_Chapter 8_
The way home lay across country, through deep little lanes where the
late foxgloves sat seriously, like sad hounds; over open downlands,
rough with gorse and ling, and through pocketed hollows of bracken
and trees.
They came to a small Roman Catholic church in the fields. There the
carved Christ looked down on the dead whose sleeping forms made mounds
under the coverlet. Helena's heart was swelling with emotion. All the
yearning and pathos of Christianity filled her again.
The path skirted the churchyard wall, so that she had on the one hand
the sleeping dead, and on the other Siegmund, strong and vigorous, but
walking in the old, dejected fashion. She felt a rare tenderness and
admiration for him. It was unusual for her to be so humble-minded, but
this evening she felt she must minister to him, and be submissive.
She made him stop to look at the graves. Suddenly, as they stood, she
kissed him, clasped him fervently, roused him till his passion burned
away his heaviness, and he seemed tipped with life, his face glowing as
if soon he would burst alight. Then she was satisfied, and could laugh.
As they went through the fir copse, listening to the birds like a family
assembled and chattering at home in the evening, listening to the light
swish of the wind, she let Siegmund predominate; he set the swing of
their motion; she rested on him like a bird on a swaying bough.
They argued concerning the way. Siegmund, as usual, submitted to her.
They went quite wrong. As they retraced their steps, stealthily, through
a poultry farm whose fowls were standing in forlorn groups, once more
dismayed by evening, Helena's pride battled with her new subjugation to
Siegmund. She walked head down, saying nothing. He also was silent, but
his heart was strong in him. Somewhere in the distance a band was
playing 'The Watch on the Rhine'.
As they passed the beeches and were near home, Helena said, to try him,
and to strike a last blow for her pride:
'I wonder what next Monday will bring us.'
'Quick curtain,' he answered joyously. He was looking down and smiling
at her with such careless happiness that she loved him. He was wonderful
to her. She loved him, was jealous of every particle of him that evaded
her. She wanted to sacrifice to him, make herself a burning altar to
him, and she wanted to possess him.
The hours that would be purely their own came too slowly for her.
That night she met his passion with love. It was not his passion she
wanted, actually. But she desired that he should want _her_ madly, and
that he should have all--everything. It was a wonderful night to him. It
restored in him the full 'will to live'. But she felt it destroyed her.
Her soul seemed blasted.
At seven o'clock in the morning Helena lay in the deliciously cool
water, while small waves ran up the beach full and clear and foamless,
continuing perfectly in their flicker the rhythm of the night's passion.
Nothing, she felt, had ever been so delightful as this cool water
running over her. She lay and looked out on the shining sea. All things,
it seemed, were made of sunshine more or less soiled. The cliffs rose
out of the shining waves like clouds of strong, fine texture, and rocks
along the shore were the dapplings of a bright dawn. The coarseness was
fused out of the world, so that sunlight showed in the veins of the
morning cliffs and the rocks. Yea, everything ran with sunshine, as we
are full of blood, and plants are tissued from green-gold, glistening
sap. Substance and solidity were shadows that the morning cast round
itself to make itself tangible: as she herself was a shadow, cast by
that fragment of sunshine, her soul, over its inefficiency.
She remembered to have seen the bats flying low over a burnished pool at
sunset, and the web of their wings had burned in scarlet flickers, as
they stretched across the light. Winged momentarily on bits of tissued
flame, threaded with blood, the bats had flickered a secret to her.
Now the cliffs were like wings uplifted, and the morning was coming
dimly through them. She felt the wings of all the world upraised against
the morning in a flashing, multitudinous flight. The world itself was
flying. Sunlight poured on the large round world till she fancied it a
heavy bee humming on its iridescent atmosphere across a vast air
of sunshine.
She lay and rode the fine journey. Sunlight liquid in the water made the
waves heavy, golden, and rich with a velvety coolness like cowslips. Her
feet fluttered in the shadowy underwater. Her breast came out bright as
the breast of a white bird.
Where was Siegmund? she wondered. He also was somewhere among the sea
and the sunshine, white and playing like a bird, shining like a vivid,
restless speck of sunlight. She struck the water, smiling, feeling along
with him. They two were the owners of this morning, as a pair of wild,
large birds inhabiting an empty sea.
Siegmund had found a white cave welling with green water, brilliant and
full of life as mounting sap. The white rock glimmered through the
water, and soon Siegmund shimmered also in the living green of the sea,
like pale flowers trembling upward.
'The water,' said Siegmund, 'is as full of life as I am,' and he pressed
forward his breast against it. He swam very well that morning; he had
more wilful life than the sea, so he mastered it laughingly with his
arms, feeling a delight in his triumph over the waves. Venturing
recklessly in his new pride, he swam round the corner of the rock,
through an archway, lofty and spacious, into a passage where the water
ran like a flood of green light over the skin-white bottom. Suddenly he
emerged in the brilliant daylight of the next tiny scoop of a bay.
There he arrived like a pioneer, for the bay was inaccessible from the
land. He waded out of the green, cold water on to sand that was pure as
the shoulders of Helena, out of the shadow of the archway into the
sunlight, on to the glistening petal of this blossom of a sea-bay.
