Very carefully she lowered the kitten which she had carried clasped to her bosom. The mite was bewildered and scared. It turned round pathetically.
‘Go on, Tissie; you’re all right,’ said the child. ‘Go on; have a run on the sand.’
The kitten stood dubious and unhappy. Then, perceiving the dog some distance ahead, it scampered after him, a fluffy, scurrying mite. But the dog had already raced into the water. The kitten walked a few steps, turning its small face this way and that, and mewing piteously. It looked extraordinarily tiny as it stood, a fluffy handful, staring away from the noisy water, its thin cry floating over the plash of waves.
Helena glanced at Siegmund, and her eyes were shining with pity. He was watching the kitten and smiling.
‘Crying because things are too big, and it can’t take them in,’ he said.
‘But look how frightened it is,’ she said.
‘So am I.’ He laughed. ‘And if there are any gods looking on and laughing at me, at least they won’t be kind enough to put me in their pinafores. . . . ’
She laughed very quickly.
‘But why?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why should you want putting in a pinafore?’
‘I don’t,’ he laughed.
On the top of the cliff they were between two bays, with darkening blue water on the left, and on the right gold water smoothing to the sun. Siegmund seemed to stand waist-deep in shadow, with his face bright and glowing. He was watching earnestly.
‘I want to absorb it all,’ he said.
When at last they turned away:
‘Yes,’ said Helena slowly; ‘one can recall the details, but never the atmosphere.’
He pondered a moment.
‘How strange!’ he said. I can recall the atmosphere, but not the detail. It is a moment to me, not a piece of scenery. I should say the picture was in me, not out there.’
Without troubling to understand — she was inclined to think it verbiage — she made a small sound of assent.
‘That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don’t care so much, because I have it with me,’ he concluded.
Chapter 11
They decided to find their way through the lanes to Alum Bay, and then, keeping the cross in sight, to return over the downs, with the moon-path broad on the water before them. For the moon was rising late. Twilight, however, rose more rapidly than they had anticipated. The lane twisted among meadows and wild lands and copses — a wilful little lane, quite incomprehensible. So they lost their distant landmark, the white cross.
Darkness filtered through the daylight. When at last they came to a signpost, it was almost too dark to read it. The fingers seemed to withdraw into the dusk the more they looked.
‘We must go to the left,’ said Helena.
To the left rose the downs, smooth and grey near at hand, but higher black with gorse, like a giant lying asleep with a bearskin over his shoulders.
Several pale chalk-tracks ran side by side through the turf. Climbing, they came to a disused chalk-pit, which they circumvented. Having passed a lonely farmhouse, they mounted the side of the open down, where was a sense of space and freedom.
‘We can steer by the night,’ said Siegmund, as they trod upwards pathlessly. Helena did not mind whither they steered. All places in that large fair night were home and welcome to her. They drew nearer to the shaggy cloak of furze.
‘There will be a path through it,’ said Siegmund.
But when they arrived there was no path. They were confronted by a tall, impenetrable growth of gorse, taller than Siegmund.
‘Stay here,’ said he, ‘while I look for a way through. I am afraid you will be tired.’
She stood alone by the walls of gorse. The lights that had flickered into being during the dusk grew stronger, so that a little farmhouse down the hill glowed with great importance on the night, while the far-off in visible sea became like a roadway, large and mysterious, its specks of light moving slowly, and its bigger lamps stationed out amid the darkness. Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant. The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure the condition of intense waiting.
He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming.
‘No good,’ he said, ‘no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.’
‘Then we will sit down awhile,’ said she calmly.
‘“Here on this mole-hill,”’ he quoted mockingly.
They sat down in a small gap in the gorse, where the turf was very soft, and where the darkness seemed deeper. The night was all fragrance, cool odour of darkness, keen, savoury scent of the downs, touched with honeysuckle and gorse and bracken scent.
Helena turned to him, leaning her hand on his thigh.
‘What day is it, Siegmund?’ she asked, in a joyous, wondering tone. He laughed, understanding, and kissed her.
‘But really,’ she insisted, ‘I would not have believed the labels could have fallen off everything like this.’
He laughed again. She still leaned towards him, her weight on her hand, stopping the flow in the artery down his thigh.
‘The days used to walk in procession like seven marionettes, each in order and costume, going endlessly round.’ She laughed, amused at the idea.
‘It is very strange,’ she continued, ‘to have the days and nights smeared into one piece, as if the clock-hand only went round once in a lifetime.’
‘That is how it is,’ he admitted, touched by her eloquence. ‘You have torn the labels off things, and they all are so different. This morning! It does seem absurd to talk about this morning. Why should I be parcelled up into mornings and evenings and nights? I am not made up of sections of time. Now, nights and days go racing over us like cloud-shadows and sunshine over the sea, and all the time we take no notice.’
She put her arms round his neck. He was reminded by a sudden pain in his leg how much her hand had been pressing on him. He held his breath from pain. She was kissing him softly over the eyes. They lay cheek to cheek, looking at the stars. He felt a peculiar tingling sense of joy, a keenness of perception, a fine, delicate tingling as of music.
‘You know,’ he said, repeating himself, ‘it is true. You seem to have knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are all in a symphony. They go moving on and on. You are the motive in everything.’
Helena lay beside him, half upon him, sad with bliss.
‘You must write a symphony of this — of us,’ she said, prompted by a disciple’s vanity.
‘Some time,’ he answered. ‘Later, when I have time.’
‘Later,’ she murmured —‘later than what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘This is so bright we can’t see beyond.’ He turned his face to hers and through the darkness smiled into her eyes that were so close to his. Then he kissed her long and lovingly. He lay, with her head on his shoulder looking through her hair at the stars.
‘I wonder how it is you have such a fine natural perfume,’ he said, always in the same abstract, inquiring tone of happiness.