They stood folded thus for some time. Then Helena raised her burning face, and relaxed. She was throbbing with strange elation and satisfaction.
‘It might as well have been the sea as any other way, dear,’ she said, startling both of them. The speech went across their thoughtfulness like a star flying into the night, from nowhere. She had no idea why she said it. He pressed his mouth on hers. ‘Not for you,’ he thought, by reflex. ‘You can’t go that way yet.’ But he said nothing, strained her very tightly, and kept her lips.
They were roused by the sound of voices. Unclasping, they went to walk at the fringe of the water. The tide was creeping back. Siegmund stooped, and from among the water’s combings picked up an electric-light bulb. It lay in some weed at the base of a rock. He held it in his hand to Helena. Her face lighted with a curious pleasure. She took the thing delicately from his hand, fingered it with her exquisite softness.
‘Isn’t it remarkable!’ she exclaimed joyously. ‘The sea must be very, very gentle — and very kind.’
‘Sometimes,’ smiled Siegmund.
‘But I did not think it could be so fine-fingered,’ she said. She breathed on the glass bulb till it looked like a dim magnolia bud; she inhaled its fine savour.
‘It would not have treated you so well,’ he said. She looked at him with heavy eyes. Then she returned to her bulb. Her fingers were very small and very pink. She had the most delicate touch in the world, like a faint feel of silk. As he watched her lifting her fingers from off the glass, then gently stroking it, his blood ran hot. He watched her, waited upon her words and movements attentively.
‘It is a graceful act on the sea’s part,’ she said. ‘Wotan is so clumsy — he knocks over the bowl, and flap-flap-flap go the gasping fishes, pizzicato! — but the sea —’
Helena’s speech was often difficult to render into plain terms. She was not lucid.
‘But life’s so full of anti-climax,’ she concluded. Siegmund smiled softly at her. She had him too much in love to disagree or to examine her words.
‘There’s no reckoning with life, and no reckoning with the sea. The only way to get on with both is to be as near a vacuum as possible, and float,’ he jested. It hurt her that he was flippant. She proceeded to forget he had spoken.
There were three children on the beach. Helena had handed him back the senseless bauble, not able to throw it away. Being a father:
‘I will give it to the children,’ he said.
She looked up at him, loved him for the thought.
Wandering hand in hand, for it pleased them both to own each other publicly, after years of conventional distance, they came to a little girl who was bending over a pool. Her black hair hung in long snakes to the water. She stood up, flung back her locks to see them as they approached. In one hand she clasped some pebbles.
‘Would you like this? I found it down there,’ said Siegmund, offering her the bulb.
She looked at him with grave blue eyes and accepted his gift. Evidently she was not going to say anything.
‘The sea brought it all the way from the mainland without breaking it,’ said Helena, with the interesting intonation some folk use to children.
The girl looked at her.
‘The waves put it out of their lap on to some seaweed with such careful fingers —’
The child’s eyes brightened.
‘The tide-line is full of treasures,’ said Helena, smiling.
The child answered her smile a little.
Siegmund had walked away.
‘What beautiful eyes she had!’ said Helena.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
She looked up at him. He felt her searching him tenderly with her eyes. But he could not look back at her. She took his hand and kissed it, knowing he was thinking of his own youngest child.
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