He went into the bathroom and washed himself. Everything he did gave him a grateful sense of pleasure, notwithstanding the misery of his position. He dipped his arms deeper into the cold water, that he might feel the delight of it a little farther. His neck he swilled time after time, and it seemed to him he laughed with pleasure as the water caught him and fell away. The towel reminded him how sore were his forehead and his neck, blistered both to a state of rawness by the sun. He touched them very cautiously to dry them, wincing, and smiling at his own childish touch-and-shrink.
Though his bedroom was very dark, he did not light the gas. Instead, he stepped out into the small balcony. His shirt was open at the neck and wrists. He pulled it farther apart, baring his chest to the deliciously soft night. He stood looking out at the darkness for some time. The night was as yet moonless, but luminous with a certain atmosphere of light. The stars were small. Near at hand, large shapes of trees rose up. Farther, lamps like little mushroom groups shone amid an undergrowth of darkness. There was a vague hoarse noise filling the sky, like the whispering in a shell, and this breathing of the summer night occasionally swelled into a restless sigh as a train roared across the distance.
‘What a big night!’ thought Siegmund. ‘The night gathers everything into a oneness. I wonder what is in it.’
He leaned forward over the balcony, trying to catch something out of the night. He felt his soul like tendrils stretched out anxiously to grasp a hold. What could he hold to in this great, hoarse breathing night? A star fell. It seemed to burst into sight just across his eyes with a yellow flash. He looked up, unable to make up his mind whether he had seen it or not. There was no gap in the sky.
‘It is a good sign — a shooting star,’ he said to himself. ‘It is a good sign for me. I know I am right. That was my sign.’
Having assured himself, he stepped indoors, unpacked his bag, and was soon in bed.
‘This is a good bed,’ he said. ‘And the sheets are very fresh.’
He lay for a little while with his head bending forwards, looking from his pillow out at the stars, then he went to sleep.
At half past six in the morning he suddenly opened his eyes.
‘What is it?’ he asked, and almost without interruption answered: ‘Well, I’ve got to go through it.’
His sleep had shaped him perfect premonition, which, like a dream, he forgot when he awoke. Only this naïve question and answer betrayed what had taken place in his sleep. Immediately he awoke this subordinate knowledge vanished.
Another fine day was striding in triumphant. The first thing Siegmund did was to salute the morning, because of its brightness. The second thing was to call to mind the aspect of that bay in the Isle of Wight. ‘What would it just be like now?’ said he to himself. He had to give his heart some justification for the peculiar pain left in it from his sleep activity, so he began poignantly to long for the place which had been his during the last mornings. He pictured the garden with roses and nasturtiums; he remembered the sunny way down the shore, and all the expanse of sea hung softly between the tall white cliffs.
‘It is impossible it is gone!’ he cried to himself. ‘It can’t be gone. I looked forward to it as if it never would come. It can’t be gone now. Helena is not lost to me, surely.’ Then he began a long pining for the departed beauty of his life. He turned the jewel of memory, and facet by facet it wounded him with its brilliant loveliness. This pain, though it was keen, was half pleasure.
Presently he heard his wife stirring. She opened the door of the room next to his, and he heard her:
‘Frank, it’s a quarter to eight. You will be late.’
‘All right, Mother. Why didn’t you call me sooner?’ grumbled the lad.
‘I didn’t wake myself. I didn’t go to sleep till morning, and then I slept.’
She went downstairs. Siegmund listened for his son to get out of bed. The minutes passed.
‘The young donkey, why doesn’t he get out?’ said Siegmund angrily to himself. He turned over, pressing himself upon the bed in anger and humiliation, because now he had no authority to call to his son and keep him to his duty. Siegmund waited, writhing with anger, shame, and anxiety. When the suave, velvety ‘Pan-n-n! pan-n-n-n!’ of the clock was heard striking, Frank stepped with a thud on to the floor. He could be heard dressing in clumsy haste. Beatrice called from the bottom of the stairs:
‘Do you want any hot water?’
‘You know there isn’t time for me to shave now,’ answered her son, lifting his voice to a kind of broken falsetto.
The scent of the cooking of bacon filled the house. Siegmund heard his second daughter, Marjory, aged nine, talking to Vera, who occupied the same room with her. The child was evidently questioning, and the elder girl answered briefly. There was a lull in the household noises, broken suddenly by Marjory, shouting from the top of the stairs:
‘Mam!’ She wailed. ‘Mam!’ Still Beatrice did not hear her. ‘Mam! Mamma!’ Beatrice was in the scullery. ‘Mamma-a!’ The child was getting impatient. She lifted her voice and shouted: ‘Mam? Mamma!’ Still no answer. ‘Mam-mee-e!’ she squealed.
Siegmund could hardly contain himself.
‘Why don’t you go down and ask?’ Vera called crossly from the bedroom.
And at the same moment Beatrice answered, also crossly: ‘What do you want?’
‘Where’s my stockings?’ cried the child at the top of her voice.
‘Why do you ask me? Are they down here?’ replied her mother. ‘What are you shouting for?’
The child plodded downstairs. Directly she returned, and as she passed into Vera’s room, she grumbled: ‘And now they’re not mended.’
Siegmund heard a sound that made his heart beat. It was the crackling of the sides of the crib, as Gwen, his little girl of five, climbed out. She was silent for a space. He imagined her sitting on the white rug and pulling on her stockings. Then there came the quick little thud of her feet as she went downstairs.
‘Mam,’ Siegmund heard her say as she went down the hall, ‘has dad come?’
The answer and the child’s further talk were lost in the distance of the kitchen. The small, anxious question, and the quick thudding of Gwen’s feet, made Siegmund lie still with torture. He wanted to hear no more. He lay shrinking within himself. It seemed that his soul was sensitive to madness. He felt that he could not, come what might, get up and meet them all.
The front door banged, and he heard Frank’s hasty call: ‘Good-bye!’ Evidently the lad was in an ill-humour. Siegmund listened for the sound of the train; it seemed an age; the boy would catch it. Then the water from the wash-hand bowl in the bathroom ran loudly out. That, he suggested, was Vera, who was evidently not going up to town. At the thought of this, Siegmund almost hated her. He listened for her to go downstairs. It was nine o’clock.
The footsteps of Beatrice came upstairs. She put something down in the bathroom — his hot water. Siegmund listened intently for her to come to his door. Would she speak? She approached hurriedly, knocked, and waited. Siegmund, startled, for the moment, could not answer. She knocked loudly.
‘All right,’ said he.
Then she went downstairs.
He lay probing and torturing himself for another half-hour, till Vera’s voice said coldly, beneath his window outside:
‘You should clear away, then. We don’t want the breakfast things on the table for a week.’
Siegmund’s heart set hard. He rose, with a shut mouth, and went across to the bathroom. There he started. The quaint figure of Gwen stood at the bowl, her back was towards him;