How can one be outcast in one's own night, and the moon always
naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?'
Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt
something of the harmony.
'Whatever I have or haven't from now,' he continued, 'the darkness is a
sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and
sometimes the sea is a brother: and there's a family in one house,
you see.'
'And I, Siegmund?' she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She
looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit
ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed,
then bent to kiss her.
'The key of the castle,' he said. He put his face against hers, and felt
on his cheek the smart of her tears.
'It's all very grandiose,' he said comfortably, 'but it does for
tonight, all this that I say.'
'It is true for ever,' she declared.
'In so far as tonight is eternal,' he said.
He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from
under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon.
They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night.
