The morning was of a lovely limpid gold colour. Veils of shadow seemed to be drifting away on the north and the south. Clara stood shrinking slightly from the touch of the wind, twisting her hair. The sea-grass rose behind the white stripped woman. She glanced at the sea, then looked at him. He was watching her with dark eyes which she loved and could not understand. She hugged her breasts between her arms, cringing, laughing:
“Oo, it will be so cold!” she said.
He bent forward and kissed her, held her suddenly close, and kissed her again. She stood waiting. He looked into her eyes, then away at the pale sands.
“Go, then!” he said quietly.
She flung her arms round his neck, drew him against her, kissed him passionately, and went, saying:
“But you'll come in?”
“In a minute.”
She went plodding heavily over the sand that was soft as velvet. He, on the sandhills, watched the great pale coast envelop her. She grew smaller, lost proportion, seemed only like a large white bird toiling forward.
“Not much more than a big white pebble on the beach, not much more than a clot of foam being blown and rolled over the sand,” he said to himself.
She seemed to move very slowly across the vast sounding shore. As he watched, he lost her. She was dazzled out of sight by the sunshine. Again he saw her, the merest white speck moving against the white, muttering sea-edge.
“Look how little she is!” he said to himself. “She's lost like a grain of sand in the beach—just a concentrated speck blown along, a tiny white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning. Why does she absorb me?”
The morning was altogether uninterrupted: she was gone in the water. Far and wide the beach, the sandhills with their blue marrain, the shining water, glowed together in immense, unbroken solitude.
“What is she, after all?” he said to himself. “Here's the seacoast morning, big and permanent and beautiful; there is she, fretting, always unsatisfied, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean to me, after all? She represents something, like a bubble of foam represents the sea. But what is she? It's not her I care for.”
Then, startled by his own unconscious thoughts, that seemed to speak so distinctly that all the morning could hear, he undressed and ran quickly down the sands. She was watching for him. Her arm flashed up to him, she heaved on a wave, subsided, her shoulders in a pool of liquid silver. He jumped through the breakers, and in a moment her hand was on his shoulder.
He was a poor swimmer, and could not stay long in the water. She played round him in triumph, sporting with her superiority, which he begrudged her. The sunshine stood deep and fine on the water. They laughed in the sea for a minute or two, then raced each other back to the sandhills.
When they were drying themselves, panting heavily, he watched her laughing, breathless face, her bright shoulders, her breasts that swayed and made him frightened as she rubbed them, and he thought again:
“But she is magnificent, and even bigger than the morning and the sea. Is she—? Is she—”
She, seeing his dark eyes fixed on her, broke off from her drying with a laugh.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“You,” he answered, laughing.
Her eyes met his, and in a moment he was kissing her white “goose-fleshed” shoulder, and thinking:
“What is she? What is she?”
She loved him in the morning. There was something detached, hard, and elemental about his kisses then, as if he were only conscious of his own will, not in the least of her and her wanting him.
Later in the day he went out sketching.
“You,” he said to her, “go with your mother to Sutton. I am so dull.”
She stood and looked at him. He knew she wanted to come with him, but he preferred to be alone. She made him feel imprisoned when she was there, as if he could not get a free deep breath, as if there were something on top of him. She felt his desire to be free of her.
In the evening he came back to her. They walked down the shore in the darkness, then sat for a while in the shelter of the sandhills.
“It seems,” she said, as they stared over the darkness of the sea, where no light was to be seen—“it seemed as if you only loved me at night—as if you didn't love me in the daytime.”
He ran the cold sand through his fingers, feeling guilty under the accusation.
“The night is free to you,” he replied. “In the daytime I want to be by myself.”
“But why?” she said. “Why, even now, when we are on this short holiday?”
“I don't know. Love-making stifles me in the daytime.”
“But it needn't be always love-making,” she said.
“It always is,” he answered, “when you and I are together.”
She sat feeling very bitter.
“Do you ever want to marry me?” he asked curiously.
“Do you me?” she replied.
“Yes, yes; I should like us to have children,” he answered slowly.
She sat with her head bent, fingering the sand.
“But you don't really want a divorce from Baxter, do you?” he said.
It was some minutes before she replied.
“No,” she said, very deliberately; “I don't think I do.”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
“Do you feel as if you belonged to him?”
“No; I don't think so.”
“What, then?”
“I think he belongs to me,” she replied.
He was silent for some minutes, listening to the wind blowing over the hoarse, dark sea.
“And you never really intended to belong to ME?” he said.
“Yes, I do belong to you,” she answered.
“No,” he said; “because you don't want to be divorced.”
It was a knot they could not untie, so they left it, took what they could get, and what they could not attain they ignored.
“I consider you treated Baxter rottenly,” he said another time.
He half-expected Clara to answer him, as his mother would: “You consider your own affairs, and don't know so much about other people's.” But she took him seriously, almost to his own surprise.
“Why?” she said.
“I suppose you thought he was a lily of the valley, and so you put him in an appropriate pot, and tended him according. You made up your mind he was a lily of the valley and it was no good his being a cow-parsnip. You wouldn't have it.”
“I certainly never imagined him a lily of the valley.”
“You imagined him something he wasn't. That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him.”
“And what are you doing?” she asked.
“I'm thinking what tune I shall whistle,” he laughed.
And instead of boxing his ears, she considered him in earnest.
“You think I want to give you what's good for you?” she asked.