Helena’s cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured him to the end.
Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some time she had confused Siegmund with her god. Yesterday she had cried to her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side of his tortured self-respect.
‘At least,’ he said, in mortification of himself —‘at least, someone must recognize a strain of God in me — and who does? I don’t believe in it myself.’
And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized passion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore, and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do?
‘You know, Domine,’ said Helena — it was his old nickname she used —‘you look quite stern today.’
‘I feel anything but stern,’ he laughed. ‘Weaker than usual, in fact.’
‘Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you — you seem so grave.’
He laughed.
‘And shall I not be brave?’ he said. ‘Can’t you smell Fumum et opes strepitumque Romae?’ He turned quickly to Helena. ‘I wonder if that’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s years since I did a line of Latin, and I thought it had all gone.’
‘In the first place, what does it mean?’ said Helena calmly, ‘for I can only half translate. I have thrown overboard all my scrap-books of such stuff.’
‘Why,’ said Siegmund, rather abashed, ‘only “the row and the smoke of Rome”. But it is remarkable, Helena’— here the peculiar look of interest came on his face again —‘it is really remarkable that I should have said that.’
‘Yes, you look surprised,’ smiled she.
‘But it must be twenty’— he counted —‘twenty-two or three years since I learned that, and I forgot it — goodness knows how long ago. Like a drowning man, I have these memories before. . . . ’ He broke off, smiling mockingly, to tease her.
‘Before you go back to London,’ said she, in a matter-of-fact, almost ironical tone. She was inscrutable. This morning she could not bear to let any deep emotion come uppermost. She wanted rest. ‘No,’ she said, with calm distinctness, a few moments after, when they were climbing the rise to the cliff’s edge. ‘I can’t say that I smell the smoke of London. The mist-curtain is thick yet. There it is’— she pointed to the heavy, purple-grey haze that hung like arras on a wall, between the sloping sky and the sea. She thought of yesterday morning’s mist-curtain, thick and blazing gold, so heavy that no wind could sway its fringe.
They lay down in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird’s-foot trefoil of the cliff’s edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm drooped over everything.
‘Six hours,’ thought Helena, ‘and we shall have passed the mist-curtain. Already it is thinning. I could break it open with waving my hand. I will not wave my hand.’
She was exhausted by the suffering of the last night, so she refused to allow any emotion to move her this morning, till she was strong. Siegmund was also exhausted; but his thoughts laboured like ants, in spite of himself, striving towards a conclusion.
Helena had rejected him. In his heart he felt that in this love affair also he had been a failure. No matter how he contradicted himself, and said it was absurd to imagine he was a failure as Helena’s lover, yet he felt a physical sensation of defeat, a kind of knot in his breast which neither reason, nor dialectics, nor circumstance, not even Helena, could untie. He had failed as lover to Helena.
It was not surprising his marriage with Beatrice should prove disastrous. Rushing into wedlock as he had done, at the ripe age of seventeen, he had known nothing of his woman, nor she of him. When his mind and soul set to develop, as Beatrice could not sympathize with his interests, he naturally inclined away from her, so that now, after twenty years, he was almost a stranger to her. That was not very surprising.
But why should he have failed with Helena?
The bees droned fitfully over the scented grass, aimlessly swinging in the heat. Siegmund watched one gold and amber fellow lazily let go a white clover-head, and boom in a careless curve out to sea, humming softer and softer as he reeled along in the giddy space.
‘The little fool!’ said Siegmund, watching the black dot swallowed into the light.
No ship sailed the curving sea. The light danced in a whirl upon the ripples. Everything else watched with heavy eyes of heat enhancement the wild spinning of the lights.
‘Even if I were free,’ he continued to think, ‘we should only grow apart, Helena and I. She would leave me. This time I should be the laggard. She is young and vigorous; I am beginning to set.
‘Is that why I have failed? I ought to have had her in love sufficiently to keep her these few days. I am not quick. I do not follow her or understand her swiftly enough. And I am always timid of compulsion. I cannot compel anybody to follow me.
‘So we are here. I am out of my depth. Like the bee, I was mad with the sight of so much joy, such a blue space, and now I shall find no footing to alight on. I have flown out into life beyond my strength to get back. When can I set my feet on when this is gone?’
The sun grew stronger. Slower and more slowly went the hawks of Siegmund’s mind, after the quarry of conclusion. He lay bare-headed, looking out to sea. The sun was burning deeper into his face and head.
‘I feel as if it were burning into me,’ thought Siegmund abstractedly. ‘It is certainly consuming some part of me. Perhaps it is making me ill.’ Meanwhile, perversely, he gave his face and his hot black hair to the sun.
Helena lay in what shadow he afforded. The heat put out all her thought-activity. Presently she said:
‘This heat is terrible, Siegmund. Shall we go down to the water?’
They climbed giddily down the cliff path. Already they were somewhat sun-intoxicated. Siegmund chose the hot sand, where no shade was, on which to lie.
‘Shall we not go under the rocks?’ said Helena.
‘Look!’ he said, ‘the sun is beating on the cliffs. It is hotter, more suffocating, there.’
So they lay down in the glare, Helena watching the foam retreat slowly with a cool splash; Siegmund thinking. The naked body of heat was dreadful.
‘My arms, Siegmund,’ said she. ‘They feel as if they were dipped in fire.’
Siegmund took them, without a word, and hid them under his coat.
‘Are you sure it is not bad for you — your head, Siegmund? Are you sure?’
He laughed stupidly.
‘That is all right,’ he said. He knew that the sun was burning through him, and doing him harm, but he wanted the intoxication.
As he looked wistfully far away over the sea at Helena’s mist-curtain, he said:
‘I think we should be able to keep together if’— he faltered —‘if only I could have you a little longer. I have never had you . . . ’
Some sound of failure, some tone telling her it was too late, some ring of despair in his quietness, made Helena cling to him wildly, with a savage little cry as if she were wounded.