‘It will make him ill,’ she whispered to herself, and she bent over to smell the hot hair. She noticed where the sun was scalding his forehead. She felt very pitiful and helpless when she saw his brow becoming inflamed with the sun-scalding.
Turning weariedly away, she sought relief in the landscape. But the sea was glittering unbearably, like a scaled dragon wreathing. The houses of Freshwater slept, as cattle sleep motionless in the hollow valley. Green Farringford on the slope, was drawn over with a shadow of heat and sleep. In the bay below the hill the sea was hot and restless. Helena was sick with sunshine and the restless glitter of water.
‘“And there shall be no more sea,”’ she quoted to herself, she knew not wherefrom.
‘No more sea, no more anything,’ she thought dazedly, as she sat in the midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the old activities, the old manner of living.
‘It is impossible,’ she said; ‘it is impossible! What shall I be when I come out of this? I shall not come out, except as metal to be cast in another shape. No more the same Siegmund, no more the same life. What will become of us — what will happen?’
She was roused from these semi-delirious speculations in the sun furnace by Siegmund’s waking. He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked smiling at Helena.
‘It is worth while to sleep,’ said he, ‘for the sake of waking like this. I was dreaming of huge ice-crystals.’
She smiled at him. He seemed unconscious of fate, happy and strong. She smiled upon him almost in condescension.
‘I should like to realize your dream,’ she said. ‘This is terrible!’
They went to the cliff’s edge, to receive the cool up-flow of air from the water. She drank the travelling freshness eagerly with her face, and put forward her sunburnt arms to be refreshed.
‘It is really a very fine sun,’ said Siegmund lightly. ‘I feel as if I were almost satisfied with heat.’
Helena felt the chagrin of one whose wretchedness must go unperceived, while she affects a light interest in another’s pleasure. This time, when Siegmund ‘failed to follow her’, as she put it, she felt she must follow him.
‘You are having your satisfaction complete this journey,’ she said, smiling; ‘even a sufficiency of me.’
‘Ay!’ said Siegmund drowsily. ‘I think I am. I think this is about perfect, don’t you?’
She laughed.
‘I want nothing more and nothing different,’ he continued; ‘and that’s the extreme of a decent time, I should think.’
‘The extreme of a decent time!’ she repeated.
But he drawled on lazily:
‘I’ve only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I’ve got all the cheese — which is you, my dear.’
‘I certainly feel eaten up,’ she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy’s, his whole being careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or spoil one minute of his consummate hour.
From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them. Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid’s chair, wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man, was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide —‘the life tide,’ she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own distress. She was fretted to her soul.
‘Come!’ she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.
‘We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow — so quiet,’ she said to herself.
They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own state, after her own fashion.
‘The Mist Spirit,’ she said to herself. ‘The Mist Spirit draws a curtain round us — it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.’
As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said:
‘Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next year, and stay for a whole month?’
‘If there be any next year,’ said she.
Siegmund did not reply.
She wondered if he had really spoken in sincerity, or if he, too, were mocking fate. They walked slowly through the broiling sun towards their lodging.
‘There will be an end to this,’ said Helena, communing with herself. ‘And when we come out of the mist-curtain, what will it be? No matter — let come what will. All along Fate has been resolving, from the very beginning, resolving obvious discords, gradually, by unfamiliar progression; and out of original combinations weaving wondrous harmonies with our lives. Really, the working out has been wondrous, is wondrous now. The Master-Fate is too great an artist to suffer an anti-climax. I am sure the Master-Musician is too great an artist to allow a bathetic anti-climax.’
Chapter 15
The afternoon of the blazing day passed drowsily. Lying close together on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her in the traces, like overthrown charioteers. So the hours passed.
After tea they went eastwards on the downs. Siegmund was animated, so that Helena caught his mood. It was very rare that they spoke of the time preceding their acquaintance, Helena knew little or nothing of Siegmund’s life up to the age of thirty, whilst he had never learned anything concerning her childhood. Somehow she did not