‘“You know, dear, it troubles me a good deal . . . but if I were your mother, I don’t know how I should feel,”’ she quoted.
‘When one engages rooms one doesn’t usually stipulate for a stepmother to nourish one’s conscience,’ said Siegmund. They laughed, making jest of the affair; but they were both too thin-skinned. Siegmund writhed within himself with mortification, while Helena talked as if her teeth were on edge.
‘I don’t mind in the least,’ she said. ‘The poor old woman has her opinions, and I mine.’
Siegmund brooded a little.
‘I know I’m a moral coward,’ he said bitterly.
‘Nonsense’ she replied. Then, with a little heat: ‘But you do continue to try so hard to justify yourself, as if you felt you needed justification.’
He laughed bitterly.
‘I tell you — a little thing like this — it remains tied tight round something inside me, reminding me for hours — well, what everybody else’s opinion of me is.’
Helena laughed rather plaintively.
‘I thought you were so sure we were right,’ she said.
He winced again.
‘In myself I am. But in the eyes of the world —’
‘If you feel so in yourself, is not that enough?’ she said brutally.
He hung his head, and slowly turned his serviette-ring.
‘What is myself?’ he asked.
‘Nothing very definite,’ she said, with a bitter laugh.
They were silent. After a while she rose, went lovingly over to him, and put her arms round his neck.
‘This is our last clear day, dear,’ she said.
A wave of love came over him, sweeping away all the rest. He took her in his arms. . . .
‘It will be hot today,’ said Helena, as they prepared to go out.
‘I felt the sun steaming in my hair as I came up,’ he replied.
‘I shall wear a hat — you had better do so too.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I told you I wanted a sun-soaking; now I think I shall get one.’
She did not urge or compel him. In these matters he was old enough to choose for himself.
This morning they were rather silent. Each felt the tarnish on their remaining day.
‘I think, dear,’ she said, ‘we ought to find the little path that escaped us last night.’
‘We were lucky to miss it,’ he answered. ‘You don’t get a walk like that twice in a lifetime, in spite of the old ladies.’
She glanced up at him with a winsome smile, glad to hear his words.
They set off, Siegmund bare-headed. He was dressed in flannels and a loose canvas shirt, but he looked what he was — a Londoner on holiday. He had the appearance, the diffident bearing, and the well-cut clothes of a gentleman. He had a slight stoop, a strong-shouldered stoop, and as he walked he looked unseeing in front of him.
Helena belonged to the unclassed. She was not ladylike, nor smart, nor assertive. One could not tell whether she were of independent means or a worker. One thing was obvious about her: she was evidently educated.
Rather short, of strong figure, she was much more noticeably a concentrée than was Siegmund. Unless definitely looking at something she always seemed coiled within herself.
She wore a white voile dress made with the waist just below her breasts, and the skirt dropping straight and clinging. On her head was a large, simple hat of burnt straw.
Through the open-worked sleeves of her dress she could feel the sun bite vigorously.
‘I wish you had put on a hat, Siegmund,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he laughed. ‘My hair is like a hood,’ He ruffled it back with his hand. The sunlight glistened on his forehead.
On the higher paths a fresh breeze was energetically chasing the butterflies and driving the few small clouds disconsolate out of the sky. The lovers stood for some time watching the people of the farm in the down below dip their sheep on this sunny morning. There was a ragged noise of bleating from the flock penned in a corner of the yard. Two red-armed men seized a sheep, hauled it to a large bath that stood in the middle of the yard, and there held it, more or less in the bath, whilst a third man baled a dirty yellow liquid over its body. The white legs of the sheep twinkled as it butted this way and that to escape the yellow douche, the blue-shirted men ducked and struggled. There was a faint splashing and shouting to be heard even from a distance. The farmer’s wife and children stood by ready to rush in with assistance if necessary.
Helena laughed with pleasure.
‘That is really a very quaint and primitive proceeding,’ she said. ‘It is cruder than Theocritus.’
‘In an instant it makes me wish I were a farmer,’ he laughed. ‘I think every man has a passion for farming at the bottom of his blood. It would be fine to be plain-minded, to see no farther than the end of one’s nose, and to own cattle and land.’
‘Would it?’ asked Helena sceptically.
‘If I had a red face, and went to sleep as soon as I sat comfortable, I should love it,‘he said.
‘It amuses me to hear you long to be stupid,’ she replied.
‘To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the desideratum.’
‘Is it?’ she asked ironically.
‘I would give anything to be like that,’ he said.
‘That is, not to be yourself,’ she said pointedly.
He laughed without much heartiness.
‘Don’t they seem a long way off?’ he said, staring at the bucolic scene. ‘They are farther than Theocritus — down there is farther than Sicily, and more than twenty centuries from us. I wish it weren’t.’
‘Why do you?’ she cried, with curious impatience.
He laughed.
Crossing the down, scattered with dark bushes, they came directly opposite the path through the furze.
‘There it is!’ she cried, ‘How could we miss it?’
‘Ascribe it to the fairies,’ he replied, whistling the bird music out of Siegfried, then pieces of Tristan. They talked very little.
She was tired. When they arrived at a green, naked hollow near the cliff’s edge, she said:
‘This shall be our house today.’
‘Welcome home!’ said Siegmund.
He flung himself down on the high, breezy slope of the dip, looking out to sea. Helena sat beside him. It was absolutely still, and the wind was slackening more and more. Though they listened attentively, they could hear only an indistinct breathing sound, quite small, from the water below: no clapping nor hoarse conversation of waves. Siegmund lay with his hands beneath his head, looking over the sparkling sea. To put her page in the shadow, Helena propped her book against him and began to read.
Presently the breeze, and Siegmund, dropped asleep. The sun was pouring with dreadful persistence. It beat and beat on Helena, gradually drawing her from her book in a confusion of thought. She closed her eyes wearily, longing for shade. Vaguely she felt a sympathy with Adam in ‘Adam Cast Forth’. Her mind traced again the tumultuous, obscure strugglings of the two, forth from Eden through the primitive wildernesses, and she felt