In the midst of their passion of fear the moon rose. Siegmund started to see the rim appear ruddily beyond the sea. His struggling suddenly ceased, and he watched, spellbound, the oval horn of fiery gold come up, resolve itself. Some golden liquor dripped and spilled upon the far waves, where it shook in ruddy splashes. The gold-red cup rose higher, looming before him very large, yet still not all discovered. By degrees the horn of gold detached itself from the darkness at back of the waves. It was immense and terrible. When would the tip be placed upon the table of the sea?
It stood at last, whole and calm, before him; then the night took up this drinking-cup of fiery gold, lifting it with majestic movement overhead, letting stream forth the wonderful unwasted liquor of gold over the sea — a libation.
Siegmund looked at the shaking flood of gold and paling gold spread wider as the night upraised the blanching crystal, poured out farther and farther the immense libation from the whitening cup, till at last the moon looked frail and empty.
And there, exhaustless in the night, the white light shook on the floor of the sea. He wondered how it would be gathered up. ‘I gather it up into myself,’ he said. And the stars and the cliffs and a few trees were watching, too. ‘If I have spilled my life,’ he thought, ‘the unfamiliar eyes of the land and sky will gather it up again.’
Turning to Helena, he found her face white and shining as the empty moon.
Chapter 17
Towards morning, Siegmund went to sleep. For four hours, until seven o’clock, the womb of sleep received him and nourished him again.
‘But it is finest of all to wake,’ he said, as the bright sunshine of the window, and the lumining green sunshine coming through the lifted hands of the leaves, challenged him into the open.
The morning was exceedingly fair, and it looked at him so gently that his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful, offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. Everything looked at him with the same eyes of tenderness, offering him, timidly, a little love.
‘They are all extraordinarily sweet,’ said Siegmund to the full-mouthed scabious and the awkward, downcast ragwort. Three or four butterflies fluttered up and down in agitated little leaps, around him. Instinctively Siegmund put his hand forward to touch them.
‘The careless little beggars!’ he said.
When he came to the cliff tops there was the morning, very bravely dressed, rustling forward with a silken sound and much silken shining to meet him. The battleships had gone; the sea was blue with a panier of diamonds; the sky was full with a misty tenderness like love. Siegmund had never recognized before the affection that existed between him and everything. We do not realize how tremendously dear and indispensable to us are the hosts of common things, till we must leave them, and we break our hearts.
‘We have been very happy together,’ everything seemed to say.
Siegmund looked up into the eyes of the morning with a laugh.
‘It is very lovely,’ he said, ‘whatever happens.’
So he went down to the beach; his dark blue eyes, darker from last night’s experience, smiled always with the pride of love. He undressed by his usual altar-stone.
‘How closely familiar everything is,’ he thought. ‘It seems almost as if the curves of this stone were rounded to fit in my soul.’
He touched the smooth white slope of the stone gently with discovering fingers, in the same way as he touched the cheek of Helena, or of his own babies. He found great pleasure in this feeling of intimacy with things. A very soft wind, shy as a girl, put his arms round him, and seemed to lay its cheek against his chest. He placed his hands beneath his arms, where the wind was caressing him, and his eyes opened with wondering pleasure.
‘They find no fault with me,’ he said. ‘I suppose they are as fallible as I, and so don’t judge,’ he added, as he waded thigh-deep into the water, thrusting it to hear the mock-angry remonstrance.
‘Once more,’ he said, and he took the sea in his arms. He swam very quietly. The water buoyed him up, holding him closely clasped. He swam towards the white rocks of the headlands; they rose before him like beautiful buttressed gates, so glistening that he half expected to see fantail pigeons puffing like white irises in the niches, and white peacocks with dark green feet stepping down the terraces, trailing a sheen of silver.
‘Helena is right,’ he said to himself as he swam, scarcely swimming, but moving upon the bosom of the tide; ‘she is right, it is all enchanted. I have got into her magic at last. Let us see what it is like.’
He determined to visit again his little bay. He swam carefully round the terraces, whose pale shadows through the swift-spinning emerald facets of the water seemed merest fancy. Siegmund touched them with his foot; they were hard, cold, dangerous. He swam carefully. As he made for the archway, the shadows of the headland chilled the water. There under water, clamouring in a throng at the base of the submerged walls, were sea-women with dark locks, and young sea-girls, with soft hair, vividly green, striving to climb up out of the darkness into the morning, their hair swirling in abandon. Siegmund was half afraid of their frantic efforts.
But the tide carried him swiftly through the high gate into the porch. There was exultance in this sweeping entry. The skin-white, full-fleshed walls of the archway were dappled with green lights that danced in and out among themselves. Siegmund was carried along in an invisible chariot, beneath the jewel-stained walls. The tide swerved, threw him as he swam against the inward-curving white rock; his elbow met the rock, and he was sick with pain. He held his breath, trying to get back the joy and magic. He could not believe that the lovely, smooth side of the rock, fair as his own side with its ripple of muscles, could have hurt him thus. He let the water carry him till he might climb out on to the shingle. There he sat upon a warm boulder, and twisted to look at his arm. The skin was grazed, not very badly, merely a ragged scarlet patch no bigger than a carnation petal. The bruise, however, was painful, especially when, a minute or two later, he bent his arm.
‘No,’ said he pitiably to himself, ‘it is impossible it should have hurt me. I suppose I was careless.’
Nevertheless, the aspect of the morning changed. He sat on the boulder looking out on the sea. The azure sky and the sea laughed on, holding a bright conversation one with another. The two headlands of the tiny bay gossiped across the street of water. All the boulders and pebbles of the sea-shore played together.
‘Surely,’ said Siegmund, ‘they take no notice of me; they do not care a jot or a tittle for me. I am a fool to think myself one with them.’
He contrasted this with the kindness of the morning as he had stood on the cliffs.
‘I was mistaken,’ he said. ‘It was an illusion.’
He looked wistfully out again. Like neighbours leaning from opposite windows of an overhanging street, the headlands were occupied one with another. White rocks strayed out to sea, followed closely by other white rocks. Everything was busy, interested, occupied with its own pursuit and with its own comrades. Siegmund alone was without pursuit or comrade.
‘They will all go on the same; they will be just as gay. Even Helena, after a while, will laugh and take interest in others. What do I matter?’
Siegmund thought of the futility of death:
We are not long for music and laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think we have no portion in them