He did not know till he felt the sunlight how the sea had drunk with its
cold lips deeply of his warmth. Throwing himself down on the sand that
was soft and warm as white fur, he lay glistening wet, panting, swelling
with glad pride at having conquered also this small, inaccessible
sea-cave, creeping into it like a white bee into a white virgin blossom
that had waited, how long, for its bee.
The sand was warm to his breast, and his belly, and his arms. It was
like a great body he cleaved to. Almost, he fancied, he felt it heaving
under him in its breathing. Then he turned his face to the sun, and
laughed. All the while, he hugged the warm body of the sea-bay beneath
him. He spread his hands upon the sand; he took it in handfuls, and let
it run smooth, warm, delightful, through his fingers.
'Surely,' he said to himself, 'it is like Helena;' and he laid his hands
again on the warm body of the shore, let them wander, discovering,
gathering all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder of smooth
warm pebbles, then shrinking from the deep weight of cold his hand
encountered as he burrowed under the surface wrist-deep. In the end he
found the cold mystery of the deep sand also thrilling. He pushed in his
hands again and deeper, enjoying the almost hurt of the dark, heavy
coldness. For the sun and the white flower of the bay were breathing and
kissing him dry, were holding him in their warm concave, like a bee in a
flower, like himself on the bosom of Helena, and flowing like the warmth
of her breath in his hair came the sunshine, breathing near and
lovingly; yet, under all, was this deep mass of cold, that the softness
and warmth merely floated upon.
Siegmund lay and clasped the sand, and tossed it in handfuls till over
him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and
laughed. The water was swaying reproachfully against the steep pebbles
below, murmuring like a child that it was not fair--it was not fair he
should abandon his playmate. Siegmund laughed, and began to rub himself
free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He
tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself, busy and intent like a
child playing some absorbing game with itself. Soon his body was dry and
warm and smooth as a camomile flower. He was, however, greyed and
smeared with sand-dust. Siegmund looked at himself with disapproval,
though his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of
himself. He wanted himself clean. He felt the sand thick in his hair,
even in his moustache. He went painfully over the pebbles till he found
himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his
head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his
hands assiduously. He must feel perfectly clean and free--fresh, as if
he had washed away all the years of soilure in this morning's sea and
sun and sand. It was the purification. Siegmund became again a happy
priest of the sun. He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out
of him, as he might soak clean a soiled garment in the sea, and bleach
it white on the sunny shore. So white and sweet and tissue-clean he
felt--full of lightness and grace.
The garden in front of their house, where Helena was waiting for him,
was long and crooked, with a sunken flagstone pavement running up to the
door by the side of the lawn. On either hand the high fence of the
garden was heavy with wild clematis and honeysuckle. Helena sat
sideways, with a map spread out on her bench under the bushy little
laburnum tree, tracing the course of their wanderings. It was very
still. There was just a murmur of bees going in and out the brilliant
little porches of nasturtium flowers. The nasturtium leaf-coins stood
cool and grey; in their delicate shade, underneath in the green
twilight, a few flowers shone their submerged gold and scarlet. There
was a faint scent of mignonette. Helena, like a white butterfly in the
shade, her two white arms for antennae stretching firmly to the bench,
leaned over her map. She was busy, very busy, out of sheer happiness.
She traced word after word, and evoked scene after scene. As she
discovered a name, she conjured up the place. As she moved to the next
mark she imagined the long path lifting and falling happily.
She was waiting for Siegmund, yet his hand upon the latch startled her.
She rose suddenly, in agitation. Siegmund was standing in the sunshine
at the gate. They greeted each other across the tall roses.
When Siegmund was holding her hand, he said, softly laughing:
'You have come out of the water very beautiful this morning.'
She laughed. She was not beautiful, but she felt so at that moment. She
glanced up at him, full of love and gratefulness.
'And you,' she murmured, in a still tone, as if it were almost
sacrilegiously unnecessary to say it.
Siegmund was glad. He rejoiced to be told he was beautiful. After a few
moments of listening to the bees and breathing the mignonette, he said:
'I found a little white bay, just like you--a virgin bay. I had to swim
there.'
'Oh!' she said, very interested in him, not in the fact.
'It seemed just like you. Many things seem like you,' he said.
She laughed again in her joyous fashion, and the reed-like vibration
came into her voice.
'I saw the sun through the cliffs, and the sea, and you,' she said.
He did not understand. He looked at her searchingly. She was white and
still and inscrutable. Then she looked up at him; her earnest eyes, that
would not flinch, gazed straight into him. He trembled, and things all
swept into a blur. After she had taken away her eyes he found
himself saying:
'You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like
Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.'
'I saw the sunshine in you,' repeated Helena quietly, looking at him
with her eyes heavy with meaning.
He laughed again, not understanding, but feeling she meant love.
'No, but you have altered everything,' he said.
The note of wonder, of joy, in his voice touched her almost beyond
self-control. She caught his hand and pressed it; then quickly kissed
it. He became suddenly grave.
'I feel as if it were right--you and me, Helena--so, even righteous. It
is so, isn't it? And the sea and everything, they all seem with us. Do
you think so?'
Looking at her, he found her eyes full of tears. He bent and kissed her,
and she pressed his head to her bosom. He was very glad.
