‘Oh, it’s only what I think,’ replied Hampson. ‘We’re a good deal alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn’t; but women have always done as they liked with me.’
‘That’s hardly so in my case,’ said Siegmund.
Hampson eyed him critically.
‘Say one woman; it’s enough,’ he replied.
Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.
‘The best sort of women — the most interesting — are the worst for us,’ Hampson resumed. ‘By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and animal in us. Then they are supersensitive — refined a bit beyond humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her force becomes evident.
‘She can’t live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting women don’t want us; they want the flowers of the spirit they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us — that is, us altogether.’
‘You’re a bit downright are you not?’ asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements were arbitrary.
‘That’s according to my intensity,’ laughed Hampson. ‘I can open the blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and see — God knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!’
‘Don’t you think it’s wrong to get like it?’ asked Siegmund.
‘Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them; and the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible.’
Siegmund pondered a little. . . .
‘You make me feel — as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,’ he said slowly.
The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins.
‘I can scarcely believe they are me,’ he said. ‘If they rose up and refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren’t they beautiful?’
He looked, with a faint smile, at Siegmund.
Siegmund glanced from the stranger’s to his own hands, which lay curved on the sea-wall as if asleep. They were small for a man of his stature, but, lying warm in the sun, they looked particularly secure in life. Instinctively, with a wave of self-love, he closed his fists over his thumbs.
‘I wonder,’ said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, ‘that she can’t see it; I wonder she doesn’t cherish you. You are full and beautiful enough in the flesh — why will she help to destroy you, when she loved you to such extremity?’
Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man, with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly.
‘Fools — the fools, these women!’ he said. ‘Either they smash their own crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands. Look at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick with compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold up by itself. I am very sorry.’
All at once he stopped. The bitter despair in his tone was the voice of a heavy feeling of which Siegmund had been vaguely aware for some weeks. Siegmund felt a sense of doom. He laughed, trying to shake it off.
‘I wish I didn’t go on like this,’ said Hampson piteously. ‘I wish I could be normal. How hot it is already! You should wear a hat. It is really hot.’ He pulled open his flannel shirt.
‘I like the heat,’ said Siegmund.
‘So do I.’
Directly, the young man dashed the long hair on his forehead into some sort of order, bowed, and smiling in his gay fashion, walked leisurely to the village.
Siegmund stood awhile as if stunned. It seemed to him only a painful dream. Sighing deeply to relieve himself of the pain, he set off to find Helena.
Chapter 14
In the garden of tall rose trees and nasturtiums Helena was again waiting. It was past nine o’clock, so she was growing impatient. To herself, however, she professed a great interest in a little book of verses she had bought in St Martin’s Lane for twopence.
A late, harsh blackbird smote him with her wings,
As through the glade, dim in the dark, she flew. . . .
So she read. She made a curious, pleased sound, and remarked to herself that she thought these verses very fine. But she watched the road for Siegmund.
And now she takes the scissors on her thumb . . .
Oh then, no more unto my lattice come.
‘H’m!’ she said, ‘I really don’t know whether I like that or not.’
Therefore she read the piece again before she looked down the road.
‘He really is very late. It is absurd to think he may have got drowned; but if he were washing about at the bottom of the sea, his hair loose on the water!’
Her heart stood still as she imagined this.
‘But what nonsense! I like these verses very much. I will read them as I walk along the side path, where I shall hear the bees, and catch the flutter of a butterfly among the words. That will be a very fitting way to read this poet.’
So she strolled to the gate, glancing up now and again. There, sure enough, was Siegmund coming, the towel hanging over his shoulder, his throat bare, and his face bright. She stood in the mottled shade.
‘I have kept you waiting,’ said Siegmund.
‘Well, I was reading, you see.’
She would not admit her impatience.
‘I have been talking,’ he said.
‘Talking!’ she exclaimed in slight displeasure. ‘Have you found an acquaintance even here?’
‘A fellow who was quite close friends in Savoy days; he made me feel queer-sort of Doppelgänger, he was.’
Helena glanced up swiftly and curiously.
‘In what way?’ she said.
‘He talked all the skeletons in the cupboard-such piffle it seems, now! The sea is like a harebell, and there are two battleships lying in the bay. You can hear the voices of the men on deck distinctly. Well, have you made the plans for today?’
They went into the house to breakfast. She watched him helping himself to the scarlet and green salad.
‘Mrs Curtiss,’ she said, in rather reedy tone, ‘has been very motherly to me this morning; oh, very motherly!’
Siegmund, who was in a warm, gay mood, shrank up.
‘What, has she been saying something about last night?’ he asked.
‘She was very much concerned for me-was afraid something dreadful had happened,’ continued Helena, in the same keen, sarcastic tone, which showed she was trying to rid herself of her own mortification.
‘Because